Bernie Hogan » Uncategorized

Real name sites are necessarily inadequate for free speech

BERNiE — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:36:04 +0000

Recently on the social media collective blog, danah boyd set off a firestorm by suggesting that the imposition of real names on social media sites is an abuse of power…or even authoritarian. The obvious retort is “don’t like it, don’t use it”, or learn how to segement one’s network (i.e. bend to the system, because its your problem).

But I’m here to take another angle on this one: real name sites are necessarily inadequate for online audiences. Yes, necessarily inadequate.

I once had a dream that people could seamlessly manage their social networks on any site through some combination of visulaization and clever user interfaces. It was based on the visualization of Facebook networks. People who see these networks, as I’ve discovered in many interviews (early work discussed here), readily identify the myriad social contexts in their networks. One cluster is clearly family, another is clearly coworkers, and so forth. As such, it seemed like the next step would be to use this information to create some sort of selective sharing interface. These are Google+’s social circles (or Diaspora’s Aspects), except determined semi-automatically. Then one could simply select which context, and read from it, or post to it.

Old Facebook personal network showing many social contexts

This is “the myth of selective sharing” (as Marc Smith calls it). Its an engineer’s dream based on a misunderstanding of the key distinction between offline and online life. Offline we assume that our conversations are not encoded and thereafter available to people outside of our immediate audience, by default. Yes, some lucky people give talks to large audiences, they get on the radio or tv. Most don’t. But everyone has some reason to share things with one person but not another. We don’t need to go as far as whistle blowers, political dissidents or closet cases in religious areas. Lots of people have grievances with their bosses, or find someone else attractive, or have problem students / subordinates they need advice on. Lots of people need advice on their own issues, be it alcoholism, drug abuse or gambling. When people do this offline, they do it in situations: temporally and spatially bounded contexts for action. The pub after work; the patio over a cup of coffee; the closed door meeting.

But what do we mean by offline anymore? Some assume it is when they are not searching and browsing the web? Or when they aren’t streaming video, emailing someone or inside a virtual world. Being offline actually refers to a much more limited space than that. Being online is being encoded and having that which is encoded available to some party other than those immediately present. You are not online when you are in front of a computer – you are online when your actions are being digitized and networked. Online is on-the-record. Offline is off-the-record.

Offline people say things appropriate to the group they are in. That doesn’t mean they are two-faced, insincere or liars. It means people are context aware. People observe walls, clocks, furniture, fashion and music. These things guide us as to the appropriate way of acting. The guy writing his novel at the bar on Friday night is out-of-place. The guy who shows up to work drunk on Monday morning has a problem. Offline people don’t have to worry about their real name, because their behavior is tied to the context and the impressions the foster in that context. In fact, I’ll say that even more strongly – if your speech is not confined to the context you are in – but available to a potentially unknowable audience – you are online.

This is why real name sites are necessarily inadequate. They deny individuals the right to be context-specific. They turn the performance of impression management into the process of curation. Facebook curates through the top news feed, Twitter does it through lists and Google+ through some confusing (and as far as I can tell, failing) social circles model. Impression management means selectively presenting an idealized version of one’s self specific to that context. Curation means selecting objects for display. So if you don’t think that being context-specific is a right, consider what you think the ‘free’ means in the right to free speech. When my speech is necessarily encumbered by a tethering to a single all-encompassing key (the real name) that unlocks whatever I say, I am no longer free to address one specific context and not another one. I am engaging in a trust relationship with the curator, but I am not free to say what I want. Sometimes that relationship fails, sometimes its out of my control (when others post on my behalf, tag me, etc…)

Of course, this applies most strongly to non-addressed spaces. When I address someone in an email or on the phone, I am still online, but I’m not necessarily subject to curation. I send a message to a specific recipient, I expect that recipient to get the message, not have gmail decide (but even then spam is filtered out through some curation). On the other hand, when I submit content to social media sites, I do not have a clear view of who is, or will see it, outside of some vague notion of friend lists.

Pseudonyms have long been a way out of this situation. Someone might have one name for an anonymous support group, another for a group of bi-curious and closeted individuals (or just for sex in general), another for a message board about programming, and one for politics or political action. If these were mine, then the choice to blend them or keep them separate is mine. Real names and third-party curation takes away that choice. In their place they offer many advantages, but freedom is not one of them. And that’s why the imposition of one name, one network for all is an abuse of power. It says not only is the curator better at deciding who you should read your content than you, the curator won’t even give you the choice to begin with.

(Cross posted at the social media collective blog)

Correction!!! My NodeXL workshop is Tuesday

BERNiE — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:33:55 +0000

Just a small correction to note that my NodeXL social network analysis workshop is on Tuesday, July 5th!

Still on the fence? Here’s a testamonial from Dr Jo Hamilton, ClimateXChange Coordinator at the Environmental Change Institute Oxford University Centre for the Environment.

“Bernie Hogan’s workshop was an excellent introduction to the topic and themes of Social Network Analysis. He conveyed the key points succinctly, incorporating questions and discussion as he went along. The exercises using NODEXL were a great way to embed our knowledge, and to enable us to ask more practical questions about using the software. An excellent introduction which has made me more confident to approach and use the tools.”

OII Network course 2011: A Showcase

BERNiE — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 17:19:42 +0000

For the second year in a row, I co-taught the OII’s Online Social Networks course with Dr. Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon. Again this year we had some excellent studies and some excellent students. But I thought the graphs were so visually interesting, and often creative that I’ve asked for permission to compile them in a gallery. This isn’t a complete list of sociograms (and of course, not every network analysis needs a sociogram) but this work ought to give you a sense of what we have been doing.

The students have provided the text themselves and often additional material if you follow links in the descriptions and comments to their own personal blogs and websites. Enjoy!

Many Faces of Facebook

BERNiE — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:24:28 +0000

I’m a mentor for Nina Jones for BBC Material World’s contest, “So You Want to Be a Scientist”. We set up a survey on the project Facebook page. The survey is finished, the data is almost cleaned and now Nina is getting ready to code the profile pictures we’ve captured. Perhaps the name of the contest should be altered, however, as I’ve been having an awful lot of fun with the profile pictures: “So you want to be a graphic designer”, perhaps? Below is a photo of all the thumbnails ordered by saturation. A big version is here

1708 Profile photos for our picture study

Now we said that we didn’t want to uniquely identify people, but we would show profile pics in reports and presentation. So I originally had ordered these by Facebook ID, but then figured that is in some way a form of identifying information (outside the picture itself). Being unsatisfied with this, I came up with a simple saturation ordering and voila.

I did most of this work in the Python Imaging Library (PIL), which unfortunately, doesn’t play nice with Mac OSX. It involved first getting an ‘average color’ by shrinking the image down to one pixel, and then sorting the image by the sum of the RGB color values. Then, I simply stacked all of them (all 1708 images that is) in rows of width 50 to get as close as possible to the dimensions of A paper.

Finally, although it is called “The Many Faces of Facebook”, I will accept that those faces look awfully white. Of course, these photos are drawn primarily from people in the United Kingdom (who are primarily white) and primarily from listeners of Material World on BBC Radio 4. This is in no way supposed to be a unbiased sample of Facebook, so please take it with a grain of salt and enjoy.

Special thanks to Terry Handcock, who came up with the algorithm for finding the average color.

New Pinwheel network layout

BERNiE — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:25:14 +0000

I’m presently working on a chapter on Facebook networks for the forthcoming Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL edited by Marc Smith, Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman. Working with NodeXL has been a lot of fun. Since NodeXL does not have native facilities for importing Facebook, there’s not much to discuss for data collection. I simply describe my tool for exporting edge lists and paste them into the Excel worksheet. Consequently, I spend a lot of time showing how to push out new and interesting layouts.

One of the layouts I show people how to create is something that looks like Thomas Fletcher’s friend wheel. I’ve always enjoyed the look of a Friendwheel but I don’t find it especially informative. To beef up this visualization, I toyed around with NodeXL to get a new visualization that I call a Pinwheel.

After the cut I describe some details of the visualization and how to interpret it.

Each wing of the Pinwheel represents a group as discovered by a community detection algorithm. The head of the pinwheel is the node of highest degree and the tail includes nodes of smallest degree. The colors and sizes are also mapped to degree to reinforce the overall shape of each wing. The nodes closest to the center are nodes of highest betweenness. I chose betweenness to reflect a sort of ‘gravity’ where these nodes want to be pulled towards other groups. I use an opacity of 50% for both the nodes and the edges so you can see overlapping nodes and edges.

I like this diagram for several reasons:

The angle of each wing (i.e. each cluster) is proportionate to its share of the network. So if a cluster has 25% of all nodes, it will have 90 degrees.
Because of the shading and the arcs (through betweenness) each wing does not need to be colored differently in order to be seen as a distinct group (which is nice when it has to be printed in grayscale).
By looking at the tail you can see how much of a periphery each group has. Those groups with many small nodes at the tail have lots of members who only know people in that group.
By looking at the head you can see which groups have people with the highest overall degree.
By looking at the edges that cross between the wings you can see which groups are well connected, but also because the nodes are sorted by degree it is easy to see if the best connected nodes are the ones that mainly link the groups, or if the entire group links from one wing to another.
Finally, if each wing goes from white to blue it looks like an iceball and if each wing goes from red to yellow it looks like a fireball. (Can you tell I’ve been playing a little too much Super Mario Bros. Wii?)

Off the Internet no one knows you’re an escapee

BERNiE — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:29:07 +0000

Craig “Lazie” Lynch escaped from prison in September of 2009. Recently, he has become somewhat of an international spectacle as he has been posting some regular updates on Facebook. Some probably wonder, first, what is he thinking, and second, why are so many people interested in his whereabouts?

As for why he is doing it, no doubt Craig is having fun taunting police. The man has already jumped a few psychological hurdles insofar as he presumably completed an aggravated burglary as well as escaped from prison. I imagine he enjoys considering himself more clever than those who would keep him imprisoned. And if he is going to be some sort of micro-celebrity, where else than on Facebook? The technology is easy, well understood and very well adopted.

But as for the second, I doubt that Craig is fuelling a rash of copy cat prison breaks or of them posting on Facebook as a consequence. Rather, I think people are revelling in the idea that there is still a clear firewall between online and offline interactions. Everyone downloading a movie or music, checking out porn, or posting a rude comment will take some measure of satisfaction in the idea that deviance online is not easily punished; that the authorities do not have a master control system that tracks, monitors and ultimately captures people instantly, and that while Google makes the internet findable, the internet doesn’t necessarily make people findable. CCTV, airport screenings and roadblocks are as much about self-policing as they are about successful interventions. These are disciplining technologies.

The reinforce the idea that surveillance is as much about self-policing as it is about policing, one need only examine the group “We Hate Craig Lynch”. The comments therein are not simply directed at Craig for what he has done, but Craig for undermining the entire system. “I hope the police find him and put him away for life. And for him life should mean life, no chance of parole or visitors NOTHING. Hes a bastard.” says one commenter. Of course, comments are somewhat more mixed on his own wall, but there are more than a few wellwishers: “All people say the Policemen in Greece aren´t good.Here´s a example for the british policemen ( won´t catch him anyway ).GOOD LUCK CRAIG”. He is now a pariah and a hero of the online world.

I have no doubt that Craig will be found. The story of Evan Ratliff at Wired is a lesson here. If enough people really want to find you, you’ll be found, and the technology to keep you truly anonymous online is somewhere between impressively complex and virtually impossible. But in the meantime, and as long has he’s staying above the law, it is not hard to find his arrogance just a bit charming – off the Internet no one knows you’re an escapee? But if word leaks of Craig doing one violent act since his escape the sympathy will undoubtedly vanish as quickly as Craig did…and here comes everybody.

Crowdsourcing sociology

BERNiE — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:35 +0000

Reddit has posts of all kinds, and comments to follow. This includes its fair share of navel gazing. But reddit’s penchant for self analysis has no lack of thoughtful points alongside mere complaining and in-jokes. This is doubly interesting in a recent (ongoing) discussion about the state of the site. One user asked: Is “reddiquette” or etiquette on Reddit going the way of the dodo? The top conversation is a typical reddit trail of wisecracks (this time about Reddit being a hipster that is “too cool” for Reddit these days). But following that is a sustained discussion of different comparable websites, Eternal summer, and scaling issues. There’s an appeal to more participation and cynical retorts. One particular post on the general life cycle of online discussion forums usernametaken6767 summarizes this issue rather nicely:

I’ve been using the internet since the mid-90s. Every single awesome community or interesting subculture on the net that I came across has eventually turned to utter crap due to an influx of people.

It’s basically this: Regression toward the mean

combined with this: Eternal Summer

finally with a bit of this: Online disinhibition

edit: the only communities that haven’t turned to crap, I’ve found anyway, has been criss-crossing conversations on well-written specialist topic blogs. For instance, I’m interested in warfare. There are some excellent blogs and conversations on war out there that you would never find on digg, reddit, or other social voting type sites. This holds for most blogs I’ve read where the bloggers and the people discussing things have been specialists, authorities in the area, or “pro amateurs” from a variety of political and social positions. Free for all voting communities that are topically transient tend to eventually forment group think, whether blogs gathered around some topic tend to be more individualistic (individuals agreeing or disagreeing with each other).

But is it really that simple? People tend to do things online they wouldn’t otherwise, but this pushes people towards some general average. Those who resist, or have a pretty specific conception of the site tend to complain, but still participate. The best way to avoid a dull average gorup is to seek out smaller topic oriented forum or fragment that group into a smaller more ones where the mean is more aligned with their expectations.

Well, I guess that’s not that simple. But it’s classic Reddit, and reminds me a lot of my theory of Lowest Common Denominator culture. The above quote received at least 71 points.

Call for Papers Extended – BSTS

BERNiE — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:47:40 +0000

We have extended our call for papers for the special issue of Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society. Please note the new dates. Feel free to contact either myself or Anabel with questions or requests for further information.

Best, Anabel & Bernie

REVISED CALL FOR PAPERS Special Issue on “Persistence and Change in Social Media” “You can never step into the same river; for new waters are always flowing on to you.” Heraclitus.

Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society

ISSN: 0270-4676 eISSN: 1552-4183 http://bst.sagepub.com/

Submission deadline: November 1, 2009 Scheduled Publication date: May 2010

Guest editors: Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute Anabel Quan-Haase, University of Western Ontario

BSTS editor: Willem H. Vanderburg, University of Toronto

TOPIC OUTLINE We seek papers for a special issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society on the twin topics of persistence and change in social media. From ICQ to IM, Six-degrees to Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter, change seems to be a recurrent theme in social media. Not only are users willing to try out new tools, but they also continue using existing media. In light of the seemingly endless novelty in social media, how can researchers build a theory of social media practice, rather than local theories on a per-site basis? Which insights from one site can we apply to another? Which ones are due to period and cohort effects and which ones relate to the structure of social media generally?

For this issue we hope to publish papers that not only address a specific social media phenomenon, but also do so with an eye to the potential for constant change and the persistence in social media of trends and communication patterns. We will gladly accept papers studying a specific web site or online context, but we want to encourage submitters to frame their analysis in terms of wider shifts occurring theoretically, empirically or substantively.

Topics include but are not limited to: - Comparative analyses of multiple social media - Pan-site theories of interaction, self-presentation, privacy, disclosure, boundaries, and media usage - Change in user behaviors over time - Global differences in social media use patterns - Meta-analyses of articles on specific media sites or social media-specific topics - Shifting public concerns in the usage of social media - Evolution of specific online memes, events or practices - Evolving practices in privacy, communication, social networks, and friendship formation - Development and maintenance of community in social media

Methodologies include but are not limited to: - Multivariate statistical analysis - Virtual Ethnography - Social network analysis - Scholarly meta-analysis - Content analysis

Typical social media tools include but are not limited to: - Interpersonal Tools (Instant Messaging and Voice-Call tools): ICQ, Windows Live, Skype, AIM, etc. - Business Tools (Knowledge Exchange and Collaborative): IBM Sametime, Oracle Collaboration Suite, etc. - Large-Scale Social Network Sites (Friendship and Community): Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Friendster, Coach Potatoes, etc.

Paper length: Papers should be between 5,000 and 7,500 words (excluding references, tables, and figures).

Important dates: Papers due: November 1, 2009 Comments to authors: December 15, 2009 Final papers due: February 1, 2009 Expected publication date: Summer 2010

Submission Guidelines: Information about manuscript submission guidelines can be found online http://www.sagepub.com/journalsProdManSub.nav?prodId=Journal200908. Formatting follows APA style.

Please send questions and papers to Bernie Hogan (bernie.hogan@oii.ox.ac.uk) or Anabel Quan-Haase (aquan@uwo.ca).

The global network

BERNiE — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:26:51 +0000

For me, presently the most impressive network in the world is not the network of email traffic, Facebook friends or cell phone calls. Both for sheer size and complexity, the personal network must surely take the cake. In many ways, it is not merely a superset of most communication networks. It is something different. It exists in minds. The rest is a proxy. This is the network of mutual acknowledgement, of individuals as particular beings, rather than as signifiers of something larger, such as a town, ethnic group or any classification. Like rebranding bank machines as “Personal Touch” machines, as Royal Bank did in Canada, rebranding this network of particular relationships as the personal network, we make it sweet and homely. It softly bumps up against community, and might mutter “sorry” for complicating terminology. It is anything but homely. It is not simply a friend when you’re feeling down or a neighbor to loan a cup of sugar; it is almost everyone who knows anyone.

In my work I show samples, like microscope slides, of this personal network. They are not perfect. But it is worth knowing that the people who try to access this network in a measurable way realize they are not perfect. But nor are they completely made up and hopelessly useless because of recall error. Firstly, it is not “error”, it is bias, and it is not noise, it is difference in how people understand the world.

Such samples, done through direct questioning are a snapshot of the world as is understood, rather than the world as made (via telephone calls, emails or twitter feeds). At a fundamental level, there is no need to be sneaky about this network, or seek to assert the primacy of the ‘communication network’ simply because it allows researchers to scale up their ventures more rapidly. The fact that humans presently cannot read each others minds, or directly access these minds should not be forgotten, or ignored. It is this limitation that prompts us to use representations like a call graph. But it is so obvious, or at least so taken for granted, that we often forget this network of minds is the real target. The fact that we cannot read minds means that we must infer them, not that data stands in for them, not that behavioral traces encapsulate them.

Of course, not every large scale network concerns the personal network. There are many designed systems that benefit from the understandings brought on by massive scale network analysis; we need efficient power grids, transportation hubs, waterways, commodity distribution systems and so forth. But that should not blind us to the fact that as humans, it is the relations to each other that matter most. The rest is just a proxy.

Thinking “I should look that up”

BERNiE — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:36:41 +0000

Not long ago when listening to the band Menomena I thought to myself, “I should look up more about them.” It’s a pretty mundane thought, in fact one I have pretty regularly through the day, not about Menomena, but about things in general, including books, people, musicians, movies and events.

I posit two interesting things about this thought:

The potential to act immediately: I can act on that thought now, by myself, and immediately. My capacity to search for information is limited only by my mental focus on another task (including the often extremely important task of paying attention to other co-present people). But, assuming I can switch my focus, I can do it almost immediately. I’m neither going to wait and ask my friends nor go to a library, record store or magazine rack. I just pick up my phone or type in my computer a search for “Menomena”. Often, I search specific storehouses of information, such as allmusic, metacritic or if it is something for which I don’t know the right site(s), just Google.

The premise of action: I’m not a medical doctor, private investigator or stock broker. I’m not solving a problem when listening to Menomena, the way a doctor may wish to immediately look up information on a specific ailment, injury or drug. If I don’t look up information the music will still play, and I’ll be none the wiser. But nevertheless, consider listening to music on an Internet enabled device as contrasted with television or radio. An internet-enabled listening device is a sufficient condition of possibility for this sense that acting on this thought is possible and practical. It doesn’t create the thought, but compared to watching a one-way chanel or radio station, it clearly facilitates a different and engaged mode of consumption.

These two interesting points about the thought “I should look up more about X”, reminds me of childhood. When I was a child I enjoyed encyclopedias, dictionaries, price guides and compendiums. I suspect it was less what they contained then their experience as an object that allowed me to search for things. They implied a certain empowerment. I’ve met lots of people who were charmed by the encyclopedia, especially when they were young. I would pour over facts, scan pages and come up with questions that I hoped the encyclopedia might answer. I had friends who would create tables, on loose-leaf paper, of the population of major cities and countries. This was grade 4. I also know a lot of older people who have an encyclopedia in their house and may look something up as reference once in a blue moon. When asked why they purchased such a little-used set of books, they say it is for ‘the children’.

The encyclopedia experience is all grown up now, and it no longer lives in static pages stacked on living room shelves. But it is not just Wikipedia, it is searchable knowledge in general. I wouldn’t conflate this encyclopedia experience with Web 2.0 or a ‘network society’. It is merely one small slice of the attitude adjustment and difference in being-in-the-world that is suggested by the Internet. Certainly not a revolution, but why not consider it an evolution? The thought “I should look that up” is not mundane at all. It’s a sign of empowerment in the face of streams of one-way communication. It indicates social cohesion when it is premised on the idea that you can get accurate or at least “proper” information from outside, often community driven, sources. It indicates progress of some kind when the search results become increasingly coherent without being redundant. It’s a testament to freedom (along that very thin line between thought and action) when it is not followed up by “I better not”.