Summer Social Webshop
on
Technology-Mediated Social Participation
University of Maryland, College Park
August 23-26, 2011

Eventful.  The 2011 Webshop at the University of Maryland was certainly that with both an earthquake and a hurricane to mark the start and end of the event.  We really moved heaven and earth at this workshop.

In 4  days, 20 talks, 45 students, an earthquake, a hurricane and many new connections – the Webshop touched on a set of related concepts, methods, and findings about ways to use communication and computation technology to help groups, neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations work collectively towards common goals.

Several years ago a program at the University of Maryland called “Webshop” (Web Workshop) was organized by Professor John Robinson and held for three consecutive Summers.  I visited and spoke at two of these events and know many people who attended or spoke at one or more and remember the event enthusiastically.   The students who attended include some of the now leading researchers in the field of social science studies of the internet.  There is an impressive alumni list.

The last Webshop was held in 2003 and many years and significant changes have occurred in the time since. Twitter, Facebook, StreetView, iPad,FourSquare, Android, Kinect, EC2, Mechanical Turk, Arduino, were all new or non-existent when the first Webshops were run.  Today we have more reason than ever to focus on the details and patterns of computer-mediated human association. Ever more people channel more of their communications with others through more digital media, often of the social kind.  A new data resource for the social sciences is growing in scale and promise: from billions of events it is possible to start to build a picture of an aggregate whole, and to start to grasp the terrain and landscape of social media.

After many years of inactivity, the Summer Social Webshop (@Webshop2011) happened again!  With the generous support of the National Science Foundation and additional assistance from Google Research, on August 23-26, 2011 at the University of Maryland, College Park, a group of students heard and engaged with more than two dozen leading researchers exploring digital social landscapes from a variety of perspectives.  Organized by a collaboration between the University of Maryland’s Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), the College of Information Studies, the Sociology and Computer Science Department, and the Social Media Research Foundation, the event gathered students from a wide range of disciplines to get a concentrated dose of advanced efforts to gather data from social media and people’s understanding and practices around digital technologies.   Doctoral students in computer science, iSchools, sociology, communications, political science, anthropology, psychology, journalism, and related disciplines applied to attend the 4-day intensive workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP).  The workshop explored the many ways social media can be applied to national priorities such as health, energy, education, disaster response, political participation, environmental protection, business innovation, or community safety.  The workshop attracted graduate students at US universities studying social-networking tools, blogs and microblogs, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems, mobile and location aware media creation, and other social media.

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Organizers

Alan Neustadtl (@smilex3md) - Sociology, University of Maryland
Jennifer Preece (@jenpre) – iSchool, University of Maryland
Marc Smith(@Marc_Smith) - Social Media Research Foundation
Ben Shneiderman (@benbendc) - Computer Science, University of Maryland
PJ Rey (@pjrey) - Sociology, University of Maryland, Student Coordinator

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Photos

I will speak at Purdue University on September 22 and 23, 2011 about mapping social media networks.

My host is Sorin Matei, professor of Communications, who has been researching the social structure of social media networks.

I will also speak at Professor Matei’s class: COM 63200 On-line Interaction and Facilitation

Here is an example map of the connections among the people who tweeted the word “Purdue” on September 16th, 2011:

Connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word Purdue when queried on September 16, 2011, scaled by numbers of tweets (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.

See: www.purdue.edu/

Layout using the “Group Layout” composed of tiled bounded regions. Clusters calculated by the Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm are also encoded by color.

(Edges connecting users are bundled and curved with recent features added to NodeXL v.177.)

A larger version of the image is here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6155750905/sizes/o/in/ph…

Betweenness Centrality is defined here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Betweenness_centrality

Clauset-Newman-Moore algorithm is defined here: pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v70/i6/e066111

Top most between users:
@lifeatpurdue
@jajuanjohnson
@stfu_gabby
@purdueexponent
@charliienosheen
@mbrister2
@boilerfootball
@purduesports
@hipandresanbo
@cheesebrrrrr

Graph Metric: Value
Graph Type: Directed
Vertices: 1000
Unique Edges: 4045
Edges With Duplicates: 706
Total Edges: 4751
Self-Loops: 977
Connected Components: 429
Single-Vertex Connected Components: 395
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component: 528
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component: 4134
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter): 12
Average Geodesic Distance: 3.517707
Graph Density: 0.003507508
NodeXL Version: 1.0.1.177

More NodeXL network visualizations are here: www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157622437066929/

NodeXL is free and open and available from www.codeplex.com/nodexl

NodeXL is developed by the Social Media Research Foundation (www.smrfoundation.org) – which is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship.

The book, Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, is available from Morgan Kaufmann and from Amazon.

2011 ASA meetings are being held in Las Vega, Nevada.  Several sessions are related to the study of the social uses and effects of information technology are hosted by the Communications and Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association (CITASA).

These are the connections among the people who recently tweeted the term “ASA2011″ on 18 August 2011.

Several papers and panels related to the sociology of the internet will take place:

Saturday, Aug 20 – 2:30pm – 4:10pm

 124. Section on Sociology of Law Paper Session. Privacy in the Digital Age: Law, Culture, and Contention I (co-sponsored with the Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements and Section on Communication and Information Technology)

Monday, Aug 22 – 8:30-9:30AM Roundtables

338. Section on Communication and Information Technology Roundtable Session

Monday, Aug 22 – 9:30-10:10AM Business and Awards Ceremony

(immediately follows roundtables)

Monday, Aug 22 – 10:30AM – 12:10PM 

376. Section on Communication and Information Technology Invited Session. Social Media in Community Action and Social Change

Monday, Aug 22 – 2:30pm – 4:10pm

419. Section on Communication and Information Technology Paper Session. New Media Frontiers: Youth and New Media

Monday, Aug 22 – 5:00-7:00PM, Section Reception, hotel suite, Caesars Palace

Location to be announced at all CITASA sessions and meetings.

Tuesday has the main day of panels and talks:

Tueday, August 23 – 10:30am – 12:10pm

514. Section on Sociology of Culture Invited Session. Privacy in the Digital Age II: Law, Culture, and Contention (co-sponsored with the Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements and Section on Communication and Information Technology)

Regular Session. Social Participant On and Off the Internet.

Session Organizer: Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)
Sunday 1030-12

The Active Few and the Sporadic Many: Making Sense of Opinion Dynamics in Online Review Systems
*Fedor Dokshin (Cornell University)

The Internet, Young Adults and Political Engagement around the 2008 Presidential Elections

*Aaron Shaw (University of California-Berkeley), Eszter Hargittai (Northwestern University)

Social movements’ use of information and communication technologies: diffusion, usefulness and empowerment

*Piotr Konieczny (University of Pittsburgh)

*=presenter

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Regular Session. Networked Individuals On and Off the Internet

Scheduled Time: Sun, Aug 21 – 2:30pm – 4:10pm

Session Participants:

Session Organizer: Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)
Presider: Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)

“If you’re not texting me, you must be old:” Age Cohort Attachment to Mobile Phones
*Amanda M. Warr (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Shelia R. Cotten (University of Alabama at Birmingham), William A. Anderson (University of Alabama at Birmingham)

The Intersection of Gender and Place in Online Health Activities
*Melinda Goldner (Union College), Timothy M. Hale (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Shelia R. Cotten (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Michael J. Stern (College of Charleston), Patricia Drentea (University of Alabama-Birmingham)

Core Discussion Networks Over Time: How the Internet Reduces Social Isolation and Increases Network Diversity
*Keith N. Hampton (University of Pennsylvania), Lauren Sessions Goulet (University of Pennsylvania)

Social Network Sites, Social Ties, and Social Capital
*Randy Lynn (George Mason University), *James C. Witte (George Mason University)

Discussant: Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)

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Regular Session. Digital Divides in the Internet Age
Scheduled Time: Mon, Aug 22 – 4:30pm – 6:10pm

Session Organizer: Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)
Presider: Barry Wellman (University of Toronto)
Cyberasociality and the Online Sociality Divide: Third Level Digital Divide?

*Zeynep Tufekci (University of Maryland-Baltimore County)
(Tech) Culture in Action: Using a cultural framework to describe and explain differences in technological competency

*Cassidy Puckett (Northwestern University)
Does the “Do-it-yourself approach” reduce digital inequality? Lack of digital skills and infrequent Internet use

*Uwe Matzat (Eindhoven University of Technology), Bert M. Sadowski (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Stalled Digital Divide: Gender Differences in the Use of ICT in Taiwan

*Yu-Hua Chen (National Taiwan University), Wen-Yin Chien (United Daily News)

Along with my colleague Eduarda Mendes-Rodriguez I will be speaking at the University of Porto next Friday, March 26th.

Hands-on Workshop – Social Media Network Analysis in NodeXL

This workshop provides an overview of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and its application to social media. The network or directed graph is a common structure in a wide range of different kinds of social media. Social Network Analysis is a set of tools, concepts, and techniques that can help measure a graph and the location and connection pattern of each component part.

Using NodeXL, workshop participants will learn how to take data from common social media sources (including enterprise discussions and online communities, Twitter, Flickr, your own email) and perform various types of analysis. Through this workshop, participants will:

· be able to understand the basics of SNA, its terminology and background.
· be able to transform communication data (e.g. Twitter, email, Flickr, message boards etc.) into network data.
· understand the different possible presentations of social networks, e.g. in a matrix or a sociogram.
· apply network metrics and visualizations to find clusters and key contributors in real world social media data.
· get familiar with the use of standard SNA tools and software in general and the NodeXL social network analysis add-in for Excel in particular.
· be able to derive practical and useful information through SNA analysis that would help design an innovative and successful online community.

After speaking at the Israel Internet Association conference February 22, I will speak at IBM Research in Haifa at an event co-sponsored by the University of Haifa Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the M.A. program in Sociology of Technology.  My hosts are Professor Gustavo Mesch from the university and Dr. Adam Perer from IBM research.

Wednesday, February 24^th, 1 pm

IBM Building
Haifa University

Title: Visualizing collections of social media connections: using social network analysis to assess, evaluate and measure social media engagement

Abstract: Social networks are created whenever people interact.  These networks become more visible when interactions take place through social media.  Social networks form when people link, reply, comment, edit, tag, and friend one another.  Sub-populations are formed whenever people mention the same company, products, event, topic, or personality.  Using social network analysis on collections of social media connections reveals important patterns: how are people clustered and grouped, where are the gaps, who plays the roles of bridge, hub, and isolate? In this talk I will display maps of twitter, you tube, flickr, and enterprise email systems and demonstrate several tools that can be used to collect, analyze, map and monitor social media, including the free and open NodeXL (network overview, discovery and exploration) add-in Excel 2007.

Here, for example, is a map of the connections among people who recently mentioned “haifa” in twitter sized by number of followers:

Some photos taken during the trip are available after the jump:

I. Introduction

Introduction to Communities in Cyberspace, Peter Kollock and Marc Smith

“Since 1993, computer networks have grabbed enormous public attention. The major news and entertainment media have been filled with stories about the “information superhighway” and of the financial and political fortunes to be made on it. Computer sales continue to rise and more and more people are getting connected to “the Net”. Computer networks, once an obscure and arcane set of technologies used by a small elite, are now widely used and the subject of political debate, public interest, and popular culture. The “information superhighway” competes with a collection of metaphors that attempt to label and define these technologies. Others, like “cyberspace,” “the Net,” “online,” and “the web,” highlight different aspects of network technology and its meaning, role and impact. Whichever term is used, it is clear that computer networks allow people to create a range of new social spaces in which to meet and interact with one another.”

More details from the book…

II. Identity

Identity and deception in the virtual community, Judith S. Donath, MIT Media Lab

“Identity plays a key role in virtual communities. In communication, which is the primary activity, knowing the identity of those with whom you communicate is essential for understanding and evaluating an interaction. Yet in the disembodied world of the virtual community, identity is also ambiguous. Many of the basic cues about personality and social role we are accustomed to in the physical world are absent. The goal of this paper is to understand how identity is established in an online community and to examine the effects of identity deception and the conditions that give rise to it.”

Reading Race Online: Discovering Racial Identity in Usenet Discussions, Byron Burkhalter (UCLA, Sociology)

Writing in the Body: Gender (Re)Production in Cyber Interactions, Jodi O’Brien (Seattle University, Sociology)

III Social Order and Control

Hierarchy and Power: Social Control in Cyberspace, Elizabeth Reid (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Communications)

Hierarchies and power on MUDs-the text-based multi-player virtual reality games found on the Internet-rely on the control of players’ abilities to manipulate the virtual environment. Social status on a MUD is linked to a player’s ability to manipulate the virtual components of the system; rewards consist of increased access to such world-manipulating tools. In Power/Knowledge Foucault described an effective form of power as one that enables the powerful to “gain access to the bodies of individuals, to their acts, attitudes and modes of everyday behaviour.” On a MUD, where the physical body is not present, but the virtual body is at the absolute mercy of those who control the system, such power exists. The theatre of authority in a MUD is one which demands and facilitates a strongly dramaturgical element. Underlying each MUD system are cohesive social structures which centre on control and the manipulation of game elements. Every piece of information a player integrates into the MUD universe permits and assures the exercise of power. Speaking and writing-transmitting knowledge-are acts of literal power in the virtual reality of a MUD, and permit the creation of hierarchies of social control.

Problems of Conflict Management in Virtual Communities, Anna DuVal Smith (Case Western Reserve University, School of Management)

This paper explores the sources of conflict and techniques of social control in an open-access, text-based virtual community. It argues that such social systems have the same kinds of opportunities and problems brought by diversity that real communities do, but that unique features of cyberspace make effective conflict management both more important and more difficult. Cases of interpersonal disputes collected during 22 months of participant observation revealed that power strategies of social control were generally counterproductive in managing the conflict that resulted from the multiplicity of values, goals, interests and cultural norms brought by members of the community. As in real life, methods that reconcile divergent interests mediation and factfinding) and adjudicate rights (factfinding and arbitration) appeared to manage issue-based conflicts more effectively. However, their utility and, therefore, the community’s ability to adapt and thrive as an open, goal-directed system depends on member awareness of the program, human resource availability and administration willingness to share power.

IV Community Structure and Dynamics

Net Surfers Don’t Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities, Barry Wellman & Milena Gulia (University of Toronto, Sociology)

Invisible Crowds in Cyberspace: Measuring and Mapping the USENET , Marc Smith (UCLA, Sociology)

The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace, Peter Kollock (UCLA, Sociology)

V Collective Action

The Promise and the Peril of Social Action in Cyberspace: Ethos, Delivery, and the Protests over MarketPlace and the Clipper Chip, Laura J. Gurak (University of Minnesota, Rhetoric)

In April 1990, Lotus Development Corporation announced a product called MarketPlace: Households. MarketPlace was to be a direct mail marketing database for Macintosh computers and would contain name, address, and spending habit information on 120 million individual American consumers. After MarketPlace was announced, computer privacy advocates began investigating the product. Although most of the data contained in MarketPlace was already available (data was provided by Equifax, the second largest credit reporting agency in the United States), privacy advocates felt that MarketPlace went beyond current standards for privacy protection. Having the data so readily available to a mass market of personal computer users extended the existing network of information sources in the US, including credit profiles, grocery store checkout scanning systems, and government files. Furthermore, the data was provided on the non-correctable media of CD-ROM; therefore, if an entry was in error, it could not be corrected. And although Lotus did include certain privacy protection measures when designing the product, privacy advocates were not convinced.

From Lotus’s first announcement until months after it canceled the product, the Internet was full of discussions about MarketPlace; soon, debates about the privacy implications of MarketPlace and suggestions for contacting Lotus began to circulate. People posted Lotus’s address and phone number, the email address of Lotus’s CEO, and also gave information about how to request that names be removed from the database. Some people posted “form letters” that could be sent to Lotus. Notices were forwarded around the Internet, re-posted to other newsgroups, and sent off as email messages. In one case, a discussion group was formed specifically to discuss the product. As a result of the Internet-based protest, over 30,000 people contacted Lotus and asked that their names be removed from the database. The product, which had been scheduled to be released during the third quarter of 1990, was never released. In January 1991, Lotus issued a press release announcing that it would cancel MarketPlace: Households. In the end, many acknowledged the role of networks in stopping the release of MarketPlace. Some subsequently called it “[a] victory for computer populism” (Winner).

Electronic Homesteading on the Rural Frontier: Big Sky Telegraph and its Community, Willard Uncapher (University of Texas at Austin, Communications).

This chapter provides an overview of an ethnography exploring the introduction of a low cost computer mediated conferencing and communication system into the rural Montana one room school system and develops a framework based on the conflicts between the material economy using information technology to organize global economies of scale and an online gift economies and social scale to explore the informatization of rural communities. The paper proposes that we should not limit our analysis of online communities simply to online behavior.

Based on interview, site visits, and an extensive collection of secondary materials, primarily between January 1988 when Big Sky Telegraph first went online, and January 1990, the research provides a case study of the way social, cultural, economic, and pre-existing communication arrangements come to frame the uses of the new technology, even as they are transformed by them. Not all communities are transformed equally, and those users, such as rural teachers and women wanting to change their lives provided a base of new users, while the ranching and farming community was more circumspect. The social differences would impact not only online behavior, but how behavior gets online, and even how the borders between these worlds are imagined.

Cyberspace and Disadvantaged Communities: The Internet as a Tool for Collective Action, Christopher Mele (State University of New York at Buffalo, Sociology)

This chapter recounts the collective action of an organized group of African-American women residents of Jervay Place, a low-income housing development in Wilmington, North Carolina, and their use of online communication to attempt to challenge not only the immediate issue of adequate housing but their position within the unequal power relationship between African-American women and white elite-dominated institutions. In the case of Jervay, collective action emerged in response to the housing authority’s exclusion of residents as agents in the planning for the site’s future. Their efforts at mobilization and resistance and the reactions of the housing authority were particularly embedded in the local and historical context of power and race. Ultimately, in order to challenge the unilateral decisions of the housing authority effectively, resident determined it was necessary to circumvent the local customary (paternalist) forms of interaction that have long existed between disenfranchised African-Americans and local political and social institutions. Use of online communication afforded the women an opportunity to operate outside the local and exclusive pathways of information, discourse and social action controlled by the institution of the housing authority. In a broader sense, their grassroots networking activities online subverted longstanding local articulations of power. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of online communication for mediation of historically unequal relations between disadvantaged groups and social institutions.

]]> http://www.connectedaction.net/2009/12/15/book-communities-in-cyberspace-ten-years-later/feed/ 4 http://www.connectedaction.net/2009/09/12/2009-sociological-association-meetings-internet-sociologists-meet-citasa-asa09/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=2009-sociological-association-meetings-internet-sociologists-meet-citasa-asa09 http://www.connectedaction.net/2009/09/12/2009-sociological-association-meetings-internet-sociologists-meet-citasa-asa09/#comments Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:04:05 +0000 Marc Smith http://www.connectedaction.net/?p=1515 @     

The 2009 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting was held in San Francisco, California, August 8-11.

The ASA attracts thousands of sociologists, a subsection of whom have  a passion for the study of the Internet and its many forms of social impacts and uses.  The Communications and Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association (CITASA) is the group that gathers many forms of social science research on the creation and uses of information technology.  This year’s meeting included two CITASA panels, round tables, a business meeting with awards, and a (windy!) boat ride through San Francisco Bay and beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

The CITASA sponsored papers at the conference are listed below.  The range of work illustrates the continued interest in social science studies of the impacts of information technology.

Session 1: Cultural Divergences and Convergences: Mediated Communication, Community, and Social Networks
Presider: Laura Robinson, Santa Clara University
10:30 – 12:10 PM, Location: Parc 55 Hotel

Reframing Public Space Through Digital Mobilization: The Case of Flash Mobs
Virág Molnár

The Consumption of Online News at Work
Pablo J. Boczkowski

French Software Politics: The Freedom Discourse and Globalization from Below
Sara Schoonmaker

Convergence in E-Campaigning: Comparing the Use of Attacks on German and American Political Web Sites
Eva Johanna Schweitzer

The Flow of Mediated Culture: Trends of Supply and Demand 1960-2005
W. Russell Neuman

Session 2: Sociology of Communications and IT
Presider: Keith N. Hampton, University of Pennsylvania
2:30 – 4:10 PM, Location: Parc 55 Hotel

Gauging the Impact of e-Research in the Social Sciences
Ralph Schroeder, Eric T. Meyer, University of Oxford

Does Previous Technology Use Influence Later Opinions Linking Use to Work Experiences, Relationships, and Time?
Noelle A. Chesley, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Medical Conversations in Technology Enabled Communities: Perceived Benefits of Participation in Online Patient Communities
Gul Seckin

Model Failure: Assemblages, Performances, and Uneasy Collaborations in Commercial Construction
Gina Neff, University of Washington; Brittany Fiore-Silfvast, University of Washington; Carrie Sturts Dossick, University of Washington

Core Discussion Networks, Internet and Mobile Phone Use: New Media are not Increasing Privatism in America
Keith N. Hampton, University of Pennsylvania; Lauren Sessions, University of Pennsylvania; Eun Ja Her, University of Pennsylvania

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Round tables (1-hour): Open Submission
Organizer: Steven G. Hoffman, SUNY Buffalo
8:30 – 9:30 AM, Location: Parc 55 Hotel

Table 1: Communication and Information Technologies at the Producer-Consumer Nexus
Presider: Chris Rhomberg, Fordham University

A Tale of Two Newspaper Chains: Gannett, Knight Ridder, and the Crisis of American Newspapers
Chris Rhomberg, Fordham University

Analyzing design activity in architect and user talk-in-interaction: a preliminary analysis
Rachael Luck, University of Reading

Distributed Cognition and the Emerging Peer-to-Peer Production Model
Michael Restivo, Stony Brook University

Table 2: Communication and Information Technologies, Community, and Sexuality

Negotiating identities/remediating queering desires: Coming out and coming of age online
Mary L. Gray, Indiana University

Sociological Examination of People’s Attitude Towards Online Dating
Xue Liu, Clemson University

The Amorous Migrant: Race, Interracial Desire and Relocation in Cyberspace
Nicholas Andrew Boston, Cambridge University/Lehman College of the City University of New York

Virtually Gay: The Internet and the Construction of Hybrid Queer Identities and Transnational Gay Cultures

James Paul Thing, University of Southern California

Table 3: The Internet and Political Engagement I
Presider: Phil Howard, University of Washington

Bringing the body back in: considering the role of the body in deliberative democracy
Amy Stuart, New School for Social Research ICANN and Internet Governance
Hangwoo Lee, Chungbuk National University

Social Capital and Political Mobilization in Online Community
Jun Young Ah, Yonsei university; Jeong-han Kang, Yonsei University

Vitalizing Donation Culture in Korea: Comparison of Strategies between Traditional Off-line and New Online Donations
Sun Hyoung Lee, Yonsei University

Table 4: The Internet and Political Engagement II

A Facilitator of Civic Engagement in Online Group Contexts
Ja Hyouk Koo, University of Virginia

Muslim resistance online: a diasporic Pakistani punk music subculture on the Internet
Dhiraj Murthy, Bowdoin College

Transylvania, the Internet, and the Strategic Construction of Ethnic/National Identity
J. Patrick Williams, Nanyang Technological University

Table 5: New Technologies, Social Change and Knowledge
Presider: James A. Evans, University of Chicago

How the Internet Shrinks Knowledge By Extending It
James A. Evans, University of Chicago

Socializing the Mobile Phone: Young Urban Poor’s Fascination at Play
Lip Soon Wong, Telenor Research and Innovation Center

Social Networks inside the Enterprise: analyzing colleague link patterns in an IT workplace
Marc Smith

Table 6: Computer Mediated Communication, Social Capital, and Symbolic Interaction
Presider: Simon Gottschalk, University of Nevada- Las Vegas

Dramaturgy, Technology and Public Health: Finding Sex Partners Online among Men who have Sex with Men
Anthony P. Lombardo, University of Toronto

eIntelligence: Social Intelligence in Computer-Mediated Communication
Simon Gottschalk, University of Nevada- Las Vegas

How to Ground a Child in Cyberspace: Parents’ Exploration of Norms and Rules
Mito Akiyoshi, Senshu University

Structured Talk and Web 2.0: Blogs and Community Formation

Kenneth M. Kambara, California Lutheran University

Table 7: Communication Technologies and Network Formation
Presider: John P. Robinson, University of Maryland

Events and Attendees in Two Countries: Factors Influencing the Size and Composition of Online Social Groups
Ryan M. Acton, University of California, Irvine

From each according to media? Testing Wellman’s theory of networked individualism
Bernard Hogan, University of Toronto

The Composition of a Korean Immigrant Social Network
Sun Kyong Lee, Rutgers University

Table 8: Information Production, Coordination and Distribution

Order, Coordination and Uncertainty in Online Information Systems”
Judd Antin, University of California, Berkeley
Coye V. Cheshire, University of California, Berkeley

When High Commitment Hurts: Evidence from Wikipedia
Andreea Gorbatai, Harvard University

Wikipedia: Community or a social movement?
Piotr Konieczny, University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Karen Cook, Stanford University

Dr. Toshio Yamagishi, Hokkaido University

Dr. Jodi O’Brien, Seattle University

and myself.

Earlier in the year, in March 2009, many people gathered at De Neve Plaza at UCLA to remember Peter Kollock.

On Monday, September 14th, at 10:30 PST, I met on the phone with Jerry Michalski and other participants for one of his regular weekly Yi-tan conference calls to discuss the scholarship and personal legacy of Peter Kollock.  In this podcast, I spoke about my years of working with Peter to apply the models of collective action dilemmas, common pool resources, cooperation, and conflict to the creation of Internet social institutions and resources. I discussed Peter’s work with his colleague Jodi O’Brien, and the lasting impact of his research into studies of cooperation, collective action, and common goods as well as his impact on students, business, and the field of social science.  Jodi and Peter were colleagues and co-authors for many years, creating a widely used text The Production of Reality: Essays and Readings in Social Psychology as well as several other publications.  I worked with Peter while studying for my Ph.D. at UCLA in Sociology.  Peter and I wrote about the sociology of the Internet together and co-edited a book Communities in Cyberspace.

I will post a few links to some of Peter’s work that has had the most impact on me in upcoming posts.

Listen here!

This year’s CITASA awards have been announced!  CITASA is the Communications and Information Technology section of the American Sociological Association.  It gathers together more than 300 sociologists interested in the ways groups of people make use of computation and networks. This year the line up is uniformly high quality scholarship about the nature of societies that increasingly rely upon information technology.

You are welcome to join the CITASA Business Meeting on Aug 8 from 9:30-10:10am at the Parc 55 Hotel where the recipients will be presented with their awards. A description of the awards and list of past recipients can be found on the CITASA website:  http://citasa.org/awards

2009 CITASA Student Paper Award

Daniel A. Menchik and Xiaoli Tian (University of Chicago)

Putting Social Context into Text: The Semiotics of E-mail Interaction. American Journal of Sociology 114(2): 332-370. (2008).

Committee members: Zeynep Tufekci (Chair), Lori Kendall, and Anabel Quan-Haase

2009 CITASA Award for Public Sociology

Peter Kollock (University of California at Los Angeles)

Committee members: Michael Macy (Chair), Marc Smith, Keith Hampton

2009 CITASA Paper Award

Eszter Hargitta, Jason Gallo, and Matthew Kane (Northwestern University)

Cross-ideological discussions among conservative and liberal bloggers. Public Choice 134: 67-86. (2008).

Honorable mention:

Lori Kendall (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

How do issues of gender and sexuality influence the structures and process of qualitative internet research? pp. 99-118. In Internet Inquiry: Conversations about method, Annette Markham and Nancy Baym (eds). Los Angeles: Sage (2008).

Committee members: Hiroshi Ono (Chair), Rich Ling, and Bernie Hogan

2009 CITASA Book Award

Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University). (MIT Press, 2007).

Committee members: Leslie Shade (Chair), Marc Smith, and Alison Powell

2009 CITASA William F. Ogburn Career Achievement Award

Elihu Katz (University of Pennsylvania)

Committee members: Anabel Quan-Haase (Co-Chair), Barry Wellman (Co-Chair), and Keith Hampton

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2GfOhFZkY8

This is one of the great works of empirical sociology: using a time lapse camera (and an analog clock) to study the flow of people over time through several spaces in New York City in the 1970s.

The associated books, City: Rediscovering the Center and the Social Life of Small Urban Spaces are masterpieces in the study of social interaction in specific locations.

Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

The larger related work, City, ranges more widely to include sidewalks and the struggle between pedestrians seeking seating and property owners who want them to roost elsewhere.

City: Rediscovering the Center

Uptime Institute

I had an interesting discussion with Deborah Grove about the ways social media impacts the costs of computing and the efforts to “green” IT by making servers and networks more power efficient.  Social media is a growing segment of all the data stored and processed on earth.  But social media has different properties than previous classes of data like transactions and documents.  Some social media is more resource intensive than others (a YouTube video consumes more energy to store, transmit and view than a Twitter tweet) but even light weight social media can cause heavier media types to be suddenly accessed in a high spike of demand, for example when a brief tweet points to a video that then drawn thousands of viewers.

More efficient IT is clearly important as computing consumes a growing slice of our power consumption.  Social media is both a new source of demand for compute resources (and by extension, power) and a possible method for gaining new efficiency as server farms are better tuned and maintained.  I would like to see major resource consuming services like YouTube and Google surface the costs of computing more.  While google, for example, reports how many fractions of a second it takes for them to return your search results, it would be useful to see how many shot glasses of diesel fuel were needed to power the servers that generated those results.  PCs and server farms do no have tailpipes spewing emissions but they are not carbon neutral: lots of coal, oil, gas, and uranium (and not nearly as much wind, hydo, and solar) are needed to keep the net alive.  Making the energy costs of computing more visible would be a good step toward IT conservation.  I know I have too many computers running all the time (short boot up times would help!) and should think more about the energy consumption impact of my information diet.

Podcast at the Uptime Institute.

NEW! Dr. Marc Smith On Social Media and High Density Computing 
The Internet is an example of Social Media. 

I would have been smarter in the interview if I read How Green is my Blog on Slate by Jacob Leibenluft which does a good job of digging into the real costs of moving a gigabyte around the net.  Still I wonder if all costs are being accounted for.  Storage and transmission are one set of computing energy costs, how much computation do different classes of data require?  The weather report takes more computation to deliver than the comics page.  A web crawl and index may cost more than a hosted data set that is only minimally analyzed or recalculated.  Some bytes change more often than others.   Not every byte has the same amount of energy expended to get it into its current state.

We’ll be updating this blog fairly often with pointers to interesting research and applications along with musings based on our own experiences. We hope you’ll find it informative, entertaining, enlightening, or some combination of the three.

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