After I sent a request for speakers: Ann Coulter and Ben Shapiro, Noah, the VP of communication has been avoiding me like the devil avoids the holy water. I finally met him at Jack Layton’s speech. No wonder we cannot have any balance here if the members of Univ. communication are also members or sympathisers of NDP. Which bring me to another point. Should Universities be a place for political activity? I say no. Want political activity? Go to NDP meeting.
Now, privatisation of education.
Unfortunately, I’m not the first one to come with this fantastic idea. There have been others. The article I quote from is so good that I basically have nothing to say and it is useless to paraphrase. Here’s the excerpt. I will probably use it in my final paper. I don’t know yet.
"But subjecting speech to majority rule, the left correctly argues, obliterates freedom of speech. Thus, it concludes, we must leave college professors alone.
This is a false conclusion. The truth is that public education as such is antithetical to free speech. Whether leftists are forced to pay taxes to fund universities from which their academic spokesmen are barred, or non-leftists are forced to pay taxes to fund professors who condemn America as a terrorist nation, someone loses the right to choose which ideas his money supports.
To protect free speech, therefore, universities would have to be privatized. The owners of a university could then hire the faculty they endorsed, while others could refuse to fund the university if they disagreed with its teachings. But since privatization would threaten the left's grip on the universities, it vehemently opposes this solution. In the name of free speech, the left denounces as "tyranny of the almighty dollar" the sole means of actually preserving free speech.
So we must not be fooled by the professors' cries about threats to their freedom of speech. Freedom is precisely what they don't want. Their grumblings are simply smokescreens to prevent us from seeing that we are right in objecting to being forced to finance their loathsome ideas."
This is it guys. Separation. Deadly words, taking into consideration that liberals are not a majority in this country so if Concordia (providing it stays liberal) had a conservative competitor with no unions, it would lose lots of money. Not only from the government, but also from tuition as many students finally having a choice, as it should be in democratic society, would switch to other university.
Brilliant. Now let’s do it. I can’t wait for the end of a semester. It’s going to be a busy summer.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Paccagnella, Luciano. (1997). “Getting the Seat of Your Pants Dirty: Strategies for Ethnographic Research on Virtual Communities”. Journal of Computer
While I was reading an article by Luciano Paccagnella I thought I was reading cyber archeology. It’s amazing how we progressed. Reading his article is almost like reading Morgan. OK, I exaggerate, I actually like Morgan, but, but, but many so-called networks that he talks about do not exist anymore. For instance, Usnet groups are really Bronze Age. This article actually reminded me that Usnet groups existed. I forgot all about them. Poor Usnet groups, they can’t even be called dinosaurs because dinosaurs are kind of glamorous while Usnet groups are, well, sooo… backward!
In his chapter “Naturalistic analysis” he talks about ethical problems while studying virtual groups. He cites two problems “specifically related to participant observation in CMC: going native and role conflict, the first referring to involving oneself in the group to the extent that objectivity is lost, while the second means a dilemma between the goals of the group and those of the evaluation” (p. 5).
It’s a problem I’ve noticed in our class project. A few students are doing research on groups they are already ”native members” of. Objectivity is obviously already lost before any research has been done.
Paccagnella cites ethical guidelines on doing research on the Internet established by in the ProjectH Research Group in 1993-94:
1. Viewing and analysis of public on CMC are public. “Such study is more akin to the study of tombstone epitaphs, graffiti, or letters to the editor. Personal? - yes. Private- no.” (p. 6).
2. Messages posted on messages boards are not equivalent to private letters. “They are instead public acts deliberately intended for public consumption” (p.6).
In closing Paccagnella notes the beginning of multimedia systems on the Internet. He states,
Research on virtual communities cannot ignore these new environments, which can potentially take the task of the researcher extraordinarily close to that of traditional field anthropologists.
Screenshots taken from graphical worlds like Alphaworld [4] show a land inhabited by different people and modeled by different artifacts: buildings, streets, gardens, means of transportation and other tools may be analyzed in their shapes and aesthetics. They can be captured and compared by specific software, perhaps like that discussed above for textual CMC.
Research on virtual communities will then be even more similar to research on traditional communities in "real life."
I was never tempted to have a “second life” to kill my time or to talk to people who hide behind avatars, but as some of well-known retailers opened their stores there, I think Paccagnella is correct in his prediction.
In his chapter “Naturalistic analysis” he talks about ethical problems while studying virtual groups. He cites two problems “specifically related to participant observation in CMC: going native and role conflict, the first referring to involving oneself in the group to the extent that objectivity is lost, while the second means a dilemma between the goals of the group and those of the evaluation” (p. 5).
It’s a problem I’ve noticed in our class project. A few students are doing research on groups they are already ”native members” of. Objectivity is obviously already lost before any research has been done.
Paccagnella cites ethical guidelines on doing research on the Internet established by in the ProjectH Research Group in 1993-94:
1. Viewing and analysis of public on CMC are public. “Such study is more akin to the study of tombstone epitaphs, graffiti, or letters to the editor. Personal? - yes. Private- no.” (p. 6).
2. Messages posted on messages boards are not equivalent to private letters. “They are instead public acts deliberately intended for public consumption” (p.6).
In closing Paccagnella notes the beginning of multimedia systems on the Internet. He states,
Research on virtual communities cannot ignore these new environments, which can potentially take the task of the researcher extraordinarily close to that of traditional field anthropologists.
Screenshots taken from graphical worlds like Alphaworld [4] show a land inhabited by different people and modeled by different artifacts: buildings, streets, gardens, means of transportation and other tools may be analyzed in their shapes and aesthetics. They can be captured and compared by specific software, perhaps like that discussed above for textual CMC.
Research on virtual communities will then be even more similar to research on traditional communities in "real life."
I was never tempted to have a “second life” to kill my time or to talk to people who hide behind avatars, but as some of well-known retailers opened their stores there, I think Paccagnella is correct in his prediction.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Week 9
Hakken, David. (1999). Cyborgs@Cyberspace? An Ethnographer Looks to the Future. New York: Routledge.
I am so tired of ethnographic writing that I really cannot take it anymore. And Hakke is adding to my goal to desacrilize the giants and wanna be giants of anthropology. Nevertheless, I jumped sky high when I read weeping of Hakken that he was attacked by Paul Gross. I quickly checked Gross name on the Internet. The first one that came was an actor. Never heard of him either, but that was not him. I finally found this devastating attacker and his article on education at: http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/spring2008/gross.htm.
I love this article. Gross should be the president of Concordia. Although I suspect that Gross is on the left, at least he has enough intelligence and talent to see through it. So although I think that Hakken is writing about nothing, I did get something out of it. He directed me to Paul R. Gross whose essay I will be using in my research.
The second part of Hakken’s writing gets a little bit better better. He provides an account of some anthropological writing in the field of cyber ethnography: e.g. Kling, Wynn, and Suchman.
He lists factors that inhibit appreciation of anthropological cyberethnograpy’s contribution:
1. Holistic ethnography approach that strives to explain as well as describe, contextualizing the results of participant observation in relation to broader structural dynamics (p. 45).
2. the extent to which one must/should master and /or identify with the professional field(s) relevant to her research (p. 57).
And finally a paragraph I do agree with:
Many of the difficulties in analyzing cyberspace ethnographically derive from inadequately developed sense of culture. These difficulties parallel those encountered by an earlier generation of ethnographers, like Margaret Mead and Oscar Lewis. They were trying to use the notion of culture, developed in anthropological ethnography to analyze simpler social formations, to study more complex ones. p.62.
Another person that Hakken directed me to was Oscar Lewis. Surprisingly, Lewis’ name is avoided in a university classroom. Unfortunately, index was not provided so I don’t know from which article these quotes were taken, probably from his book. I agree with Lewis’ culture of poverty, but not with the final analysis that “the primary cause of the cultures of poverty is lack of resources” (p. 62). If that is what Lewis really said.
In general, Hakken took on a task to show that the subject of cyberethnography has come of age and has a maturity, which is spite of his enemies (Gross) can’t be longer dismissed. Was he successful in proving it?
Hakken, David. (1999). Cyborgs@Cyberspace? An Ethnographer Looks to the Future. New York: Routledge.
I am so tired of ethnographic writing that I really cannot take it anymore. And Hakke is adding to my goal to desacrilize the giants and wanna be giants of anthropology. Nevertheless, I jumped sky high when I read weeping of Hakken that he was attacked by Paul Gross. I quickly checked Gross name on the Internet. The first one that came was an actor. Never heard of him either, but that was not him. I finally found this devastating attacker and his article on education at: http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/spring2008/gross.htm.
I love this article. Gross should be the president of Concordia. Although I suspect that Gross is on the left, at least he has enough intelligence and talent to see through it. So although I think that Hakken is writing about nothing, I did get something out of it. He directed me to Paul R. Gross whose essay I will be using in my research.
The second part of Hakken’s writing gets a little bit better better. He provides an account of some anthropological writing in the field of cyber ethnography: e.g. Kling, Wynn, and Suchman.
He lists factors that inhibit appreciation of anthropological cyberethnograpy’s contribution:
1. Holistic ethnography approach that strives to explain as well as describe, contextualizing the results of participant observation in relation to broader structural dynamics (p. 45).
2. the extent to which one must/should master and /or identify with the professional field(s) relevant to her research (p. 57).
And finally a paragraph I do agree with:
Many of the difficulties in analyzing cyberspace ethnographically derive from inadequately developed sense of culture. These difficulties parallel those encountered by an earlier generation of ethnographers, like Margaret Mead and Oscar Lewis. They were trying to use the notion of culture, developed in anthropological ethnography to analyze simpler social formations, to study more complex ones. p.62.
Another person that Hakken directed me to was Oscar Lewis. Surprisingly, Lewis’ name is avoided in a university classroom. Unfortunately, index was not provided so I don’t know from which article these quotes were taken, probably from his book. I agree with Lewis’ culture of poverty, but not with the final analysis that “the primary cause of the cultures of poverty is lack of resources” (p. 62). If that is what Lewis really said.
In general, Hakken took on a task to show that the subject of cyberethnography has come of age and has a maturity, which is spite of his enemies (Gross) can’t be longer dismissed. Was he successful in proving it?
Week 8
TURKLE, SHERRY. LIFE ON THE.SCREEN. NEW YORK: SIMON & SCHUSTER,
1995.
Turkle starts her article by confessing that she used to call a computer her second-self as saw her relationship with a computer as identity-transforming. This kind of statement startles me as I have always thought that this is a kind of stuff that science-fiction stories are made of. Apparently it happens to scholars too. She does not stop there though and claims that one-on-one relationship with a computer is a thing of a past. Today, “A rapidly expanding system of networks, collectively known as the Internet, links millions of people in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality, the form of our communities, our very identities” (p. 9). I think that Turkle got engaged in the old debate of nature vs. nurture and states that we are made by our environment, in this case the Internet technology.
She then goes to explaining that our children are leading the way in “a nascent culture of simulation” and the adults are the ones “anxiously trailing behind” (p. 10). I am surprised by such revelations. I thought that young people have always led “a nascent of culture” in every era. My father, for example, like many people of his generation, had real difficulty to switch from a rotary to touch-tone phone. One day, when I am his age, I will be clinging to the technology of my days. This is one the facts of life that should not come as surprise to scholars.
I found her description of different games (available in 1995) interesting, as I myself do not play any games except chess. She states, “As players participate, they become authors not only of text but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction. One player says, 'You are the character and you are not the character, both at the same time." Another says, 'You are who you pretend to be’" (p. 12). I think that her statement that one construct new selves through social interaction is a general statement applicable to the world outside of the Internet. I see the player’s statement, “You are who you pretend to be” applicable to the non-virtual world. We can ask a question, “do people really show their real self or pretend? As the spouses of serial killers and murders can attest, they shared their lives with criminals not having the slightest idea of the true character of their spouses.
I do agree with Turkle the Internet has supplied a place and means for some people to expose their real character and personality. I argue against all theories that suggest that the Internet (or virtual reality) creates our personality.
Nowak, Kristine L. and Christian Rauh. (2006). “The Influence of the Avatar on Online Perceptions of Anthropomorphism, Androgyny, Credibility, Homophily, and Attraction.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11: 153-178.
Nowak and Rauch begin their essay by explaining what avatar is. Avatars are “[C]omputer generated visual representations of people or bots, are increasingly being used in ecommerce, social virtual environments” (p. 153).
They also state, “The inclusion of avatars in interfaces designed to facilitate interactions has increased without much information about the influence of such images on message and person perception” (p. 154). Their research is on the human response to avatars.
They explain the purpose of their research by saying, “how people perceive avatars may influence both the self-perception and perception of others using a particular avatar as well as message perception and retention. Thus, understanding the influence of avatars is of theoretical relevance to researchers. It is also of practical importance to users and designers of systems using avatars” (p. 154). As I do not use avatars I was particularly interested with their findings.
Their research showed that people preferred avatars that were more anthropomorphic. These were perceived to be more attractive and credible” (p. 174).
TURKLE, SHERRY. LIFE ON THE.SCREEN. NEW YORK: SIMON & SCHUSTER,
1995.
Turkle starts her article by confessing that she used to call a computer her second-self as saw her relationship with a computer as identity-transforming. This kind of statement startles me as I have always thought that this is a kind of stuff that science-fiction stories are made of. Apparently it happens to scholars too. She does not stop there though and claims that one-on-one relationship with a computer is a thing of a past. Today, “A rapidly expanding system of networks, collectively known as the Internet, links millions of people in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality, the form of our communities, our very identities” (p. 9). I think that Turkle got engaged in the old debate of nature vs. nurture and states that we are made by our environment, in this case the Internet technology.
She then goes to explaining that our children are leading the way in “a nascent culture of simulation” and the adults are the ones “anxiously trailing behind” (p. 10). I am surprised by such revelations. I thought that young people have always led “a nascent of culture” in every era. My father, for example, like many people of his generation, had real difficulty to switch from a rotary to touch-tone phone. One day, when I am his age, I will be clinging to the technology of my days. This is one the facts of life that should not come as surprise to scholars.
I found her description of different games (available in 1995) interesting, as I myself do not play any games except chess. She states, “As players participate, they become authors not only of text but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction. One player says, 'You are the character and you are not the character, both at the same time." Another says, 'You are who you pretend to be’" (p. 12). I think that her statement that one construct new selves through social interaction is a general statement applicable to the world outside of the Internet. I see the player’s statement, “You are who you pretend to be” applicable to the non-virtual world. We can ask a question, “do people really show their real self or pretend? As the spouses of serial killers and murders can attest, they shared their lives with criminals not having the slightest idea of the true character of their spouses.
I do agree with Turkle the Internet has supplied a place and means for some people to expose their real character and personality. I argue against all theories that suggest that the Internet (or virtual reality) creates our personality.
Nowak, Kristine L. and Christian Rauh. (2006). “The Influence of the Avatar on Online Perceptions of Anthropomorphism, Androgyny, Credibility, Homophily, and Attraction.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11: 153-178.
Nowak and Rauch begin their essay by explaining what avatar is. Avatars are “[C]omputer generated visual representations of people or bots, are increasingly being used in ecommerce, social virtual environments” (p. 153).
They also state, “The inclusion of avatars in interfaces designed to facilitate interactions has increased without much information about the influence of such images on message and person perception” (p. 154). Their research is on the human response to avatars.
They explain the purpose of their research by saying, “how people perceive avatars may influence both the self-perception and perception of others using a particular avatar as well as message perception and retention. Thus, understanding the influence of avatars is of theoretical relevance to researchers. It is also of practical importance to users and designers of systems using avatars” (p. 154). As I do not use avatars I was particularly interested with their findings.
Their research showed that people preferred avatars that were more anthropomorphic. These were perceived to be more attractive and credible” (p. 174).
Monday, April 7, 2008
Censhorship on a campus. Yeah, wha'ts new?
Great article on censorship. It is about 9/11 but the atmosphere described really applies to liberal censorship of conservative and neutral voice on campuses. Except nobody writes about it. Well, OK, Ann Coulter and Ben Shapiro write about it. I’ll be the third one. Another John Pilger movie anyone? And how about writing an essay on John Pilger? I had to do it in one of my classes, so had you?
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Döring, Nicola. (2002). “Personal Homepages on the Web: A Review of Research”.
Both articles presented in this week class can be used to argue the idea that the analysis of websites is not suitable for ethnographic studies and it is just the analysis of text.
Döring writes:
Critics complain that personal home pages are often trivial or even tasteless, amateurish and superfluous products of narcissism and exhibitionism (Rothstein, 1996).
The Web is full of examples of assertive confession: the college sophomore who posted
every rock concert he ever attended, or another student chronicling every pop song he has listened to since Dec. 22, 1995. There are resumes, photos of significant others clothed and unclothed, and endless lists, not just of concerts and songs and tapes and CDs but of other Web sites where the word "cool" proliferates. Sartre had it only partly right. Hell is not other people, it's other people's home pages.
Döring does not agree with this notion and writes quite persuasive defence of personal homepages: No one's life is insignificant, no matter where they are, what they do, how old they are...
Anyone's experiences can bring something to our lives -- thought, perspective, laughs, tears. With a Webring, you're not limited to one social realm. You could jump from the nightmare of a divorced attorney in New York to a teen's ramblings about going to the mall.
Without a Webring, you might have only found the attorney's journal and her links to other journals of other attorneys. Thanks to Open Pages and the Webring concept, and with each individual's quirks and link crossovers, the range of lives accessible becomes limitless.
I do agree with Döring that “No one's life is insignificant” and don’t have anything to add to it. She said it well. On the other hand, I do agree with Sartre “hell is other people.” Some of us make hell for ourselves (criminals), majority of us have our life made into hell by criminal element.
Döring’s article was very much current in the era of personal homepages and phenomena such as jennicam.com (where Jeni transmitted her life over webcam 24/7, including her intimate life with her boyfriend). Today, personal webpages are part of web history and were replaced by bloggs and social networking sites.
Schmidt, Jan. (2007). “Blogging Practices: An Analytical Framework”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12: 1409-1427
Schmidt concentrated his attention on blog culture. As he reports “Specialized search engines and meta-directories like blogpulse.com or technorati.com have tracked between 50 and 85 million blogs as of June 2007, although the exact number of blogs is impossible to state at any given point in time due to the highly dynamic and decentralized character of the blogosphere (Sifry, 2007),” (p.1). It is a large number pointing to a special psychological need in people to express themselves in writing. Smidth is not interested in psychology of blog writing, but rather he is interested in coming with a new general model that will “analyze and compare different uses of the blog format. Based on ideas from sociological structuration theory, as well as on existing blog research, it argues that individual usage episodes are framed by three structural dimensions of rules, relations, and code, which in turn are constantly (re)produced in social action” (p.1).
I fond a number of insights about censorship and blog etiquette, which I will use in my final paper; thus I will not be discussing this issue in this post.I found his ideas that blog usage can be investigated from the point of view of communication sociology agreeable.
Huffaker, David A. and Sandra L. Calvert. (2005). “Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10 (2)
Huffaker and Calvert article analyses the usage of weblogs and particular the language in teenage blogs. Huffaker and Calvert limited their study to a group aged 13 to 17, since as they explain, “many youth still live at home during those years, thereby providing a more homogenous sample than if some of our sample was in junior high school while others were in college” (p.2). They center their interest on the use of new forms of expressive language. This language “sometimes referred to as netspeak… is an emergent discourse that is shaped entirely by the creativity of its community” (p. 2). They provide examples, “The introduction of acronyms (e.g., "lol = laugh out loud," "brb = be right back"), plays or variations on words (e.g., "cya = see you", "latah = later"), graphical icons that represent emotions, called emoticons (e.g., :) or ;-{} ) or graphical icons that represent a real person in a virtual context, called avatars, are all examples of language produced by online communicators. This language continues to evolve and remains an important area of study when considering the ways in which Internet users interact and express who they are” (p.3).
One interesting finding was in the use of emoticons. Huffaker and Calvert explain: “Because females are traditionally more emotionally expressive than are males, we expected females to use emoticons in their blogs more often than males. Contrary to prediction, there were no overall gender differences for how often emoticons were used” (p. 13).
The final conclusion that Huffaker and Calvert draw is that “ The online presentations of teenagers demonstrate that blogs are an extension of the real world, rather than a place where people like to pretend. For instance, teenagers reveal a considerable amount of personal information in their blogs.” It is hard to argue with this conclusion, but I have a question in my head after reading this article. People o reveal a lot of personal information on their blogs, but are they really the person that they present on their websites?
Döring writes:
Critics complain that personal home pages are often trivial or even tasteless, amateurish and superfluous products of narcissism and exhibitionism (Rothstein, 1996).
The Web is full of examples of assertive confession: the college sophomore who posted
every rock concert he ever attended, or another student chronicling every pop song he has listened to since Dec. 22, 1995. There are resumes, photos of significant others clothed and unclothed, and endless lists, not just of concerts and songs and tapes and CDs but of other Web sites where the word "cool" proliferates. Sartre had it only partly right. Hell is not other people, it's other people's home pages.
Döring does not agree with this notion and writes quite persuasive defence of personal homepages: No one's life is insignificant, no matter where they are, what they do, how old they are...
Anyone's experiences can bring something to our lives -- thought, perspective, laughs, tears. With a Webring, you're not limited to one social realm. You could jump from the nightmare of a divorced attorney in New York to a teen's ramblings about going to the mall.
Without a Webring, you might have only found the attorney's journal and her links to other journals of other attorneys. Thanks to Open Pages and the Webring concept, and with each individual's quirks and link crossovers, the range of lives accessible becomes limitless.
I do agree with Döring that “No one's life is insignificant” and don’t have anything to add to it. She said it well. On the other hand, I do agree with Sartre “hell is other people.” Some of us make hell for ourselves (criminals), majority of us have our life made into hell by criminal element.
Döring’s article was very much current in the era of personal homepages and phenomena such as jennicam.com (where Jeni transmitted her life over webcam 24/7, including her intimate life with her boyfriend). Today, personal webpages are part of web history and were replaced by bloggs and social networking sites.
Schmidt, Jan. (2007). “Blogging Practices: An Analytical Framework”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12: 1409-1427
Schmidt concentrated his attention on blog culture. As he reports “Specialized search engines and meta-directories like blogpulse.com or technorati.com have tracked between 50 and 85 million blogs as of June 2007, although the exact number of blogs is impossible to state at any given point in time due to the highly dynamic and decentralized character of the blogosphere (Sifry, 2007),” (p.1). It is a large number pointing to a special psychological need in people to express themselves in writing. Smidth is not interested in psychology of blog writing, but rather he is interested in coming with a new general model that will “analyze and compare different uses of the blog format. Based on ideas from sociological structuration theory, as well as on existing blog research, it argues that individual usage episodes are framed by three structural dimensions of rules, relations, and code, which in turn are constantly (re)produced in social action” (p.1).
I fond a number of insights about censorship and blog etiquette, which I will use in my final paper; thus I will not be discussing this issue in this post.I found his ideas that blog usage can be investigated from the point of view of communication sociology agreeable.
Huffaker, David A. and Sandra L. Calvert. (2005). “Gender, Identity, and Language Use in Teenage Blogs”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10 (2)
Huffaker and Calvert article analyses the usage of weblogs and particular the language in teenage blogs. Huffaker and Calvert limited their study to a group aged 13 to 17, since as they explain, “many youth still live at home during those years, thereby providing a more homogenous sample than if some of our sample was in junior high school while others were in college” (p.2). They center their interest on the use of new forms of expressive language. This language “sometimes referred to as netspeak… is an emergent discourse that is shaped entirely by the creativity of its community” (p. 2). They provide examples, “The introduction of acronyms (e.g., "lol = laugh out loud," "brb = be right back"), plays or variations on words (e.g., "cya = see you", "latah = later"), graphical icons that represent emotions, called emoticons (e.g., :) or ;-{} ) or graphical icons that represent a real person in a virtual context, called avatars, are all examples of language produced by online communicators. This language continues to evolve and remains an important area of study when considering the ways in which Internet users interact and express who they are” (p.3).
One interesting finding was in the use of emoticons. Huffaker and Calvert explain: “Because females are traditionally more emotionally expressive than are males, we expected females to use emoticons in their blogs more often than males. Contrary to prediction, there were no overall gender differences for how often emoticons were used” (p. 13).
The final conclusion that Huffaker and Calvert draw is that “ The online presentations of teenagers demonstrate that blogs are an extension of the real world, rather than a place where people like to pretend. For instance, teenagers reveal a considerable amount of personal information in their blogs.” It is hard to argue with this conclusion, but I have a question in my head after reading this article. People o reveal a lot of personal information on their blogs, but are they really the person that they present on their websites?
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Boyd, Danah m. and Nicole B. Ellison. (2007). “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship”.
Boyd, Danah m. and Nicole B. Ellison. (2007). “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship”.
I found this article informative. It introduced me to new social networking opportunities I did not know about such as Ning as well as other social networking sites (SSN) and their history of popularity with users. I was amused to find out that some of the American networking sites that failed to attract American audience became popular abroad. For example, ”Orkut became the premier SNS in Brazil before growing rapidly in India” (p. 10). If they can make money there then that’s fine, if not, then I am sorry for the founders of these sites. This article makes me to produce another question not asked by the authors and that is thought piracy. Non-American SSNs such as those in Asia are shameless copies of the American SSNS. they make millions of $$$ and give nothing in return to the visionary who first came with the idea. My conclusion- it doesn’t pay to be brilliant. It’s better to be a parasite. But then I don’t think I said anything new here.
Ellison, Nicole B.; Steinfield, Charles and Cliff Lampe. (2007). “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites”.
The authors analyze the use of Facebook from Pierre Bourdieu’s social capital angle. As I can’t stand Pierre Bourdieu and consider him a charlatan, I don’t even feel like writing an intelligent response to this article. I would be just bringing credibility to this guy and his zombie followers. Zombie because they don’t think for themselves, just repeat after their “master.”
The purpose of the author’s research was “to determine whether offline
social capital can be generated by online tools. The results of our study show that
Facebook use among college-age respondents was significantly associated with measures
of social capital” (p. 3).
Although some scholars indicated that the Internet decreases social capital (e.g. Nie “argued that Internet use detracts from face-to-face time with others, which might diminish an individual’s social capital” (p. 4) other scholars don’t agree. Numerous researches, including the authors, have shown that “that computer-mediated interactions have had positive effects on community interaction, involvement, and social capital” (p. 4).
I found this article informative. It introduced me to new social networking opportunities I did not know about such as Ning as well as other social networking sites (SSN) and their history of popularity with users. I was amused to find out that some of the American networking sites that failed to attract American audience became popular abroad. For example, ”Orkut became the premier SNS in Brazil before growing rapidly in India” (p. 10). If they can make money there then that’s fine, if not, then I am sorry for the founders of these sites. This article makes me to produce another question not asked by the authors and that is thought piracy. Non-American SSNs such as those in Asia are shameless copies of the American SSNS. they make millions of $$$ and give nothing in return to the visionary who first came with the idea. My conclusion- it doesn’t pay to be brilliant. It’s better to be a parasite. But then I don’t think I said anything new here.
Ellison, Nicole B.; Steinfield, Charles and Cliff Lampe. (2007). “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites”.
The authors analyze the use of Facebook from Pierre Bourdieu’s social capital angle. As I can’t stand Pierre Bourdieu and consider him a charlatan, I don’t even feel like writing an intelligent response to this article. I would be just bringing credibility to this guy and his zombie followers. Zombie because they don’t think for themselves, just repeat after their “master.”
The purpose of the author’s research was “to determine whether offline
social capital can be generated by online tools. The results of our study show that
Facebook use among college-age respondents was significantly associated with measures
of social capital” (p. 3).
Although some scholars indicated that the Internet decreases social capital (e.g. Nie “argued that Internet use detracts from face-to-face time with others, which might diminish an individual’s social capital” (p. 4) other scholars don’t agree. Numerous researches, including the authors, have shown that “that computer-mediated interactions have had positive effects on community interaction, involvement, and social capital” (p. 4).
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