facebook interview

A reporter with the Daily Universe, BYU's paper, interviewed me via email about Facebook, social capital, and the announced rollout of Facebook to non-academic settings. I've copied some of my responses below in case they are of interest to others:

3) After conducting your survey, do think there is any harm as far as privacy issues on the site?
NE: There is the potential for students to disclose personal information without realizing that their true audience is not limited to their on-campus friends.

4) Facebook is planning to open up its eligibility to anyone with an email address- what do you think about this?
NE: I think depending on how it’s implemented, it could mean very little changes for current members, or it could be very disruptive. There is already a movement growing to protest this change; Facebook should tread carefully so as to not alienate its core userbase – college students who value the exclusivity of the system.

5) do you think this will affect social capital?
NE: Theoretically, it could lead to an increase in current members’ bridging social capital. This kind of social capital is based on having lots of “weak ties” – people you don’t know that well but who might provide you with valuable information or resources. Of course, it all depends on how the new system is implemented and how easy it is for people to connect with those outside their network.

6) How do you think this will affect college students willingness to use facebook?
NE: see 4 above – we could see a backlash of students who leave Facebook in protest, or because they think they’ll have encounters with people they don’t want to connect with. Some of the message boards have talked about it becoming non-exclusive like MySpace or full of pedophiles. I think this fear is overblown, but I do think Facebook will have to manage the rollout carefully. I’m surprised they are doing it so soon after the NewsFeeds incident.

7) Do you think usership will increase or decrease?
NE: Overall, it will increase. Among college students, it could decrease, depending on how the system is set up and the reaction among existing members.

8) Is there any other information, you learned while conducting your study, that you think would be valuable for college students to know?
NE: Facebook can be a valuable tool for getting information, staying in touch with people, and finding out more about people you want to get to know. But be aware that it’s not as exclusive as most people think – it’s fairly easy for law enforcement, future employers, marketing companies, and others to get access to it. Give some thought to how you want to present yourself online knowing that you may have multiple audiences for your profile.

The Dark Side

This morning my daughter, K, and her friend M and I were driving to school, chatting about our three cats. We all decided Mr. Friendly (the one K named, if you couldn't guess) was our favorite. Then I mentioned that Sasha (who K thinks is "evil" because she won't submit to being put in a paper bag and dragged around the house) was Daddy's favorite. K looked at the window and remarked quietly, "Daddy always goes to the Dark Side." How did she know?

Speaking of the dark side, i'm going to be officially a Mac person again in a couple of weeks once my new macbook arrives!

New Facebook Feature

I spoke with a WSJ reporter yesterday, then sent her to my colleague Cliff Lampe who was quoted in the short story they ran about facebook's new newsfeed feature. My reaction echoes that of Alex and no doubt others as well: this feature isn't doing anything other than make visible in a very transparent way the vast amounts of information that students are placing into Facebook. My sense is that students don't necessarily understand the true audience of their facebook profiles. This feature, which has generated a huge backlash among users, may be the proverbial wake-up call prompting users to either rethink the extent and nature of the information they provide or revisit their privacy settings. Unfortunately there is some evidence that suggests even after being made aware of some of the privacy issues regarding facebook, students didn't change their privacy settings.
I think Cliff's point is a good one- students feel ownership of facebook and want to have more of a voice in the design of the site. It will be interesting to see how the facebook team reacts.

Blogs For Learning in Beta!

I'm pleased to announce that "Blogs for Learning" is now in Beta! BFL is a web-based resource for students and instructors interested in blogging in the classroom. Our primary audience is college instructors but as there seems to be a lot of movement on this front among high school teachers, we are trying to include content for this audience as well. More information soon...

Updates

I again have been less than diligent in my postings. This has something to do with my lack of clarity regarding the audience for this blog. Another big article last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the perils of blogging for those dreaming of tenure: "The Hazards of Academic Blogging." My solution is to create a second blog which I'll post to anonymously. This blog, then, will be updates about my academic work and commentary about things related to my area of study - new media - with personal tidbits thrown in here and there of course.
Since my last post, I've had two articles appear in print. Both are linked from my homepage. I'm especially proud of the JCMC piece, Managing Impressions Online: Self-Presentation Processes in the Online Dating Environment, a birthing many, many months in the making. Both of these pieces deal with self-presentation in online dating contexts, an area that is particularly fascinating to me.
In other news - we are revising our Facebook paper for publication, I'm working on another piece exploring the use of blogs in the classroom, "Blogs for Learning" is close to being ready for beta-testing, and I just got back from a week in the Bahamas having "encounters" with wild dolphins, sharks (nurse, lemon, and tiger), rays, sea turtles, and more Europeans than you could shake a stick at. I should put in a plug for Jim Abernethy's Scuba Adventures, the diving operation out of Palm Beach that ran the trip. Except for a few small unavoidable logistical problems, everything was top-notch. Now back to reality!

Sporaticity

My posts have been sporatic at best and I am going to remedy this.

I participated in my first online conference last week - HigherEdBlogCon. I co-authored two presentations - one with Ethan Watrall on an online web resource we are building (with a team of undergrads and support from our college) on blogging in the classroom, which is available here; and a second presentation titled "An empirical test of blogging in the classroom" which is based on the data I collected last Fall. Although I wasn't too keen on the lack of immediate feedback while recording the screencast, the comments have been useful and I am less skeptical than before of the possibilities for these kind of events.

Typewriters

We're in Northern California for the holidays, and I happened to meet an old college friend of my husband. I noticed a stack of old, manual typewriters in cases along a wall in their apartment and inquired about them. As it turns out, this woman and her husband organize letter-writing campaigns, gathering a group of like-minded ("left wing") folks together to type out letters to politicans. The motive behind this scheme is the oft-touted belief that one visibly hand-written letter is considered a representation of 100 individuals (as opposed to, say, an e-mail petition or even a computer-generated letter). They encourage individuals to mark the letters in some way so that it is clear they are generated by live human beings - putting a coffee ring on one, or perhaps crossing out a few words here or there.
This made me think about some of the findings that have emerged from my interviews with online dating participants. Many of these individuals disucssed the way in which the words in a profile (the content) were not as important clues to identity as were other stylistic aspects of the message, such as the time an email was sent, the extent to which the message included typographic or grammatical errors, the length of a profile description. I'm still thinking about the meaning of this, but I think there's something interesting here about the ways in which technology gives voice to more individuals, but in doing so mutes their individuality. And thus we work harder to insert this information back in (lugging manual typewriters around) and to discern information about others ("What time was this message sent? 1 am? He must be desperate."). Of course, SIP (Social Information Processing) theory does a similar claim, but I think there's more there to uncover -- especially as CMC norms continue to develop.

Blogs on CNN

As part of my new exercise kick, I was browsing the channels at the gym and caught the end of a CNN segment on blogs. It appeared as though two bloggers (Joi Ito and Rebecca MacKinnon) were being interviewed via webcam in front of a studio audience. Neither said anything terribly new to me, but it was nice to see some of these ideas get more play in such a public forum.
As for the idea of using webcams for broadcast interviews such as this, I think the technology needs to be developed a bit more before widespread adoption. The audio, especially for Ito, was hard to understand, and the visuals were pixelated and clunky.

How to email a professor

Stumbled across this post today - all about the act of emailing a professor and the norms that should be adhered to. I always get a kick out of my students addressing me as "Ms Nellison." I see this as a cue that's given off -- evidence that they perhaps haven't looked at the syllabus but rather are only responding to emails from me. And signing one's name and class is always welcome - I've received a few emails from such cryptic characters as "hotbuns54."

Bill Gates - in a new light

The Oct. 24, 2005 New Yorker includes an insightful article, Healing Africa, which made me look at Bill Gates in a new light. He's spent literally millions of dollars trying to fight diseases, such as malaria, which have been essentially eradicated in the developed countries and therefore aren't popular with drug company researchers. But which still kills thousands, mostly children under 5, in African countries. This research seems so much more important than most other things many of us - myself included - are doing.

Travelin'

Been busy traveling as of late. I was in Chicago for the Association of Internet Researchers conference where I presented some of my research on the effects of publicly writing about one's Ideal Self. We are still crunching the numbers and are collecting additional data to get a true control group. It turns out thinking about the Ideal Self may have effects similar to writing about the Ideal Self.
The following weekend I went to beautiful Ithaca, NY to visit the Communication Department at Cornell and participate in their research speaker series. What a gorgeous place! Some very interesting research being done -- I was especially impressed with the graduate students I met.

Blogging in Academe

Inside Higher Ed recently had an interesting article about academics who blog: Too Much Information. This issue is something that's come up a lot for me, most recently in a grad class i'm teaching. I am curious about the ways in which academics manage the desire to disclose with the need for impression management; the pressures to have an active online presence (especially in media fields) with the penchant for revealing minimal information that could be "used against you." (What! Assistant Professor Jones is blogging about Desperate Housewives again - when does he have time to publish!")

Anonymous blogging is sounding better and better.

George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People

If you haven't seen this video or heard the song, you should. it's a great example of remixed culture being more than the sum of its parts.

Update (or lack thereof)

The blog has been quiet lately as we've been away on vacation and now are back but awash in household projects. Namely, a complete kitchen renovation. Well, we kept the walls up, so perhaps it doesn't qualify as complete, but pretty close!
Last week we spent a delightful, relaxing week in west virginia with my friend laura and her family. I can safely report that there is not much happening in WV. Which is a good thing.

More Blog bashing from the NYT

Actually, that's not quite true - but "more discouraging rhetoric" doesn't have quite the same ring. Today the NYT warns would-be bloggers about incorporating work-related content into their blogs. The title of the article, "Write all about it - at your own risk" says it all. Granted, this approach may apply to some kinds of blogs and some kinds of organizations. But what about all the organizations who have incorporated blogging into their PR/knowledge-management/public outreach strategies? Or those who benefit from blogging? How about some of these kinds of stories?

The Littlest UnderWater Hockey Player

Recently my husband participated in the National Underwater Hockey tournement. For those of you unfamiliar with the sport, it is played with snorkeling gear and a weighted puck at the bottom of a swimming pool.

Katerina here is modeling the typical gear, including googles, a stick (for pushing the puck along the bottom of the pool towards the goal), ear protection, and rubber glove (to keep skin on your hand as opposed to on the bottom of the pool).

Hooking Up - Where's the technology?

Although the recent ABC online dating reality show ("Hooking Up") is an addictive guilty pleasure, it has little to do with online dating as I've studied it for the past three years. As pointed out in WiRed (and elsewhere, no doubt), the technology that underpins these encounters is largely absent. A glimpse of an email here, a pixelated photo there, but very little of the CMC leading up to the dates is present. This is a real loss, as without it this show is much like"Blind Date" -- but with a updated hook for 2005. I guess it is the nature of the beast, as watching people type email in their jammies does not make for very exciting television. And watching relationships develop, then deteriorate, from afar satisfies the busybody in all of us.

I would have liked to see a wider range of participants and perhaps a glipse of online dating as it is practiced outside of New York City. However, I am curious to see, in the end, how this show affects the ways in which the average American perceives online dating.

Riled up and inspired by the postings on the recent article in the Chronicle, Bloggers Need Not Apply, I've decided to take the plunge and get serious about keeping a blog. I've had students in multiple courses keep blogs as part of their participation, so it only seems fitting that I as well venture into this territory in a more committed way.
Recent events that have caught my attention include the recent online/offline discussions about blogs and the way they mesh personal and professional lives. I'm thinking specifically of the recent article in the New York Times in which the writer describes her discomfort with her nanny's blogging activity (and the, um, rebuttal here) as well as the recent discussions in the Chronicle. As danah and others have noted, social software tools such as blogs make it easier for us to collapse contexts. Rather than keeping professional activities in one box, and personal aspects in another, everything is available and very, very searchable. When I did my interviews with teleworkers several years ago, I noted that they used ICTs (information and communication technologies) purposely to calibrate the permeability of their home/work boundaries. For instance, they might have a work telephone line and a home line, and adhere to rules about when they answered one or the other.
It seems now with the tools we have today that less calibration and control is possible. If I post something in a newsgroup and ten years later wish I hadn't - too bad. If someone wants to say something unkind about me online, so be it. I suppose there are those who see this transparency as positive, but I'm not completely sold yet.