Can You See Me Now?

Drawing on work from Altman, Tufekci believes that the manner in which teenagers approach online interactions can best be understood as a process of optimisation. By this it is meant that individuals in fact want to be seen and use information about themselves as a way to be noticed but also being mindful of the pitfalls of extending too much information. He notes that doing so in an online environment poses significant increased threats thanks to the collapsing of many temporal boundaries that exist in the real world.

He makes the point that an online environment captures data by default. This is done via cookies, ISP's, databases, RSS feeds, etc, etc. and makes for a prime environment for surveillance. On the other hand, the real world requires a conscious decision PRIOR to a conversation to record the conversation eg a wire tap, or some other form of surveillance. Unlike a real world conversation that, unless recorded, disappears immediately as it occurs, a digital conversation is recorded and can be retrieved months and years later. This is a significant difference in that the default positions are at polar ends of the surveillance spectrum.

Tufekci claims the Internet can be divided into the instrumental Internet and the expressive Internet. By this he means that the former is where we go online to achieve an outcome and uses the purchase of airline tickets as an example. The latter, he contends, refers to the creation of self trough identity expression and impression management through the release of personal information.

He suggests that Altman's model of privacy, where boundaries are actively negotiated, is a more accurate reflection of what occurs in an online environment then early conceptions of privacy as "the right to be let alone". He suggests that people don't necessarily seek more seclusion, but rather, at times, seek more self-disclosure as a way of self-creation.

For me, this rings true. As an active participant on FB, I'm aware that the most interesting profiles and relationships are with those participants who "open up" or show some form of vulnerability or express an outrageous opinion. Others who treat FB as a personal brochure have little interaction and therefore an unexciting presence. Interesting people are usually interesting both on and offline.

He draws on the findings of Pallin and Dourish who suggest that an online environment creates special problems for privacy. We have no idea of who is watching and where and therefore have no control over our spatial boundaries and, because conversations are recorded, virtually forever, we have no control over our temporal boundaries. Our audience can exist far into the the future. Finally there is the problem of the management of context. What is posted on MySpace may well not be appropriate in a job interview, however, because of the nature of the digital environment, these two contexts can (and often do) intersect with often unintended consequences.

Tufecki's research indicated that a staggering 94.9% of Facebook users used their real names on their profiles. There was some tendency of Facebook users to make their profiles visible only to friends, but the research found there was no correlation between an open profile and the use of a real name. They found there was a general link between concerns about online privacy and making telephone numbers available. Males were more likely to display their phone numbers.

The study showed that participants modified their profiles, particularly the display of telephone numbers in line with their own privacy concerns, but they were generally unconcerned about a future employer reading their profile. Participants showed little concern about the consequences of a potential future partner seeing their profile. On the contrary they saw it as a potential benefit for a potential partner to see their profile.

He concludes by suggesting that disclosure is sought by youth as a way to create the self and as a way to limit access to the self through proactive self-disclosure. Although most concern, he claims is for present issues, youth could be more concerned about future problems that could result from the persistence of data.

Can You See Me Now? Audience and Disclosure
Regulation in Online Social Network Sites (subscription required)
Zeynep Tufekci
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

DOI: 10.1177/0270467607311484
2008; 28; 20
Bulletin of Science Technology Society
http://bst.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/28/1/20

Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck

Here's a few comments on an article from Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore Vol 14(1): 13–20

Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck
Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence
danah boyd
Harvard University and University of California-Berkeley, USA

Boyd argues that changes made to the public feed feature on Facebook have significanly altered the dynamic of what is viewed as private. She uses the example of a party conversation where one needs to shout to be heard only to find that everything suddenly goes quiet as you're about to finish your sentence. What was a conversation protected in some way by the din of the surroundings, the need to be physically proximate, and the assessment that only those nearby could hear what was being said suddenly becomes a very public communication.

Boyd notes that a similar event happened when Facebook created the public feed and caused what seemingly were private moments and events - despite them being available if someone searched hard enough - into easily accessible public information. It is this disruption she suggests that is new in the digital world.

In the physical world we have become accustomed to ways to protect our privacy, notably walls, physical distance, volume of speech. However, Boyd points out that in a digital world these disappear and are replaced by search capabilities that make previously "private" information very public.

Privacy is all about control one has about information about the self, Boyd suggests. Information is private therefore, not because it is not known, but because it is carefully controlled. It is far more difficult to keep a secret then to not allow the information out at all. Some information, she opines, is only relevant in certain social settings, but Facebook's public feed obliterated the context of this "grey"area information and disrupted the way in which people approached their privacy online.

This collapsing of social domains has resulted in what Boyd calls "social convergence" where previously discrete social contexts are brought together through technologies and digitisation. This convergence raises a number of questions, says Boyd, and significant concerns about the future of privacy as people deal with these converged domains without any form of social scripts.

Social networking sites pose danger to law firms

By Kevin Lo

Damned if you do and damned if you don't by the sounds of what Kevin Lo has to say. Here he recommends that companies be vigilant about what information finds its way onto SN sites, such as FB. He recommends either banning mention of the company at all, or at the least setting up a policy on what can and can't be said about a company on a SN site. He suggests that FB is great, but building a company controlled SN site is better.

But Lo here, appears to take the side of the company. He fails to address the question of who has sovereignty - the corporation or the individual. One suspects he believes that, if the company pays the coin, they own the person. That somewhat flies in the face of basic human rights but it appears that commerce continues to seep into every pore of the free speech membrane.

Is there inconsistency in corporate SN policy?

With the rush of organisations banning access to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, I can't help wonder if there's more than a little bit of double-standards at work. Let's say for a moment that a worker participated on LinkedIn as a way of forming a better network, would they find this acceptable? If so why would this form of networking be acceptable and not the Facebook kind?

Simply because a social networking site is fun, does that automatically make it unproductive? And does the fun diminish the quality of the relationship? I'm a member of both LinkedIn and Facebook and can say that, as a professional, I get little out of the former, and plenty out of the latter.

It's time for businesses to consider the longer term ramifications of too much control around SN.

Do social networking sites really result in networking?

Dana Boyd claims that:

Social network sites do not help most youth see beyond their social walls. Because most youth do not engage in "networking," they do not meet new people or see the world from a different perspective. Social network sites reinforce everyday networks, providing a gathering space when none previously existed.

I can't see how this statement stacks up? How can Boyd say that "most youth don't engage in "networking""? If someone adds a friends friend as a friend, does that not amount to "networking"? Or is that something else? What if you started seeing that person offline? Still not networking? I guess a rigourous definition of "networking" might say no, but instinctively I'd say it was networking.

Then there's the bit about social networks reinforcing everyday networks, but then she says that it's a gathering space where none previously existed. That just doesn't make much sense to me. If they reinforced everyday networks surely the networks existed before.

Social networking costing business billions?

A recent article on ZDNet suggests that social networking is a huge drain on company resources. The article reports that the practice costs businesses $6.5 billion pounds caused by staff spending on average 30 minutes per day on social networking. Around 30% of this cost, it is claimed, comes from the consumption of band width.

Interestingly, the article reports a growing tension between network managers, who would ban social networking sites completely, and recruiters HR managers, who encourage the practice believing that such sites give them an opportunity without the need for interaction.

The article then sensibly asks the question; what about the benefits of social networking such as the deals that flow from an active network - particularly from sites such as LinkedIn.

Good question that.

Editorial: Convergence Culture

I never thought of media much before.

It's described here as a medium between people, communities, organisations, and industries. In the classic view, a few media organisations act as the medium but this is now changing as we see the democratisation of the means of production of media content. These changes have brought about a hybrid media that is no longer creates a homogenising effect as did big, monolithic media organisations. These media outlets are everywhere and include individual, government, groups, etc.

This blog is an example of a component of this hybrid media.

The authors call this "socialised media". Of course, the big media companies want a piece of this action and seek to regain control of this new social media through mergers and acquisitions (note the Murdoch purchase of MySpace and the WSJ).

The convergence of these media types is both bottom up and top down. Big media attempts to re-badge content and make it available on other sites and in other contexts as a way of earning further revenue, decrease costs, and improve brand awareness. On the other hand consumers attempt to control what media they do and don't see and this can create conflict and negotiation between the players.

This negotiation plays itself out in a way that sees business claiming to harness collective intelligence where the business gets something for free by providing the means for participation. On the one hand, these platforms for participation can help a business build a brand - note the hyper-viral way applications spread on Facebook - but this same viral effect can also damage reputations and cause harm.

Some businesses boast about how cleverly they've harnessed this collective intelligence, only to find that they have ceded control of their brand to an environment that will never yield them control they once had - and of course this doesn't always work out the way the business hoped.

In the one moment, businesses can gain and lose control of their brands.

Downloaded from http://con.sagepub.com by Peter Fletcher on January 21, 2008
Editorial: Convergence Culture
Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze
Convergence 2008; 14; 5
DOI: 10.1177/1354856507084415