For those skeptical about whether on-line communities offer the same level of social capital as in person friendships, this cartoon is for you.
Source: tedmccagg.typepad.com
For those skeptical about whether on-line communities offer the same level of social capital as in person friendships, this cartoon is for you.
Source: tedmccagg.typepad.com
Posted in facebook, Instagram, internet, linkedin, Modern Friendship, online, Pinterest, social capital, technology, twitter
Tagged facebook, Instagram, internet, linkedin, Modern Friendship, online, Pinterest, social capital, technology, twitter
I recently saw an interesting TED talk by Eli Pariser on the next wave of cyberbalkanization. [Read his fascinating new book “The Filter Bubble” here.]
Background: Marshall Van Alstyne predicted 15 years earlier that users would self-segregate on the net and choose to get exposed to ever more narrow communities of interest.
We’re now onto the “The Daily Me” 2.0. Some news sites originally let users click on their interests a user could limit his/her news to say sports and entertainment news. Cass Sunstein and Nicholas Negroponte predicted that it would lead to stronger news blinders and expose us to less and less common information, what they called “The Daily Me”.
Well, it turns out that users actually choose to subject themselves to more diversity in opinions and networks on the net than people predicted.
But the latest onslaught, what Eli Pariser calls “The Filter Bubble”, is more invidious. More and more user sites (Facebook, Google Search, Yahoo News, Huffington Post, the Washington Post) now automatically tailor your stream of results, facebook feed, and news feed based on your past clicks, where you are sitting, what type of computer you use, what web browser you use, etc.
Unlike in the past, this is not “opt in” cyberbalkanization but automatic. And since it happens behind-the-scenes, you can’t know what you’re not seeing. One’s search of Tunisia on Google might not even tell you about the political uprising if you haven’t expressed interest in politics in the past. Eric Schmidt of Google said “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”
Pariser notes that we all have internal battles between our aspirational selves (who want greater diversity) and our current selves (who often want something easy to consume). In most of our lives or Netflix queues we continually play out these battles with sometimes our aspirational selves winning out. These filter bubbles edit out our aspirational selves when we need a mix of vegetables and dessert. Pariser believes that the algorithmic gatekeepers need to show us things that are not only junk food but also things that are challenging, important and uncomfortable and present competing points of view. We need Internet ethics in the way that journalistic ethics were introduced in 1915 with transparency and a sense of civic responsibility and room for user control.
It’s an interesting talk and I clearly agree with Pariser that gatekeepers should be more transparent and allow user input to tweak our ratio of dessert to vegetables, to use his analogy. But I think Pariser, in forecasting the degree of our Filter Bubble, misses out the fact that there are other sources of finding about news articles. Take Twitter retweets. Even if my friends are not that diverse — and many of us will choose to “follow” people we don’t agree with — as long as one of the people I’m following has diverse views in his/her circle of followers and retweets their interesting posts, I get exposed to them. Ditto with e-mail alerts by friends of interesting articles or social searches using Google. We live in far more of a social world where information leads come from many other sources than Google searches or Yahoo News. So let’s work on the automatic filters, but the sky is not falling just yet.
See “The Filter Bubble.” (Feb. 2011 TED talk)
Posted in Cass Sunstein, cyberbalkanization, Daily Me, Eli Pariser, facebook, Filter Bubble, Filtering, google, Huffington Post, internet, marshall van Alstyne, Nicholas Negroponte, preferences, TED, The Filter Bubble, twitter, washington post, yahoo, Yahoo News
Tagged Cass Sunstein, cyberbalkanization, Daily Me, Eli Pariser, facebook, Filter Bubble, Filtering, google, Huffington Post, internet, marshall van Alstyne, Nicholas Negroponte, preferences, TED, The Filter Bubble, twitter, washington post, yahoo, Yahoo News
I was quoted last month in a Philadelphia Inquirer piece on “slacktivism”.
“The easier it is to show support for the cause, the more easily [the action] is dismissed,” says Harvard University’s Tom Sander, who studies civic engagement as executive director of the Saguaro Seminar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
When Sander worked in Washington for Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, it was common lore among legislative staffers that e-petitions “signed” online were not taken as seriously as ones that bore actual signatures. The same was true for letters in which writers cut and pasted their messages from a master copy on the Internet, he says.
Obviously the label “slacktivism” already has the conclusion embedded within: i.e., that slacktivism is lazy activism that implicitly can’t work. I noted, which Davis did not quote me on, that social change typically is fighting against self-interests that are deeply vested for a reason — those individuals are benefiting strongly financially from the status quo, they care passionately about the status quo, etc. It’s hard to fathom that anything as important as civil rights or women’s suffrage could have been obtained by Americans’ signaling on their Facebook face that they liked civil rights or liked the idea of women voting. I noted that typically social change, as Weber noted, requires “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”
I think the interesting question is when can change occur without serious effort and how can technology be used in that process. There are examples, like the Jody Williams’ initial work on the International Land Mine Ban, or Kate Hanni’s electronic organizing for the Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights, that were organized without large-scale public marches or rallies (things that typically signify just how importantly people care about an issue because it takes a lot of people’s time and expense to come, say to Washington, to rally). I think the electronic phase of a movement may be helpful in identifying at some level how widespread support is for an issue and help leaders who are willing to devote serious time to lobbying Congress or organizing a boycott, whether “there is a there there.” But in the case of the land mine or the passengers’ bill of rights, it still took tireless advocacy on the part of Jody Williams or Kate Hanni, although internet organizing was a useful tool in informing their followers and rallying them.
Certainly groups like MoveOn and more recent political campaigns are also testament that the internet is a ripe source for raising money that may be critical to sustaining an organized campaign. [While I certainly differ from what I see as Clay Shirky’s over-optimistic tone in Here Comes Everybody, the book is instructive in helping us to rethink ways in which technology might enable new forms of civic engagement and new forms of protest.]
In any event, I don’t want to be categorized in the group that believes that internet activism can’t play an important role (for sure it has and will), but I think the danger is to think that cheap action (e.g., putting a cartoon character on your Facebook page to show opposition to animal cruelty) is sufficient in and of itself to bring about meaningful change.
As I noted to Carolyn Davis, it’s a similar danger to corporate volunteer days where individuals may feel at the end of the day that they’ve satisfied their yearly dose of volunteering rather than spurring them to deepen their civic and social engagement during the rest of the year.
I welcome your thoughts.
See “Slacktivism emerges as questionable online way to support causes” (Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 27, 2010, Carolyn Davis).
Posted in Activism, Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights, animal cruelty, Carolyn Davis, clay shirky, facebook, here comes everybody, International Land Mine Ban, internet, Jody Williams, Kate Hanni, MoveOn, online, Philadelphia Inquirer, slacktivism, social change
Tagged Activism, Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights, animal cruelty, Carolyn Davis, clay shirky, facebook, here comes everybody, International Land Mine Ban, internet, Jody Williams, Kate Hanni, MoveOn, online, Philadelphia Inquirer, slacktivism, social change
Two snippets from recent interesting episodes on Charlie Rose:
1) Andrew Mason, cofounder of Groupon, was on Charlie Rose the other week. He stumbled upon Groupon while trying to launch “The Point” about social change and online collective action on the web, but users found they were being asked to do something too amorphous.
He describes the social component of Groupon (which he insists is trying to change the world by repopulating Main Street):
2) In another Charlie Rose episode, Ken Auletta, Michael Malone and David Kirkpatrick were talking about how 500 million users on Facebook is causing companies to rethink about how to reformat their products to make the experience more social and make greater use of social marketing. Michael Malone: What other product reaches 500 million people (Coca Cola, KFC?). It’s literally changing the way young people think. Goldman’s recent deal with its implicit valuation may put greater scrutiny on Facebook for being regulated. David Kirkpatrick: Facebook wants to change the world. Zuckerberg’s not in it for the money. He wants to make Facebook available to as many of the 7 billion people on the planet as possible. He wants to make everything we do more social. As Facebook is more mobile, we are bringing our friends everywhere we go. We can ask our friends (via Facebook) at the supermarket whether they like this product or that. Ken Auletta: why do I need Google if I can ask my friends on Facebook what camera to buy? Michael Malone: Linked-in [the leading competitor to Facebook] is of course the network of professional people and is feeling its way around how you go beyond just swapping business cards and actually aggregating people on projects, starting companies….Reed [Hoffman, the CEO] is moving fairly quickly to create the virtual corporation, the protean corporation where people work in the cloud and aggregate on projects. We’re seeing more local geographic-based social networks that center on restaurants, local events. There’s a website where you can leave a virtual postcard at a store for others to find out you were there.
See Charlie Rose interview on Future of Social Networking (January 7, 2011)
See Charlie Rose interview with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason (December 9, 2010)
Posted in Andrew Mason, Charlie Rose, David Kirkpatrick, facebook, groupon, Ken Auletta, linkedin, Mark Zuckerberg, marketing, Michael Malone, social, social marketing, The Point
Tagged Andrew Mason, Charlie Rose, David Kirkpatrick, facebook, groupon, Ken Auletta, linkedin, Mark Zuckerberg, marketing, Michael Malone, social, social marketing, The Point
Yahoo is trying to spark random acts of kindness around the world through the 600 million people who are part of the Yahoo “community.”
They ask people to visit kindness.yahoo.com and post online status messages describing their good deeds, inspiring others to reciprocate and amplify their actions.
They call their effort “You In?” since they encourage those doing good deeds to add this to the end of their posts. For example, “I just dropped off a coat from my closet at a homeless shelter, You In?” or “I paid the toll fee for the car behind me, You In?” The messages appear in that poster’s Yahoo! status and can be shared via social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Visitors can also see an interactive global map on the campaign’s website at kindness.yahoo.com.
Given that the effort encourages altruism, it is ironic that Yahoo! seeded the program by giving $100 to early participants.
The program builds on the “Pay It Forward” concept (serial reciprocity); and there was already an on-line version of Pay it Forward developed called The Giving Game.
Nick Christakis and James Fowler in their book Connected have an interesting experiment to test altruism and the “pay it forward” concept. But for example, in an experiment they conducted of “paying it forward”, 120 individuals who didn’t know each other were paired off for five rounds of cooperation games involving groups of 4 people each. They never encountered the same individuals. Individuals could decide how how much to share of an initial pile of money and then all groups were told what others had done, the individuals were reshuffled into new groups 4 more times and this process was repeated. They found that for every extra dollar that a person (call him/her A) gave in round one to members of A’s group (call them B), those Bs gave twenty cents more in round 2 to their new groups (we’ll call these individuals C). Then the C individuals each gave five cents more in round three. This was true even though it was not reciprocity since B’s generosity was to new strangers as was C’s, since the groups were reshuffled. Since each B individual and C joined three new individuals in the next round, there was a multiplicative impact of A’s generosity of $1.00 to generate an additional $1.05 of generosity in future rounds. Here the multiplier was restrained by the survey design that had groups of 4, but in principle it is possible that a higher multiplier might be found depending on the group size.
Notable Acts of Kindness under the Yahoo! effort:
– “I traded in a $100 bill for 100 one-dollar bills and wrote a note on each that read: ‘Please take this dollar bill, add one dollar bill, and pass it on.’”
– “I helped an 85-year-old neighbor bring her Xmas decorations down from the rafters — all 12 boxes!”
– “I helped an elderly lady carry her groceries to her car.”
– “I am baking Christmas cakes to share with friends in need of help.”
– “I dropped off supplies at the local Humane Society and at the local women’s shelter.”
Posted in altruism, connected, facebook, Giving Game, internet, james fowler, myspace, nicholas christakis, pay it forward, random acts of kindness, reciprocity, serial reciprocity, twitter, yahoo, You In?
Tagged altruism, connected, facebook, Giving Game, internet, james fowler, myspace, nicholas christakis, pay it forward, random acts of kindness, reciprocity, serial reciprocity, twitter, yahoo, You In?
As many of you know, the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team (part of the MIT Media Lab) won the race to locate the DARPA Red Weather Balloon Challenge. Their system was a reverse Ponzi scheme where those finding the balloon got $2000, and those progressively farther back the invite chain in finding those people got progressively lower payouts; the surplus got donated to charity. (Because the payoffs were cut in 1/2 with every additional degree of separation from the balloon finder, there is no way that MIT could owe more than $4000 per balloon, even if path links to MIT were very long, and MIT assumed that many of the path lengths would be short.)
MIT team members reported that they sent out 2 million SMS messages as one of their strategies but that was a complete bust as far as finding the balloons. Twitter and Facebook on the other hand were far more effective. They are going to be subsequently distilling their findings on effective viral communication and sharing it at an appropriate venue.
Their victory was a victory of human connections (“social capital“) over number crunching. A Google Team was racing them using number crunching and image recognition techniques (e.g., crawling the web in real time for images of red balloons) and had spotted 9 of the 10 balloons when the MIT Team found 10. The MIT Team noted that the balloon finders were using Google Map to determine the coordinates of their balloon sighting (to report to the MIT team) and Google could have captured that information and used it for their own proprietary team but didn’t.
See a blog post about the basic architecture of the MIT reward structure. DARPA’s network challenge obviously has implications for how to effectively and rapidly spread information in the event of an attack, although clearly the task here (spotting a red balloon) is infinitely easier than other possible challenges which are less observable to the the naked eye (infectious diseases or biological attacks) or actions who cause is less clear (a plane crashing for instance).
DARPA noted how the challenge explored “how broad-scope problems can be tackled using social networking tools. The Challenge explores basic research issues such as mobilization, collaboration, and trust in diverse social networking constructs and could serve to fuel innovation across a wide spectrum of applications.”
Posted in balloon, collaboration, DARPA, facebook, google, MIT Media Lab, MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team, red weather balloons, SMS, social networks, trust, twitter, weather balloons
Tagged balloon, collaboration, DARPA, facebook, google, MIT Media Lab, MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team, red weather balloons, SMS, social networks, trust, twitter, weather balloons
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)