cyberspace

Social network studies will move from sociology to online interactions and contagion

Peter Levin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:37:07 -0800

Description

Sociology seems to be unable to capitalize on the recent explosion of interest in social networks. Economic sociology has embraced networks since the early 1980s, with Harrison White 1981 article 'Where do Markets Come from?' arguing that "markets are self-reproducing social structures among specific cliques of firms and other actors who evolve roles from observations of each other's behavior" (518).

But more recently, the emergence of quantitative technologies and large network data sets has pushed social networks further. Duncan Watts has been central in this effort, with his work on Small World networks - where properties of real-world networks can be embodied by relatively simple mathematical models interpolating between order and randomness. Measures for density, randomness, and separation (the shortest path length between nodes) can all be determined for a surprisingly wide range of real-world networks.

Much of this work has migrated from sociology to physics, and from there to studies of disease spreading, power line transmissions, and internet web usage. This work is rather alarming, for instance, that we could expect that 'random shortcuts' in networks would result in more dangerous human-to-human diseases.

As network scholars have turned to 'idea contagion', the findings are more interesting. Unlike diseases, ideas are not memory-free processes - if you are exposed to the same idea twice, it has a cumulative effect. So instead of a linear probability of infection, there is a threshold model of infection. Fads, rumors, ideas, are likely to exhibit 'all of a sudden' effects. Here, the social network literature provides the scientific basis for Tipping Points arguments.

Practically, network studies are most likely to have impacts in disease and online environments. Contagion has been embraced as a model for understanding disease, and it is not surpising to find it there. But the growth of social networks in online spaces, and the interests and monetization of online search provide fertile ground for networks. Watts himself has begun working for Yahoo to improve their social networking applications, along with a number of his students.

Reality Mining at MIT's Media lab provides another place where network studies will continue to take shape and influence online interaction. Drawing on data culled from the so-called 'soft' signals of social interaction (voice inflection, conversation browsing at a conference), researchers have proposed social interactional data as a source for mining the 'new rules of social interaction'. The breakthrough aim is to provide more contextual interpretation for non-face-to-face-interactions. The implications for 'improving' online interaction 10-20% or more (as claims Alex (Sandy) Pentland, would possibly be a fairly dramatic increase in adoption of online interactions, especially in business.

Boots, Michael and Akira Sasaki. 1999. 'Small worlds' and the Evolution of Virulence: Infection Occurs Locally and at a Distance. Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B 266: 1933-1938.

Watts, Duncan. 2003. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. NY: Norton

Watts, Duncan. 2004. The 'New' Science of Networks. Annual Review of Sociology 30: 243-270.

Watts' Small World site

White, Harrison. 1981. Where do Markets Come From? American Journal of Sociology 87(3): 517-547.

Signals

Reality Mining

Social networks constructed by blog and SMS in China

Studying Human Behavior in Cyberspace

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:10:30 -0700

Description

Cyber-ethnography, defined as the study of online interaction, will pioneer new methods and theories as more and more human activites are conducted in cyberspace.

Anthropologists have traditionally conducted fieldwork by living in distant cultures, conducting interviews, and observing participants. As people conduct more and more activities online and leave digital tracks (pictures, blogs, emails, and such), anthropologists have begun to study human behaviour in cyberspace. Cyber-ethnographers participate in and observe blogs, Web sites, and chat rooms. They analyse how people form social networks or groups online and establish cultural identity. Visual anthropologists, media and cultural studies scholars, ludologists, and science and technology scholars are among those who are building cyberethnography. See http://www.cas.usf.edu/anthropology/cma/CMAnthropologists.htm>http://www.cas.usf.edu/anthropology/cma/CMAnthropologists.htm for an example of the wide range of emerging cyberanthropologists.

Cyber-ethnography is part of the move to reconceptualize the traditional notion of 'the field'. In cyberspace, the boundaries of the observed field are both virtual and embedded in place, discursive and geographical. New methods for understanding the nature of virtual experiences and environments will explode as the variety and frequency of cyber-experiences grow."

This will be enabled by:

Increase in number of Internet users globally.
Increase in the average time spent online across the globe and the subsequent formation of virtual communities

Early indicators include:

Estimate as of May 2005 by Nielsen/NetRatings that there are 455 million inhabitants of the 'digital universe' who spend roughly 26.5 hours per month of their time at home connected to the Internet
Employment of cyber-ethnographic techniques by anthropologists at elite universities that have cultural/social anthropology programs such as University of Michigan and Harvard University
Recent research by anthropologists analyzing culture and power through blogs
Establishment at Cambridge University of a program that looks at the social implications of technology (broadband and nanotechnology)

What to watch:

Cyber-ethnography becomes increasingly accepted as an anthropological specialisation at universities worldwide.

Signals

The End of Cyberspace

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:10:29 -0700

Description

The concept of cyberspace as a distinct geographical entity has influenced the way we think about information technology, e-commerce, copyright, and high-tech products. New technologies are revealing a more complex relation between data-space and the real world, with consequences in all these areas.

The concept of cyberspace has been (to quote George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) a "metaphor we live by," a conceptual framework for making sense of the Internet. For the past twenty years, the Internet has been described as a kind of alternate dimension or place, separate from and in some ways superior to general life and physical reality.

The metaphor has had several sources. Science fiction and video games offered some of the earliest articulations of the idea of computers and networks as places. Arguments for and against the regulation of online speech and commerce both appealed to the notion of the Internet as a place. Software developers instantiated the metaphor of computers as places in the design of graphical user interfaces, Web browsers, and massive multiplayer online games. Finally, the social and psychological experience of using personal computers, usually in computer labs, workplaces, or home offices, reinforced the sense of the Internet as separate from real life: going online required tuning out the real world.

However, the underlying geographical assumption in the concept of "cyberspace" is that computing environments are necessarily distinct from physical reality. Inspired partly by the notion of "virtual reality", many commentators on computing in the recent past perceived an inexorable path towards "immersive" computing in which users inhabit the same 'space" as their data rather than data inhabiting users' spaces. The development of "pervasive computing" (also known as "ubiquitous computing") has revealed alternatives to immersive computing. Cyberspace is still a valid geographical concept, but its relation with "real" (physical and social) space is complex.

Pervasive computing technologies like flexible displays, smart dust, sensors, and wireless offer an alternative to immersion. The experience of using devices designed to be socially unobtrusive, to require little of a user's attention, and to operate anywhere will change the experience of being online. Users capable of accessing the Internet anywhere will discover "real space" information-- information about the places that they are, accessed in that space-- that complements "real time" information. Rather than requiring users to focus exclusively on either the digital or physical, new devices will allow users to attend to both simultaneously.

A comparison can be made with "virtual reality". (In the popular imagination, cyberspace and virtual reality are closely enmeshed.) When the concept was popularised in the early 1990s, commentators imagined that, as more applications were found for virtual reality technology, we would spend less time in real-space and more time in "virtual" space. It was assumed that as virtual spaces grew in sophistication, they would also become increasingly divorced from "reality", that virtual spaces would provide an alternative space to inhabit. Though the technology has developed apace, we have not seen the emergence of totally immersive alternate realities to the extent that was predicted. "Augmented reality", which maps digital media to the physical world, has proved to be more useful than fully immersive virtual reality.

Similarly, cyberspace is not as distinct from "real" space as it was imagined it would be. Geographically, it is not a separate world or a new frontier, but rather a layer atop (or beneath?) the everyday world. We inhabit both cyberspace and physical space at the same time."

This will be enabled by:

"Pervasive computing technologies: flexible displays, smart dust, sensors, and wireless."

Early indicators include:

"Mobile devices like cell phones and Web-enabled PDAs, especially in Asia and Europe, have already become leading-- if not primary-- devices for young people to access the Internet."

What to watch:

"Emerging mobile and pervasive computing technologies.

The use of language, particularly by youth, describing their online interactions.

Signals

Book sales creating new audiences, communities online