SNS

In our class few weeks ago, Bill asked us that how many facebook friends we have and I was kind a surprise to hear everyones' answer. Most of people had at least hundreds of friends; and my answer was under 10. Also remember how embarrassed I was to hear everyones laughing. When I first opened my SNS was about 10years ago. I opened Cyworld in 2003 which was leading SNS site in Korea. Cyworld was a huge phenomenon. I was in high school at the time and all the people that I know was actually in my friends- Cyworld called it as il-chon, which indicates family members- and contact each other with it. Most of the people used it as self-express tool I guess. Uploading their everyday photos and share it with friends and comments on them. You can find people if you know the name and the year when they were born. Thinking that Korean people are very aware of the age; people in Korean actually use the term friend mostly when they are in same age and someone is even a year older, there is other term according to it to call them. So it was very simple to search people and make il-chon with them. After you find a person you want to make il-chon with you request it and when that someone accepts it you both share the mini-hompie(I think it came from miniature homepage). On the top of your mini-hompie you can see how many people today and up-to today visited so once it was a way of judging whether you are popular or not. Though it is story while ago and the case here that I mentioned is Cyworld but I don't think it is too different in Facebook; which is obviously the leading SNS website in the world. It already too famous that several crime had involved Facebook. This naturally relates the topic the essay said about the privacy problem. This is also the problem that I faced when I ran a mini-homepie. At first the reason I created it was to share photos and many other thing among friends. However, after a while this became too popular that everyone started to make accounts and add me as a friend even we barely know each other. To deny the friend request was too awkward I began to accept those meaningless il-chon. And I began to uncomfortable in posting and using it less often then it just stopped. Yesterday I went on both of my facebook and Cyworld to see when I actually open an account and that was first time I logged in since last year. Not only this little privacy but there are more serious privacy problem occurred from these SNS services. Still, many people using it and will continuously using this services. And with the development in digital devices such as smart phones and tablet it will be in the market pretty popular. However, I feel like it needs many improvement not only on the privacy but also in a variety of format to attract people like me and people in all interest levels.

Social Networking

After I read those three reading (Social Network Sites, FCC says 93M in U.S. lack broadband.., For Minorities, New ‘Digital Divide..’), I would like to say it seems to me that the Internet, chat rooms, message boards, and social networking are all things that are likely to increase group polarization. Group polarization is a phenomenon in which, if a person set up a special post (whatever according to nationality, belief or interest), and let people talk for a while, on the whole all of them will end up supporting that position and finally become a super strong aligned group in opposition to people with the contradicting view points. As you can see the example in the reading of “For Minorities, New ‘Digital Divide’, the first thing Simmons does when he just starts using Twitter is to look for other African American faces to connect with. As you can see, social networking sites have a power to gather the people who have the same interest. Social networking sites become a marketing tool for companies to advertise, fund-raising and gain support.

Recently, there have been many news stories about how social networking destroys families. When one woman found out that her husband had a tagged picture kissing a hot girl, there would be a disaster of the family. However, social networking sites also have a good side. Social networking can be a weapon of our job finding. People’s action will influence one another. A picture that is posted on facebook will affect the future of the people in the picture. Therefore we should always beware of what poses we take and how we act because people like to “share”.  Also, we should beware about the profile, whether we make it fake or real.

Here is a site http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2012/04/20/make-social-media-your-job-finding-weapon/

“Make Social Media Your Job-Finding Weapon”, which says two in five companies browse applicant’s social media profiles to evaluate their character and personality and some even base their hiring decision on what they find. There are 7 tips for landing a job. I found one is very useful. “Create Relevant Profiles—build job history that let people know your strengths.” I found that this is quite true. When you list your job history in your profile, then your new employers noticed that and think that you have a specific skill and that skill is very suitable for the company. Then here is your chance.

Besides, I found interesting research in the reading of “For minorities, New” Researchers have noticed signs of segregation online that perpetuate divisions in the physical world. Coley is a black person and he said, "Twitter is a great social network to kill time.” And he talked about how the African Americans are active on Twitter. Does this article imply that the African American people have more free time to kill? Does this implication make people make a mistake to think of the stereotypes of white and black people? In this way, it is true that SNS site have group polarization. 

The most productive day ever

Sometime before the SOPA online protest, someone had posted an image of a calendar where January 18th was marked as the most productive day ever. On January 18th, Wikipedia, Reddit, and other popular sites black out  to protest against SOPA and PIPA bills, so for one day people may do their work and not be distracted by the pictures of cats. Of course that was not a message. The black out showed people what effect SOPA and PIPA could have on the Internet ecosystem: The bills would have gave authorities to censor the internet. As Prof. Herman tells us in his article that the protest turned out to be the biggest online protest in the history of the Internet.

The Internet have spoken, and on January 18th, it told the people what SOPA stood for.  Participating in the protest websites posted links that explain what SOPA was and how it would affect the Internet neutrality. They were written in the same manner as the PDF about SOPA that Prof. Herman put on blackboard. So on January 18th, the word SOPA dominated the Internet. People started wondering what was that SOPA that plastered all over the web. Click after click, share after share, like after like, and the SOPA  blackout became the largest online protest, and on January 20th, the Congress had voted against SOPA.

P.S. If the online protest had happened on April 23rd, then I wouldn't have been distracted by silly memes and would have written this blog post on time.

Readings

If this helps for readings.....

Hamblen, “FCC says 93M in U.S. lack broadband …” (BB)

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9160738/FCC_says_93M_in_U.S._lack_broadband_digital_divide_grows

Washington, “For Minorities, New ‘Digital Divide’ ...” (BB)
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/4526783/For-minorities-new-digital-divide-seen

Walker, “When Funny Goes Viral” (BB)
http://current.com/entertainment/comedy/92553091_when-funny-goes-viral-roflcon.htm

Christian, “Outsiders After Viral Video” (BB)
http://blog.ajchristian.org/2012/01/27/outsiders-after-viral-video/

What Happens on Facebook Stays on Facebook

Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score. Fiorella hesitated awkwardly before confessing that he had no idea what a Klout score was.

The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”

Partly intrigued, partly scared, Fiorella spent the next six months working feverishly to boost his Klout score, eventually hitting 72. As his score rose, so did the number of job offers and speaking invitations he received. “Fifteen years of accomplishments weren’t as important as that score,” he says.
“What Your Klout Score Really Means,” by Seth Stevenson in Wired

I wonder if only a professional marketer would assume that using a proprietary algorithm designed to rate your social networking influence is a legitimate basis for a hiring decision. I fear the answer may be no, it’s not only marketers who make that assumption. As social networking becomes ever more central to most computer users’ online experience, “networked practices,” as danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison put it, “mirror, support, and alter known everyday practices, especially with respect to how people present (and hide) aspects of themselves and connect with others.” If this was true in 2007 (and I think it was), then it’s even more true today; in which case, Klout, or some social media competence-rater like it, could very well become the carrot and stick of typical professional-level job searches in the future.

“The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you,” wrote Lori Andrews in a New York Times editorial in February. “Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.” Andrews cites other examples of social networking coming back to bite the networker:

 Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages. Employers sometimes decide whether to hire people based on their online profiles, with one study indicating that 70 percent of recruiters and human resource professionals in the United States have rejected candidates based on data found online. A company called Spokeo gathers online data for employers, the public and anyone else who wants it. The company even posts ads urging “HR Recruiters — Click Here Now!” and asking women to submit their boyfriends’ e-mail addresses for an analysis of their online photos and activities to learn “Is He Cheating on You?”

Are Andrews’ privacy concerns (and mine) about social networking misplaced or overdone? Surely the hundreds of millions using these services worldwide are strong evidence that they provide some social good. They create spaces, for example, where people can (as boyd and Ellison put it) “articulate and make visible their social networks” across time and distance, and this is clearly what makes them so attractive to so many. Whether the connection is with close friends, lost friends, relatives, fans of a shared interest or business contacts, the point of these sites is connection, and, after all, connection is essential to our very social species.

Despite the strong tendency of people to congregate homogeneously, there is some evidence, as Jesse Washington notes in an article that otherwise reinforces the suspicion of a persistent digital divide among people of different races and ethnicities in the US, that at least some people’s online social circles are growing to include those they wouldn’t ordinarily associate with offline. Washington cites Anjuan Simmons, an African-American technology consultant who “has seen his social network expand. Only about half of his 2,834 Facebook friends are black, down from about 80% when he signed up in 2006.” Speaking for myself, a (sometimes) avid Twitter user for about a year now, my online social circle has become similarly much more diverse than my offline one, and this is unquestionably for the good. It is the time-and-space canceling nature of the internet that makes this network diversification possible, bringing people together where they are, at their desktops, laptops and mobile phones, rather than leaving it to them to expand their networks where they might never think to go offline.

But I think it’s easy to forget that there’s a major difference between online and offline socializing. Offline, we can socialize relatively privately in our own homes or even in public spaces where, ever more ubiquitous security cameras notwithstanding, our socializing doesn’t leave much of a trace. This is never true online. Even when our profiles are set to the most hermetic of privacy settings, our behavior is always in the sights of the host site. Not to say we’re always being watched. I doubt we are. But all of our actions online are available to our hosts. They’re stored on our hosts’ servers. They’re subject, if not absolutely legally—yet—to inspection at any time from any power that asserts itself if the host is (or is compelled to be) susceptible to it. This means the government, of course, but also anyone who can hack into the system.

The point is, we need to be reminded from time to time, what we do on Facebook stays on Facebook much longer than what we do in Vegas (for example) stays there. And that, I think, has serious consequences for our privacy in general.

Social Network Sites and the 'Digital Divide'

The use of social network sites (SNSs) has become an intensely popular slice of online consumption throughout the globe in recent years. Some researchers would even venture to say that this popularity borders on obsession for some users. With wide(r)-spread internet accessibility, social network sites are thriving and active. However, similar to how Matthew Hindman, in The Myth of Digital Democracy, indicated that the web is not entirely "democratized," neither is social network usage among different ethnicities and socioeconomic brackets.  Currently, there is ongoing discourse involving "digital divide." 

In danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison's "Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship," "social network sites" are described as "web-based services" that allow individuals to create a public or semi-public profile, build a list of other users/"friends" with whom they can share a connection, and view and navigate their list of connections and others' content within the system. According to boyd and Ellison, what's unique about social network sites is their ability to enable users to "articulate and make visible their social networks," which can result in "connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made," although that is often not the intention. In theory, social network sites, just like the Internet itself, offer the potential to expand an individual's group of connections and opportunities. However, media literacy is not uniform across populations, and neither is access to the web. In "The Digital Divide and What to Do About It," Eszter Hargittai defines "digital divide" as "the gap between those who have access to digital technologies and those who do not, or the gap between those who use digital technologies and those who do not, understood in binary terms distinguishing the 'haves' from the 'have- nots'." In 2006-7, social media researcher boyd interviewed teens in 17 states and spent more than 2,000 hours observing online habits. At the time, she found that black youths tended to cluster on MySpace, while whites were leaving what some users called "ghetto" MySpace environment for Facebook. boyd indicated that their comments were often integrally tied to race and class, and thus, "reflected a reproduction of social categories that exist in schools throughout the United States. Because race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status shape social categories, the choice between MySpace and Facebook became racialized," boyd wrote in "Race After the Internet."  

Peter Chow-White of Simon Fraser University stated, in "For Minorities, New 'Digital Divide' Seen," that "as long as you have structural inequalities in society, you cannot expect to have anything less than that on the Internet. The Internet is not a separate space from the world, it's intricately connected to everyday life and social situations." Ultimately, that's a good starting point for reconfiguring the accessibility. One of the dominant approaches to dealing with the "digital divide" focuses on distinguishing those who are connected from those who don't have access. Resultant policy discourse also limit their attention to identifying "connectedness" without truly delving into issues of "ability" and "skill." In "Why Critical Design Literacy is Needed Now More Than Ever," S. Craig Watkins indicates that the need for critical design literacy is extremely urgent, stating, "There is one clear and dominant trend in the most populous metropolitan areas of the U.S.: growing racial and ethnic diversity . . . The problems that these communities are facing require a broad array of resources, skills, and social innovations. Crucially, the individuals living in these communities must become the change that they want to see. Their very survival will be dependent on the ability of educators to make the skills and learning principles that critical design literacy promotes accessible to the students and communities that need them the most." Thus, the ability to use a medium effectively and efficiently allows the users to benefit from its use, and as such, policy may be more effective if the focus was on improving BOTH access AND training. It's simplistic to assume that merely providing those with access will enhance the lives of everyone who use it. 

We end with a quote that will hopefully invite us to think beyond the constraints of previous discourse on the "digital divide," stated by award-winning performance artist, writer, activist, and educator Guillermo Gómez Peña, who explores cross-cultural issues, including new technologies and the digital divide in an era of globalization through mixed genres and experimental language, combining English and Spanish, "fact and fiction, social reality, and pop culture":

"Less than 3 percent of the population of Latin America is wired, and less than 10 percent of the Chicano/Mexican population in the United States is wired. So what are we really talking about when we use terms like global or access? Whose global project are we talking about? Access to what? Cyberspace reproduces almost identically the geopolitical cartography of nonvirtual reality. There are borders and there are people south of the digital divide . . . Latinos. That's why I often describe myself as a 'Webback,' illegally crossing the digital borderline and facing the 'cybermigra.' Once in cyberspace, my own weapons are my humor, my linguas polutas and my political imagination."

- Guillermo Gómez Peña 

(Peña, Guillermo Gómez, and Elaine Peña. Ethno-techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy. Routledge, 2005). 

Blog #4 on Social Network Sites (SNS)

            Taking a course titled "Internet and Society" I had no doubt that there would be discussions on social networking sites, it was just a matter of 'when'. While Facebook is obviously the biggest player in the world of social network sites and comes to the mind very quickly when one thinks of SNS, what I appreciated about the Boyd reading was that for the most part, it focused on social network sites as a whole as opposed to narrowing down on two or three popular sites.
            One of the more interesting sections of the reading was in regard to privacy in relation to social network sites. Over the past few years, there have been news of Facebook privacy policies.  For example, not too long ago there were talks that Facebook was selling users' information to companies.  Using myself an an example, there has never been a time when I had actually explored the user agreements or the fine print of Facebook and I think I can safely assume the same in the cases of countless other individuals.  It wasn't until the Facebook privacy criticisms came to light that I decided to take a look at my settings.  In essence, they are much like the instruction manuals that come with a microwave, DVD player or even an Iphone. They are glanced at quickly, if at all but not thoroughly scanned.  If the consumer already knows how to use the product then why bother wasting time on the small matters? It is only when there is a malfunction or problem in the mechanics does one feel the need to refer to the instruction manual or in this case, the social network privacy policies.
            After having read the Boyd reading, I decided to click on the privacy link on Facebook and amidst all the usual lines, there was a line that concerned me somewhat:
we don't share information we receive about you with others unless we have: 

• given you notice, such as by telling you about it in this policy; or
• removed your name or any other personally identifying information from it.

  
  

         Thus, they can and do share information about the users, they just remove what they consider more specific details about the user. I'm sorry, but I'm not comfortable with any of my information being shared at all and I keep my personal information to a minimum which is in contrast to many people who put every detail about themselves that they can think of.  Also, they also share information when the user is informed of it, such as in the privacy policy which, as mentioned before, many individuals do not look at.  Boyd refers to something called the 'privacy paradox' in which teens are not knowledgeable about the 'public nature of the internet.'

           Another problem related to privacy on social network sites is 'phising' which Boyd mentions. I am somewhat familiar with this term because I remember it from the Myspace days when I would find random advertising comments on a friend's Myspace that I did not write which correlates with Boyd's description 'a "phishing" scheme that appeared to originate from a friend on the network'.