Social Media as a Mind Set.

Posted on 04/04/2012 by lbraun

A couple of days ago I have retweeted an announcement about the podcast “One Click Society” from WeEarth Global Radio Network.

The latest episode from August 25, 2011 is an interview with social media expert and blogger Erik Deckers. Most of the interview is based on the use of social media in corporate communication, a topic which is interesting, but certainly not the one I like to focus on.

But what caught my attention were little ideas that popped up between the lines on the conversation and especially one kept me thinking:

B.: “How important are the tools (of SM)”
D.: “Not as important! You know there are some tools that you think, hey this could never go away, this is too big or Facebook is the one network that might take over the planet, etc. etc. but ask yourself what happened to AOL [...]
The companies that were big aren’t that big anymore, but still the ideas have carried on where, we can connect with people on the Internet, we can sell things on the Internet, we can do so much more on the Internet, no matter what happens to the tools.[...]”

B.: “With this in mind, then is it fair to say that, rather than being a tool set social media is more of a mind set?”
D.: “Yes absolutely. When we were talking about relationship marketing earlier, that is the mindset that you should have in using social media, providing value and being interesting. [...]”

I kept on thinking about the phrase “social media as a mind set” and realized that this is exactly the way I have always understood SM. As a Mind Set. This was actually the reason for me to start writing this blog, the frustration that almost all conversation around SM is focused on Twitter and Facebook, the two most representative tools of the SM mind set. Like I wrote on the about page of this blog the focus is not on the wheels or the engine, but on the car and its meaning for transportation.

I have always seen SM as a mind set independent from the tools that provide the technological basis of SM. I think that many people today still haven’t fully understood that. And I am happy to have made a huge step in encountering the purpose and the very essence of this web blog.

Classification of Social Media.

Posted on 28/03/2012 by lbraun

During my research on the very basics of Social Media I have encountered various approaches, solutions, and problems.

Certainly most of the information found on this topic online is very unprofessional, but still there are some researchers who have succeeded in providing academic frameworks to identify what SM is. One of these works come from Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) who have provided not only a good definition of SM, but have also also successfully classified different SM types.

Kaplan and Haenlein denominate that the first website that can be considered a modern SM service, was Open Diary, a service that allowed the creation of public, semi-public, or private texts which could be shared with a community. Open Diary was the prototype of todays blogging services. The terms “webblog” and one year later “blog” were invented around the discussions about the success of Open Diary.

The publishing capabilities in combination with the upcoming of more sophisticated social communities via social network services “coined the term Social Media and contributed to the prominence it has today” (Kaplan, Haenlein, 2010: 60).

Definition of SM:

“Social Media is a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content“(Kaplan, Haenlein, 2010: 61)

Classification of SM:

Kaplan and Haenlein were able to identify and discribe six types of social media. (1) collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia), (2) blogs and microblogs (e.g. WordPress, Twitter), (3) content communities (e.g. Flickr, Youtube), (4) social network services (e.g. Facebook, Orkut), (5) virtual game worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft), (6) and virtual social worlds (Second Life).

Kaplan and Haenlein then developed a consistent classification of SM based on Social Presence / Media Richness and Self-Presentation / Self-Disclosure:

A table of the classification of social media

Classification of Social Media by social presence / media richness and self-presentation / self-disclosure

This classification is very useful for researchers and certainly one of the few consistent approaches to this topic. Still, there are certain limitations to it, which have to be overcome in the future to further understand what social media is. One of these limitations is the nonobservance of personal identities in digital environments. The often ambivalent coexistence of anonymity, pseodonymity and real identities are not considered by Kaplan and Haenlein. Certainly would this add another axis to the diagram above.

More on the topic of identities in digital communication can be found here and here.

–

KAPLAN, Andreas M. & HAENLEIN, Michael (2010), “Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media”, Business Horizons, vol. 53, 59-68.
or from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681309001232

Introduction to social bots.

Posted on 20/02/2012 by lbraun

Bots, also known as Web Robots or Internet Bots, are software that is used to do simple and repetetive tasks to substitute human labor. The most widespread use of bots is in web site spidering or web site crawling where these programs crawl and index web sites to create a map of the internet.

Bots are part of the internet since the very beginning. There is a growing number of bot types that can be encounter nowadays. Apart from web crawlers, bots have been widely used as spambots to distribute spam emails or as chatterbots (also called talk bots, chatterboxes or artificial conversational entitities), bots that simulate human conversation, mainly in a chat room or instant messaging environment, and intent to fool human users into thinking that the program is a human being. This is famously known as the turing test of chatterbots.

Chatterbots in the commercial area can also have the purpose to offer another source of product support where human support labor is limited, or simply to automatically distribute information, such as weather forecasts or traffic information. The output of a chatterbot, text or voice, depends on the design of the software and the budget of the development. Although these bots often succeed in reading, interpreting, and responding to a humans input, the technical backend of the software is often rather simple. The most common technique is to scan the input text for keywords and compare them to a database with possible answers that include these keywords, the answers with the highles compliance is then given back to the user. This is a reason why chatterbots can be easily indentified by human beings, given the often unnatural way of responding or the incapacity to participate in a more elaborated conversation.

With the appearance of massive social media the chatterbots have developed further. The tremendous amount of publically availabe human conversation especially created by the users of twitter, but also by other social network services, have given software engeneers new possibilities to enhance the quality of chatterbots. These new generation of internet bots is recently better known as socialbots and marks a new step in the evolution of such software.

By definition a social bot is “an automation software that controls an account on a particular OSN (Online Social Network), and has the ability to perform basic activities such as posting a message and sending a connection request. What makes a socialbot different from self-declared bots (e.g., Twitter bots that post up-to-date weather forecasts) and spambots is that it is designed to be stealthy, that is, it is able to pass itself off as a human being. “(Boshmaf, et al., 2011)

Social bots do not only communicate in such a social network environment, they are even able to create their proper social network around them. Just like every human user, they are able to create or cut connections to other users (follow/unfollow or friending/unfriending), they are able to distinguish between direct conversation with a specific individual or public conversation, and they are able to reference to other sources via web site links or retweets. These sophisticated means of imitating human behavior trick much more user into believing that such a bot is actually a human being.

BOSHMAF, Yazan & MUSLUKHOV, Ildar & BEZNOSOV Konstantin & RIPEANU, Matei (2011). “The socialbot network: when bots socialize for fame and money”. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC’11), December 2011: LERSSE-RefConfPaper-2011-008

Future Predictions.

Posted on 16/11/2011 by lbraun

Yesterday I listened to a great podcast about software development. After an interesting hour of talk radio the host of the podcast Elementarfragen (in German only), asked his two guests about the future of computers and the Internet. This question made me think what I would answer to such a difficult question.

The two guests of the show were wise enough to give a wide answer, focusing on the human to computer interface and the developments we are about to encounter in the field of speech recognition. They also said that many of the most important inventions have already happened and that the next generation of advanced software will not be HAL (from 2001 Space Odysee), but only iOS6.

I immediately remembered how, especially in the late 90s/early 2000s, we were often blown away from growth of processing power, hard disc space, and other technological features like this. A computer lasted two years or three until it was completely out of date. A laptop without a wifi card was useless, by the time wireless routers were sold. In comparison the laptop I write this article on is five years old and it still works perfect for my needs.

Today, I think, it is not so much the technological features that are mind blowingly evolving, but it is something else. Something that is difficult to grasp. It is the merging of the Internet in society. The way the computers and the Internet are changing every aspect of our real life is incredible and even way more profound than in the first decade of the new millennium. Paperless desktops, mobile internet, cloud services, internet of things, net politics. These terms exist for a long time already, but it is only recent that these paradigms have become truly implemented in everybody’s real life.

I think these are the next big things to expect: True global, universal, and social implementation of digital technologies in real life and it’s consequences.

Experiment.

Posted on 16/10/2011 by lbraun

Thinking about the actual amount of news that reach me everyday I decided to make a little self-experiment.

I had a vivid conversation about Facebook with a friend of mine. We had both the same opinion about the ambivalent relationship we have with this social network site. Besides the usual privacy discussion (which I do not want to treat in this post) we were lamenting about the news we receive from our friends. One thing that was left stuck in my mind from this conversation was the statement “What I like about FB is that news reach me, which I otherwise would not have heart of”.

More precisely my friend was referring to the Spanish protest movement #15M, also known as #democraciarealya, which has developed in the wake of the Arab Spring and prior to the autonomic and municipal elections from 23.05.2011 and had a peak on May 15. We both were agreeing on the fact that we are somehow addicted to news media, visiting the same news web site up to 10 times a day and only reading the top 5 headlines. We figured it is some kind of “not wanting to miss out on something” that makes us enjoy real time news consumption.

This conversation and other papers I have read about the topic of news information made me come up with the idea of a self experiment. The rules are the following: I may not consume any news bit that does not reach me via social media.

Now I have to say, this is n o t empiric. I am sure I will encounter situations that will not be compatible with the experiment. Neither have I decided on the duration of this experiment. The goal is to understand, feel, or simply discover a subjective difference in the way I will be informed about everyday news. This is the first post regarding this experiment. The experience will be documented under the category self-experiment.

Scalability of Social Networks.

Posted on 11/10/2011 by lbraun

Doing my usual research I have encountered an interesting report today which I would like to mention here.

The report is called “The Strength of Internet Ties. The internet and email aid users in maintaining their social networks and provide pathways to help when people face big decisions” (Rainie et al., 2006)

Focusing on email communication the report describes what effects the internet has on our social network and how it enables new possibilities to encounter help and make decisions. I do not want to talk about the Help and Decision part in this blog post, although it is worth reading, what I am interested in are the effects on our social networks.

The report and the researches on which it is based demonstrate very well how our social networks change from what the author calls a “Pleasantville like geographically limited household-based know-everybody-by-name type of single social group” to a “glocalized person-based scalable timely asynchronous combination of various social networks”.

Personally, to me it was the first time that I have encountered proof for what I was already assuming: Digital social networks are larger in size than traditional offline social networks. This is due to the fact that we have more sophisticated means to manage the communication necessary to maintain a larger network. Additionally the percentage of our core ties (very close ties, such as family, the partner, or close friends) decreases the larger a social network becomes. So called significant ties (usually friends, collegues, but can also be family, that are more important than mere acquaintances) increases with the growing of the social network.

I always had the same impression about relationships in social network services. Although most of our Facebook friends are not and will never be core ties to our social network, we might still maintain a significant tie to them which we would not do without this technology. On the other hand have I personally lost significant ties from my earlier offline social network, which have not registered on Facebook.

The report is very interesting, comprehensive, and well written. It can be found here

RAINIE, Lee and John B. Horrigan and Barry Wellman and Jeffrey Boase (2006). “The Strength of Internet Ties. The internet and email aid users in maintaining their social networks and provide pathways to help when people face big decisions”, from http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2006/The-Strength-of-Internet-Ties.aspx, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Jan 25 2006.

Thoughts on Digital Identity.

Posted on 11/10/2011 by lbraun

The possibilities of digital identity management have become more and more sophisticated over the years. 20 years ago there was little more space for defining identity than a username and a biography (at least to the mainstream user), social media services nowadays offer functions to communicate that we like/read/listen/watch a great variety of digital content. Profiles have become ever more sophisticated allowing us to create a limitless multimedia timeline of our own lives.

But what really identifies us is the relationship to our connections? In social network services it is possible to encounter twelve people with the same name and still identify your old friend from high school based on her connections. Maybe Facebook was one of the first services that understood and implemented this paradigm. Since the beginning they are encouraging their users to embrace their real-life identities.

Relationships in Facebook are “Friendships” and this is a limitation in the complexity of our relationships. If our identities are partly defined by our relationship to others, the friendship-relationship model is not able to persist as the need for more detailed identification in online communication grows.

Google+ has introduced the circles to facilitate the way we can establish different relationship forms with our social contacts. This approach is more advanced and by design easier to adopt than the lists feature in Facebook for instance. More complex mechanisms of relationship management have been evolving on many social network sites.

If we assume that digital identity has the need to become as complex as real-life identity than one might ask: who is ever going to be able to manage all this complexity? When I unfriend someone in real life I simply do nothing, in Facebook I need 5 clicks. The shear amount of everyday decisions that shape our offline social networks is unlikely to be translated to clicks.

The question that comes into my mind is:
Isn’t the automation of these decision, through the help of algorithms, the only way to manage relationship complexities online? Is Facebook or Google going to predict my relationship to a certain person automatically so I do not have to drag’n'drop this person into a circle anymore?

Analog and Digital Identity.

Posted on 11/10/2011 by lbraun

‘Identity’ as we know it derives mainly from the work of the psychologist Erik Erikson¹ in the 1950s. Identity is part of human beings for millions of years due to the characteristic of the human being to recognize herself as an individual. The term ‘identity’ is used as an umbrella term throughout science. In psychology it usually defines the process of empathizing with another human being and, in doing so, defining an individuality and/or group affiliations. Social psychology tries to investigate the issues of how an individual reacts to the social environment.

Identity is shown through markers, such as fashion, behavior, or language. Markers create certain boundaries, that define the extent of the identification of an individual. These markers are not always universally understood and can be confusing to outsiders. The boundaries established by an individual serve as being either inclusive or exclusive.

A simple login feature that is used to provide or deny access to a computer or a web community is based on a username. Although a username is a very limited way to reveal identity it is able to provide quite some amount of information. Many usernames provoke a certain image of its user (Sk8rBoy, xxxsweet_girlxxx, WebSurfer, cool_guy_17), some nicknames are chosen from fictional characters or animals (rambo123, trillian_jedi, polarbear88), others are just an adaption of real names (mike12345, smith1975, katty_style). Whether the username is a pseudonym or a short version of the real name it still provides a space for self-disclosure. Most usernames reveal at least the sex of its holder.

In Web 2.0 the possiblities of user profile creation have become much more complex. Users do not only identify themselves via usernames and text based communication but also through the social connections that they establish. Digital identity management is becoming more and more sophisticated, but it is still far from the complexity of analog identity management. Although Web 2.0 services have already established as an important dimension in digital communication the evolution of digital identity, or identity 2.0 as it is called, is still happening.

Basically there are three types of identity management in online communities: Anonymous, pseudononymous or real identity based.

Although one might argue that there is no real anonymity in computer-mediated communication, we can discover something like limited anonymity. This limited anonymity can happen in web forums or chats when a user chooses a username that does not reveal any information, either true or false, about his persona (e.g. “xUm61a1″). The administrator of this forum might be able to identify the IP-address and eventually an email address of this user, but to the broad public this user can remain anonymous. A user can reveal information about herself through language, typography and chronemic information, that is why a user gradually looses anonymity with every communication piece.

Some communities allow or encourage the use of pseudonyms. By doing so they provide a free conversation environment for their users that is not restricted to the limitations of anonymous identities. This form of digital identity reminds of the principles of role-plaing in analog conversations described by Goffmann (1959). Many Web 2.0 applications allow their users to create complex multimedia profiles of themselves and further provide tool for communication. Famous examples of such Web 2.0 services are World of Warcraft, MySpace, or Second Life.

The third type of digital identity is the management of users based on their real identity. In these environments users are encouraged or even obligated to provide a real identity. The first service that has successfully accomplished this on a great scale was Facebook. The network suceeded in establishing a certain trust relationship with its user which facilitated the massive adoption of real identity based networking.
Identity 2.0 is likely to become as complex as identity in the real world. Still there are great limitations to the amount of digital complexity. Users are stuggeling to keep up with their digital sozialization and identities are different from one community to another, since they cannot be transfered. The evolution of identity 2.0 is still happening and will depend on economic, business strategic and political decisions.

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Erikson#Major_works

GOFFMAN, Erving (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York, Anchor Books.

Social Media and Society

A Website about Social Media as a Phenomenon of Society

Future Predictions.