Reflecting on Your Social Networks.

‪http://whataboutme.intel.com

So I found out about this new site that can search through all your posts on your social networks and tell you about yourself.

I thought it was a really interesting idea to compare what you share about yourself through various social networks versus how you view yourself.

What you can do is connect with your Facebook account, and It will give you back an analysis of what you post about (or even a lack of posting). It can sort out what percent of your social network discusses various topics such as TV and Film, Travel, Studying, Sports, Art, Food, Fashion, Technology, Music, Gaming, Science, etc. It can tell you what your most popular photos or statuses were, what time of day you tend to post, how much information you put out there (ratio of posting vs liking or favoriting that of others) and even your general mood.

I would like to learn much more about how they analyze this data because some of it doesn't sound like me. However the idea of such a disconnect existing between someone’s perception of themselves and the culmination of themselves that exists in their social networks is rather intriguing! It can tell us about which parts of ourselves we’re comfortable sharing and how we are perceived by others.

Another aspect of this website is you can link other social networks in addition to Facebook. I linked this with my twitter and YouTube accounts and it significantly influenced the results! Apparently overall I am much more interested in tech, tv and film, and music when I include twitter and YouTube, and less interested in fashion and food. It would make sense that linking my YouTube account would indicate that I like music and tv and film more than my Facebook alone because videos are not the main focus of the Facebook network, as well as the proportion of how much I post going up with twitter (where it is specifically designed for me to post frequently), and going down with YouTube (where I use it to organize my intake of online video). I think this tool can reflect both how we can express different versions of ourselves, and also how the nature of the social networking platform can influence that.

Open Discussion

Last week, I suggested to my mentoring "family" that we all go spend some quality time together tonight and go watch the Hunger Games and grab dinner beforehand. Most everyone was interested and available to attend.
Then a couple of days ago I decided it would be time to finalize details, such as when we would meet, the movie time, dinner place and time, etc. I made a public facebook event and invited people in my mentoring family. And then that's when the madness began.

The thing about making it an event on Facebook is that it allows people to comment on the event wall, which can be both good and bad. Some people posted about how excited they were (like me) and others suggested other options. Some people asked to move it to another day, some people suggested eating dinner at one place and others suggested another place. Some one wanted to catch an earlier showing and then movie hop to another movie and then some people didn't even want to watch the Hunger Games.

And then since it was a public event, friends of invitees invited themselves to the event. And then people heard there was a group of people going to see the movie tonight and then personally asked me if they could tag along/invite other people who are not a part of the mentoring group. And although the initial point of the event was to spend quality time alone with my mentoring family, how could I say no to anyone else who wanted to come to dinner and a movie? There were both suggestions and complaints and it really was impossible to please everyone.

This situation is an example of a problem I see quite often when there are opportunities for open discussion in networks. You want everyone's opinions, but they don't necessarily agree and because of that sometime's its hard to get anything done. It's frustrating, really. But then again, it proves how there needs to be one person to  put there foot down and make executive decisions and in my situation, that person is me.

Occupy and 天安门(Tian'anmen)

The Tian’anmen square protests in China in 1989 was one of the largest political protest movements in human history. After studying the scale of those protests, movements like the “Occupy Wall Street” movement seem almost like a joke. However, most people don’t know all the facts behind the Tian’anmen square protests, in high school history books it is referred to as “an event which signified that communist governments could still exist in the modern day era,” which doesn’t exactly present the full picture.

The protests started when students went to the square to memorialize the death of a popular political leader. However, they soon found themselves advocating for democratic reforms in the Chinese government. The square (which was designed to hold 1 million people) became rapidly filled with students from the surrounding area.

However, with so many protesters, the movement began to factionalize; some groups thought that they should be willing to concede some points to the government to get other, while some groups thought that the government should give in to all of their demands. As the months went by, the protesters became frustrated, and many of them left the square to return to classes.  However, the square was still full of new people who came to Beijing from the surrounding areas. These people were excited to continue the protest.

Gradually, the leaders of the movement began to realize that they were losing their government supporters (at the time, the government was composed of both reformers and conservative members. The reformers had the most sway at the time of the protests.) Because the students were unable to come to a consensus among themselves, they had difficulty presenting a unified position to the government. Therefore, they began to start up a vote to leave the square, as they did not feel that remaining in the square was the best direction for the movement.

However, their democratic ways backfired. Every day they brought up the vote to leave the square; and every day the vote was nearly unanimous: the protesters would stay.

The problem lay in the fact that the protesters who felt the best option was to leave the square simply left the square. Therefore, whenever there was a vote on the issue, the only protesters voting were those who actively felt remaining in the square was the best decision. Even though all the leaders agreed that leaving the square was the best route, because of the nature of extremist formation, they were unable to make the correct decision.

And what of the Occupy Movement? Well, the American Government isn’t going to be sending in troops to stop them, but then again, the occupy movement doesn’t have 300,000 people protesting in one mass. Modern protest movements aren’t won by numbers, but by mobility. Using communication technologies to create an impossible to hit target has enabled the Occupy movement to become far more dynamic. Perhaps it’s better off, then, that protests are ruled by ideas rather than places. Occupy will no longer hold a physical place, but will certainly Occupy the idea of protest movements in the 21^st century.

The International Village Bubble

After taking the tour around campus on Monday, I started to think about which places at Northeastern that I visit to build my social capital.  While this changes year to year, depending on my schedule and where I live, freshman year specifically I would have to say that International Village was the place that shaped my social connections.  I lived in the north tower of IV which was also home to every single freshman in the honors program. 

Being in this situation had both its upsides and downsides.  On the positive side, the people who I lived near were the people I had classes with and the people who ate dinner in the same dining hall.  There was never a night that you could walk into the IV dining hall without seeing at least one face that you recognized.  This was great because it was a way to make connections with individuals that you shared a lot in common with.  At Northeastern, a school of over 16,000 undergraduates, it is not possible for you to know everyone and you are not very likely to make connections with a random person on the street.  In IV, there was a smaller pool of people and a greater likelihood that you knew someone.  This led to the possibility of ties to form between people living in the building because you are more likely to make an effort to forge a friendship with someone that you see on a regular basis.  In a way, IV is its own little world.  You don’t even have to leave the building if you want to eat, workout, or study.  This increases the likelihood that you see people, say hi, and increase your social capital.

There were a few downsides to living in IV as well.  Being on the other side of Ruggles, it was rare that other freshman would venture to that part of the campus unless they were feeling adventurous or it was absolutely necessary.  This made it difficult to make friends outside of the honors program unless you went specifically out of your way to do so.  At the time, I did not realize how many people in my major I did not know, but leaving IV and the all-honors classes has helped me to expand my social network.  It is important to not overwhelm freshman when they are entering college and give them a chance to befriend people on a smaller scale, but it is also beneficial for freshman to be exposed to other parts of campus.

Reunited via MySpace

When I was in the second grade, my distant relatives moved to the United States from China; this included my father’s cousin’s son and his wife and daughter, who was just about my age. My family had sponsored them to come over and they lived in my city of Fall River, MA for about a year or so until they decided to move to Dallas, Texas to live closer with the mother’s side of the family.

As time passed, we lost touch with them with the exception of the occasional phone call between the mother and my grandmother from my mother’s side. Despite the fact that these two were not blood related, they had gotten really close while she was still living in Fall River.

As I grew older, I became involved with social networking and began using sites. After being active on MySpace for a while, I started to search for old friends, including those from elementary school and this girl relative of mine who I mentioned earlier – I’ll call her my cousin to make things easier. I knew her name and I knew she was in Texas somewhere, so I looked for her. Her name is pretty unique so I did not have much trouble finding her.

So then I friend requested her and asked her if she remembered me, which luckily, she did. From there, we exchanged numbers, began texting frequently and I even started talking to her mother, who was glad to see that we were reconnecting, seeing as we were very good friends during the time they lived in MA.

From there, her mother suggested my cousin come up for a visit, and almost 2 weeks later she spent a week of summer here. While here, we found out she was not doing too well in school and so my father suggested she move in with us and go to school with us, since my brothers and I were all doing well in school. And so she did. My parents legally adopted her and she spent all of her years of high school here and then finally went back to Texas this past year for her freshmen year in college.

If we did not have this technology and social networking sites, I do not think there was any way she would have had the opportunity to get through high school here or even get into college. Nowadays, we still talk, although not as much. Occasionally we do chat over Facebook - yet another example of the usefulness of social networking sites J

Individualism As Seen by a Saudi

While in Saudi Arabia, I had the opportunity to speak with students similar in age to myself who were attending Saudi Universities. We talked a lot about stereotypes and misperceptions on both sides of the Ocean. The Americans like myself had thought that society would be much more repressed, that Facebook would be blocked by the government, or that women would be confined to the home and not out in society working and studying and doing all of the things that we associate with a “free” Democratic society. The Saudis whole-heartedly laughed at our misperceptions of their lives, thinking many of our notions ridiculous. And then the Saudi girls told us what they thought of Americans, and it didn’t seem anymore like we were at all dissimilar. But what I did discover about the export of American society is that things that seem mundane but fantastical can be seen by other cultures like a part of our daily lives. For example, national dialogue in the United States on the influence that violent movies, television, and video games has on children has taken subject matter that has become commonplace and elevates it in the common ideological landscape. One Saudi girl very seriously looked at me and asked, “Is it true that your society is very individualistic and that you don’t talk to your family like in the movies?” To a Saudi, who live at home throughout higher education until they marry and move out, dormitories are a thing of movie stars. Family is the core of Saudi society, and family is how culture is mobilized. The ruling family is just that; family. Political influence is a family discussion first.

Putnam’s Bowling Alone highlights a perceived decline in social capital formed through secondary associations to which individuals belong which aggregate social capital for the collective benefit. After discussions with Saudis whose only introduction to the American way of life is through our films and television, it is clear from the outsider’s perspective why this has happened. The decline in family values and a rise in individualism as distinct from most other societies, for better or for worse, has declined individual membership and affiliations. It is easier for the new generation to belong virtually to many groups while not investing a full social premium in the face-to-face friendships that arise from sustained group contact. The movies reflect our reality. So while most of us laughed at this proposition of the individuality of Americans, saying we were strongly connected to our families, our perceptions are relative.

Education Homophily

Since coming to college, I have found it harder and harder to stay close with some of my friends from home, especially those who decided not to go to college. Many of those people have gone through teenage pregnancy and are currently young parents. There are fewer things to talk about with them, other than the usual small talk: what has been happening to the city since my last visit home and reminiscing about the old days in high school and even before. Sometimes when I am home and yearn for an intellectual conversation, it can be hard to find someone to have one with. The kinds of friendships I have formed in college are different from those from home. At Northeastern, I feel that my conversations with my college friends have much more depth in them. I also think that because of this, I sometimes enjoy/value my college friendships more than I do my friendships from home. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing, but I do fear that as my education continues to grow, this separation between my friendships at home and college will only become greater. Another thing is that I do try to form a bridge between these two different groups of friends, but seeing as it is hard enough for me to reconnect with friends from home, it is even harder for the two groups to even form an initial connection. A driving force for this education homophily is that I value education very, very much. Therefore, I cannot stand when others do not value their education. In fact, this is one of the reasons my most recent ex-boyfriend and I could not see eye to eye on certain things.

Focus Constraints

Scott Feld explains the importance of foci in network structure in "The Focused Organization of Social Ties." He explain that ties are not entirely dependent on the existence of a common focus, but that these foci can definitely affect the way we from ties, and the conditions of these foci affect the degree to which we form these ties.
People who are in constant contact and interaction with each other have a particular foci, proximity. This may be a physical proximity, like being neighbors, or a genetic proximity, like being related. My dad, for example, has a few ties that are dependent on the proximity focus. One is our neighbor Dave. He is quite a bit younger and different from my dad, but they have become good friends and depend on each other in many situations because they live across the street from each other. Also, my dad has a strong tie to his cousin Johnny. Johnny always calls him and always needs money, and that annoys my dad. But the genetic tie exists, so my dad always does what he can to help Johnny out.
Another key point made by Feld is that the severity of certain constraints cause pressures to form ties by creating various foci. One common example of this could be kids at a one or two-week summer camp. These kids only have a few weeks to be in contact with the people around them, and therefore actively search for certain common interests to come out of the experience with a friend, whether or not they will continue to see them afterwards. I can remember going to a one-week science-related camp over the summer during middle school at UMass Lowell. I did not know anybody there, and two other kids and I would always play with games like Jenga and others while on our lunch break. I ended up hanging around these kids for the rest of the camp because we found a game to bond over.

So Much Copy Paste...(My Life In Data Collection {Or, how I stopped worrying and learned to love the alt-tab})

I've never been one to like to write long, analytical papers about OTHER papers that I've read, as I tend to go to one page and say "Yeah, I've pretty much written down all the key points." Therefore, for my papers for this class, I'm experiencing the wonders of data collection and analysis.

For my first paper, I wrote about connections between various members of the furry fandom by analyzing their posts on the furry news site flayrah.com. I managed to get to around 360 posts before I just couldn't take it any more. The Alt-Tabbing was simply frying my brain, as the only way to record information was to copy information into Excel.

Unfortunately, as I started my project in gephi, I started to realize what a paltry number 360 was. I could clearly tell where my data was weak, as I began to see some trends which I felt didn't exactly do much to explain the overall character of the network. Rather, because I only used 4 articles, one was particularly harmful to one members' relationships, and the other articles didn't manage to balance it out enough.

For my more recent project, I'm creating a map of the My Little Pony Music Fandom (as artists in this particular music fandom tend to cite each other very frequently through remixes and the like) and have already mapped out over 600 nodes and around 1000 edges. While that seems like a lot, I still realize that I have a long way to go.

It's incredibly hard to tell how much data you need to create an accurate picture until after you've created your network in gephi and you can visualize where the project is going. With over 4000 songs created in 2011 alone, I realize I'm going to have to make a cut-off point somewhere. But how do I determine the line where it's important to collect data and where it is not too important? While you can't have too much data, I realize that I have other homework that I need to do, so I can't simply spend ALL my time doing this. I will need to find shortcuts if I hope to complete this project in a reasonable period of time.

(On that note, does anyone know if any tools that harvest youtube data? I have all of the links to the pages in my excel, but I need to collect "views" "comments" and "likes". If there's some faster way to do this than me being alt-tab poisoned, I will be eternally grateful.)

Small World

  It really is a small world. Three examples immediately come to my mind when I think of a small world, and two of them are tied in with Facebook.

            The most recent example is another experience of mine tied in with my a cappella group. We were asked to sing at a benefit show for awareness of domestic violence and were asked to sing “a contemporary R&B song with a positive female message.” We did not have a song that fit this mold already, and did not have time to arrange one, so we bought an arrangement online from a girl that none of us new. Our president found her on a website. The arrangement was of “Just the Way You Are” by Bruno Mars. When we went to learn the song, we discovered that the arrangement was, well, terrible.  It did not sound good, or even remotely like the original song. In our frustration, one of our members decided to look this girl up on Facebook. He found that he had one mutual friend with her, and that mutual friend was the girl he was dating.

            My second small world example happened last semester. I was procrastinating on Facebook and suddenly the words “is now friends with Tyler Seguin” showed up on my minifeed. I am a huge Bruins fan, so I immediately needed to check this out. Sure enough it was him, and he had four mutual friends. Two of them I was not very surprised to find out about; one girl is the daughter of one of the Bruins assistant coaches and went to my high school, another was a girl from my high school rumored to have been asked by Seguin for her number. The third I could see a connection to as well, as a girl who graduated from my high school a few years before me was a Celtics cheerleader. The fourth however, I can see no connection other than that she is a hockey player. Still, I find it pretty cool to be only two degrees from Tyler Seguin in a few different ways.

            The last example involves a history teacher of mine. I went to high school in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. My dad used to be the hockey coach at Salem High School in Salem before I was born. My freshman year history teacher, who was from Iowa, is married to one of my dad’s former goalies.

The Rich Getting Richer

  In spirit with the rich get richer model, I was reminded of a friend of mine that used to be in my a cappella group. My friend Don was in the group until this semester, as he could no longer attend the University for financial reasons.

            The very first night of my freshman year, I was wandering around with a group of people that had formed in the common room on my floor. I uncomfortably followed my suitemates around in the group, as I felt really out of place in my new environment and am shy. Later in the night, a few of us in the group were heading back to our rooms and heard music coming from an open door. People were flooding from this room, there were probably at least fifty people squeezed in there, watching the boy play his guitar and sing.

            That was the first time I saw Don. I actually met him a few nights later when we both played at an Open Mic night in afterHours. As I was there with one other kid, Don had several people there with him.

            A week or so later, we both auditioned for the UniSons all-guys a cappella group and we both got in. After this point I really started to notice that Don just seemed to know EVERYBODY. Whenever we’d walk back through Ruggles to International Village from rehearsal, it seemed that every twenty feet or so he’d stop to say hi to someone he knew. Some people I recognized, most I had never seen before. These people were of all different looks, backgrounds, interest groups.

I would go to the dining hall with Don, find a seat and be halfway done with my meal before he cam e to sit, distracted by all the people he would see.

            If you met someone, they would already know him. If you met someone who didn’t, they soon would.

            If we had a party after a show with a group from another school, I would look up somebody I met there on Facebook as soon as I got back to my room and Don was already listed as a mutual friend with just about everyone at the show and the party.

            Don was just so charismatic that he had to make friends with everyone he met, and he had to meet a large number of the people he encountered. He knew a crazy amount of people, and it seemed that that list would always be continuously growing.

Oprah, and Ryan Seacrest, and George Clooney...Oh my!

When we were discussing the small world phenomenon in class, all I could think about was how I had no way to get myself to anyone famous through my network. Most people have met someone famous or at least know someone who knows someone famous, but I have could not find anyone in my network that got me to a celebrity. I didn’t even think that the six degrees of separation applied to me when it came to connecting to a famous person, but over the course of the last week, I found out that I am more closely connected to a few celebrities than I thought.

My mom’s best friend from childhood was in town this past weekend, so the three of us went out to lunch. I have known this woman my entire life, but never really knew what she did; all I ever knew was that she travelled a lot. Turns out, she is an event planner at Microsoft Inc. and is in charge of setting up interview panels with influential people in society. Right now, she is in contact with Oprah Winfrey, Ryan Seacrest, and Warren Buffet trying to get one of them to agree to an interview. So all this time, I have been three hops away from who knows how many celebrities and never knew it. Also, my mom just found out that one of her friends from work lives with a pilot who has flown the private jet of George Clooney on multiple occasions.

So while I would never actively utilize these connections, it is kind of cool to see just how connected everyone is, even if we don’t recognize it. I was so focused on looking at my strong ties to search for a path to a celebrity that I forgot about one of the most important aspects of social networks: the strength of weak ties. 

Greedy Vs Altruistic Behaviour in Ultimatum Games

In the most recent reading we were assigned, more specifically “Who Killed Homo Economicus?” in Chapter 7, there was discussion of ultimatum games and the type of people who play them. There are the greedy people, and altruistic people, and it discussed how they would react to one another if faced with multiple interactions or even generations with one another. Then he discussed how humans generally react with these ultimatum games, the illogical decision (or the non evolutionary beneficial option) of not taking all that we can take, and giving some of the money away to a person we’ve never met. This is generally believed to occur because humans have a concept of fairness and what some interpret as an evolutionary evolved predisposition to not be greedy so as to possibly allow reciprocity on the kindness offered for their future benefit.

Either way, I learned about a version of this model where there is a small spectrum of people who interact with each other: Very Greedy, Moderately Greedy, Fair, Moderately Altruistic, and Very Altruistic. Here are the diagrams that came with it. The colours are Black, red, blue, yellow, and white, representing people ranging from black being Very Greedy and white being Very Altruistic (the person who organized this might have been subconsciously racist).

The first image shows how each person is a colour coded pixel and what happens is they each interact with each of their neighbors in an ultimatum game. There will be winners and losers, and each pixel will observe and change their strategy to the strategy that did the best around them (could remain the same if they did well too) for the next generation, the next picture. This shows how people interact with their neighbors and learn behaviour through their social networks. It doesn’t have to be literal neighbors, but nodes and edges in a very uniform network for example. A side note: it reminds me of that model of clusters of happy vs depressed people in chapter 2, how there are clusters of happy, neutral and depressed people all around each other and how we can learn or contract their emotional state

Anyway, this model continues for many generations, and what happens is Greedy wins over the first generation, but then pockets of other milder strategies, with a tendency towards greedy (altruistic is basically gone) and eventually larger and larger groups of fair crop up and take over. I thought it was a really interesting mathematical model, and this is all I have of it but I’m interested to see where it will go past this, such as different variations or starting points. What I do know is that these patters will generally follow this flow chart until they hit the equilibriums of either all fair at the top or half greedy and half altruistic.

An interesting interaction I had recently … with Gephi.

I was working on our most recent visualization project a while ago and had some issues. Gephi is a really powerful program and I think it’s really interesting with the potential to do so much, but we all know it isn’t glitch free. After the overview tab appeared in the preview tab within the overview tab, and after zooming out too far meant that I could not zoom back in or save my work, after the files I’d exported continually caused the entire Finder application to ‘unexpectedly quit’, and the spinning rainbow processing cursor soon became more familiar to me than the arrow, the final frustrated force quit of so many, I let out a frustrated tweet suggesting that Gephi was less than optimal, questioning it’s sobriety.

A few hours later, I received this at reply:

Gephi Graph Viz (@Gephi)

@(mytwitterusername) please share your experience on forum.gephi.org to help you identify what’s going wrong.

I woke up to see this after I eventually finished my project, sent it in and went to sleep. At first I was quite startled, because I didn’t know Gephi had a twitter account and I had not used it’s username in my tweet.

But thinking about it now it’s rather fantastic and I should have seen it coming. Of COURSE a program about social networks is officially represented on one of the most popular social networking platforms. Of COURSE they would track the use of their name and why WOULDN’T they direct frustrated users to a forum of crowd sourced information on issues and their resolution? Gephi’s all about social networks.

It sort of shocked me (well, firstly because I had just woken up and this inanimate program that had caused me certain amounts of frustration was replying (politely) to my tweets, but secondly) because I never realised such organizations could so easily reach out to you and reply to your issues personally and successfully. The only real experience I’ve had with troubleshooting with most programs is looking for online tutorials and other peoples’ posts online. (Usually in forums. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why it didn’t occur to me to try that when I had problems. I don’t get a lot of sleep.) But now I think this is great. I feel like it connects me with the people behind the product a bit more, or at least to people who share my issues and can help me. If I’d seen this tweet before I’d finished the project it would have been helpful and a fitting way finding the solution to my network issues through social networking. I mostly follow actual people on twitter, and a few automated ones with either news headlines or related to blogs I also follow, so I guess I’m a bit behind because I know a lot of other organizations have specialised twitters but I never saw the point. Now I see some of the positive effects they can have and how public contact information can enable positive changes. (if they don’t spam you with @replies and promotions.)

Convenient friendships

I have really enjoyed reading the chapters from Christakis and Fowler because I feel they are easy to relate to. In the last reading “It’s in our nature” Christakis and Fowler discussed why humans form relationships. They explained that it was a normal part of life for people to form connections. That people tend to form friendships with people that will benefit them. It also explained that people who connections and relationships have to fend for themselves. They have no one to reciprocate favors for or anyone to help them out. Forming relationships is an important part of life.

I found this particularly important when coming to college. When I first moved into college I immediately made friends with my roommates. This was great for me to have people to relate to and people to hang out with and go to things with. I always had people to go to the dining hall with and I never had to feel alone. I think the beginning of school, or just school in general would be miserable if people don’t make friends.

Once classes started I was mostly around people in my major. Unfortunately, none of my roommates or any of the friends I had made were in my major. At the beginning of school I had no one to go to classes with, no one to sit with in class and no one to help me if I had any questions about any of my classes or homework. I didn’t like this.

I noticed that as time went on I started to become friends with many people in my major because I was around them all day. Forming relationships with these people became convenient for me. Now I have made a group of friends that are in all of my classes. It is nice to have people to walk to my classes with and sit with in class. I can relate to these people a lot because we have all the same work to do. What is most helpful is that we can all talk about our classes and study together. Having people to study with is great because we can all help each other if someone doesn’t understand something. These friendships I have made prove that people create relationships with people that can benefit them. In this group of friends we are all able to benefit each other.

Crowdsourcing: Making Sure It's Here to Stay

Thanks to the advent of social networking, sources of information are no longer limited to professionals (i.e. scholars, authors, journalists.) Rather, a common person with internet access is capable to contributing their insight or personal expertise to the vast array of information available. Because of this, it is now possible to present problems, questions, or requests to internet users to gain information in a practice known as “crowdsourcing.” I did some reading (articles posted below) and found a couple of reasons as to why crowdsourcing is beneficial and also how we as internet users can help to propagate its existence.

The benefits of crowdsourcing are available to both internet users who post the information and those who make use of it. In the sense of the common internet user, crowdsourcing offers opportunities to increase one’s social capital by connecting them more easily to others who may be in need of their knowledge and/or skill set. In the sense of those looking for information, crowdsourcing can make the search process considerably quicker and cheaper, and in some cases yields more accurate results. For example, it was found that overall, conclusions that are made by a group of average people are generally more accurate than those made by a few experts in that field.

All of this being said, it is easy to see why crowdsourcing is a practice that we want to maintain. In a study conducted with Youtube channels, it was demonstrated that the makers of videos that received more views had a far greater chance of continuing to produce content than those whose videos had received fewer or decreasing views. This makes the method for preserving crowdsourcing a simple one: participation. Participating in crowdsourcing, whether by putting your knowledge or content out there or by absorbing that of others, is the only way to keep it going. Whether this means reading a blog post, watching a Youtube video, or upvoting a meme on Reddit, the goal is to make sure that adequate attention is being given to those whose internet activity makes them a potential valuable contributor to crowdsourcing.

Sources:

http://newtechpost.com/2010/10/12/will-social-media-enable-humanitys-next-evolutionary-step

http://newtechpost.com/node/192

"The (Rather Unusual) Rich Get Richer Effect" of #TwitterHashtags

Twitter hash tags are a perfect example of "The Rich Get Richer Effect." Certain hash tags start trending, and then Twitter users see these hash tags and will often tweet about them (including the hash tag in their tweets), which causes the hash tags to continue trending. However, this process becomes unusual when you consider that a hash tag can be trending while not being particularly popular among Twitter users. 


One thing I often see is, on those rare occasions when a controversial or offensive hash tag begins trending, the hash tag continues to trend due to people's negative responses to it. By clicking on the hash tag one will find that many of the tweets pertaining to it criticize or express outrage over its sentiment. So although the hash tag is "trending," it is not doing so because it is popular, but rather because angry comments about the hash tag prolong the hash tag's trending which induces more comments...etc., etc. Though I haven’t had much luck in verifying this, I have heard that Twitter has a method of countering this effect and thus preventing these sorts of hash tags from trending.

Another example of this occurs when the plans of hash tag sponsors go awry. Some Twitter hash tags are often displayed as "trending" because a company has paid to spread that hash tagged phrase around Twitter as an advertising strategy. However, as McDonald's found out the hard way through their "#McDStrories" campaign, any press is not necessarily good press. Rather than praising McDonald's in their "#McDStories," Twitter users posted bad reviews and terrible experiences, adhered the hash tag to their comments. Once again, although it would appear that the hash tag was trending because of a positive reason (as McDonald's had intended it to occur), this was indeed not the case. Thus, the rich who get richer may, in the end, be worse off for it. 

My Experiences with Norms and Social Capital. (Or lack thereof.)

I’ve never lived in one house for longer than 6 years. I’ve moved around the US when younger, and the UK when older. I attended a very small international school with loads of kids moving in and out of it, usually only staying for 2-3 years at a time. So, my house changed, my surroundings changed, my friends changed, my school changed, people changed; norms were all up in the air. Because I lead this uncommon transitory life, most of the people I interacted with outside of school or family had different norms when it came to how they were living in one place with people they’d known for ages. 

I guess I’m trying to comment on the idea of shifting between norms frequently and how that affects a person in terms of their personal norms. For me, I feel I have a deeper appreciation for what many more stationary people have. The word ‘home’ has a meaning. They’ve known people for long stretches of time and can observe how they change and evolve, and more importantly, they can develop a trusting relationship with many people. Basically, the only real investment in social capital I have is with the people who have travelled with me, my parents, or people who have managed to keep in touch along the way. 

The name people in similar or more extreme situations compared to mine are called Third Culture Kids. The idea is that you are born in one country (1^st culture), you live/grow up in another (2^nd culture) and you live your life as an amalgamation of the two. More like in the middle of a venn diagram.  

But the idea I was headed towards was that for highly transitory people like third culture kids, we have many weak ties, which we have clearly found there to be strength in, but we have very small amounts of social capital in any one place. Additionally, the sense of 'norms' can range quite drastically. From the International School I grew up in, I know some people who will travel all over and act the exact same way in the many years I’ve kept in touch with them, and others who you can observe which parts they’ve picked up from which places, and others who will drastically change over a short period of time. So, really the idea of norms is extremely relative.

What is social media used for?

While avoiding doing all of my work before spring break, I stumbled across the following diagram which describes how different people use social media.

Looking at the picture, you can see that the types of behavior are broken up into different categories.  The section with the highest percentages of social media use is Friends/Family.  Considering Facebook in particular, most people “friend” others because they are family, know them personally now, or used to know them.  Social media tools like this help people keep their network ties strong even when there is distance between them.

Another reason people use social media is for entertainment purposes.  While this does not exclusively apply to expanding your network, things like games and blogs can possibly forge connections between certain people.  Individuals with certain interests can meet others with the same interests and develop a personal tie that way.

Social media can also be a great outlet for products and services.  As we discussed in class, it can often take multiple exposures to a fact or piece of information for a person to actually believe it, and social media gives companies a way to put their product on the market.  Reviews from different consumers, either positive or negative, can determine whether or not a person will buy something.  Without social media, there would be less of an opportunity to be exposed to that feedback.  Unfortunately sometimes companies take advantage of this and create fake entries of positive feedback, but overall this can be very beneficial to consumers.

The final category for social media use is in finding jobs and expanding your professional network.  Sites like Linked-In are places where job opportunities and business contacts can be found which can be very beneficial if you are looking for a specific type of work in a certain area.

This diagram also helps us distinguish between the social media uses of men and women.  The percentages in purple are the ones that are comprised of mostly women and the ones in blue are mostly men.  With that in mind, we can tell that it is more common for women to use social media as a creative outlet, to give positive feedback, and to receive coupons.  On the opposite side, men use social media more than women when they are looking for jobs or business contacts as well as potential dating partners.

Looking at the percentages, it is more clear how people use social media and this information can be used to understand how people form relationships and friendship ties.

The Social Safety Network

Christakis and Fowler discuss natural selection, and the ways in which it encouraged us to help each other out as a means of helping ourselves survive. This has great relevance for current politics, and even political movements of the past few centuries. Government is a construction made to protect ourselves from ourselves, in the words of Hobbs. It is thought to be a uniquely human construction, derived from our superior standpoint as the species with the most highly developed mental capacity.

Do Christakis and Fowler suggest that socialism, and at an even more base level all government, is not only altruistic, but is a result of evolutionary processes? Are our social networks a key reason why our species survived and thrived?

In the book, Christakis and Fowler outline the use of social networks as crucial to human survival, similarly to the way that apes use social networks. The saying “two heads are better than one” seems to hold true here; a single individual would not be able construct their own residence, grow all of their own food, etc. Society is built around the group or community because it is endlessly more efficient to collectively produce all of the things that humans need based on specialization of each individual. Social constructs are the way in which our world operates. It takes social networks to have an operating economy and marketplace for goods. Social networks are the method by which information is dispersed still to this day. We need these networks to organize and operate our lives, which is why it makes sense that we evolved to favor them.

In this way, our habit of protecting the weak, the sick, the elderly, and the young seems to come from our evolution. In the United States our welfare system, the social safety net that prevents a family or individual from falling through the cracks, can also be seen as network. Networks keep us alive, healthy, and productive.