Presentationgroup 3:
group members:
Benjamin
Conny
Kristin
Danah Boyd: The Significance of Social Software
Social software is getting more and more important, "is all around us", influences daily social life, communications etc.
Social software programs allow users to interact and share data with other users. Examples are: Friendster and MySpace.
Danah Boyd acknowledges earlier approaches towards a definition of the term 'social software' and comes up with her
own meaning of the term.
Introduction of two definitions:
Clay Shirky: uses the term 'social software' in order to include and address certain new technologies which support the inter-
action between members of a group; "stuff worth spamming".
Tom Coates: "Social software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from social
behaviour"
Conferences about the topic of 'social software' tried to emphasize that there are new technologies behind social software,
tried to emphasize the aspect of the 'new'.
Critics argue: there is nothing new about it, (just new term for "groupware", "sociable media", "computer-mediated communication")
just a hyped term for something that has always been there --> there are no technological advances
Danah Boyd agrees with critics that 'the new' are not technological advances but changes in the attitude and behaviour of millions of
people worldwide.
Social software is more a movement not a category of technologies; offers new possibilities in the web. Apart from the web just being
a broadcast channel it offers interactivity.
She claims that social software caused three dramatic changes:
1) in the way that technologies are designed (p. 18)
2) in the way how participation spreads (p. 22)
3) in the way how people behave (p. 26)
1) Change in the way that technologies are designed
traditional software design process:
I. idea emerges
II. product people design a spec (short for specification: formal articulation of what features the product will contain)
III. engineers build the product according to the spec
IV. quality assurance team tests the system
V. usability team assures that people can use the system
VI. legal team makes sure that it is legal to release the product
VIII. release of the product
new software design process:
skips steps II-VII --> no bureaucratic overload, takes less time, spares the costs of the marketing budget >spreading of the
product through verbal propaganda among friends. Asking users for possible improvements of the product allows the founders
to continually develop it and create a better usability.
2) Change in the way how participation spreads
Organic growth through viral marketing. Learning about something through a word-of-mouth publicity is a very effective way of
establishing a new product; friends invite others into the community --> growth and spreading of the social software product
3) Change in the way how people behave
Shift of behaviour refers to the context of the system. Context is characterized by the people who found and the people who
use the system. It allows people to understand how to behave and what to expect from others' behaviour.
Change:
pre-boom: context was determined by a special topic ("Social applications ... were all about connecting people around topics")
examples: usenet [internet discussion system where users read and post public messages to one or more categories],
mailing lists, etc.
post-boom: new way of building context. Now interaction and connection to people are of great importance --> "people first, topic
second"
Danah Boyd: None of this is Real: Identity and Participation in Friendster
Friendster:
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online service where people can create personal Profiles and link them to other people on the service (similar to MySpace). It was founded by Jonathan Abrams in 2002 and originally intended as a dating service.
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Grew primarily through verbal propaganda and email invitations from community members themselves. Today it counts about 50 million members worlwide.
In order to be a member of a social software community you need to explicitly state who you are and how you relate to others. Doing so,
you have to use the given structural means. Therefore, there is only a restricted number of different ways to present yourself.
Members of a social software community represent their local social connections within the community -> those connections are visible on a broader scale; Friendster includes four 'degrees' of separation and makes them visible -> network system shows your own friends and the friends of your friends (and so on) on a four-step scala -> allows an insight in social structures that goes beyond the one which is normally possible, but can also make people want to see the global structure behind this.
In order to manage social life people need social cues signalling e.g. what kind of audience one is facing and what kind of behaviour is appropriate in a situation (different way of speaking to your professor or boss than speaking to peers). Social software systems enable people to build social relations over vast geographic distances, but do not provide social cues -> very hard for people to know how to behave, no border between professional and personal behaviour.
Social software applications can only show flattened social networks, binary system of Friend/Not-Friend. It cannot provide representation of different nuances of human relationships -> people are forced to give social judgements visible for everyone when they decide if someone is a friend or not without being able to represent different nuances of their relationship. -> in contrast to traditional sociological networks "Connection on Friendster do not signal strong relationship ties; people often connect to others that they simply recogniz, a connection which would never appear in a sociological network." (see figure 3, p.15).
Theoretically, there is free choice concerning the representation of one`s persona within a community, but: influenced by other users and one´s interpretation of social contexts which derive from their Profiles -> collective development and contextual framework arising from people´s performance and interactions -> "Contexts are not static backgrounds, but constantly evolve through this process." (p.9) Performance and impression of a persona in the system highly depend on linked people and the decicisions and performances of those.
->"impression management is an inescapably collective process." (p.10)
Fakesters: (p.16-22)
> phenomenon which already started during Friendster´s early days
> fakesters create faked accounts which do not reveal information about their real identity; this offers the chance to act freely
from rules about behaviour in networks, especially from those made by the creators of Friendster. Doing so, Fakesters become
a subculture within the subculture Friendster. -> the focus on who is a "revoluzzer" is changed.
Questions:
How can "social software" be defined? Which different approaches are there and what is Danah Boyd´s view of the term?
What kind of changes did social software evoke?
How are these changes characterized?
How would you describe the identity of a persona in a social software system (like Friendster)?
Social software programs come along with "flattering of complex social structures". What is meant by this and what are the consequences?
What does Danah Boyd mean by her claim that the Friendster phenomenon "illustrates an inverse relationship between the scalability and
manageability of social networks"?
Who are Fakesters and what are their special characteristics?
Do Fakesters change any social constellations and conventions within Friendster?
Are Fakesters revoluzzers or just another part of the given social structure Frienster?
Comments (3)
Anni said
at 8:29 pm on Nov 28, 2007
Hello everybody.
To start with our feedback, we liked that you did a short introduction to make clear what your topic is all about. Also the mentioning of some definitions of the term “social software” was helpful. You did a good job on arranging the three different changes which are caused by social software. In general all points of danah boyd were listed in your presentation and thus no information got lost.
We would have liked if you had made some kind of subtitles to your presentation because it’s a bit confusing sometimes just to have text. It also would have been helpful if you merely had made clear what you see as the five main points of the texts and naming them instead of summarizing the whole articles. On the other hand there are some key words which should be clarified more exactly, e.g. in Nr. 2 of the changes which social software brings with it (“in the way how participation spreads (p. 22)”): What does organic growth or viral marketing in this context mean?
Anni said
at 8:30 pm on Nov 28, 2007
The second text of danah boyd is well summarized and the main features of it are alluded. We liked that you explained an argument and then draw a conclusion out of it at the end of each paragraph. We want to add that an important aspect of the “four degrees” is, too, that social software doesn’t provide an endless social range but these four degrees express an end to the network representation in order to keep it manageable. In the end of your presentation you say that “theoretically, there is free choice concerning the representation of one’s persona within a community” and list some counterarguments. We would argue that the representation of one’s persona is also limited by the rules of the site-admins, e.g. that you (mostly) aren’t allowed to post nude photos or to be politically incorrect (racism).
We thought that the part of your presentation which dealt with “Fakesters” was a little bit short for the large attention that danah boyd devotes to it. You could have elaborated on why the creators of Friendster were against the Fakester-community and how that struggle changed Friendster. But maybe you just wanted to ask us this question in order to discuss it later.
Anni said
at 8:30 pm on Nov 28, 2007
To answer one of your questions we picked out question 8:
Do Fakesters change any social constellations and conventions within Friendster?
Because it was an aim of some Fakesters to have as much friends as possible, the people who were friends with for example the “Ali G.”-Fakester (p. 18) had much more possibilities to enter thousands of profiles of other Ali G. friends than people with an “ordinary” circle of friends. Furthermore, the connecting of normal users to Fakesters can also help them to signal their interests such as films or sexual orientation what was limited by the creators of Fakester. As the Fakester profiles often were more creative than other profiles one could argue that these creative profiles contributed to the variety of the Friendster world.
But there are also disadvantages because of Fakesters. As Fakesters are “hacking the system” (p. 17), they misapplied Friendster and thus “created an appearance of unreliability, which irritated both the company and individuals intent on using Friendster for serious networking.” This means that users can’t trust each other anymore because everyone could be a Fakester and that is why social contacts on Friendster are shaken by distrust.
Thanks for your attention,
sincerely,
Alex und Anni
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