One hopes that this is not a sign of the less civicly engaged times….
Facebook has reportedly booted off some of their users who were, get this, too social. Apparently their software identified these users as behaving suspiciously.
Eliabeth Coe got booted after she sent friends and professional acquaintances a link to her company’s Web site when they thought she was spamming. She had to endure the Facebook-addict equivalent of Siberian exile — 31 days without being logged on.
Lisa Shane was organizing a high school reunion on facebook, when she got booted off for sending the same messages to more than 200 people. She was locked out of her account, contacts, RSVP list and details about the venue one week before the reunion.
The Post reports that “Others have been kicked off the popular site for adding too many friends at once; sending too many messages; joining too many groups; or “poking” too many friends, a casual greeting on the site. Shunned Facebookers said the punishment contradicts the site’s core mission — to help people connect and communicate.”
In defense of Facebook, with 100 million users, they do have to battle an increasing amount of spam, fake messages and links, some generated by bots and malware. The Post notes that “About 64 large-scale spam attacks have been reported on social networking sites over the past year, and 37 percent of users have noticed an increase in unwanted messages in the past six months, according to Cloudmark, a Web security company.”
But we fear that the backdrop of lower levels of social capital makes any highly social individual appear “suspicious.” On the positive side, maybe “necessity will be the mother of invention” and the Elizabeth Coes of the world can learn that it actually may be a lot more effective trying to make friends the horse-and-buggy era way of actually calling people and getting together.
[Updated 4/7/09 to reflect latest use of Twitter in Moldovan protests.]
Clay Shirky, author of the interesting read, Here Comes Everybody, has commented on how technologies that seemed trivial and pointless have shown their mettle outside the U.S.
Flash mobs: As Shirky says everyone remembers flash mobs. The technology that made it possible to almost instantaneously and without a clear organization, assemble a pillow fight in downtown Toronto, or enable a mob to all meet in New York’s Central Park, and make pigeon noises for a few minutes. A wonderful recent cool, but pointless example, was 100s of New Yorkers freezing simultaneously in Grand Central Station for a minute.
The anonymous New York founder “Bill”, aimed to critique hipster culture and art happenings.
I published a piece on the meaningless of this trend (“Flash-in -the-pan Mobs?“, 2003). But then in 2006, a developer created a page on Live Journal in Belarus. He proposed a flash mob of citizens convening in the central square and simultaneously eating ice cream. The government’s rules prohibited group public actions (although no doubt the law’s inventors weren’t thinking about ice cream eating). The protesters brought their cameras and filmed black clad security forces apprehending them in October Square. The mission didn’t bring down the government since the protesters overestimated how enraged citizens outside Belarus would at this action, but they did make the government look foolish.
Twitter: another seemingly mindless technology being put to social use. Twitter users send ‘tweets’ (short descriptions, up to 140 characters, of what they are doing at the moment). ‘Having a little trail mix’, ‘On my way to the daily grind’, etc. As the Toronto Star describes Twitter: “In Akron last week, JuggleNuts coded 250 death certificates in a single day. “A new record,” he said. In Bakersfield, jcjdoss “(j)ust bit into a rotten apple… almost barfed.” Seconds later and half a world away, sauj in Auckland, New Zealand, shared a moment that was, he said, “Beautiful: the early morning train, witnessing the gentle pink blushes or the sun reflected on the wind-caressed waves of the Orakei basin.
“Random musings, mundane updates, boredom-fueled brain farts, the rare poetic outburst – all constant fare on Twitter, the online social-networking (think: Facebook) world’s fascination of the moment.
“Until very recently, Twitter could have been regarded as little more than that: an always-on inanity machine, indulging spontaneous tedium. In the past two months, though, those narrow parameters have broadened considerably.”
Then Egypt and China found twitter. An American journalism grade, James Karl Buck, arrested in April in Egypt, send a ‘tweet’ through his cellphone that said simply ‘Arrested.’ Buck’s tweet, after being taken in by policy following an anti-government protest, rallied family, friends and even the U.S. government and led to his ultimate release.
Last month, the Chinese 7.9-magnitude earthquake in Chengdu offered Twitter another chance to shine as a meaningful technology. The Toronto Star notes that “Twitter users offered the first on-scene accounts. “Slight ly dizzy after being shaken around by the Chengdu earthquake for several hours now,” tweeted one user, Casperodj.
“Suddenly, Twitter’s triviality was no longer its most notable feature. ‘I saw three people in Chengdou giving reports on the ground long before traditional media could even get close,’ said Fons Tuinstra, a media consultant in Shanghai and a fellow at the U.S. media nonprofit organization the Poynter Institute. ‘On that first day, it was a very important tool – a great example of how it could work.’
“A year ago, it was a weird little toy,” says Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief of Technology Review, a publication owned by M.I.T. “Now, its potential seems significantly greater than that.
“How much greater? That’s open for debate. (‘One of the reasons it’s not fully mature yet is that it keeps breaking,’ says Pontin, a nod to the service’s iffy architecture).
“But slow down a moment. The weird little toy is still very much at play, and with tweets like this one, from femmedelacreme, still being the norm, overblown idealism is kept well in check: ‘I am really craving shavings of parmesan cheese. Plain. Such oddness.’ “
Twitter users have doubled in only 18 months from just over 600,000 to more than 1.2 million. The creators (much like Flash Mobs) did not build it with social purpose in mind, although the Toronto Star notes that Twitter offers to turn the world into 24-hour a day micro-blogging.
And some claim that with Twitter’s rise in popularity, comes the increased corporatization of the site (a la Friendster, Facebook or Second Life) that ultimately portends its demise as an innovative social approach.
The Economist has an interesting set of stories this week on the relationship of technology to social capital.
They note that these smaller mini-connections with friends and family throughout the day using cellphones, texting, IM, etc. keep us more connected to kith and kin, at the cost of our connections with strangers — the latter potentially a cohesive glue that holds society together. There is also some question whether the continuing ties of adolescents to their parents through cellphones is retarding adolescence. The article discusses how new technology is changing dating rituals in Japan.
There is also an interesting conversation about how it is changing etiquette. They note a huge gradient in the US by age about whether using cellphones in public is a major irritation with 74% of those over age 60 saying yes, and only 32% of those ages 18-27 agreeing.
Excerpt: “Trickier etiquette problems arise when the issue is not so much noise as context. One example that will enter the history books occurred last September when Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, was still waging a vigorous campaign for the presidency. As he was up on his podium and in mid-sentence addressing the National Rifle Association (NRA), a crucial constituency for a Republican candidate, his mobile rang and, to gasps in the huge audience, he decided to answer it. What followed, captured on microphone, is worth repeating in its banality: “Hello, dear. I’m talking, I’m talking to the members of the NRA right now. Would you like to say hello? I love you, and I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m finished. OK? OK, have a safe trip. Bye-bye. Talk to you later, dear. I love you.” When he hung up, the audience had turned to stone.
“Usually the situation is subtler and the incongruence has more to do with attention. This can be true even during silent mobile communications. It is now routine for university students to text, e-mail and instant-message during lectures. Mr Ling, whose job includes loitering in public places for observation, watched a woman at an Oslo underground station who texted as she walked. She was wholly focused on her text message but had to look up occasionally to weave through the crowds on the platform. Other people were doing the same. It was an “atomised and individualised” scene, says Mr Ling: a new form of the proverbial lonely crowd.
“But at least this particular Norwegian woman was signalling through her body language to all around her that she wanted to be left alone. The spread of “hands-free” Bluetooth devices, with hidden earplugs seemingly attached to nothing, is removing even those clues. Steve Love, a psychologist, was travelling on a train from Edinburgh to Glasgow once when a girl standing next to him started talking to him. She asked him how he was and how his day had been, and Mr Love, though a bit shy, politely told her how much he was looking forward to watching Scotland play football that evening. As he spoke, the girl looked at him in horror, then turned away. Only then did Mr Love hear her say “OK, I’ll call you later.” Not a word or gesture was exchanged for the remainder of the (suddenly uncomfortable) journey.
“Probably the single most common etiquette conflict occurs, as Mr Ling puts it, when mediated communication interrupts co-present communication, as when two or more people are sitting at a table in conversation or negotiation and one of them gets, and answers, a call. The other co-present people must now keep themselves busy while seeming nonchalant. What is more, they must pretend not to be eavesdropping even though they are only a few feet away from the mediated conversation, ideally by assuming a pose of concentration on some other object, such as their fingernails or their own phone. As soon as the intervening call ends, everybody must try to re-enter the co-present context as gracefully as possible.
“So there is evidence that nomadism is good for in-groups, but at the expense of strangers. If that is true, Mr Granovetter would consider it bad for society. Fortunately, however, the last chapter has not yet been written. Since the outburst of pessimism about the internet among sociologists in the 1990s, the web has recently become an intensely social medium, thanks in large part to proliferating online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Young people have been using these websites on their PCs to keep in touch with much larger groups of people than has ever been feasible before. It is not uncommon for adolescents to add several “friends” a day to their “social graph” on Facebook or to the “buddy list” of their instant-messaging service.”
Animal researchers have long been puzzled why humans have such larger and more complex brains than other animals, “…seven times larger than one would predict for an average mammal of our size. Many of our extra neurons are in a region called the frontal cortex, where much of the most sophisticated thought takes place.”
One potential clue came from apes who also had outsize brains, a large frontal cortex (heavily associated with socializing) and engaged in lots of social activity in groups. Carl Zimmer in the NY Times writes: ” Primates may be pushed into larger groups thanks to predators or to patchy sources of food like fruit trees. As their numbers grow, natural selection may favor social intelligence. The primates form long-term alliances with each other and compete with rivals. They begin to keep track of a larger and larger social network….A boost in social intelligence can lead to an evolutionary edge for primates. Well-connected female baboons, for example, dominate their bands. They have more babies than lower-ranking females, and their babies enjoy better health and faster growth.”
But this frontal cortex-socializing-large brain theory has until now been largely limited to humans and primates. A new important piece of the puzzle has emerged from research by Kay E. Holekamp, who has been observing spotted hyenas on the savannas in southern Kenya. Holekamp said that researchers studied primates because of a bias assuming that other animals weren’t worth studying. In Holekamp’s research she finds that the “social brain” is not limited to primates. Hyenas (with much smaller brains) can differentiate which hyena they are hearing on tape.
Spotted hyenas have a rigid hierarchy. One dominant female rules over a number of hyenas beneath her. Each cub learns exactly where it and all other hyenas fit into this hierarchy. If a kill is made, other clans may fight for the meat, but the first right within the clan goes to the dominant female. But other species of hyenas — striped, aardwol, and brown — lived very different lives.
Were their lifestyles were a function of their brain size? Holekamp’s discovery was that they were: the “social complexity model” fit the data. There was a continuum from the hyenas with the simplest social systems and the tiniest frontal cortices (striped), to brown and striped hyenas, with intermediate social systems and intermediate brains, to the spotted hyena, with the largest brains and frontal cortexes who lived in the most complex societies.
Holekamp is now testing whether the brain size from sociability also influences the innovation and intelligence of hyenas by seeing which of these hyenas can learn new system (like unbolting a gate to get food). This would test whether the brain size that came from socializing led to an intelligence and innovation advantage.
“Spending just 10 minutes talking to another person can help improve your memory and your performance on tests, according to a University of Michigan study to be published in the February 2008 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
” ‘In our study, socializing was just as effective as more traditional kinds of mental exercise in boosting memory and intellectual performance,’ said Oscar Ybarra, a psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and a lead author of the study with ISR psychologist Eugene Burnstein and psychologist Piotr Winkielman from the University of California, San Diego….According to Ybarra, the findings suggest that visiting with a friend or neighbor may be just as helpful in staying sharp as doing a daily crossword puzzle.
“The findings also suggest that social isolation may have a negative effect on intellectual abilities as well as emotional well-being. And for a society characterized by increasing levels of social isolationa trend sociologist Robert Putnam calls Bowling Alone the effects could be far-reaching.”
For further briefing see this link. Podcast with Ybarra here.
For the moment, their evidence is correlational (and relies on pre-existing archival data), and they can’t rule out that it is the intellectual effort generated during the social activities (like playing games) that produces the increase in intelligence or conversely that it is caused by a third unknown common factor. They plan follow-up work to better understand the relationship and any causal mechanism.
P.S. Jane Brody recently reported on this body of research as well in “Mental Reserves Keep Brains Agile“
(NY Times, 12/11/07). Brody reports: “Long-term studies in other countries, including Sweden and China, have also found that continued social interactions helped protect against dementia. The more extensive an older person’s social network, the better the brain is likely to work, the research suggests. Especially helpful are productive or mentally stimulating activities pursued with other people, like community gardening, taking classes, volunteering or participating in a play-reading group.”
The study purports to find that (at least on MSU campus), more Facebook use is associated with higher levels of social capital, but especially useful for maintaing social ties to high school friends and to building bridging social capital. I’m less persuaded by these latter two findings. For “maintained social capital” all the reports of “maintaining social ties” that they use are self-reports and more hypothetical and less behavioral. So the study asks whether you would have a person you could stay with from high school rather than how many times in the last year (if ever) you did so. I think the measures encourage inflated perceptions of whether e-connections are valuable, without any tethering to real world behavior to test whether these inflated perceptions are valid. I’ve written earlier on how Facebook can cheapen the currency of “friendship” and simply calling someone a friend doesn’t necessarily afford the same benefits as comes with friends made off-line.
“Bridging” social capital in the study really just means an imagined connection with the MSU community and the ability to make new friends. I would find the results more powerful if the questions referred to actual friendship networks with people who were different than the respondent (with regard to race, ethnicity, religion, etc.) or questions on trust of different ethnic groups as we’ve done in our 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. Even in our surveying where we ask people how many close personal friends they have who are African American, Asian, Hispanic, etc. we find that people enlarge their circle of “close” friends to find bridging relationships. So we know already that there is response desirability (people want to be able to report bridging relationships) and this tendency is fueled by loosely worded questions. I’m confident that people using the Internet think it increases their social bridges (the folk wisdom that “the Internet brings us all together”), so it requires more tightly worded questions to sort out fizzle from fact.
One of the more interesting findings from the paper was their finding, contrary to some of the “rich get richer” Meetup analysis I have done about what type of users benefit from participating in Meetup, was that the “poor get richer” through Facebook. [They use the terms slightly differently than I did; I was referring to people who were richer in "social capital" (already more socially connected) benefitting more than the people who were less connected. By the "poor get richer", they mean that those with lower self-esteem and life satisfaction, may show the biggest gains by using Facebook more.] Nevertheless, the finding is still interesting.
Conclusion: it’s more serious research than I’ve seen on Facebook, but still leaves me hungering for better measures that are more behavioral and less ethereal.
Postscript: There is an interesting, more rigorous study of Facebook by Nicholas Christakis and Jason Kauffman at Harvard, but the results for now are largely limited to verifying homophily (the fact that “birds of a feather flock together”) on Facebook.
There have been prior reports of the connection between oxytocin and social capital and social trust; oxytocin works as a neurotransmitter and is produced from bonding between individuals and from the mothering process.
The latest reports are of a nasal spray of synthetic oxytocin to decrease social shyness.
University of Zurich researchers (Markus Heinrichs et al) have experimented with a nasal spray and are planning to conduct large scale tests. If these pan out, a product could be in the works in 5 years.
The spray increases social confidence and dissipates anxiety, making it easier for them for socialise with others.
The spray is reportedly very easy to use, and only requires squirting it up one’s nose. No reports of possible side-effects: likelihood of giving away the store? belief that a check actually is in the mail? belief that someone actually is selling me the Brooklyn bridge?
Background on oxytocin:
In addition to oxytocin being a byproduct of bonding between friends, it is also released from sex or mothers nursing their babies and is thought to accentuate the bonds between individuals.
A 2006 study by Domes et al in Biological Psychiatry reported that higher levels of oxytocin in the brain enhance our mind’s ability to read others’ emotions. Subjects whose oxytocin levels were mildly increased could infer significantly better, based only on eye cues, what a target person was thinking about. The effect was more pronounced for emotions harder to read through eye cues.
A 2005 study found that people sprayed with oxytocin were more trusting in a 1-on-1 cooperation game. (Nature magazine)
There was an interesting column by David Brooks on Friday (NYT, 7/20/07). Brooks, based on Douglas Hofstadter’s “I Am A Strange Loop“, discusses the idea of the relational self. Namely, that Hofstadter’s work emphasizes “how profoundly we are shaped by relationships with others, but it’s not one of the those stiffling collectivist theories that puts the community above the individual.” Brooks notes that this line of research invaldiates the Ayn Rand claim that success is merely a function of genius and willpower since there “is no self that exists before society.”
In a statement sure to vex fellow conservatives, Brooks notes that Hofstadter’s work “explains why it’s so hard to tackle concentrated poverty. Human beings are permeable. The habits that are common in underclass areas get inside the brains of those who grow up there and undermine long-range thinking and social trust.” It explains how the same individual could be a flaming liberal or flaming conservative depending on where they grow up.
We’ve been interested in related questions of social identity (how people come to define themselves, what groups they see themselves as part of, etc.) and although the field of social identity is just starting to become a bit more hard-nosed, it has appeared clear to us that people’s sense of identity is partly informed by their social capital (who they hang around with and befriend, their relationships) and their social identity in turn also influences their social capital. More work will need to be done to sort out how strong these arrrows are in both directions. Are you more of a radical feminist or a Dittohead because of the friends you hang out with or does your identity as a radical feminist or Dittohead more influence who you relate to?
Brooks notes that in the information age we know that we’re connected to others by communication and “no man is an island” but yet the ways in which those webs of relationships and interconnections influence us is still somewhat of a mystery that Hofstadter is helping to solve.
[The Brooks article called "A Partnership of Minds" is available here.]
“Hostile Outlook May Affect Breathing, Research Shows” (NYT Science Times, 6/19/07)
While the NY Times doesn’t label social capital a potential culprit to explain the relationship between more difficult breathing and hostility, alternative research has highlighted the relationship between issues like charitable giving or trust and pleasure sensors in the brain, and substantiated that there is a link between socializing and the reduction in our stress levels. Makes one wonder whether in the same way that dreams and sleep play a critical role in cementing in learning and recharging our systems, whether things like socializing, giving and trust might also be a resetting and calming tonic for the system that prevent or reduce issues like breathing problems which might come from an accumulation of these stressors.
“Having a hostile attitude may affect your breathing, a new study reports.
“Using a sample of 4,629 healthy adults ages 18 to 30, researchers determined hostility using a 50-item questionnaire and then administered breathing tests to record objective measures of breathing efficiency and lung capacity. The study appears in the May issue of Health Psychology.”
[The study controlled for age, height, socioeconomic status, smoking and asthma.] For reasons not explained the low lung function was consistently found among hostile black men and women and in hostile white women. They didn’t find a statistically significant lung function decline in hostile white men.
The authors speculated that it could be environmental factors or even that low lung performance triggered hostility.
A New York Times op-ed (Danger: Playground Ahead) by Allison Arieff (5/29/07) points out that playgrounds were originally invented to train future citizens in a social democracy, but to reduce liability issues have offered children less and less opportunity to shape their experience.
Her Op-Ed features a handful of artists/architects to reimagine playgrounds and also describes the Imagination Playground that was recently designed that lets children build things, tear them down and start again, so that each visitor encounteres a different experience.
Playgrouds were also used in the Progressive Era to help build stronger social ties among recent immigrants and between them and the longer-term natives. The Op-Ed serves as a reminder that we may not be doing enough to maximize the social opportunitiy inherent in traditional playgrounds or more updated forms.
