It Depends.

I’ve always liked either/or questions.  My sister and I, whenever we had to ride in the car for days (the mainland never seems quite so big as when you’re driving, in our case, from Michigan to Arizona), would play Death Is Not An Option, only our situations were always pleasant.  The older we got, the more the conversation changed.  Classic example: Tom Cruise vs. Brad Pitt.  There would be actual debate (Cruise looses points for aliens, Pitt for Meet Joe Black), clarification (were we drinking tea or performing espionage?), and then the eventual conclusion.  But, like I said, we got older and the rules changed.  For one, I don’t even like tea.  Anyway, the answer, is, of course, Johnny Depp.  If you were wondering.

So we come to the question of social tagging vs. professional cataloging and classification.  (in this instance, I feel Pitt is social tagging)  Thing is, they both have very strong points and very serious drawbacks.  So we change the rules a little, we combine the two.

There are several key differences between the systems:

• Rules for social tagging are much looser than for subject headings.  You can add as many tags as you want, but subject headings are more specific.  This is a plus for social tagging because you stand a better chance of finding the resource if there are multiple entry points.  However, this kind of thinking often leads one in circles, and it is part of what subject headings can help avoid.  With tagging, there are no ‘broader terms,’ or ‘narrower terms,’ just more options in general.   The long-term effect of repeated social tagging for specific resources would be that the useful tags would float to the top, and the pointless ones would die off–Darwinism.  Subject headings don’t have that luxury.  People living in Hawaii are going to be classed as aliens until someone in charge realizes it’s part of the United States and changes the book.
• The tag is determined by the user. This allows for greater flexibility in regards to the diversity of users.  Dewy Decimal classification, for example, is ridiculously skewed toward white Americans.  If you’re, for example, not a white dude from Minnesota, it’s probably more difficult to follow the chain of thought that puts Hawaiians and Martians in the same category. (admittedly, I’m a white chick from Michigan, and I still find the logic awfully fuzzy.)  So a huge bonus that makes social tagging so accessible is that you can use slang or local terminology (seriously, all examples of Brit Speak as compared to the American Bastardization Of are completely fleeing my brain, but you know what I’m talking about.) to look up your materials.  Subject Headings do help, though, to make sure there are specific places to look for specific materials.  I do find it interesting that at some point, there become accepted slang terms for social bookmarking, the collective edits itself.  The adaptability of the structure is helpful, but would be aided significantly if paired with a stricter framework.
• Tags can be easier to remember.  searching for ‘purple people eaters’ is easier than remembering you have to look for ‘magical creatures, care of’ and then continue on, because you just look up exactly what you need. (and oh my god, has there ever been a more disturbing mental image to drive home the importance of grammar: are the people being eaten purple,  or are the people eaters themselves purple?  never thought about it until I just typed it. ick.)  Being able to remember what you’re looking for when going back is fairly crucial on large projects.  However, again the structure of subject headings proves its worth by making the exact same path to a source available to all users.  It is frequently not just one person who wants to know about local recipes.  Using subject headings, you’d look through Cooking to find a recipe for Loco Moco.  In my tag list it would be under Culinary Experiments Gone Seriously Awry.  In Jenna’s it’d be under Gastrointestinal Bliss.  You can see how I’d miss that if I were only using her tags.  So while I might have a fondness for my easily remembered tag, it would prove useless to a different user.  And while we do want to allow access to resources to be personalized, only using social tags would be far too personal.

There really are a great many benefits to each system, but I think the best option is the third: combine the two.  Live Journal, for example,  now allows you to tag your blog entries, however you want.  But the most useful tags, the ones used in moderated communities where more than one person uses them, are the ones selected from a list.  I think if there were an easy way of users choosing tags, instead of just inventing them, social tagging could really revolutionize catalogs.  As it stands, subject headings rely completly on the assessment done by only a few individuals.  If users as well as catalogers were allowed access to tagging utilities, the results could be remarkable.

Trust is not a four letter word

First of all: Threaded Comments For The Win!  All I’ve got to do is figure out how to turn it on.

Anyway, to the assignment.

I found the bridging vs. bonding concept to be the most intriguing as well as providing an interesting framework for levels of trust, and settled in to find communities that exhibited both kinds of interaction.  I decided to join Listal and del.icio.us.  Listal is a community where you list and rank everything you’ve read, listened to, watched, or played, and can connect with people with similar interests.  At first I assumed this would be a blatant bridging type of community.  However, closer inspection of the forums frequented by the users illustrated that frequently, deeper friendships were forged through the use of the community.  For example, one young man started a thread about writing, inviting others to share what they’d written themselves.  As the discussion progressed, first between only the OP and the first respondent, their language became more relaxed, they joked around and encouraged each other with their writing.  And then the conversation that started with the Question Person and the Answer Person started to bring in other people as well, filling out the conversation a bit more.

an exchange on the Writing board at Listal

Although it’s a limited example, this type of back and forth support and encouragement is the kind of behavior I associate with bonding rather than bridging.

del.icio.us, on the other hand, really is a bridging SNS.  It’s social bookmarking, sharing links to interesting things with other people.  I hoped to find some good typography sites, and was inundated with loads of links from various users.

a fraction of the sites tagged as 'typography'

I came to recognize my taste ran parallel to some particular users, and discovered they had other interesting links as well. For example, I followed a user who had bookmarked I Love Typography, clicked on the ‘inspiration’ tag, and found a link to a really interesting architect’s site.

it's industrial and modern! what's not to love? ok, don't answer that, just appreciate that I appreciate it.

For me, that’s the kind of interaction that indicates bridging behavior.

I like the system of trust built into del.icio.us better than that of Listal because, quite frankly, it’s easier to ignore a link to something you don’t agree with or find interesting than it is to ignore an entire review you don’t agree with.  The simple fact that there is more commentary in Listal makes the trust perhaps more broad, but also more difficult to earn.  Also, due to the nature of listing everything you’ve consumed, there is much more inherent negativity in Listal compared to the all-recommendations nature of del.icio.us.

The complicated part of this session’s work was the final project aspect.  The way I view social networking sites has been very definitely altered, in a good way, for sure, but it makes me want to pause and re-evaluate some things I thought I had a handle on.  It’s not a particular secret that I enjoy television shows, and I think I’d like to focus my research on online communities that form around them.  Specifically, what kinds of connections do people make within the communities? are they weak or strong ties?  Do they extend beyond the original purpose of the community, that is, to share information about a tv show?

I’m particularly interested in how the new groups form and create social roles within themselves over time.  How do the social norms form within new communities?  Gleave’s paper was particularly interesting to me.  I’d like to follow the formation of a new online community and work out how the social roles get filled.  The mid-season replacement shows just started, so there should be some new communities cropping up.  Dollhouse, for example, just started airing a couple weeks ago, and Joss Whedon fans aren’t really known for their silence, so that may be a good place to look.  Gleave did an excellent job deconstructing Wikipedia, but content for fan communities is generated in different ways, and I’d like to look into that more.  If new communities are to succeed, how do maintainers generate enough initial content to keep the comm going?  Does the bulk of the content fall to one person, or does the responsibility eventually get split up? How does that happen?

I’m eager to read other people’s thoughts on their projects and look forward to refining my own, so questions and comments are definately appreciated.

session 3

I tried to find a balance between hammering home points I’m sure everybody else has made on the same readings (second entry), and glossing too broadly over (my first entry).  The readings did a lot to clarify in my mind the central question of “why?” in my head, which was nice.  I mean, I know why I participate in online comms, but I also know I’m not Joe Standard, either.  As my sister would point out on occasion, I’m skewing the data (which, yes, unfortunate, but fun to say: “skew”).  So I tried to take myself out of the equation this time as I read, and to be a little more objective.

——–

Hang out online:
It’s interesting to see the data on why people join online communities.  Like the researchers said, it would take more time to survey a broader spectrum of communities, but it’d be interesting to see if the results in the future follow these.  I expect they would, honestly.

social psych:
This kind of research always piques my interest because I like knowing why people behave the way they do.  I couldn’t help but wonder, though, because I’d just finished reading the previous paper, if why the people had joined in the first place had any impact on their participation or on how the emails they recieved affected them.  I would think that someone who joined to make friends would be more likely to be swayed by the implication that more activity would help other people rather than the implication that more ratings would help specifficaly him.  It would be interesting to see this kind of research conducted in a community based on Health or Professional topics.

Schrock:
There were a couple of colclusions Schrock made that I found interesting, namely that with more multi-media content, extroverts are becoming more interested in contributing to SNSs, and that men and women use SNSs differently, but for about as long during the day.  I was also interested in the conclusions he drew about trans-media experiences.  Not to mention that it was great fun to hear “A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila” used in all seriousness.  I’m curious about the success of trans-media works.  How do the developers guage success?  Like Schrock said, the ratings for Quarterlife and Tequila were comperable, but for MTV that means a hit, and for NBC a massive bomb.  I haven’t watched much made-for-web content, really, a few webisodes of Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Horrible (he has a Ph.D…in horribleness.) are pretty much the extent of it, and honestly, I didn’t see much of a difference between the content and the conventions used to make them and what I see on TV.  It makes me wonder if as this type of thing evolves if web-based shows will develop their own conventions.  Maybe trying to shove a show based on something online into our living rooms just won’t work because the environments are too different.

contributing:
I’ll admit, I feel a little bit like the rat in a cage with the pain, food, or pleasure buttons in front of her.  It’s a little disconcerting to have people study ways to manipulate my involvment online.  It’s not a new idea, but it’s still a little disturbing.  I think the most reailistic ways companies will choose to reward users would be intrinsic ones.  They don’t cost additional money.  At least not outright.  There might be additional costs required to get the design of the program right, but not like paying money for a t-shirt or gift certificate.  I’ve never been a particularly big participater in the corporately funded OC, but I’ve noticed an increasingly large push on network tv to get watchers to go to a show’s website, and I’ll admit it’s sort of worked for a couple of shows.  But when it did work?  It was interest in additional content-deleted scenes, outtakes, behind the scenes interviews and things, that led me there.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t really consider watching the psych-outs online as actual community involvement.  The only forum I actually participated in at the encouragement of the network was the firefly one, and even then it was more ‘in the desperate hope the network won’t pull the plug’/’look! nathan fillian!’ rather than anything FOX did. But I won’t get started on that.  I’d be curious to see the conclusions the authors put forth tested, they seem like genearlly agreeable propositions to me.  I follow the logic they’re using so it’d be intersting to see if the logic is applicable to the way people behave.

micorblogging:
The map that illustrated the global spread of twitter was pretty interesting.  There is something to the whole “it takes less time” aspect of the site that encourages use.  But after reading about theories behind contributors to online communities and their motivations, I can’t help but wonder about Twitter users’ motivations.  What makes people want to updated the world on their daily lives, several times a day?  I wonder, too, how something with such a limited messaging system (180 characters) can foster a community.

———-

My strategy for AB was to sign up and jump on in.  I figured if I got going, I’d be able to roll into the objectives.  I lurked a bit, trying to find areas I could actually provide answers in (which, lets face it, sent me directly to the Out Of The Bag section, and the section on TV.  Like we didn’t see that coming.).  I tried to answer some questions that hadn’t been answered, and chimed in on interesting-looking conversations.  I noticed that frequent posters would greet each other and inquire about things in that general small-talk way people have.  It was kind of fun to see.  I asked some questions I was genuinely curious about (for example: Do lizards feel pain?–this is incredibly relevant right now because I think I accidentally killed a lizard that was ON MY BED, and I really hope he didn’t feel pain.  the trauma runs deep, people. I don’t like harming animals…back on track.), and then more pointed topical answers, because I noticed people tended to glom onto their topics–the gun people really know their stuff, and sort of stick to the gun section of the Bag, so they gain some level of comradarie with one another.  But I am not actually a gun person (yet), so my questions would all be answered with “try a few, whatever works the best for you”/”whatever you can shoot and aim well with” and various other answers that had been answered before.  Although I did learn you can kill a bear with a pistol (although it’s not recommended, as bears are testy and getting off the second required shot can prove difficult).

At that point, I noticed that a lot of theoretical questions or What If…scenarios were getting a lot of notice, and I tried a few out.  This was along the same time I began to feel seedy, trying strategies and working different angles to get points out of the seemingly nice group of people.  I’ll admit I wasn’t a fan of that.  I never like it when I’m made to feel like a rat in a cage, and I don’t like making other people the rats.  I think my goal would have been better achieved if I had ignored the moral part of me who pointed out the site wasn’t made for me to try to weasel points out of people and just gone with the never-ending barrage of questions and answers.  I stayed logged on for several hours several days, but ultimately I needed a more aggressive strategy to accumulate the necessary points and answers.

I did like looking at the types of questions that got answered most frequently (the bizarre and the terrible to think about ones), which ones got ignored (the ones that sounded like the lit teacher’s handout of the essay question).  However, exploiting those observations didn’t seem to do me enough good.  I needed to interact with more people, I think.  People indicate that they join communities for interaction and entertainment, and I don’t think I appealed to those needs very well.  I would have liked to pose more original questions, I think, something that really reached out and grabbed attention and piqued their interest. Also, if I had really stayed focused in say, the book section, I could have built more exchanges with particular individuals, which would have probably led to mutual bumping up of points.  A more targeted approach would have worked better.

I signed u with the username iv_love, here: http://www.answerbag.com/profile/  I’ll admit, I don’t know how to link directly to my profile page, as that’s the only url I can find when I’m there.

Session 2

First of all, I’d like to apologize that this is late; you can’t comment if you can’t read it, so I’m sorry. I have chronic migraines, and while I usually have things under control, that was not the case this last week. I went to the hospital, had the thrilling adventure of morphine in the IV (it is not. nearly. as fun as they make it look on tv, if you wondered), and got some painkillers from the neurologist. This is the first time in a very long time I’ve had a headache this weak (mom actually asked “what’d you take?” in a totally supportive, loving, get more of it way, not a suspicious one, when we talked earlier today.), and I’m really quite glad; I have a lot of work to catch up on.

That being said, I found the readings pretty interesting. I agreed with a lot of what was said, and was frustrated by some of it, but interested in all, so that’s good. I also took notes this time while I read, and responded immediately, which I found to be a big help. Can’t believe I didn’t do it last session.
———————
Galston:
I see what Galston’s saying, but I also get the feeling he’s not been part of an online community before. I’m most likely biased by my feelings on the matter and my experiences, but I wonder about how he defines participation in a comm, and don’t really understand how anyone can participate, be an actual contributing member of a community and not feel some sort of attachment to the other people. You start talking about the one thing, sure, but then you talk about other things and you realize that all these people with the excellent taste are just like you and have things-insight, wisdom, support-to offer you if you let them. I really fail to see how you can talk with someone over a period of time and not develop some sort of feeling of propriety. I think that’s just me as a person, though. I adopt people fairly quickly into my view of ‘my people’ and then treat them that way. Which both raises the cost of exit, increases my interest in voice, and in my experience has fostered mutual obligation. I do think the authority issue has some wiggle room–I prefer authority to interfere little and keep things running smoothly, not mandate behavior expectations, so he might be right about that one. But seriously, how do you talk to people very often and not feel somewhat responsible for your behavior and the effect it may have on those other people?

It’s not entirely surprising to me that the second most popular activity is taking part in an online community, I mean, it’s fun and can easily take up your time without you noticing. Forums are particularly easy to get sucked into. Kansas/Terra Firma was like breathing there for a while in undergrad. And the thing about people with diseases is creepy true. One of the worst things about it is feeling like you’re alone, and online is just another support group/information access point. Personally, not the best experience with online migraine groups ever, mostly ’cause I’ve run the gamut with available treatments, so the ‘have you tried’ questions always seem to result in a ‘yeah, didn’t work, but thanks’ answers to me, and quite frankly that’s a little depressing. also, there’s no hierarchy to pain, but there’s also a difference between a bad headache and chronic migraines so the whole low barriers to entry deal is nice in that it encourages people to come and share and learn and grow, but can be frustrating because in a place where you’re supposed to feel all comfortable and normal, I still managed to feel uncomfortable and weird. but that was likely just the comm i joined, quite frankly. not the best experience ever, but one i’m glad i had at some point.

NPR:
Okay, you don’t joke about killing people unless you can give overwhelming visual, tonal, and whatever else you can think of cues that you’re not going to go homicidal. That’s just common sense. Like you don’t joke about bombs on planes while in the airport. And you especially don’t joke about killing kids for crying out loud. Or if you do, you can’t get upset when someone takes you seriously. Honestly, it’s a pain trying to convey tone via text–have you ever read a screenplay? dude, you have to get *into* it for it to be half as great as the movie. But I pretty much agree with Fogg on this one–the internet is new frontier, but people are still people. And if you’ve ever watched an argument devolve over time, you inevitably get to the Nazi point (this has a name that I can’t remember, the point in the argument where someone or something gets compared to the Nazis), which is always ridiculous and amazing, every time it happens. As to responsibility for someone else’s actions, I still pretty much believe my responsibility extends as far as my general interaction with the person in question. I’m generally not inclined to call the police when I’m experiencing something first-hand. Experiencing something virtually is not really going to make me more inclined to call, but I would have been compelled to respond in the same way other contact had been made–if we were emailing each other, I’d drop a line, if we had exchanged numbers, I would have called. I wouldn’t have wanted to be the person who knew a kid was going to be smothered and then not have done anything, but I don’t feel responsible beyond the realistic confines of previous contact.

LaRose:
My problem is that they seem to be treating online communication as some new thing, and while there are aspects that are new, communication is still communication. I get frustrated with the assumption that online ties are weaker than face to face ties. I fit into a slew of categories of people they tried to pin down, and sometimes their conclusions matched my experiences and sometimes they didn’t. I’m mobile, majorly depressed (i keep waiting for the DSM-IV to add ‘wicked’ to their descriptions. ‘no, she’s not majorly depressed, she’s wicked depressed.’ that sounds much less sad than ‘majorly,’ and also slightly less Bill and Ted), and an experienced internet user. I contact old friends and family (my cousin and i haven’t talked to each other this much in years) and have new support only available online (I’ve never actually met anyone else with chronic pain, but online other people are available. let’s face it, when you hurt, you’re not really in a social mood, so being online and talking to other people in a similar situation is an excellent balance between not expelling the effort required to be conventionally social and having the chance to talk to someone). There are a lot of things that go into being depressed, and pinning the results on one aspect like online activity seems a little ridiculous to me, and it always has.

Bubblegen:
It’s interesting, the idea that people are under the impression everything must be useful. That’s ridiculous and boring. And very, very practical. It reminds me of the standing argument my sister and I have over art. I say the urinal on the wall can be art, she wants to know where the plumbing is, and why you’d ever pay money to have that on the wall. Blogs, and all the attendant web stuff, is very much the urinal on the wall. Does there have to be an underlying motive to bloging? What about just writing? Isn’t that an end unto itself? The act of creating, of being able to share, I think is enough to justify participating in any sort of online environment. I understand that’s not exactly the only point of view; my sister didn’t interact with anyone else online except via email until about a year ago. There’s this kind of expectation that the internet will irrevocably change things in a bad way. Yeah, things will change, but since when is that new? I feel like people are looking to demonize the internet (blame it for depression, blame it for violence…my sister’s dissertation was on violence in the media and its affects on kids, so it’s a conversation we’ve had. frequently. but we’ve finally agreed that it happens with every new technology: tv, internet, video games, there’s a cycle and an urge to blame the new thing there.), and that gets annoying to me. the internet isn’t any better or worse than any other new form of communication. It’s just going to take some time to adapt to. And it can be done, ask the broadcast networks. so the idea that maybe the internet’s value is just in existing and providing a creative outlet for anyone with a voice is kind of nice. refreshing, even.

Surveillance:
I think Albrechtslund (man, I though my last name was rough; that’s a lot of consonants there in the middle.) makes a good point about participating in the surveillance. SNS aren’t all about the lurking, you’re also sharing info about yourself, on purpose. I think it makes an interesting link back to the previous article about usefulness. People, the nay-sayers, want to know why you’d bother, they want to know the point, why SNS are useful. And I’ll admit to having that issue with Facebook (there’s no conversation about anything, it’s just, like, waving to people across the street or down the hall. it’s still weird to me. But then, I suck at small-talk in RL, too, so why should it be any different online?). I’m not really sure there has to be a point beyond the immediate, keeping tabs on the people you know.

it does make me interested in finding out, though, what my feelings on a community with a specific purpose would be. for example, i’ve seen the commercials for weight watchers online, and they’re all about the support and online community and everything. I’ve never tried joining a comm with a goal per se…that could be interesting. I wonder if I’d still be all “the journey’s the thing” then.

Rosen sums it up pretty well. She covered a lot of material, but didn’t really make me think anything I hadn’t at least briefly considered before. But I really think she hit the nail on the head there at the end when she discussed the amount of research not yet done on the implications of the increasing role SNS play in our lives. It will be interesting to see how kids growing up with Club Penguin turn out…but at the same time, won’t the technology have evolved past that point by the time those questions could be reliably answered? Won’t there be something new for the next generation to latch onto?

Man, you really can’t communicate intent through lack of participation. If I had to tell one more cousin why I wasn’t on MySpace or Facebook more often over Christmas, I was going to start wearing a sign. And then the friends started in on Twitter. Which I finally broke down and joined, if you wondered. (although, really, I’m not online enough during the day, doing interesting things, to really justify that. but they’ve stopped nagging, at any rate.) So, at that point, I caved, and I check my facebook page a little more often. Because I really do love my family, and I want to know if David’s actually going to graduate this year and join the ranks of crazy-talented creative people who don’t have jobs doing what they paid to learn, if Kelsey chooses U of M or Washington in Seattle, and whether or not Michelle is pregnant again (kid you not, the family found out through myspace. dude. just–no.). And sure, I would discover these details approximately seven point two minutes after the first person was told (it’s just the way our family works. if you don’t want people to know, you shouldn’t tell anyone. ever.) anyway, but sometimes it’s nice to be on the inside track. So I see the point the people made about not existing if you don’t exist online, I just think it’s sad and a little bit annoying.

There was one line about smashing the MySpace servers that made my stomach clench. I’m about to divulge some information now that I find academically fascinating but also just a little bit socially disturbing. It involves the word “bandom.” Actually, it’s the fact that I can use the not-word in a sentence that I don’t like divulging, so there you go. I find the entire fan-community-culture thing that the internet has made so much easier completely fascinating. If I were going to study something, it’d probably be based in fandom. the whole kit and caboodle consistently entertains me, down to the somewhat weird love people have for their bands. (which is where bandom comes from. people who are fans, of bands, and share their love with each other.) Anyway, this whole longstanding community of …stuff got deleted one day by one member of the comm, and the uproar it caused! People were livid, they felt all violated, it was terrible. Because all the conversations they’d had over, three years? (i think. might have been longer) were just wiped away as if they never existed. There were all these debates about trust and violation and the spirit of the community. Just, shock and awe, in spades. Anyway, that was a while ago, and I found it a little disturbing, and I’m not even into bandom. So when she suggested bashing in the MySpace servers, I just had this mental image of all those users going ballistic; it wasn’t pretty. It might seem shallow and pointless to a lot of people, but those involved take their online identities very seriously.

The readings left me curious about communities with a specific goal in mind, so I decided to join a LiveJournal (where you can comment on comments!) comm that is a graphics contest every two weeks. You get pictures, make an icon, everybody votes, winner gets a banner and bragging rights. I’m not sure if my whole ‘it’s human decency!’ argument will hold any water once I’ve been doing it for a while. We’ll find out, I suppose.

Initial impression? It totally will. Because even after only being in the comm for under a week, I’ve looked back through the other weeks’ work, read other people’s comments and things, and I’m already recognizing names and some styles, and it makes me a little happier when I recognize work outside of the comm. I joined merlin_stills (The BBC already owns my soul, what’s another little slice of time? Seriously, though, Merlin on the BBC, check it out. Cheesy graphics, Merlin, Arthur, Morgana, and Gwen, before they were famous! Plus, bonus Giles in the form of Anthony Stewart Head (using what I think is his actual accent, ooh!) as King Uther. It’s delightful.), and yes, I sometimes read fanfiction; I’m apparently more inclined to stop and read someone’s work when I recognize their name from the comm, and more likely to comment. That’s kind of nice. We’ll see how I feel after the photoshopping and voting are done.

———

2/11/09: And we’re done with that round.  I did not win.  Some people are crazy-tallented.  It was a lot more solitary that I’m used to when I consider an online community.  There was a lot of time while photoshopping that I thought about the comm and the other voting people, but as for actual interaction? Not a lot goin’ on.  I believe it’s the way the thing is set up, as a competition with structured posting access–it’s less ‘let’s help each other get better on purpose’ and more ‘see what other people are doing and help yourself do better.’  Both are totally valid kinds of comms, but there just isn’t much time to get to know the other members so much.  I see where some of the authors are going with ‘is it a real community?’  I still say it is, but the lack of personal exhcanges does streach the definition.

WordPress…interesting.

Hi.  My name’s Krystal. I don’t know if we’re supposed to introduce ourselves or not, but I always feel weird if I don’t.  And since the questions are always the same, or along the same vein at any rate, I’ll answer those first day of class questions, and then I’ll get on with the hard-core blogging. Or at least with the responding to the readings.  I’m not really sure that’ll be considered hard-core.

So, from the top: I’m a Taurus on the cusp of Aries.  Kidding. Well, that’s true, but doesn’t exactly have any bearing on 691, now does it?  This is my second semester with UH’s LIS program, and I’m moving into my fifth month in Hawaii.  (I’m from Michigan, outside of Detroit if you’re wanting a visual, and I’m thoroughly enjoying not being in the midst of a Winter Weather Advisory every other day.)  I’m fairly certain I want to do work in conservation and preservation, but I’m ok exploring my options at the moment.  I know I’m not on the school librarian/media specialist track…other than that, well, we’ll see.  I’m taking this class for several reasons, among them the fact that I enjoy social computing in general and want to learn more about it past the free time level, and the fact that I see the world becoming more and more interactive, in an internet sort of way, and I don’t want to be left in the lurch not understanding the newfangled web 2.0.

With that whole expanding my horizons goal in mind, I picked WordPress because…well, it’s pretty.  Seriously, though, I’m down with their design philosophy and I haven’t used it yet despite my best intentions, so this was a perfect excuse. Plus my friend started a Tech Writing blog a few months ago and was impressed with them, and she’s a good judge of usability (and design, for that matter), so I followed her lead.  At the moment, I know the blog’s got that grating color of blue for the header, but as soon as I work my way around, that’ll change.  On the other hand, if you’re just getting the feed, I don’t think you see the page.  But it’ll bug me if I leave it.

OK, who I am, how long I’ve been in the program, which track, why I’m taking the class…if there’s anything else you’re wanting to know about me, ask away.  Or if you have any brilliant WordPress insight, feel free to share.

week 1

There was this book I had to read as a freshman in James Madison (…which probably means nothing to non-MSU people, because most MSU people didn’t know what Madison was. It was the College within the University that focused mostly on political stuff. I was an International Relations major for two years before I realized I wasn’t going to be a politician or policy adviser. I switched into Telecom, and then Professional Writing, if you were curious. /tangent) called Bowling Alone.  Honestly, it was a fairly forgettable book. The Federalist Papers were more interesting. But there was one thing that stuck with me after I was done reading, although I’m not sure it’s what I was supposed to get out of the thing.  The author spoke about how people were becoming more and more cocooned in their own lives, encased in technology and engaging less with other people.

Which is a concept I took issue with at the time, and still do.  Admittedly, yes, watching TV, playing Guitar Hero, and surfing the internet are individual sports. But they don’t have to stay that way.  Technology lets these things, usually done alone, become group activities.  Ask Jericho fans if they watch TV in a vacuum.  Well, watched. It’s over now, but a group of strangers managed to get together, mostly virtually, and convince a network to put their show back on the air.  You’re missing half the fun if you don’t talk to someone about Lost the day after they move the island, or about BSG when they reveal the final Cylon.  Rock Band grew out of the idea that Guitar Hero would be more fun if everyone could play together.  And I don’t think there’s a site I regularly visit that doesn’t have substantial user-added content (even if it’s just in comment or forum form).  Technology isn’t tearing us apart, it’s pulling us together.

The interesting thing to me though, is that online communities seem like baby RL communities.  People are still trying to figure out the rules and regulations, how to make virtual space worth inhabiting.  The LambdaMOO debacle (academically fascinating, emotionally disturbing) really illustrates that.  People come together and create a community, one that by its very nature seems to prevent order and discipline, and try to work out a way to keep it from descending into chaos.  Ultimately, one guy had to step up to the plate, and I think that seemed to be Keen and Tenopir’s big issue with Web 2.0–there isn’t one guy to step up to the plate and take responsibility.  There isn’t even a plate.

I think that’s the key to social computing as a concept. It’s not just the technologies and the communities, but how people build and use them, and why.  Social networks, social software, and online communities are all aspects of social computing, but there is also an intensely individual and personal aspect to the concept that gets left out of those specific aspects.  Through this class, I’m hoping to learn not just more about the mechanics of social computing, but also more about how social computing can improve individual’s experiences, online and in real life.