Social and Civic Mobilizing in Iran

Iranian Protests: Flickr photo by John McNab

I commend Thomas Friedman’s Op-Ed today, “The Virtual Mosque”, where he wonders whether Facebook can play the same role for Iranian moderates that the mosque played for more extremist Iranians in mobilizing voters.

Social capital (or social connections) have always played a strong role in politics worldwide.  Experiments in the U.S. show that that face-to-face mobilization is far more effective than phone mobilization, and churches have always played a strong role in political mobilization (especially in black churches, as American Grace, the new book by Robert Putnam and David Campbell will show [among many other interesting findings]).

These facts, in addition to the fact that the Iranian police state has guns (as Friedman points out) and is trying hard, and perhaps effectively to block and filter the internet, make me more skeptical of whether Facebook or Twitter can be as effective a tool in mobilizing Iranian moderates as the F2F connections at the mosque.  But for sure these e-connections are way more useful than not being able to mobilize social networks.   [And mark this as another example of how what appeared to be trivial technologies can be used as pro-democratic forces in repressive countries.] If you’re curious for a live and compelling updating of situation in Iran, see Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Note: the U.S. State Department even asked Twitter to defer maintenance for fear that this might adversely impact the protests!

Moreover, various news pieces have pointed out that the Guardian Council, which previously had maintained their infallability now looks a lot more fallable (after Khamanei initially immediately certified the results and now claims that there should be at least a partial recount).  That’s a hard genie to put back in the bottle.    It’s reminiscent of a conversation with a mother-friend of mine.  When her kids misbehaved, she was constantly counting to five and telling her sons, “you better do it by the time I count to 5, or you’ll be subjected to the wrath of Mom.”  I asked her what happened if her sons didn’t do something by 5 and realized that the consequences weren’t as dangerous as they feared.  She smiled sheepishly and noted, “I’m hoping we don’t get to that point…”  If people believe that the Guardian Council has no clothes, Iranian politics could change dramatically.

See Thomas Friedman’s “The Virtual Mosque” (NYT, 6/17/09)

See also the very interesting “Twitter on the Barricades: Six Lessons Learned” (NYT, 6/21/09, Noam Cohen)

Conflicting data on Facebook: good for university attachment, bad for Cause-related fundraising

(Facebook Wheel of Friendship - photo by jurvetson)

Despite the online fundraising success of the Obama campaign, the Washington Post reports that Facebook Causes, “hugely popular among nonprofit organizations seeking to raise money online, has been largely ineffective in its first two years, trailing direct mail, fundraising events and other more traditional methods of soliciting contributions.” Only the Nature Conservancy and Students for a Free Tibet have raised more than $100,000 on Facebook Causes, and most of the 179,000 non-profits listed on Facebook don’t even make $1,000 from the site.  This is more depressing when you realize that Facebook usage has swelled to over 200 million.  Twenty five million Facebook users show their affinity through Facebook Causes and their belief in the environment or women’s rights or freedom of choice, but fewer than 1% of such users actually donate.

Other experiments have shown that 1-3% of a nonprofit group’s e-mail list donate money when solicited, at an average of about $80 per person. That is more than 44 times the rate at which such users are donating online through Facebook Causes.

Note: one reader, Will Coley, brought to my attention two blog postings contesting the Washington Post report.  See Fine Blog and  Beth’s Blog.  I don’t find these refutations all that persuasive; sure there are lot of Facebook Causes that are not NPOs (so the donation/cause is not the right statistic) and Facebook has a lot of young users (who are not big donors), but the original motivation of Facebook Causes was to help harness social networks to raise a lot for non-profits, and this has largely been a failure, although maybe it helps Facebook users to identify themselves with other users that share their values.

The more hopeful finding about Facebook comes from a recent paper “Social Capital, Self Esteem and the Use of Online Social Networks”.  [This is a longitudinal follow-up paper to an earlier paper by Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe in 2007 called “The Benefits of Facebook Friends: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites.“] Ellison et al. found in panel survey data they gathered at Michigan State University (MSU) stronger evidence that Facebook usage predicted later increased levels of “bridging social capital” than that “bridging social capital” caused increased Facebook use.  [Note: see below on their strange measure of bridging social capital.]

It’s an intriguing finding, although one should note that the size of the panel is quite small (92 students completed the earlier and later survey) and there was attrition both in whom they originally asked to do the survey (where only 277 out of 800 students contacted responded) and then secondary attrition when only a third of those 277 students then filled out the follow-up survey. [Ellison et al. note that the 92 seemed demographically representative of the 277 students, but one can never know about hidden attributes that might have explained why people would stick with the survey and also explained why these same people would have made more friends.]

Moreover, one would suppose that the power of Facebook to build social capital and bridging social capital is probably higher at a university setting where most of the e-friendships are in the same town, and one is thus more likely to encounter budding Facebook friends in real life.  (Almost all research shows that it is easier to build trust and stronger ties face-to-face, so having a strong geographic concentration of Facebook friends and ‘near friends’,  in an environment where new students are establish friends,  should provide Facebook with the strongest dynamic for friend-building.)

The paper, as I noted in a blog post on the earlier study, uses weird measures of bridging social capital.  Bridging social capital is supposed to measure the degree to which one has social friendships to people of a different religion, or social class, or race or ethnicity.  Their “bridging” measures are more about attachment to MSU as a community and include: “I feel I am part of the MSU community”, “I am interested in what goes on at MSU”, “MSU is a good place to be”, “I would be willing to contribute money to MSU after graduation”, “Interacting with people at MSU makes me want to try new things”, etc.    I definitely had loyalty to my college when I was there, but I don’t know that this necessarily says a whit about how diverse my friendships were there.

With this unusual measure of “bridging social capital”, the researchers found that both higher-esteem and lower-esteem students were likely to benefit by increased “bridging social capital” (i.e., have a stronger attachment to MSU) from Facebook use, although this effect was highest for students with low self-esteem at the beginning of the study.  And they found that Facebook produced greater attachment to MSU even after controlling for general Internet use and measures of psychological well-being.

While their survey doesn’t directly get at this question, it seems somewhat different than the common findings with technology that the socially-rich get richer, and, rather than leveling the playing field, it may fuerther tilt it.  Ellison et al. don’t directly measure level of social capital at the outset, but in their finding that those low in self-esteem may benefit the most (at least in attachment to MSU), it suggests that at least in this domain the socially unattached may benefit more.

For more information, see :

Charles Steinfield, Nicole B. Ellison, Cliff Lampe. Social capital, self-esteem, and use of online social network sites: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology 29 (2008) 434–445

To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green: Though Popular, ‘Causes’ Ineffective for Fundraising by Kim Hart and Megan Greenwell (Wash Post, 4/22/09)

Facebook as Big Brother

Facebook has morphed dramatically from their college and pre-college base.  Now only a quarter of users are 18-24 year olds (college and pre-college) and the fastest growth is coming from mature age groups.  The number of women Facebookers 55 and older, is up 175% in the past 5 months.   Facebook now stands at 175 million members.

Fortune magazine notes that the amount of time to reach 150 million users or sell 150 million units is shrinking dramatically.  Phones took 89 years, televisions took 38, cellphones took 14, iPods took 7 years and Facebook took only 5.  [Fortune doesn't focus on the fact that the population is larger now so getting to 150 million users or units is easier and that Facebook is aided by the fact that it is free, but it's impressive growth nonetheless.]

Facebookers spend 169 minutes a month on average (or almost 3 hours) on the site and this is increasing rapidly.   Fortune doesn’t present a graphic but I assume that there is a group of manic Facebook users that spend 3-5 hours a day on the site or more and some users who use it very rarely.  Facebook does acknowledge that less than 10% of users, although still a sizable 15 million folks, do update their status every day (and this is up almost 400% from last year while over the same period the number of users was up only 75%, so the growth wasn’t just coming from more users ).

Zuckerberg’s vision is to have Facebook be a “social utility” where “one day everyone would be able to use it to locate people on the web “ David Pogue has an interesting story showing how this is starting to come true: a woman who found a wallet in a NY cab was able to track the wallet’s owner down on Facebook when she couldn’t through 411.

Discussing the social implications and privacy, Jeesi Hempel writes in Fortune:

“At times it may seem hard to reconcile Zuckerberg’s lofty aspirations for Facebook with the utterly commonplace content that users create on the site. Consider 25 Random Things, a new take on the chain letter that has grown so popular it was written up in the New York Times Style section. You list 25 supposedly random things about yourself and send the note on to 25 of your friends (who are supposed to do the same), but your randomness also ends up on display to any gawker who may be surfing your profile. The items range from the banal (No. 17: I never, ever, ever throw up. Like five times in my adult life) to the intimate (No. 2: I knew I was gay in the sixth grade but didn’t tell anyone until I was 19). The feature is high profile – some 37,500 lists sprang up in just two weeks – but taken as a whole it just seems like a lot of user-generated babble.  [Note: Slate had a recent post about how 25 Random Things spread in a style approximating a natural virus.]

“Yet it is that very babble that makes Facebook so valuable to marketers. Imagine if an advertiser had the ability to eavesdrop on every phone conversation you’ve ever had. In a way, that’s what all the wall posts, status updates, 25 Random Things, and picture tagging on Facebook amount to: a semipublic airing of stuff people are interested in doing, buying, and trying. Sure, you can send private messages using Facebook, and Zuckerberg eventually hopes to give you even more tools to tailor your profile so that the face you present to, say, your employer is very different from the way you look online to your college roommate. Just like in real life. But the running lists of online interactions on Facebook, known as feeds are what make Facebook different from other social networking sites – and they are precisely what make corporations salivate.”

Facebook users get to “curate their stream” – the flow of information about changes individuals have made to their Facebook page that goes to their social networks on the site. Individuals on Facebook have two feeds: a personal field that logs changes you have made to your own site (a photo, a status update, a video post) and a second feed that tracks all the

“interactions your friends are having (and alerts friends to updates you’ve made on your personal feed). If your brother RSVP’d to a dinner party, for example, you might be notified about it, even if you weren’t invited to attend. And if you change your profile photo, it may let your brother know. Like Facebook itself, the feeds are subject to the network effect: The more data you share and interact with, the more robust your news feed becomes….

The information that pops up is partly a result of controls you establish in your privacy settings and feedback you provide to Facebook. But Facebook also can track your behavior, and if the site notices you’re spending a lot of time on the fan page of a certain movie star, for example, it will send you more information about that celebrity.

Kind of Big Brother-ish, and a marketer’s wet dream. The irony is that despite the use of tracking this personal information to sell you things, users sense that they are not being watched because there is not that much advertising currently on Facebook. It’s almost like baiting a bear by getting it comfortable feeding nonchalantly at a location before one drops the trap. And on Facebook there is no retracting all the personal information that users have left on Facebook about how they know Jane, or their e-mail chatter with friends, or who is in their inner and outer circle based on number of shared friends or who they share their personal feeds with.  That’s all stored on Facebook servers somewhere deep within the enterprise.

The level of advertising may change as Facebook is under pressure to generate more revenue and may not even be breaking even currently, despite a market capitalization of between $3 billion and $15 billion, fueled by a sense of what all this traffic coupled with personal information might be worth. Moreover, Facebook even has learned things about what ads people resonate with by their “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” reaction to specific ads.

We may be six degrees of separation from anyone else in the world, but only only degree of separation from Big Brother wearing the mask of Facebook.

Facebook is walking a fine line as much of their market value will go up in smoke if they lose user trust.  It is for this reason that they put the new changes to a vote in which 30% of their user’s (or 60 million users) had to approve the changes.

Read other posts about the social implications of Facebook.

See New York Magazine’s, “Do You Own Facebook? Or Does Facebook Own You?” (4/5/09) (describing how Julius Harper’s group on Facebook, protesting Facebook’s privacy policies, swelled to almost 150,000 members

Read the interesting Fortune Cover Story, “How Facebook is Taking Over Our Lives“  by Jessi Hempel  (3/2/09)

Stepped-on toes, sleaze and miscues in the GPS social dance

(avatar photo of Second Life by Sisi Soderstrom)

Mathew Honan, WIRED editor, decided to try publicizing his every movement through GPS as a social guinea pig for a few weeks to see how it altered his life, his ability to find good restaurants or friends, using the latest locational software.  It’s a “good, bad and sleazy” tale of some breakthroughs but also many missed connections and awkward social implications.

“Thanks to the iPhone 3G and, to a lesser extent, Google’s Android phone, millions of people are now walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that not only knows where they are but also plugs into the Internet to share that info, merge it with online databases, and find out what—and who—is in the immediate vicinity.”

He first tried WhosThere (the iPhone application).  Curious what it was used for Honan e-mailed those around him, and one woman (Bridget),  “who, according to her profile, at least, was a 25 year-old woman with a proclivity for scarves,”  responded ” ‘To find sex, a@#hole.’ “

Honan notes that some warn that GPS threatens to violate your privacy. “Geo-enthusiasts will assure you that these privacy concerns are overplayed: Your cell phone can be used to pinpoint your location anyway, and a skilled hacker could likely get that data from your mobile carrier. Heck, in the UK, tracking mobile phone users is as simple as entering their number on a Web site (as long as they give permission). But the truth is, there just aren’t that many people who want to prey on your location. Still, I can’t help being a little skittish when I start broadcasting my current position and travel plans. I mean, I used to stop newspaper delivery so people wouldn’t realize I was out of town. Now I’ve told everyone on Dopplr that I’m going to DC for five days.”

Honan also notes how locational  information can jump platforms with unexpected results.  He explains how he forgot that the social application Whrrl (like many other social apps), cross posts to Twitter which then prompted postings on Facebook  and FriendFeed before landing on Honan’s blog, where Google indexed it.  He notes that one seemingly innocuous iPhone application  led to a “giant geotagged footprint across the Web.”

“A few days later I had another disturbing realization. It’s a Tuesday and I’m blowing off a work meeting in favor of a bike ride through Golden Gate Park (37.771558 °N, 122.454478 °W). Suddenly it hits me—since I would later post my route online with the date and time, I would be just a Google search (“Mat Honan Tuesday noon”) away from getting busted. I’m a freelancer, and these are trying economic times. I can’t afford to have the Internet ratting me out like that.”  Honan notes that Fire Eagle, a location clearinghouse started by Tom Coates, lets you input that information once and have it broadcast to other geoapps, such as  Outside.in and Bizroof but Fire Eagle also lets you decide how specific to be for each application: you can provide the latitude and longitude, the neighborhood or only the city.  “[A]s Coates also notes:  ‘You have to have the ability to lie about your location.’”  if you input your fake position manually.”  Of  course being more general about your location or lying about it, defeats the purpose of finding friends who are proximate or other points of interest near you.

“I was starting to revel in the benefits of location awareness. …While working downtown one day, it looked like I was going to have to endure a lonely burrito lunch by myself. So I updated my location and asked for company. My friend Mike saw my post on Twitter and dropped by on his way to the office. Later, I met up with a couple of people I had previously known only online: After learning I would be just around the corner from their office, we agreed to get together for coffee. One of them, it turns out, works in a field I cover and gave me a tip on a story.

But then, two weeks into the experiment, I bumped into my friend Mindy at the Dovre Club (37.749008 °N, 122.420547 °W). She mentioned my constant updates, which she’d noticed on Facebook. “It seems sort of odd,” she said with a note of concern. “I’ve been a little worried about you. I thought, ‘Wow, Mat must be really lonely.’”

I explained that I wasn’t actually begging for company; I was just telling people where I was. But it’s an understandable misperception. This is new territory, and there’s no established etiquette or protocol.

This issue came up again while having dinner with a friend at Greens (37.806679 °N, 122.432131 °W), an upscale vegetarian restaurant. Of course, I thought nothing of broadcasting my location. But moments after we were seated, two other friends—Randy and Cameron—showed up, obviously expecting to join us. Randy squatted at the end of the table. Cameron stood. After a while, it became apparent that no more chairs would be coming, so they left awkwardly. I felt bad, but I hadn’t really invited them. Or had I?…

There were also missed connections—lots of missed connections. Apple doesn’t let applications from outside software makers run in the background on the iPhone…. As a result, iPhone location apps can’t send out constant updates….[So] people are often showing up where you were, rather than where you are. On a Friday afternoon, for example, I posted an update looking for nearby friends to share a postwork beer downtown (37.787229 °N, 122.387093 °W). A short time later, I heard back from my friend Lisey, who wanted to meet up. But I had already moved on to Zeitgeist (37.770088 °N, 122.422194 °W), a beer garden in San Francisco’s Mission District. I again updated my location. But the place was packed, so I decided to split and headed to Toronado (37.771920 °N, 122.431213 °W), a bar closer to home. Just after I left, I heard from Lisey again, who was now on her way to the Mission. I had accidentally dodged her twice. I later discovered that two more pals had shown up at Zeitgeist looking for me.”

And Honan’s article doesn’t deal with the social discomfort of other ‘friends’ learning you are nearby and joining you for drinks or a meal when these are people that you don’t really want to hang out with.  For more on the awkwardness of excluding people from your social networks online, see “Anxious about non-friends inviting you to be their Facebook ‘friend’? You’re not alone” or “Amassing Friends: Collect the Whole Set.”

Honan’s article also raises the interesting question of how we change social norms around open-ness to meeting with people.  If Americans have far fewer friends on average than a generation ago, can we start to change that without people worrying about the stigma of appearing socially desperate, trolling for friends by posting their GPS and encouraging people to join them for a beer or lunch.

See the WIRED article:  “I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle” by Matt Honan.

Happiness is contagious

Nick Christakis (Harvard School of Public Health) and James Fowler (Univ. of Calif., San Diego), who previously used the Framingham Heart Study to show that having fat friends increasingly makes people obese, are back with a very interesting paper showing that happy friends make you happy — what the co-authors called ‘an emotional quiet riot’.

It is already established that happiness and having social capital (friendships) are linked, but this research demonstrates that it matters how happy your friends are and that it is the happy friends that are causing your happiness rather than vice versa. Conversely, having unhappy friends over time makes you less happy.

The research shows up in the latest issue of BMJ. “Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study.”  [The study involved 5,124 adults aged 21 to 70 who were followed between 1971 and 2003.]

They measured happiness with a 4-item construct:  “I felt hopeful about the future”; “I was happy”; “I enjoyed life” and “I felt that I was just as good as other people.”

They found that happiness is a network phenomenon, clustering in groups of people that extend out to 3 degrees of separation (the friends’ friends of one’s friends), but with greater impact on friendships that are 2 or 1 degree of separation from you.  Demonstrating the magnitude of this effect, co-author James Fowler noted, “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

They found that happiness spreads across a diverse array of social ties, from spouses to siblings to neighbors. They found no happiness effect of co-workers and found that nearby ties had a far greater influence than distant ties: for example, knowing someone who is happy, makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy, but having happy next-door neighbors makes you a full 34% more likely to be happy (much higher than having happy neighbors merely on your block). The optimal effect was for a happy friend living less than half a mile away, which boosts your chance of happiness by42%. In one of the study’s surprises, happy spouses (which one assumes live less than a half mile away!) only increased one’s chance of happiness by 8%. Part of the lower spouse effect is that happiness spreads more effectively through same sex relationships than relationships (romantic or not) between a man and a woman.  (Gays take note!)  Christakis and Fowler believe we may take emotional cues from people of our gender.

They observed that network characteristics (where you were in the network and how happy the people were around you) could independently predict which individuals would be happy years into the future.

They suggest that there may be an evolutionary basis for human emotions.  Previous work noted that emotions like laughter or smiling seemed evolutionary adapted to helping people form social bonds.  [They note: "Human laughter, for example, is believed to have evolved from the 'play face' expression seen in other primates in relaxed social situations. Such facial expressions and positive emotions enhance social relations by producing analogous pleasurable feelings in others."]

While they couldn’t prove it, they suggested 3 possible causal mechanisms:

1. happy people might share their good fortune
2. happy people might change their behavior toward others (by being nicer or less hostile)
3. happy people might exude a contagious emotion (although this would have to be over a sustained time period)

Christakis and Fowler noted that the 3-degrees of separation impact observed in happiness was the same as for smoking and obesity (which also reached out 3 degrees). They wonder whether a “3-degrees of influence” extends to behaviors like depression, anxiety, loneliness, drinking, eating, exercise and other health-related activities.

So the next time you’re unhappy realize that you may be “infecting” your friends with unhappiness as well.  Christakis’ work is suggesting that we need friends, but we also need to carefully pick friends that are happy and have healthy behaviors or we risk that their unhappiness and unhealthy behaviors will spread to us.  The New York Times notes that one of the co-authors indicated that he now thinks twice about his mood knowing that it affects others. That said, he noted: “We are not giving you the advice to start smiling at everyone you meet in New York….That would be dangerous.”

While they think that face-to-face connection is important in spreading happiness (hence the decline of these effects with distance), they did a separate study of 1,700 Facebook profiles, where they found that people smiling in their photographs had more Facebook friends and that more of those friends were smiling. While the Facebook study is just an initial foray into the online word, Christakis thinks that it shows that some of these happiness findings might extend on social networking as well.  And it would take longitudinal studies to determine whether our online activities are gradually eroding our need for face-to-face communication to spread happiness.

Note: Justin Wolfers (on the Freakonomics blog) is skeptical of this research.  As he notes:

[It's possible that it is not your friends' happiness that is causing yours, but that "if you and I are friends, we are often subject to similar influences. If a buddy of ours dies, we’ll both be less happy. Or, less dramatically, if our favorite football team wins, we’ll both be happier. But this isn’t contagious happiness — it is simply a natural outcome of the shared experiences of people in the same social circles. Unfortunately, observational data cannot distinguish the headline-grabbing conclusion — that happiness is contagious — from my more mundane alternative: friends have shared emotional influences."

Wolfers notes that a very careful article by Ethan Cohen-Cole and Jason Fletcher uses the same research design to show how it can lead to silly conclusions.  Cohen-Cole and Fletcher find in another dataset that this approach shows “height, headaches, and acne are also contagious.” As Wolfers notes, it’s more likely that “the same jackhammer causing your headache is likely causing mine.” And the height finding is obviously not causal but more likely a function of homophily (people choosing similar friends).

See Clive Thompson, “Is Happiness Catching?” (NYT Sunday Magazine, 9/13/09)

Boston Globe story available here.

New York Times story available here (which also has a nice graphic showing the clustering in this network of happy and unhappy people).

L.A. Times story available here.

See Wolfers’ Freakonomics blog post here.

Facebook changing the political dynamic?

Facebook won its first election last month?

Vanessa Sievers, a 20-year old Dartmouth undergraduate from Montana, claims that $50 and all her Facebook connections catapulted her to victory in the race for Treasurer in mostly rural Grafton County, NH. Some call it less of a fight in the jungle than an ambush in the forest. The incumbent Treasurer misjudged how Facebook, in the wake of low voter turnout for such a race, could upend the result.

Sievers used her $51 to purchase a Facebook ad to mobilize students at Plymouth State College and Dartmouth University, narrowly upsetting an incumbent Treasurer (Carol Elliott) with decades of political experience. Sievers bested Elliott by 586 votes across the county, and in Hanover Sievers won by 2,438 votes (almost exactly the number of Dartmouth students who voted there).

Ironically, the fix to this problem is more people caring and voting.  In communities where voting in local races has dropped precipitously, it leaves candidates far more exposes to a smaller number of votes influencing the election.  College student votes normally could not have turned this election unless lots of adults didn’t vote.  But in an era where in many communities the League of Woman Voters is not as active as it once was, it may be that Facebook candidacies have an easier way of reaching potential voters than ones using older technologies (coffees at neighbors’ houses or standing on street corners).

“The talk around here [Grafton County] is how the young woman — a ‘teenybopper,’ in the words of Ms. Elliott, who was not amused at her fate or at the furies unleashed on Facebook — hijacked a centuries-old process to inherit a part-time job that pays only $6,408 annually but has serious, adult responsibilities, like investing around $17 million when property-tax revenues pour in and sometimes borrowing millions during the course of a year.

Vanessa Sievers, Grafton County Treasurer-elect

Indeed, Dartmouth College folklore, a rich vein even in non-election years, includes lurid and almost surely apocryphal tales of students storming into local politics, taking over the process and producing such landmark legislation as the mandate to pave a road from Hanover directly to South Hadley and Northampton, Mass., the homes, respectively, of Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges. These were tales of Dartmouth boys being boys and of (cooped-up) boys chasing girls.

…[Sievers'] resume includes being the co- chair of the college’s Bait and Bullet Club and…[her] political profile includes ardent support for hunting…. A member of the Democratic National Committee Youth Council, she is a symbol — and so is the reaction of some of her opponents to her election. Ms. Elliott…told John P. Gregg of the Valley News newspaper that the college students who voted for her opponent were ‘brainwashed.’

“She [Sievers] used technology that caught older people by surprise,” said Michael Hais, a retired vice president of the Frank N. Magid Associates communications research firm and the co-author, with Morley Winograd, of Millennial Makeover, a book outlining the political potential of Ms. Sievers and her Millennial generation. “This symbolizes a generational conflict that may not be as shrill as the one in the 1960s but may be just as important….”

Some of the first stirrings of this [the new dynamics of an Internet-based campaign[ became apparent two years ago when Andrew Edwards and Jeffrey Fontas, both 19 at the time, mounted campaigns for the New Hampshire Legislature from Nashua, in the southern part of the state. This year more advanced versions of the strategy were unveiled in the national presidential campaign, here in Grafton County in the county treasurer race and now in Israel, where the campaign of Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister has virtually replicated the look of Mr. Obama’s Web site and is seeking to harness the power of social-network communications.

Eliot has fired back; she now asserts that students who live in another state shouldn’t be able to vote in county contests, since they don’t have enough connection with ensuring that local government works. The political-comedy Internet site 24/6, noted: “At a time when the country is in crisis and the world is mere weeks away from a sweeping revolution in American politics, the last thing we need is young people ‘getting involved’ and bringing ‘fresh ideas’ to the table.”

See “The Facebook revolution: Online social networking didn’t just bring young people into politics, it brought them into power“(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 11/30/08), from whom these quotes are taken.  NYT article on Sievers’ election here.

The looming financial crisis and middle class engagement

Selling Apples (Flickr photo by SirPoseyalKnight)

David Brooks, in “The Formerly Middle Class” (NYT, 11/18/08) writes:

“[T]hey [the new middle class] will suffer a drop in social capital. In times of recession, people spend more time at home. But this will be the first steep recession since the revolution in household formation. Nesting amongst an extended family rich in social capital is very different from nesting in a one-person household that is isolated from family and community bonds. People in the lower middle class have much higher divorce rates and many fewer community ties. For them, cocooning is more likely to be a perilous psychological spiral.

In this recession, maybe even more than other ones, the last ones to join the middle class will be the first ones out. And it won’t only be material deprivations that bites. It will be the loss of a social identity, the loss of social networks, the loss of the little status symbols that suggest an elevated place in the social order. These reversals are bound to produce alienation and a political response. If you want to know where the next big social movements will come from, I’d say the formerly middle class.”

I agree with David Brooks’ first fear.  That said, since social networks have always been the backbone of social movements (from abolition to civil rights to women’s suffrage) it’s hard to fathom how this isolated ex-middle class constituency is going to build a movement out of vaporware.  But with time on their hand, and the Internet at their disposal, maybe this will be the test of whether Internet tools (from Meetup to Facebook to virally circulated YouTube recruiting efforts) can be put to use to engage these displaced Americans and give collective voice to their frustrations.

Can Facebook topple Egyptian authoritarianism?

Newest Egyptian Way to Learn Your Facebook Password: Torturing Ahmed Maher (by blogger Wael Abbas)

David Wolman has an interesting article in the current WIRED magazine chronicling the rise of Ahmed Maher and other activists in Cairo trying to use Facebook to organize student protest.  It describes all the cat-and-mouse intrigue and the government’s effort to arrest the ringleaders, torture them into submission or steal their passwords.

At one level it is a paean to technology: how the nimble, viral Facebook can out-organize the old brick-and-mortar state security force of the repressive Mubarak regime.  At another level, it raises all the risks of organizing over the Internet:  while one can build “movements” with amazing viral rapidity, will these “activists” (or slacktivists) with fewer real social ties actually come to the protests; or how without all the verbal cues and formal vetting through real networks, it is much easier for government agents to “infiltrate” the Facebook space and monitor what is going on.

The article ends on a possibly optimistic note: Ahmed Maher is not tortured in his most recent arrest by the Egyptian police, perhaps because they have no explicit orders of what to do with him, or perhaps he has reached the level of fame where harming him, fans the flames of the opposition.

[See my related post on the rise of trivial Twitter for social mobilization in developing countries.]

Anyway, “Cairo Activists Use Facebook to Rattle Regime” (WIRED, 10/20/08) is an interesting read on both the promise and peril of e-activism.

See updated post on TechPresident “Egyptian Activists Challenge Facebook-Enabled Diplomacy 2.0” (12/5/08)

Barack’s as Muslim as Sarah Palin

McCain/Palin’s slanderous attempt to portray Christian candidate Barack Obama as Muslim, by repeatedly having surrogates refer in nasty tones to Barack Obama by his full name “Barack Hussein Obama”, has spurred some impressive and inspiring reactions to seize a higher moral ground than McCain and Palin.

A lot of Facebook page owners (who also are not Muslim) have changed their middle names in sympathy to Hussein.  So I would post as Thomas Hussein Sander.  See this thread of Hussein is My Middle Name.

It’s reminiscent of the 1993 Billings, Montana story where a Jewish family’s window was shattered for lighting a menorah.

When a brick was thrown through the bedroom window of a Jewish child whose window bore a menorah, the community response was extraordinary. An organized alliance of citizens, churches, unions and the media banded together. The local paper printed a full-page, color picture of a menorah, so that others could hang it in their windows in solidarity. With the help of merchants, by late December nearly 10,000 people in Billings, Montana had this symbol of Jews overcoming persecution displayed in their windows.  PBS made a movie of this called Not In Our Town. (Thanks to Forgotten Fires for the specifics.)

And now this Massachusetts Observer page has claimed Barack O’Bama as Irish with a humorous rhyme.  What’s next?  Japanese Obama-san?

Does following the e-lives of ‘friends’ build social capital?

An interesting piece in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times (9/7/08, “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You”) discusses the success of Facebook, Twitter, et al in getting users more comfortable with their personal details being shared with all their hundreds or thousands of friends and whether this “ambient awareness” actually produces social capital.

Clive Thompson describes how Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, realized that in order to drive usage, he had to make it easier for users to find out what their friends were doing.  Users, seeking to find juicy tidbits (like that a friend had been dumped and his status was changed back to single) on other friends’ pages “was like constantly poking your head into someone’s room to see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you had 200 friends on the site — a fairly typical number — there weren’t enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time.” Zuckerberg decided to aggregate all the new information that friends had posted when you logged onto your Facebook page.  But Zuckerberg initially faced a revolution on the part of Facebook users who demanded privacy controls when he introduced NewsFeed: “…the first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends, including potentially mortifying bits of news — Tim and Lisa broke up; Persaud is no longer friends with Matthew — and drunken photos someone snapped, then uploaded and tagged with names. Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it was now like being at a giant, open party filled with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time.”  Faced with skyrocketing number of petitioners asserting that Facebook was becoming the Big Brother of the Internet, Zuckerberg ultimately agreed to provide users with controls to limit who got these feeds but not to remove the NewsFeed.  Users realized that they liked the sense of connection with their friends that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.  And Thompson claims that Zuckerberg, who was intentionally pushing the envelope, made users ultimately more comfortable sharing this personal information with others.

Most of the article is about why we are addicted to getting this personal information about others (*ambient awareness*). Ambient awareness is “very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for microblogging: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing. There are other services for reporting where you’re traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you’re looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.”  Thompson observed that this builds on patterns observed by Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito who found that couples living apart often found renewed intimacy by Ping-Ponging mini-messages that there were on the sofa or having a glass of wine.

Thompson indicates that for many over 30 it seems inane to be interested in posting or monitoring these micro-blogs, often of banal events (having a sandwich, brushing one’s teeth, waiting for a subway).  Some users strive for the arty message in only 140 text characters. But users find the process addictive and meaningful: “Indeed, many of the people I interviewed, who are among the most avid users of these awareness tools, admit that at first they couldn’t figure out why anybody would want to do this. Ben Haley, a 39-year-old documentation specialist for a software firm who lives in Seattle, told me that when he first heard about Twitter last year from an early-adopter friend who used it, his first reaction was that it seemed silly. But a few of his friends decided to give it a try, and they urged him to sign up, too.  Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like ‘I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus’; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

“But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.”  Each entry seemed meaningless, but as the hours and days went by, Thompson indicates that the messages aggregated into a short story or a novel.

“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like ‘a type of E.S.P.,’ as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

” ‘It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,’ Haley went on to say. ‘I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.’ It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, ‘So, what have you been up to?’ because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.”

The real question it seems to me is to what extent this Twittering (posting and reading) is the equivalent of either mere voyeurism or people speaking into the wilderness (I have memories of a stranger who was once on a group bike ride trip with me in Canada. 80% of his comments were of the form ‘Having a little trail mix’ — comments seeking to establish some social ties with others, but coming out in self-focused banalities that were of little or no interest to anyone other than possibly the trail-mix eater).  But if the tracking of a friends’ rhythms really does make one better able to see when they have gotten sick or better able to build stronger friendships faster, my hats are off to them.  Myself, I think if I were monitoring 150 friends’ Twitterings a day, I’d be far less likely to understand whether someone was sick or have the time to provide TLC than if I actually called or e-mailed him or her.  Thompson’s anecdotes seem a mix of the two: folks who are following strangers’ Twitters but feel highly connected to them and ones who monitor their friends’ Twitterings.  I must admit that my priors are that the ’sense of connectedness’ to others that comes from feeling intimately connected to others may be good for happiness, but I’m much more skeptical that it provides social support, or job leads, or TLC.   What’s most promising is that Twittering does seem to support and increase the number of weak ties and weak ties can be especially helpful in connecting one to job leads. It would be interesting to learn more about whether Twitterers twitter the fact that they are unemployed and looking for job leads or ask for social support through their Twitters.  Most of the Twitterings appear to be mere updates rather than demands on others.  But in principle Twitter contacts might be good sources of job leads (connecting to divergent social networks) even if they are unlikely to be fertile sources of social support (which usually require stronger social bonds of trust).

Thompson acknowledges some of this:

”I outsource my entire life,” Laura Fitton said. ”I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes.” [by asking her circle of thousands of Twitter-followers] (She also keeps a secondary Twitter account that is private and only for a much smaller circle of close friends and family — ”My little secret,” she said. It is a strategy many people told me they used: one account for their weak ties, one for their deeper relationships.)

It is also possible, though, that this profusion of weak ties can become a problem. If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships. Psychologists have long known that people can engage in ”parasocial” relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people. Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial — peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.

”The information we subscribe to on a feed is not the same as in a deep social relationship,” Boyd told me. She has seen this herself; she has many virtual admirers that have, in essence, a parasocial relationship with her. ”I’ve been very, very sick, lately and I write about it on Twitter and my blog, and I get all these people who are writing to me telling me ways to work around the health-care system, or they’re writing saying, ‘Hey, I broke my neck!’ And I’m like, ‘You’re being very nice and trying to help me, but though you feel like you know me, you don’t.’ ” Boyd sighed. ”They can observe you, but it’s not the same as knowing you.”

….Caterina Fake, a founder of Flickr (a popular photo-sharing site), …suggested an even more subtle danger: that the sheer ease of following her friends’ updates online has made her occasionally lazy about actually taking the time to visit them in person. ”At one point I realized I had a friend whose child I had seen, via photos on Flickr, grow from birth to 1 year old,” she said. ”I thought, I really should go meet her in person. But it was weird; I also felt that Flickr had satisfied that getting-to-know you satisfaction, so I didn’t feel the urgency. But then I was like, Oh, that’s not sufficient! I should go in person!”

Ironically, Thompson notes how Facebook can start to approximate life in a small town, where you find you can’t get away from the people you dislike or the past you want to leave behind.  He provides stories of Facebook users seeing old hideous pictures of them posted on their Facebook site and tagged with their name, or exes discussing what you were like publicly.  One social scientist wonders whether every misstep will follow you through life and whether kindergarteners will have to face active choices about de-friending others.

It’s a thoughtful and provocative read.  Read the interesting “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You” (9/7/08, New York Times Sunday Magazine, p. 42, Clive Thompson).  The future of socializing is likely changing.  Let’s hope it is for the better or that we’re smart enough to make wise decisions about how to use it that leave us the master and not the slave to technology.