The End

Well, here it is—post number 36 and the last for my Web 2.0 class. It has been a challenging and rewarding experience and has given me a few insights into all of those blogs I have previously taken for granted. I have a new appreciation for the mechanical ease of creating and posting to a blog, as well as the challenge of actually generating worthwhile content. I certainly hope that I have succeeded at the latter.


I won’t be continuing this particular blog, as I intended it to specifically compliment this class, a six-week exploration of Web 2.0 tools and techniques and their potential use in training and performance support. But I may well take up another blog; we’ll see. In the meantime, I wish to thank everyone who stopped by and read my efforts, and I feel special gratitude towards those who took the time to comment; the beginning blog can be a lonely (virtual) place, and the occasional calling card lets the author know that there really is an audience out there. I’m now much more inclined to let other bloggers know that, “DD was here—you have readers—keep up the good work!” I also must thank my family, who were very understanding as I sequestered myself in the office for so much of the summer, working on this class—I appreciate your support!

Now it is time to seal this time capsule. Let me wish us all happiness and meaning in our lives. And with a tip of my hat to my forever ago journalism teacher I'll finish with that traditional and mysterious conclusion to every story…

-30-

 

Week 6 in Review

Today is the last day of class for Summer Term “C”. This was a “wrap-up” week, with lots of discussion on the boards and a lot of playing with the products created by my classmates. In summary:

• I made approximately 35 posts to the Discussion Boards. I read everything my classmates posted through 0700CDT today.
• With the exception of two Facebook pages that wouldn’t let me in, I examined and explored all of my classmates produsage efforts. I have some very clever classmates and gleaned a lot of good ideas.
• I read all of my classmates blog posts through 2000CDT yesterday, and commented on several. I do wonder how many of us have caught the “blogging fever”—I will be monitoring for future activity.
• I made five blog posts of my own, including this one. Number six will follow shortly.

It’s been a very worthwhile class and I’m glad I did this. I hope to meet many of my classmates in person at some point. Good luck all!

Week 6 Prompts and Answers, part 3

“Reflect on what you have learned in the class and how you will use it professionally as both a lifelong learner and an instructional systems professional.”


How will I use this in my capacity as a lifelong learner? I feel bolder and more self-assured regarding contributing to a wiki, for example, and I have new appreciation for the actual importance of community participation for generation of new knowledge. I also think that I am now more sensitive to the subtlety and nuance of the community behind a discussion forum, and am more inclined to slow down and contribute there when I have something useful t give.

Nonetheless, I don’t know that my new insights will much change my behavior vis-à-vis my usual quest for information. I embrace my general role as a produser, but expect that I will still act as a harvester far more often as a sower. The fact is that I am still likely to consume 1000 wiki articles for every contribution I make to a topic.

Furthermore, I conclude this class every bit as much a private person as when I began. I cautiously joined LinkedIn, but can’t see myself joining Facebook. I’ve made a few tweets, but mostly about things that I think others might find useful (i.e., I don’t tweet about myself). I remain mindful of my electronic footprints.


How will I use this in my professional capacity as an ISD and performance improvement consultant? This has a two-part answer. First the fun part! I have an enhanced sense of the value of tools that permit a community of practice to document its knowledge and to generate new knowledge. I see the obvious value of a wiki within a CoP, as well as threaded discussion forums. I have new insight into blogging and responding to blog posts.

Perhaps the most personally useful experience is discovering the relative ease with which many of these tools can be employed. While some projects may call for professional skills to enhance the final production values, the fact is any designer can at least get a good trial use up and running as a test of concept in a specific situation.

The less satisfying part of the answer is that I will have to keep looking for the larger implications for design and learning. My present conceptualization is that Web 2.0 is currently best approached from the instructional strategy standpoint, and in some cases simply as mediation options. Yet I believe that incredible expansion of our general interconnectedness will soon lead to the creation of actual design models for Web 2.0; but we aren’t there yet. I am encouraged by the fact that serious academics are focused on describing and measuring different aspects of the phenomenon. I am confident that someone will soon do for Web 2.0 what John Keller did with motivation research and pull it all together in a useful theory with prescriptive value.

Week 6 Prompts and Answers, part 2

“Reflect on what you have learned in the class and how you will use it professionally as both a lifelong learner and an instructional systems professional.”


In part 1 I offered upon some of my macro-level reflections; on a more applied level I also learned that…

• …There are myriad tools for all manner of situations, and most of them are under constant revision either by their users or in response to their users suggestions and requests. If it occurs to me that, “I wish there was a way to…”, I will search for a tool because there is a decent chance someone is trying to solve the problem already.
• …Asynchronous guided discussion such as that used on the class discussion boards might take a bit of getting used to, but it can be a very interesting way to elicit the sharing and discussion of ideas. The two most obvious advantages are time-shifting and the irrelevance of location. The principle drawbacks as I experienced them are that it can be difficult to maintain a lively exchange when it is asynchronously stretched over a long period of time, the absence of body-language cues can make it challenging to “hear” the tone of a comment, and it can be difficult to interpret lack of follow-up commentary (i.e. Was this comment irrelevant? Obvious? Uninteresting? Generally regarded as moronic? Or so profound that no one else has anything to add?)
• …Setting up a blog or a virtual group or a wiki or a Twitterfeed or a Facebook page or etcetera… is easy. Populating it with interesting/meaningful content is less so. Throwing the creative access portal open to participants is the new model—ten thousand people contributing to a common purpose means that some portion of it will be really good and will rise to the top.
• ...As with so many creative endeavors, it is real experience and effort that distinguishes the “best” exemplars from the dreck and dross. This brave new networked world may allow anyone to become a publisher, but talent and professionalism still shine. So if you genuinely feel inspired to do something then do not be deterred by all the others in the same arena—quality will show.
• ...Using the power of creative networking promises/threatens to be transformative on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. To loosely paraphrase a blogger I follow, five-billion of us are in the process of joining in with what heretofore five-hundred-million of us have been doing. This is exciting in terms of creativity, but terrifying in terms of demand upon finite resources.

Okay, I guess the “how will I use this stuff” will be in part 3.

Week 6 Prompts and Answers, part 1

“Reflect on what you have learned in the class and how you will use it professionally as both a lifelong learner and an instructional systems professional."


I learned (or had reaffirmed) that...

• ...Humans are so social that every tool and technology will be explored for pro-social uses. Computers were invented to crunch big numbers and the internet originated in an effort to improve the survivability of the U.S. Military’s networked radar systems; but look how we use them. (500,000,000 active users of Facebook!?!) We tend to describe Web 2.0 in terms of participation, but the better word may be sharing.
• ...A power-law distribution is an amazing thing. I long ago adopted the Pareto Principle as a valuable lens through which to view organizational behavior. But the related PLD is a mind-blowing extension!
• ...Once you take the plunge and set you thoughts out there in a public blog, it is really (really) nice to have readers. I have to say that my posts that required the most contemplation and effort seemed not to garner any comments. They tended to be the ones where I tried on old hats in sociology, economics, and anthropology. At least I had fun. (A liberal arts education is its own reward!)
• ...Even though I often suspect that we’re all going to hell in a handcart, Benkler makes a strong and reassuring case that all this connectedness is good for society, that it promotes democracy and inhibits corruption. (My immediately previous blog post notes that Twitter and SMS were harnessed to fight election fraud this week in Kenya.)
• ...Even more than I had suspected, privacy is undergoing a distressing transformation from basic expectation if not foregone conclusion to a highly-qualified concept that is almost theoretical. When all aspects of modern life--your work and play, your location, your history, everything you’ve written and much of what you’ve said—is all internetworked, then only your thoughts are private. (And I’m sure that even that realm is under assault.)
• ...Produsage is shaking up the old information infrastructure in some very interesting ways. The recording and movie industries, as well as the publishing houses, are trying desperately to throttle what new technology makes possible and how it is used. They are going to lose, at least so far as their old ways of doing things. They are under pressure to evolve or die.
• ...The ease of producing coupled with the never-ending news cycle has led to the amateurization of much of our modern news media. We are gaining lots of eyes and ears for collecting news, but we are losing the hard-won professionalism and responsibility that characterized much of the journalism profession of my youth. The recent Shirley Sherod incident should cause us all to cringe.
• ...The most significant legal decisions of the next ten years will have to do with ownership of personal data. The bottom line will be, who owns “you”? What do you have to “give up” in order to benefit and participate in networked society? (Okay, I didn’t “learn” this so much as surmise it.) Before the next year is out, I predict that some data aggregator will attempt to sue someone for providing false information in registering to use some Web 2.0 tool.
• ...I agree with boyd that we can best serve our children by preparing them for the networked world rather than trying to protect them from it.
• ...My classmates are very smart and insightful. I really enjoyed reading their blogs (yes, really!) and I learned so much from their responses to the produsage assignment—this is the point where I wish the class could meet and debrief it all. I’ve seen some very clever ideas that I wish to learn to emulate.
• Okay, here’s an embedded measurement: if you made it this far, give me a “high-five” or an “Amen” (depending upon how southern you are) in the comments section. Come on, help me find out if this has been a game of solitaire.

Part 2: How I think I’ll use all this….

I'm going to Twitter on you....

This story in the Christian Science Monitor relates that Twitter and Short Messaging Service were used as formal monitoring tools in Kenya's national elections earlier today.  Democracy advocates set up a program called Uchaguzi to allow citizens to report on conditions, good or bad, at polling stations across the country.

The CSM reports that the election went well, due in part to the fact that anyone with a mobile phone was able to serve as a poll monitor.

Week 5 in Review

This has frankly been a challenging week. I discovered on Friday that I would have to generate a “produsage plan B”, so the weekend has been more intense than usual with this class.


In summary,

• I read everything posted to the message boards by 2115 today. I made 15 posts.
• I made seven posts to my blog.
• I read my classmates blog posts through Friday.
• I planned and launched a Twitter-stream and a Google Group in support of a Boy Scout Troop. This involved negotiation with the church that sponsors the Troop and members of the Troop Committee who are expected to be significant participants.

Week 5 Prompts and Answers

How do issues such as authorship, copyright, and open access impact your desire, ability, and willingness to engage in produsage, both personally and professionally?


It really depends upon the situation. As an independent instructional designer I am very comfortable with “work for hire” situations in which my product will carry the client’s logo and copyright. However, I also take “pride of authorship” in my creations and seethed for a very long time once when a superior inserted his name as first-author on a report I had created. I’m also comfortable with projects where my effort is followed by that of editors and graphic artists and so on—I have tremendous respect for what they do. But then again I also had a project where someone made bizarre changes after my part was done, and it left me flabbergasted. So one would think that open-access would give me heartburn. Except that I have worked on collaborative product that were really fun, and I have contributed to meaningful work that carries no one’s name. I guess it is both my expectations going into a project or effort and the prevailing social norms that together set the tone.

In an environment where individual attribution is the norm, then I desire my by-line. In situations where anonymity is perceived as serving the greater good, then I can be content to contribute uncredited. The problems would arise when the norms/expectations and the attribution policy get crossed. Just as I could be angered to find that my name had fallen off of my work when authorship credit is the standard, I would be mortified to find only my name on a group project, or in a community where attribution is not expected.

"Social Media and Web 2.0 in Government" - Website

The U.S. Federal government has a website dedicated to helping federal, state, and local agencies build and maintain quality websites.  The site offers this about Web 2.0:

"Social Media and Web 2.0 define activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and content creation. Social media tools use the "wisdom of crowds" to collaboratively connect online information. Through social media, people or groups can create, organize, edit, comment on, combine, and share content. Social media and Web 2.0 use many technologies and forms, including RSS and other syndicated web feeds, blogs, wikis, photo–sharing, video–sharing, podcasts, social networking, social bookmarking, mashups, widgets, virtual worlds, microblogs, and more."

The site is a wealth of documentation of best practices for various media.  Check it out, especially if you find yourself working in the federal environment.

Why MySpace is Different from Old-Fashioned Public Space

This week we’ve read another interesting piece by danah boyd* from UC-Berkley, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life”. boyd examines how today’s teens are coming of age in a very different kind of public space than did their parents, and she identifies four properties that are particular to being in a “networked public”:

• Persistence of communication data;
• Searchability of that data;
• Replicability of data with perfect fidelity; and
• Invisible audiences, meaning that expressions can be viewed across time and space.

She notes that, in theory, the potential audience for any personal expression that makes it into networked public space is essentially everybody, everywhere, from now on. This of course is part of what freaks out the parents of youth who use social media; adults are fearful that teenagers will fail to appreciate that, despite the sometimes clever tricks used to hide or disguise information, anything they commit to the internet may be connectable to them forever. boyd also allows that even some adults are slow to come to this realization.

But boyd states that this is the world in which the youth of today are going to be living in as adults, and that rather than try to temporarily protect them via heavy-handed restrictions we can better serve them by helping them make informed use of social media. She even suggests that adults can learn a thing or two from teens as they experience living in a mediated public space.

I will be recommending this paper to parents of young teens as they begin their own forays into their networked public space.


*boyd, danah (2007) “Why youth (heart) social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life.” MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning—Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Is Your Phone Spying on You?….

"We found that not only users, but developers as well, don't know what's happening in their apps, even in their own apps….”


An AP report carried in the San Francisco Chronicle states that approximately 25% of I-phone apps and 50% of Android apps contain code that harvests users’ information and surreptitiously sends it off to third-parties. Associated Press reporter Jordan Robertson says, “The data can include full details about users' contacts, their pictures, text messages and Internet search histories. The third parties can include advertisers and companies that analyze data on users.”

The data-harvesting code is hidden within scripts that allow apps to run advertising. The code is typically written by the third parties that facilitate ads and then provided to app developers who often do not realize they are including “extra” functions in their products.

Facebook is Good for You. Maybe.

“Social support has been linked to lower blood pressure, and a diverse collection of contacts is associated with better immune system functioning.”

A story posted to Scientific American’s website today cites the research of a psychology professor at BYU that indicates a large and active social network is positively correlated with good health. The study did not specifically examine the effects of online social media, however the author of the study speculates that such connections probably help, but not as much as face-to-face interaction.

"Unmanaged Possibilities Become Probabilities"

"I think in a few years’ time we’ll see an entirely new focus regarding social networking and business: It will be considered to have been a serious wrong turn…"  David Scott, CIO/Fortune 100 IT professional, author: I.T. WARS: Managing the Business-Technology Weave in the New Millennium.

Here is a pretty good take on the issue of social media in the workplace, as viewed from the corporate Information Technology chair.  Scott doesn't reject such use, but he does make a good case for why it must be managed.  When an employee is telling the boss why, for instance, Facebook will be benign or even beneficial  at work, this is what the boss is hearing in the other ear from the Chief Information Officer.

Week 4 in Review

What a week! Interesting reading and a tropical storm warning to boot!

In summary,

• I read everything posted to the message boards by 2215CDT today. I made eleven posts, participating most heavily in the “Informal Learning, Expertise, and Certification” thread.
• I made five posts to my blog. The most fun, on “Internet Sabbath”, stemmed from an interesting NPR interview. The most intense, "A High-Tech Lynching, Redux”, gave very minor vent to my frustration with the current state of journalism and its interaction with the blogosphere. (And then one of my journalism heroes, Daniel Schorr, died Friday at 93. I feel that we have really lost the thread on something important. and I feel sad.)
• I read all of my classmates’ blog posts through 1900 CDT today. I’ve got some sharp peers, and I enjoy seeing what they have for us.
• I enjoyed writing my “Web 2.0 Community Observations” paper. I had to whittle it down to the max length. (Seeing as it is a quarter of the overall grade for the class, I sure hope I was on the right track!) I understand this was a new assignment—it was interesting and seemed worthwhile, and I recommend trying it again next cycle.
• I explored ideas for my Produsage assignment, due in two weeks. That one feels a bit slippery so far. Should be interesting.

Week 4 Prompts and Answers

How do you judge the value of expertise on the Web?
Interesting question. I’m known (with smiles) in my family as the guy to ask the comparative rating questions, (“Is A better than B for application X?”) not because I have first hand knowledge but because I am a research hound. The level of effort I direct toward such investigations is proportionate to the importance (often “value” or “cost”) of the decision, but can be skewed positively by personal interest in the issue. (Want to talk sailboats?)

When researching purchases, I frequently haunt the Consumer Reports website, or Epinions, or the CNET forums, etcetera. I like it when I find a site with “satisfaction ratings”, such as those at Amazon. I also derive comfort from the law of large numbers; when I go to NewEgg and find that 900 people have rated a hard drive and left prose descriptions of their rationale, I tend to trust the overall summary of results. I do believe in the wisdom of crowds. I pay attention to the contrarians—I want to know why they are outliers, know to what they were paying attention. I value “Real Name” reviews, wherein verified users stand behind their statements.

When seeking non-purchase information, I try to find sources that have "trust rating" mechanisms, as these can serve as a combination of peer review and as indicators of the experience others have had with this source.  A long history of participation at a durable site can lend credibility.

Does it differ from your notion of expertise in face-to-face settings?
Somewhat, in that with F2F situations I more directly undertake to qualify the “expert”. This is easier in areas in which I too have some expertise—I can probe for edges in my “advisor’s” experience. When I’m out of my content area, I often ask specific questions about the “down side” of a product or action being recommended. Sales-minded individuals are often only prepared to speak to the up-side of their recommendation, whereas someone genuinely comfortable in their expertise can usually address trade-offs.

A High-tech Lynching, Redux

This week’s prompt centers on how to judge the value of expertise on the web. I’ll address that directly in my next post, but at the moment I am thinking about Shirky’s description of the “publish, then filter” approach of Web 2.0 and the current fallout from the Shirley Sherrod story.


In case you’ve managed to miss it, some time ago Ms. Sherrod, a mid-level administrator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, gave a speech to the NAACP in which she recounted coming to grips with and rising above her own sense of racism. It has been characterized in whole as a redemption story. This week a partisan political blogger named Andrew Breitbart posted an excerpt of a tape of that speech, edited to give the impression that Ms. Sherrod proudly espouses racist views. The blogosphere lit up, the mainstream press caught wind and joined in, and in no time the USDA pressured her to resign, which she did. It isn’t clear if the White House dictated the USDA stance.

No one was interested in poor Ms. Sherrod’s insistence that meaning and context had been edited right out of her speech. Then someone actually watched the entire recording. Now the Secretary of the agency has personally apologized to Ms. Sherrod and offered her another position, the President of the nation has commiserated with her by telephone, and the various media outlets are mildly embarrassed that they ran with a story originating in a blog and never conducted their journalistic due diligence.

In an interesting live Q&A exchange today on the website of the Washington Post, Mark Potok, Director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, was responding to a stream of questions from produsers on the web. One participant brought to mind the media attention around the confirmation hearing of now Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, opining, “I always thought that Clarence Thomas overhyped the term ‘hi-tech’ lynching" even though it caught on and seemed to work for him at the time. But wasn't what Andrew Breitbart, Fox News and others on the Right did to Shirley Sherrod on Monday a real hi-tech lynching? And for a day the Obama Administration joined the mob by requiring Sherrod's resignation from the Agriculture Department. Internet and cable technology combined with hyperbole were used to create, loop and spread a heavily edited video tape falsely insinuating that Sherrod is a ‘racist’.”

“Publish, then filter” may be the way of Web 2.0, but it isn’t the way of responsible journalism. Journalists aren’t supposed to join the lynch-mob. So how do we judge the value of expertise on the web? In the case of journalism, I neither value nor trust any news organization that puts getting the story first ahead of getting the story right. One upon a time, the threat of libel and slander lawsuits made prudent individuals and newspapers check their facts before engaging their pens and presses. I wonder if this case will inspire a closer examination of how those laws might apply to bloggers?

Social Media and the Workplace

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has just published an article suggesting that “…employers who have well-defined social networking policies shouldn’t fret about the loss of productivity or corporate data.” It suggests that for many professionals, social networking tools can serve professional networking purposes.


The article notes that, per a March 2010 survey by TrendMicro, 24% of workers in the U.S. visit social networking sites from their corporate networks. However, citing a 2009 study from Ball State University, the work-time spent on Facebook pales compared to that spent on smoking breaks. (As a complete aside, I’m having a hard time thinking of anybody I know that is a daily smoker. Huh…. The BSU figure must be an individual rather than cumulative comparison.)

Thoughtful network-use policy is touted as the key to smooth integration (“co-existence”?) between social media and workplace expectations. “As long as employees know the rules, hopefully through their social media policies, they know what they can and can’t be doing and should and shouldn’t be doing on those social networks,” said Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR, blogger and author of the book Tweet This: Twitter for Business (The P3 Business, 2010).”

To add my own two-cents—for each individual workplace this is either disruptive or not, beneficial or not. Each manager is responsible for the allocation and use of resources, including both employee time and network use. I suppose that if I was concerned about the amount of work-time employees devoted to social media sites and they retorted that they were engaged in professional networking of potential benefit to the organization, then I might simply ask them to “friend” me. That might then help me make an informed decision vis-à-vis “beneficial”, “disruptive”, or “benign”.

The "Internet Sabbath"

"We turn off the household modem, and we don't have smart phones, so therefore we can't get [in] our inboxes the whole weekend. We can't do Web surfing. We can still call, we can still text — but we're not really texting addicts," he explains. "We really enter this other zone, and it's wonderful."  William Powers in an NPR interview.

Powers is that author of Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.  He addresses the problem of information overload, and makes suggestions for how the uber-connected modern netizen can achieve some balance.  One of the tactics used in his family is the "Internet sabbath"--they schedule regular "disconnected" time.  Powers says that, "Connectedness serves us best when it is balanced by a bit of disconnectedness."

Think that the issue of constant connectedness is overstated?  The Vail School District in Southern Arizona has installed mobile wifi routers on school buses running longer routes.  School children cursed with long bus rides but blessed with laptop computers or smart phones can now complete homework assignments and catch up on e-mail.  Or they can just update their Facebook pages.
 
Speaking of which, Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook now has half-a-billion (yes, with a "b") active users.  If only he had $8 for every user... wait, he does!  His "thank you" post is on FB, of course.

Week 3 in Review

Whew. Sunday night already?  Okay, short and sweet—here is what I accomplished this week:

• I read everything posted to the message board by 2100CDT today. I contributed 13 posts of my own, including starting the “Nuts & Bolts” section, which seems to be serving as my own personal help-desk.
• I started a Twitter account, but don’t yet have a vision for how I want to use it. I’m following two people and three organizations. I’m not sure that this is my medium, but I’ll give it a fair try over the next three weeks.
• I made six posts to my blog, counting this one. The posts that took the most energy to create are not the ones drawing comments—I’m not sure what to thing about that. I feel a little like I’m singing opera in the shower.
• I put an embarrassingly large amount of time into following three forums. For the one in which I am an “active participant”, I find myself putting a large effort into researching my topics before I post. This is a lot like work!
• I’m almost three days behind on reading my classmates’ blogs. Quite frankly the time went into the forums I am following for the Web 2.0 Community Observations assignment.

But hey, I also tore-down and rebuilt an irrigation pump this weekend! (We need rain….)

Week 3 Prompts and Answers

• What uses might a collaborative wiki or blog have in your chosen (current or desired) work environment?

At present I am consulting to two clients. I believe that each of them is too small to successfully create and maintain a usable wiki. One of them makes significant use of day-labor, where literacy itself is not always assured, never mind internet access. For the other business I am actually speaking to them right now about trying a blog! I think that the main initial use would be as a combination of community service and indirect advertising.

• How would they support learning and/or performance?

I think that client education may in fact be the initial goal--helping potential clients figure out what they seek, and equipping them with the information they need to select a provider.

• What would be the design and implementation challenges if management tried to do this? What would be the design and implementation challenges of a user-initiated effort?

There are presently seven licensed professionals in the business, each acting as an independent contractor, so for the purposes of this proposal they are collectively management and users in one. All of them are sufficiently strong writers so as to be capable of contributing positively to a blog. The business already has a website to cross-link with a blog. Should they decide to try it, they will likely find it easy to each contribute a post each week or so. I would likely be asked to serve as “blog-master” to maintain standards and schedule.

We will likely try this in a few weeks.

Revisiting “Shakespeare in the Bush”

In 1966 Laura Bohannan, an anthropologist from the University of Illinois, published a wonderful account of the interplay between cultures and context. In “Shakespeare in the Bush”, she related her experience of telling the story of “Hamlet” to elders of the Tiv tribe in West Africa. (If you go right now and read her account, it will be one of the nicest treats you afford yourself this month. Go ahead, you can come back here when you are finished. Really, go!)

Chapter 8 of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks is entitled Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical. He states (pp.8-9) that, “…Culture is created through communication among human beings, …it exerts some force on what they can say to each other and how it will be received, and…the parameters of a culture as a platform for making meaning in interaction among human beings change(s) over time with use. How cultural moves are made, by whom, and with what degree of perfect replication or subtle (and not so subtle) change, become important elements in determining the rate and direction of cultural change.” Benkler’s assertion that it is culture that serves as the platform for making meaning of interactions brought Bohannan back to me through the intervening years. As the expansion of a networked existence brings more and more discrete cultures into regular contact with each other, it will be fascinating to see how cultural differences in understanding and interpretation are bridged. Bohannan thought that she was telling a story that was culturally universal in meaning, but found that it had subtlety and nuance that only a listener from a culture different from her own could point out to her.

Benkler further states that, “There are limits on the degree to which culture can actually control those who inhabit it. Those degrees depend to a great extent on the relative difficulty or ease of seeing through culture, of talking about it with others, and of seeing other alternatives or other ways of symbolizing the possible and the desirable” (p. 17). Okay, but in the case of Bohannan’s Tiv elders, that degree seemed pretty extreme. In the next ten years we will bring together in daily communication different languages, cultural frameworks, and political systems, and this is going to be interesting. We no doubt live in quite exciting times.

It would be so nice if something made sense for a change....

“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.” Alice in Wonderland (& DD in the first eight pages of Benkler).

This week we are again reading from The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom by Yochai Benkler. Chapter 8 begins with a forced march in a dark forest; take from me, the first third is a nearly impenetrable treatise on modern culture and political meaning that boils down to ontological nihilism. Suddenly, a ray of light through the canopy and Benkler tosses us an interesting proposition—Mattel’s Barbie as metaphor for modern culture. It gets much better from there, but I'll get back to that in another post.


Benkler also introduces us to the Federal Trademark Dillution Act (1995) that incredibly served to protect trademark owners “…from any use that dilutes the meaning that the brand owner has attached to its own mark.” He goes on to note that “…It can be entirely clear to consumers that a particular use does not come from the owner of the brand, and still, the owner has a right to prevent this use.”*  Sticking with Barbie for a moment, I believe this was the grounds on which Mattel sued an artist several years ago for making custom costumes for the doll that portrayed the icon in dire social straits that the manufacturer didn’t approve of—this in spite of the fact that the artist paid Mattel’s asking price for the dolls and then resold them (in extremely low volume) with the alternative outfits and makeup, clearly labeled as an aftermarket modification. The modifications disturbed the “meaning” that Mattel had crafted and marketed for Barbie.  Interestingly if not surprisingly, Mattel's protest gave the concept enough attention that others began to treat their poor Barbies in exactly the manner that the manufacturer protested.

Benkler’s justified concern is that “…this legal change marks a major shift in the understanding of the role of law in assigning control for cultural meaning generated by market actors.” More specifically, he is concerned that this may undercut the possibilities for new cultural examination, definition, and expansion made possible by new technologies in the hands of regular citizens.

The Electronic Frontiers Foundation** this week carried a report of a lawsuit in which the Omega Watch Company contested the right of Costco to purchase genuine Omega wristwatches overseas and then sell them in the United States at below Omega’s authorized U.S. price. Omega didn’t claim violation of any marketing agreement, but instead claimed violation of copyright. In essence, Omega asserts that copyright alone confers to them the authority to prevent Costco from legally purchasing genuine merchandise and then reselling it at a price of their own choosing. This theory seem to be the companion bookend to Antidilution Act mentioned above.

Together these arguments seem to reflect a (panicky) pespective that place corporatism above capitalism, the "big media" version of popular culture above the emerging one. You can buy it, but you can't resell it, change it, or improve upon it without our permission. These are strange times.


*Since Benkler's work was published, Congress enacted the Trademark Dillution Revision Act of 2006 to remedy confusion resulting from the FTDA.  Most germane to the issue at hand, the revised act substitutes a "fair use" defense for the "non-commercial use" defense in the original act.
**The EFF is a nonprofit organization chartered to champion the digital rights of individuals. Anyone concerned about the future of the World Wide Web and about the use of Web 2.0 tools ought to give them a look.

Listening to the Village Elders

I had an anthropology professor named Dudley DeGroot, who had spent a considerable period of time living with the Djuka Indians in Suriname, South America. He was an interesting teacher, and from some of his stories I received an early introduction to ethnographic technique. I remember a couple of tales that included themes of cultural transmission in general and reverence for elders in particular.

Of course, much of the cultural writing in our own society for the past forty years has centered on strain that the rise of the nuclear family placed upon the role of our elders, and upon questions about the relevance of old “wisdom” in a time of new “information”. And while it is the job of the young to alter their culture in new ways, the advent of first the world-wide-web and then Web 2.0 tools has given their users a capability to change the whole world in ways that make it nearly unrecognizable to the elderly. Importantly, while Shirky notes that having a computer is now tantamount to owning a printing press, we do risk losing the voices of our older citizens who aren’t poised to be produsers.

But NPR’s “All Things Considered” had a report this afternoon about nonagenarians Harry and Barbara Cooper and their website, “The OGs” (for “Original Grandparents”). With help from their granddaughters their posts and videos are a hit; their website is currently getting so much traffic that their host is struggling under the traffic.

I am pleased to see a story that shows that this brave new web doesn’t have to leave Poppop and Grandma behind.

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?..."

The Shadow, with some help from social media, knows!

National Public Radio carried a report on how debt collectors and skip tracers are using social media to glean asset and location information. A credit collection attorney relates that his agents will "friend" their targets to collect personal information:

"If you ask defense attorneys, they'll tell you that what I do is underhanded, sneaky and completely uncalled for. If you ask my colleagues — the plaintiff attorneys that collect these debts — we're laughing," he says. "We think it's a wonderful thing."

By all indications at this time, you cannot use social media and fly under the radar.

Week 2 in Review

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, thank you for asking. How are you?

I have the unnerving feeling that we are running a marathon at a miler’s pace. I tried out a different strategy this week, completing all of the reading before joining the Discussion Board. As a result, I avoided the awkwardness of weighing in on a topic only to discover later that the authors have done a better job of making the same point, however I instead arrived fashionably late to a well-populated discussion in which my points had already been made (again, probably more eloquently) by my colleagues. :-(

So what did I accomplish this week?

• Completed all of the assigned reading. I enjoyed all of it, though my progress with Benkler was particularly slow and I’m not sure why.
• I read all of the Discussion Board entries posted before 0900CDT today. I contributed five posts, with particular effort directed towards the topics of the internet as democracy and on reframing “lurkers” as “customers”.
• I read all of the class blog entries and comments posted before 1400CDT today. I also followed all of the links and watched all of the videos. (I don’t know if I can keep that up—some of the bloggers are pretty prolific in their use of links.) I lost count but believe that I offered in the neighborhood of fifteen or so comments on various blogs. I committed myself to helping make sure that everyone knows that they really are being heard (“read”), but am also unwilling to simply make “David was here” comments. Of course, sometimes you just can’t think of something substantive to add….
• I researched Diigo, Flickr, DimDim, Utube and some others that escape me at the moment. I joined LinkedIn and (with trepidation) Twitter. I hope the latter is not the time-waster I fear it is….
• I investigated several blogs of school teachers using Web 2.0 in their classrooms, and applied to join a Ning Network of such. I originally thought that might be the W2.0 community in which I would actively participate for the community observations assignment, but they haven’t yet approved my membership so I moved to a different topic.
• I selected three discussion forums to follow, and joined one. They are unrelated to education/training/performance, but are of current interest to me. More to come….

Okay, gotta go—the final game of the World Cup is in overtime. ;-)

Week 2 Prompts (and Again, My Responses)

One of the reading assignments for this week was “Produsage: Towards a broader framework for user-led content creation”, by Axel Bruns (2007). Bruns introduces the term “produsage” as “…a new hybrid form of simultaneous production and usage…”, and describes four key characteristics:

1) “Distributed generation of content by a wide community of participants”;
2) “Fluid movement of produsers between roles”;
3) Perpetually evolutionary, unfinished “artefacts”;
4) Right to work on artefacts based on merit rather than ownership of copyright.

This week’s prompts from the instructor center on Brun’s term:

• How might the concept of produsage be applied in your life (personal and/or professional) as it stands today?
• Are you already a produser? If yes, what do you do? If no, why not?

The boring truth is that I am only this week really taking the first steps to becoming a produser per the full definition, although I have perhaps experienced small elements here and there. Perhaps I have been a proto-produser in my professional life. To explain using the four principles listed above, I have certainly worked on many collaborative projects, sometimes with team-members drawn from near and far for the expertise, but almost always with pretty well-defined roles. And while I have had projects that had iterations, they were always a series of editions, each of which had a period in which it was “finished” and official. Finally, every project I have worked on had very serious attention to copyright and permission to use.

While I sense a sea-change due to the Web 2.0 tools and philosophy I am learning about, I cannot yet say that I have effectively combined my “user” and “producer” roles.

Turning Social Networking Data into Information

In The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom, Yochai Benkler spends some time talking about network topology. Citing Ravi Kumar and Gary Flake (et al), he states: “Early work done in the IBM Almaden Research Center on how link structure could be used as a search technique showed that by mapping densely interlinked sites without looking at content, one could find communities of interest that identify very fine-grained topical connections, such as Australian fire brigades or Turkish students in the United States. A later study out of the NEC Research Institute more formally defined the interlinking that would identify a "community" as one in which the nodes were more densely connected to each other than they were to nodes outside the cluster by some amount. The study also showed that topically connected sites meet this definition. For instance, sites related to molecular biology clustered with each other - in the sense of being more interlinked with each other than with off-topic sites - as did sites about physics and black holes. (p.25)


This brought to mind a 2009 episode of NOVA, PBS’s award winning television program. The show is called “The Spy Factory”, and it addresses present day surveillance as conducted by the National Security Agency, or NSA. (Also lovingly known by many of its employees as “No Such Agency”.) Chapter 5 of the program is entitled “Intelligence Overload” (begins at the 40.56 point of the video here); it describes how the Agency is vacuuming up absolutely stunning volumes of digital data and using massive computer resources to identify the kinds of topical connections that IBM researched. When trying to identify and track terrorists, they are engaged in the kind of community identification that NEC studied. Finding legal identities and physical locations follow virtual identification and location.

It is really quite amazing, and potentially frightening if your concerns run towards the Orwellian. If you want to lose some sleep, check out this companion article to the NOVA program: .

The “Invisible Hand” of the Network

This week’s class reading assignments included a chapter from The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom by Yochai Benkler. After reading Benkler’s explanations as to why the internet neither devolves into overwhelming bable, nor becomes an echo chamber that only knows a handful of notes, I am amused at the clever title the author chose for his work. I believe that Benkler very intentionally plays upon economist Adam Smith’s seminal work, (called in short-form) The Wealth of Nations. Smith perceived an “invisible hand” at work in free-market economies, a force that serves the best interests of society even as individuals pursue their own best interests. I think that Benkler too infers some wondrous balancing mechanisms woven into the warp and woof of the “networked Public Sphere”, and he gets a lot of mileage out of what I learned as “the Pareto Principle”, but he calls by the more encompassing term “a Power Law Distribution”. I came away reasonably satisfied with his fascinating description as to why a highly networked public has a democratizing effect.


As a practical matter, I think that Benkler also offers nice reasoning for how the network can at the same time be both nimble and robust. In the summary on this point he states, “We are seeing a newly shaped information environment, where indeed few are read by many, but clusters of moderately read sites provide platforms for vastly greater numbers of speakers than were heard in the mass-media environment. Filtering, accreditation, synthesis, and salience are created through a system of peer review by information affinity groups, topical or interest based. These groups filter the observations and opinions of an enormous range of people, and transmit those that pass local peer review to broader groups and ultimately to the polity more broadly, without recourse to market-based points of control over the information flow. Intense interest and engagement by small groups that share common concerns, rather than lowest-common-denominator interest in wide groups that are largely alienated from each other, is what draws attention to statements and makes them more visible. This makes the emerging networked public sphere more responsive to intensely held concerns of a much wider swath of the population than the mass media were capable of seeing, and creates a communications process that is more resistant to corruption by money.” (p.21)

I like his notion of nested peer review by affinity groups promoting viewpoints to national prominence, even as it also confers some “resistance to corruption”. Benkler has offered up some strong stuff, and there is a lot to chew on. I will post again shortly on another topic from this work that I enjoyed, on network topography.

The View from the Classroom....

Last week I found myself somewhat distressed that we seem to have ample anecdotes regarding the use of Web 2.0 tools yet models for their use for instruction and performance improvement are elusive.  I'm trying to get past individual displays of creativity in favor of actual models and strategies.  I haven't picked up a strong scent yet, but I'm hunting.  On the assumption that the lesson plans of teachers teaching with W2.0 rather than about W2.0 may offer instructional design insights, I've gone searching amongst the classroom educators.  Here are two promising links that are relevant to the instructional uses of Web 2.0:


“Classroom 2.0” (http://www.classroom20.com/ ) is a Ning Network that is presented as “…the social network for those interested in Web 2.0 and Social Media in education”. Posting privileges follow membership (my application is pending), but lurkers have read-access to the forums. I have hopes for the nascent (at present) discussion of constructivism.

“Mrs. Muñoz's Class Blog” (http://techmunoz.edublogs.org/) describes one teacher’s attempts to incorporate Web 2.0 in the classroom and lesson plans. Yesterday’s post, Reflection: A Year Of Implementing Web 2.0 Tools In My Classroom, offers a brief description of the tools she used during the past school year and outlines lessons learned. Good stuff!

Everyone Who Wants It Already Has It?

Whew, I finally finished reading chapter 7 of The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom by Yochai Benkler. It was a bit of a slog at times, but definitely worthwhile. I will comment on it here later after a bit more reflection.


In the meantime, I came across an interesting post from Wired-dot-com citing an impressive fall-off in new-user registrations for Facebook—7.8 million+ in May, followed by only 320,000 or so in June. By my hasty calculation that is a drop of 95% plus change!

Ryan Singel, the post’s author, notes that Facebook took a bit of a public flogging during this period over their sleight-of-hand regarding privacy settings, and that certainly could be giving potential new users pause. But the more intriguing conjecture, as Singel puts it, is “…there’s also the possibility that almost every American who has any interest in joining Facebook already has.”

That would represent one very fast ride to (U.S.) market saturation!



http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/facebook-fatigue/

Week 1 in Review

Note: This course requires some weekly bookkeeping in the form of a “participation post”. If you somehow can to this blog through the side-door and are not a member of the class, you can confidently skip the rest of this post! Have a wonderful Independence Day!

Whew, what a week! I don’t think we are asked to actually tally our hours invested, and that is good because I can’t count that high. But to be fair, I spent an obscene amount of time just researching blog-engines and RSS-readers and other nuts-and-bolts stuff. It reflects on me, not on the task. Anyway, here is the itemization for “How I spent my summer, episode 1”:

• I read the all 288 of the Discussion Board posts time-stamped before1400CDT today.
• I made 10 posts of my own, but two of those were an introduction and the URL to this blog. Of the remaining 8, about five benefited from real blood, sweat, and tears, and the other three were pretty spontaneous. One was too spontaneous and clearly didn’t make sense to anyone but me. I didn’t concentrate anywhere particular, as this is all new to me. This asynchronous, text-based communication is going to take some getting used to. At least for me, the lack of voice inflection and other body-language cues really impoverishes the communication.
• Counting this one, I made six posts to my blog. That is six more than my previous lifetime total.
• I read all of my classmates’ blog posts up through Friday night. (That’s assuming I set up my feed-reader correctly—I think I got everybody.) I did not respond to anyone’s posts on their blogs, and that is the source of my resolution for next week—I’m going to make a particular effort to let each classmate know that we really are reading what they produce. Despite my effort to keep my ego in tight check, when I see “0 comments” I can’t help but wonder, (“Was this uninteresting? Did anybody read it? Am I in the wrong class?”) I’ve found that if you choose to write for others, you suddenly need them for validation. Jeez….

Okay, time to go fire up the grill and find the sparklers. DD.

Week 1 Prompts (and My Responses)

Each week the course instructor presents a set of prompts to be addressed within our blogs. We’re nearing the end of week 1, so here goes:

• What have been your prior experiences with Web 2.0 technologies?
• Do you consider yourself a leader or follower in this realm, or something else altogether? Why?
• Discuss what you hope to get out of this class.

Prior experience with Web 2.0 technologies: Pretty minimal experience with the technologies. No blog prior to this one, no pages on Facebook or MySpace, no Tweeting. Over the past few years I have posted the occasional question to a technical forum, usually in search of a solution to a computer problem. (I have never come away disappointed! That speaks to the obvious power of a good community of practice!) But in these cases I joined the forums exclusively to ask my question and to solicit technical wisdom from experts, and then I was done--my question would be my “post #1” and my last; the response would be someone’s “post #3,029”. While each forum was a “community of practice” for those wizards who participated every day, my own experience was more akin to schlepping over to Delphi to ask a question of the Oracle. I was a supplicant—I might be present within the virtual walls, but I couldn’t be considered a member of the community.

I have served as a respondent to queries a couple of times on a sailing forum for which I have forgotten the URL and my password, “paying it forward” when my experience and knowledge allowed me to provide (hopefully) helpful responses to someone else’s need for information or advice. But I just couldn’t maintain interest in continuous on-line chit-chat about something I would rather be out “doing”. However, I have ample experience with the zeitgeist of Web 2.0, for I have been an active contributing member of teams and associations and panels that formed around particular interests and that valued and encouraged collaboration and contribution of expertise and effort!

Leader, follower, something else. Why?: If “leaders” in Web 2.0 technology are those people who create wikis and forums and virtual social meeting venues, than I could in no way claim the title. If “followers” of Web 2.0 are individuals who follow Tweets and befriend bands on Facebook and otherwise simply enjoy the mechanisms others have brought forth but who do not champion them in any noticeable way, than that doesn’t describe me either. I must be something else.

While I have been an early-adopter for some technologies, the Web 2.0 tools have never been compelling for me; they have only rarely seemed to be what I “need”. The social media tools usually leave me wary or amused. I see so many people investing astonishing amounts of time into Facebook, or being irresponsible with personal information. (Or wasting large blocks of their employers’ time, or being irresponsible with other people’s information.) I know someone who claims just over 600 “friends” on Facebook; I say if you wouldn’t loan them fifty-bucks, then maybe they aren’t really friends. But I digress….

So what is the “something else”? Well, if the Web 2.0 leaders and followers can be equated to horticulturalists, then I’ve been a hunter-gatherer.

What do I want from this class?: Well, an “A” from the instructor plus some new and interesting colleagues would serve quite well, thank you very much. Okay, okay…my motivations for taking the course are pretty much threefold—first, I am an empiricist, perpetually curious and driven to understand things. This Web 2.0 stuff has made it inside my “bubble”, and now I want to take it apart and see why it ticks. The main lenses I possess through which to examine it are sociology, economics, and instructional systems. Much of it is already starting to make “sense”.

Second, I am by both nature and profession a problem-solver, and I am always open to learning to use a new and useful tool. If there are models and techniques for using Web 2.0 technologies to improve human and organizational performance and to solve social problems, I wish to add them to my repertoire. So, are there models and techniques?....

Finally, I am also a pragmatist. There is no avoiding that fact that casual familiarity with social media is becoming requisite to modern daily life—my adolescent children have told me so. And more important to me (since I am not yet in a position to retire to my sailboat and slip the lines) a professional familiarity with Web 2.0 will likely soon be a necessary (rather than merely desirable) qualification to independently practice my craft. You can’t be a lumberjack if you don’t take time to sharpen your saw.

I want to understand the “what” and “why” of Web 2.0, and I want to know enough of the “how” to either employ the tools and techniques myself or to be a savvy employer when I hire the skill-set.

(Thanks for reading. Have a great Independence Day weekend! May God continue to bless the U.S.A.! DD.)

(Latent) Communities of Practice

As mentioned in my previous entry, the requirements for this course include reading Clay Shirky’s text on organizing without organizations as well as participating in a discussion board. The instructor started a thread regarding “communities of practice”, particularly latent communities, stating and asking in part: Shirky claims that every web page is, effectively, a latent communities. Most will not develop into a community, but some will. Those that do become communities do so because of things like common interests , communication needs, and good timing. How does this observation/claim affect our work toward developing virtual learning communities? Below is the gist of my response, with some linked examples at the end.

I’m really enjoying Shirky’s text, and I’m having fun chewing on many of his observations and comments. But his musing that “…Every webpage is a latent community….” (p.102) seems like an aside. It is mildly philosophical, kind of like observing that in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time every automobile tire is a potential flat, but it really isn’t all that useful. The statement is true, but how does it guide your behavior? And of course Shirky does goes on to state that “…In almost all cases the community will remain latent...” for the reasons cited above—mismatches in interests or timing. I suspect that the real reason most web-pages do not progress to support realized rather than latent communities has to do with the idiosyncratic purposes and motivations of their creators.

But for our purposes of intentionally developing virtual learning communities, the key would seem to be making sure that we employ the proven tools in our instructional systems kit—in this case, needs assessment. In fact, Roger Kaufman’s tenacious insistence that we consider societal-level needs seems particularly appropriate when we set out to create communities. A proper needs assessment should inform our efforts regarding common interests, communication needs, as well as good timing, and should dramatically enhance the probability that our subsequent development labors are in fact filling a gap. From a design standpoint, knowing the answers to the questions, “Why are we doing this? What is the problem to which this might be the solution?” will go a long way toward supporting the success of our nascent learning community.

Beyond trying to make sure that we are addressing a “need” that is perceived by others beyond just ourselves, there are at least two other elements that Shirky hints can contribute to the successful formation of a community of practice: 1) setting up a clear mechanism to support dialog, and 2) embedding a way for participants to gain desirable recognition for their useful contributions. In the case of the latter, many communities offer ways to vote contributions “up” or “down”, or keep track of the total number of posts an individual has made. One of my favorite examples of weighting individual comments is found at “Krebs on Security”, whose host has a forum that tracks the ratio of favorable to unfavorable ratings and actually “hides” those with poor comment ratings, although they can still be read if you click on them. The wonderful effect is that the community effectively separates the virtual wheat from the chaff. See an example here http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/07/top-apps-largely-forgo-windows-security-protections/#comments . (As a complete aside, I encourage you to check out Brian’s series on skimmer fraud—there are multiple threads but the first one is here http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/01/would-you-have-spotted-the-fraud/ ; you will never approach an ATM without scrutiny again!)

"Groups and Society" and Web2.0

The graduate course that has inspired (i.e., “required”) this blog includes as required reading a very interesting text, Clay Shirkey’s “Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations” (http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/0143114948/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278023967&sr=1-2 ). The instructor’s requirement for this first week of class is the first four chapters, and by remarkable coincidence that is the extent of my progress to date. But let me hasten to note that my slower-than-usual pace is not because the book is tedious but rather because it is so enjoyable. The book begins with a fascinating true tale of how social media was used to form an interest-group/vigilante-mob to compel the return of a lost/stolen phone—that story alone is worth the price of the book. At each turn the author gives me something to reflect upon, then I begin to think of new issues and ideas that I might explore in this blog, and then I turn the page and Shirkey is there waiting for me. On the one hand it is very satisfying to feel so in synch with the author. On the other hand, he keeps taking the wind out of my sails when I find he has already covered my new insights. If I get into chapter five and find out that he addresses the topic of this particular post, I’m gonna be pissed.

The course also involves an online discussion forum, and one of my classmates started a new thread entitled “Groups and Society” and invites comments regarding a quote from Shirkey’s book. Well, for some reason the post sent me on what is probably a wild tangent (sorry Evan), but nonetheless a topic that has perplexed me about the incredible popularity of social media. I mean, who has time for Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of blogs? Don’t people have a life? Well,... maybe this is their life, or at least an important part of where they derive meaning in their lives…. Anyway, its possible that my musings were more appropriate for my blog, so here is what I posted on the class discussion board:

Evan’s post heading, “Groups and Society” recalls to mind two terms from classical sociology--Gemeinschaft (“community” or in this case, the “group”) and Gesellschaft (“society”). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinschaft_and_Gesellschaft  for a mediocre explanation. In brief, the terms speak to the association between individuals, what binds them to each other. Gemeinschaft was often used to describe rural communities where everyone knows each other (and each other’s business), and where social values and mores are largely agreed to. The individuals in a Gemeinschaft community tend to have common interests and viewpoints. Gesellschaft was used to describe urban communities that are characterized by relative anonymity and higher levels of privacy, and hence less perceived community support (and control—Gesellschaft societies were presumed to feature higher levels of anomie, or “normlessness”, which Durkheim associated with suicide and other self-destructive behavior).

A common characterization of modern life is “I don’t even know the names of my neighbors”, and yet we might regularly communicate with someone six time zones away that we know on a special interest forum. Is it possible that Web2.0 tools are in fact allowing us to reestablish for ourselves little Gemeinschaft communities where we have things in common and we can rally around the things we agree upon (e.g., lost phones should be returned)? Are we thus lowering our sense of anomie by finding people who share and thus reinforce our norms? Does the use of social media ease our loneliness? "After all, per Facebook I have over 100 friends!"

One implication of finding “our people” virtually as opposed to next door is the phenomenon I’ve heard called the “echo effect”, in which, by reading only bloggers who share our position and chatting with people we agree with we are reinforced in our own beliefs and become convinced that we are in the majority. At present in the U.S. we have extraordinarily vocal minorities at the political poles who give every indication of believing that they speak for the mainstream. That seems to fit with the Shirkey assertion that Evan quotes, “…anything that changes the way groups get things done will affect society as a whole….” Of course, this doesn’t say anything about affecting society for the better.

(Thanks for reading!  And thanks Dr. Winston, where ever you are.)

Social Media: Who, Where, Why?

Now that I’ve turned my attention to social media, behold, there are actual data available! This link (http://www.steverubel.com/study-43-of-online-americans-addicted-to-soci ) goes to a blog entry by Steve Rubel regarding just how often people access their social networks. He uses the term “addicted” perhaps too cavalierly, but the Experian data he presents are pretty darn interesting.

In brief, use of social networking has tripled in three years, and nearly half of internet users in fact use social networking sites multiple times each day. Further, the proportion of internet users who accessed Facebook within the last month is again nearly half. Finally there is a breakdown of the reasons why people use social media, who they communicate with, and where they are concentrated geographically.

Rubel also suggests that Twitter is not so much a social medium as it is a “continuous public communications channel”, citing the fact that it “does not require mutual friending”. I will be interested to see if that criterion shows up in other definitions of “social media”.

DD.

Week 1: Getting Started....

Well, its day 3 of the class...
...and I have started a personal blog. Who'd a thunk it?

I expect the next month and a half to be an interesting experience as to date I do not have a Facebook or MySpace page, I do not have a Twitter account, and I do not have a blog. am only now making my first blog entry. This feels rather bold. I am not overly shy, but I am private and have tremendous respect for the persistence and "search-ability" of anything offered to the internet. And while I certainly have opinions and a healthy measure of conceit regarding them, I tend to "narrow-cast" them in personal conversations and sometimes appropriate public meetings; this is new territory for me, broadcasting to anyone with a search engine and a couple of hip search terms.

I expect that the technologies we subsume under the "Web 2.0" moniker are much like a good sharp knife in the kitchen, equally useful for mincing garlic and for slicing off the tips of your fingers. I hope to remain mindful of both the tools and purpose of the class, which is to investigate what Web 2.0 technologies have to offer those of us that want to help people and organizations do what they do, better. Or restated, what is the best way to hold the knife?

Thank you for reading. I hope to make this worth our mutual while.
DD.

(Since I’m actually posting to the internet, please forgive a little search engine mischief: Aphids, Brucellosis, Canterbury, Décolletage, Entropy, Foxtrot, Gagne, Hammerhead, Isis, Juniper, Klingon, Lemuria, Mica, Nebuchadnezzar, Optic, Persephone, Qumran, Resistor, Steganography, Titian, Ululation, Viceroy, Welterweight, Xenophobe, Yankeetown, Zulu. Okay, that was fun in an admittedly nerdish way.)