Anonymity and Disclosure in Blogs

What role(s) can self-disclosure play in the relationship between bloggers and their audiences?
In informal forums (fora?), self disclosure, i.e. the revealing of information about oneself and one's views, would assist with credibility. Readers would feel that the writer is exposing him/herself to criticism and by taking that risk, is deserving of more attention. In formal or academic situations, self-disclosure would often be quite inappropriate and maybe unprofessional.

What did you think of the finding that bloggers feel most anonymous when the target audience is not one that the blogger knows offline?
I regard this finding as intuitively correct. When an audience knows the blogger personally, then that audience would have a greater chance of identifying the anonymous blogger from his language and views even when the blogger did not intend it.

What did you think about the study's finding that more bloggers were worried about their families reading their blogs (23%) than possible career damage (8%)?
That's an interesting finding, but it may be just a reflection of the sample, which was predominantly young people and students.

The study found that 43% of bloggers deal with their concerns over self-disclosure by self-imposed censorship. The author of a new book on the persistence of online information, Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, argues that this kind of self-censorship stifles us. Do you agree?
I suppose it stifles us to some extent, but my inclination is to think that exposure to criticism and derision mostly causes bloggers to be more careful about accuracy and truth than they might otherwise be. Fanatics and bigots seem to be oblivious to this anyway - online bloggers and print journalists are equally capable of lies, bias and the selective use of data, when it suits them.

The authors argue that "the name "personal journal" is inaccurate and calls for revision, as many bloggers do not share their true feelings and thoughts. [...] When it comes to self-disclosure, it seems that they are cautious so as to avoid potential backlash." Do you agree?
Most bloggers would regard their material as more open to public scrutiny than their personal diary would be, no matter what the privacy settings. I agree that most people would have this in the back of their mind when blogging. The research suggests that true self-disclosure is proportional to the degree of discursive anonymity. The truth is that hard copy diaries are not that much more secure than private blogs - they can be read by family and friends, even after death, and they can be stolen.

Research methodology: was the study concerned conducted in such a way that you have faith in its results? Can you see any ways in which the results might have been biased? Was the research carried out in an ethical way?
The sample size was not great, but more importantly, the participants self-selected themselves. In this type of research, there is hardly an alternative, but self-selection invites biased participation and can lead to skewed results. I can't see anything unethical about the research.

Did you agree with the interpretation of the study's results?
My only comment here is that collapsing the categories to measure the interaction between parameters seemed simplistic, especially since the categories were not clearly mutually exclusive, but I'm not an expert in this field.

Is the study still relevant today? Are there aspects of it that need to be updated?
Given the evolution and rapid growth of blogging and social networking since 2005, the topic is more relevant than ever before, but these results would be obsolete. If the subject matter was deemed important (I'm not sure that it is), then a larger study would be warranted.

Sky's Questions on Internet Footprint

How important is 'netiquette' in our presentation of self online? Why do you think this?
I believe it to be very important. Failure to follow the norms and good practices of the relevant plaform diminishes your reputation amongst other users of the platform, and possibly causes inconvenience. Just as a trivial example, I retain emails as a "filing system" for a long period of time. When correspondents don't give good subject names, or none at all, it makes to much more difficult to find things later. Not following the implied norms leads to outbreaks of pedantry and wastes time.


What does your own Internet footprint look like at the moment?
My footprint is pretty light, because I don't engage in social networking, I've not been a prolific publisher of papers, and I'm not in the public eye. Last time I Googled my name, almost everything I found was not relevant to me. The one exception was the minutes of a community meeting I attended.

Did you try out the MIT personas installation? Were you surprised by the results? What does this tell you about the efficacy of data-mining?
Yes, I did try it out. Wasn't surprised by the results because I have a little experience with data mining and I know that imprecise data going in will yield wildly incorrect patterns and relationships. Data mining is a valid technique when sensible questions are asked and applied to relevant data.

Do you think carefully about what identity you want to present online?
Yes indeed, which is probably why my footprint is as if I've been walking on hard concrete.

Do you use an avatar online? If you do, why did you pick that avatar?
For the purpose of NET11, I have created an avatar. It is a rendering of a photograph of me, designed to "be me but not identify me". I have used this technique in some of my image manipulation work.

Do you agree that the presentation of identity has become technologised? What effects do you think this is having on us as individuals and as a society (or societies)?
I do agree with that proposition, but only for a particular (but very large and growing) demographic, mostly based on age. I had dinner last night with a group of people who (because I'm doing this unit) I surveyed on the subject. Most did not know what I was talking about! My adult son and a young woman at the dinner have a lesser online presence than I do, much to their amazement.

But (to get to the second part of the question) it seems that teenagers and young adults, as a group, are highly obsessed with their identity as revealed/displayed on their SNS of choice. By my observations, the people in this group are fairly open / honest in their online presence, and use it as a means of innocent (if banal) communication. I perceive that young people naively believe that their parents are unaware of their online activities.


Are there cues or keys that you consistently look for in dealing with people online. What are they? Why are they important? Why are they important online?
Yes, and I'm sure that I read more cues than I am aware of. Important cues to me are spelling and grammar in textual information, and in the selection of themes, images etc. Impressions count, and these cues tell me a lot about people that I am dealing with. When I know the individuals, these cues are a lot less important, but can still influence me.

Do you agree that social media is a fundamental shift in how we communicate?
Yes indeed, but again it depends on who "we" are. Newspapers and faxes, and even landline 'phones and email, have been subsumed by mobile phones and SNSs amongst the iGen demographic.

How actively do you 'read' others' profiles online? Do you look for clues as to who other Internet users are in their online content?
Not actively at all, I take my cues as they are presented to me. I'll look for more when I think I need it.

Content Sharing Activity

This is my motivational poster, made as instructed with http://www.bighugelabs.com.

The image I have used is from Flickr's library of Creative Commons - Attribution Non-Commercial photographs, but I couldn't quite see how to include the necessary attribution via BigHugeLabs, so I add it manually here below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/play4smee/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Maybe I did it wrong, but I found that BigHugeLabs did not integrate with Flikr that well even though I linked the two accounts. I had to leave BigHugeLabs, browse Flickr for the image, download it to my computer, then upload it to BigHugeLabs. I guess you get the hang of this with practice!

Course Material on Content Sharing

I thought this was going to be all about Napster, Bit Torrent and the like. I was wrong, it is much more interesting!

Thanks to the Mathes paper, terms I have heard before like taxonomy (science of classification) and folksonomy (tagging by the masses) I now understand. This paper highlights a concern I have felt when reading previous topics, that allowing users to create their own tags from an "uncontrolled vocabulary" will surely lead to numerous tags all meaning the same thing ("lack of synomym control"), and similar tags meaning different things ("ambiguity"). But then, Delicious suggests tags already applied to documents, so that's one way of reducing tag plethora. I like the Pareto-like analogy - compared to structured taxonomy, uncontrolled folksonomy delivers most of the value for a fraction of the effort! And, in my limited experience, searching keywords certainly does yield interesting and distracting surprises.

I never knew that Google's PageRank system was named after a person called Page. I thought it was just a way of ranking, well, pages on the WWW!

The Weinberger essay reading uses flowery language to say interesting things on the evolution of language (the archetypal folksonomy?) and how tags converge (e.g. on eBay, users have decided that "laptop" is preferable to "notepad") and as such folksonomy "operates as a loose, emergent thesaurus".

I've also learned what a "mashup" is. The video examples (both in the video lecture and the Notes) are indeed entertaining, but to answer Tama's question in the Notes, they are examples of both theft (in a legal sense) and creativity. The terms are not mutually exclusive. (One assumes the copyright holders did not give poermission!) To paraphrase our tutor, I am not at all interested on the genre, but I am greatly impressed by the skills applied and the dedication required from enthusiasts to produce these mashups.

In one sense, a mashup gives publicity to the original material, but I don't think it would be either welcomed or valuable. Faden's tutorial on copyright and fair use (fair dealing) was clever and most informative. I really wonder what could be produced if the creative energy of "pirates" could be better directed. Maybe a mashup is a job application?

Creative Commons looks to be a practical approach to copyright tailored for the internet, but one would not expect Hollywood or the major music distributors to embrace it. Nevertheless the Bon Iver record cover "open source culture" example in the Wolk reading is telling and probably cutting edge. I'd better move my Flickr photos over to CC, and tag them as well! And I'll use http://bit.ly/tamawiki to find image and maybe sound for Assignment 4.

Being a scientist, I subconsciously compare technical creativity with artistic creativity. All breakthroughs in science occur by building on someone's previous work. Patents delay that to some extent (26 years in Australia, I think), but (Tama explains) creative copyright has a life of 70 years after the creator dies! The commercial interests which lobbied hard and instigated this inequity deserve the contempt they attract. They are effectively nurturing the piracy they hate so much. Creative artists do deserve protection and reward for their efforts, otherwise, why should they bother? But the mainstream entertainment industry has by its own greed, failed to permit a decent balance between protecting the innovator/creator, and encouraging others to innovate/create.

I think I now know what a meme is, after hearing about them for a while in this Unit, but only because of the Muppet example. I remember them, Tama, thank you from the old-timers!

Thoughts of a Social Networking Virgin

Privacy

The boyd & Ellison paper outlines SNS' as challenging legal perspectives of privacy and asks "do police officers have the right to access content posted to Facebook without a warrant?" When do you think a social network is private and when is it public?
The internet is a form of open publication, and any material on it is able to be seen and used by anyone else unless rights are explicitly reserved. These rights may such as expressing a copyright for multimedia material, or, in the case of Social networking Sites, making privacy settings to suit your needs.

I would think that police would have every right to access content on Facebook or anywhere else when they can get it without being nominated as a “friend”, and without logging on with a username and password which is not theirs. If content is hidden behind passwords or privacy settings, then I believe it should not be available to any authority unless there is a legal warrant.

The Facebook terms of service, as quoted in our CourseWork has an intriguing clause: “subject to your privacy and application settings”. I’m no lawyer, but that clause seems to me to limit Facebook’s rights to “use” pretty extensively. But by all accounts (I’m a non-user of Facebook), Facebook does not encourage their users to stiffen their privacy settings, and the default privacy settings are “public”. This suggests that Facebook has scant respect for the privacy of their contributors. That said, Facebook does appear to allow its users to opt for privacy, if they try hard enough.

It is the personal responsibility of people posting information on Facebook to be aware of the implications. I have often read that “people are not aware of how public the internet is”. Well, despite the Stephanie Rice and British Intelligence examples mentioned by Tama, I think they should be aware, and it is their responsibility to be aware.

How do earlier identity modes such as anonymous identities in earlier virtual communities compare with public identities in SNS' such as Facebook? What do you think about the conflict between privacy and the need to share data (as stated in the curriculum - that's what social networking is about isn't it?).

The conflict is manifest. Facebook’s commercial interests may well be to collect information for consolidation and exploitation. The Terms of Service say “Facebook is about sharing information with others”. Facebook’s users may have certain privacy requirements even though they want to use the platform for the purpose of readily communicating with their nominated friends. If Facebook, through its Website and terms of use, allows users to specify privacy settings, then Facebook must respect them, regardless of the business objectives. Users must satisfy themselves as to the privacy of their information, and if they are not what is required, then they should not use Facebook.

This is difficult for young and inexperienced people, and making mistakes is part of the process of growing up and becoming wise. The main obligation on Facebook in this regard is that they make it clear to all their users the extent to which their personal information may be public, and how they can adjust whatever settings are available.

Copyright

In relation to what you have read and experienced about the TOS (Terms and Services) of social networking sites, think about the copyright issues you face as a user of these sites/services... What do you think about the ownership and use as in the terms and services of SNS' ? Do companies have the right to use data as we have outlined, data has value in the information economy? What do you think about the comment that 'these companies trade in data'?


To some extent these questions are not greatly different to those on Privacy. Users posting content over which they hold copyright are obliged to be aware of the TOS applicable. Subject to the settings they make, they may be giving up that copyright.

An oft reported matter is that users are posting material whose copyright belongs to someone else. Goldman (2007) reports that (under US law) “a website isn’t liable for hosting user copyright-infringing content unless the website receives a notice from the copyright owner and fails to promptly remove the content”. This seems to give SNSs an out when pirates post illegally obtained material, as well as the obligation to do something about it when they are notified. Stone (2009) recommends that copyright owners should post material on their own domain in the first instance, on the argument that search engines are savvy about original sources.

As for “these companies trade in data”, how can this be a surprise? It’s not a secret is it? Data definitely has a commercial value, as has been amply demonstrated by Google with targeted advertisements. But the only data SNSs have to trade in is that given to them by hapless users!

Goldman, E. (2007). Social Networking Sites and the Law. Retrieved on October 16, 2009 from http://www.ericgoldman.org/Resources/socialnetworkingsitesandthelaw.pdf

Stone, P. (2009). Social Networking Sites and Copyright Violations, Or ‘Hey Wait A Minute... That’s Mine!. Retrieved on October 16, 2009 from http://www.pattiedesign.com/pattiedesign/winter08_09.html



boyd & Ellison

After reading boyd & Ellison Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship, what do you think about the definitions of 'social network' boyd and Ellison outline? What *is* a social network? What could a 'network connection' potentially mean? Do you feel the definition of a social network might include other elements or shouldn't include some elements? Is or has anything changed since the paper was written?

I am basically unfamiliar with Social Network Sites such as Facebook, MySpace or the others mentioned in the CourseWork. I am not a member of any of these and am unlikely to ever become one unless obliged to do so by this unit or some other. (My venture into Twitter and Flikr has been scary enough!) However, I am prepared to accept the three part definition by Boyd & Ellison on the grounds that (a) I can understand it, (b) it seems to make sense and (c) I accept their expertise (although, with respect to Ms. Boyd, I am a bit doubtful about a person suffering an affectation that requires her to decapitalise her name, but acknowledge that that is a minor crime).

Since some SNSs seem to link people to the networks of their friends, as described in the video in Tama’s CourseWork “Social Networking in English”, then theoretically a network could cover the entire world’s population. James Valentine, an afternoon presenter on Sydney ABC local radio 702 used to have a segment called “degrees of separation” where he challenged two perfect strangers to find a common acquaintance in a time limited on-air conversation. Mostly they failed, but I was amazed at the occasional success and how close many others got to it. So a “network connection” could easily be anyone in the world! How terrifying to imagine a grandly popular Social Networking Site which could link any two people together.

How to Identify Authoritative Sources

The topic of "the authority of sources" is becoming increasingly interesting as the world grows its reliance on online research. We are encouraged to prefer "authoritative sources" for citing in essays, but I wonder how ungdergraduate students, by definition unfamiliar with the subject, are meant to identify them. As far as I know, Google does not rank its finds by credibility or authority!

We can probably assume that any sources actually referred in our Course Work will be deemed to be authoritative, but what can we do after that? For online sources, can we tell by the font or the styling they use? Doubtful. What about how the sources identify themselves? If there is no author at all apparent, or his/her name is something like "head-kicker", does that make the source less authoritive than an author with a name like Cloyd W. Schingledecker Jnr? I am always impressed when a webpage has a date on it, but I can hardly argue that a date implies authority. Maybe it's the language used itself - more credibility will surely accrue to an author who writes in complete sentences in structured paragraphs, and knows about punctuation and capitalisation. I hypothesise that the more arcane (that's French for highfalutin') the language, the greater the authority.

There's no doubt that peer reveiwed journal articles published by Universities are going to score well in the "authority" stakes, but search engines don't always capture these well. Sometimes we can only get abstracts, often they are incomprehensible to duffers like me. I personally haven't had much joy looking through the online libraries (such as Curtin's), but maybe my searching skills aren't up to scratch, maybe I'm using the wrong keywords. So I tend to rely on Google, and then I take my chances on authority.

Any advice would be most welcome. It will be more highly regarded if it is fully refereed and sourced from Nature, of course.

Wikipedia Exercise

We were asked to edit a Wikipedia entry and see what happened. I couldn't imagine any Wikipedia article that I would be knowlegeable enough to criticise, much less edit, but, in surfing around the 'pedia, I came up with the entry for my suburb, Surry Hills, NSW. There were no grounds to disagree with what was there, but even without researching the topic properly (i.e. looking up the entries for other urban suburbs), I felt there was plenty of opportunity to expand the article from its meagre self.

The existing item did have dot point lists of churches and heritage buildings in the area, so I felt it was only appropriate to add lists of cafes/restaurants and pubs, both of which abound in this inner city region. I also added an item on our newest, rather iconic, public building, the Surry Hills Library and Community Centre.

Learning how to make the edits, and to use Wikitext was good fun, just technical stuff. Wikipedia itself provides lots of help.

I suspected that a Wikipedia entry on an Australian city suburb would fall into the obscure category and would suffer the same fate (i.e. neglect) as the hoax item on Seigenthaler and JFK's assassination.

Actually, it took a mere 27 hours for another contributor to edit my edit, for the express (and probably justified) purpose of "restoring encyclopaedic style". You see, I used subjective assertions in my contribution to the effect that Crown Street "is the heart of the Surry Hills community, featuring an eclectic mix of cafes and restaurants and funky fashion and homewares stores". My editor obviously regarded "funky" and "eclectic" as adjectives unsuitable for Wikipedia. He basically just deleted them. I won't object, but an item without adjectives can be pretty bland! (For reasons I don't understand, my editor left my equally subjective use of "excellent and diverse" intact elsewhere in the stuff that I had added. Maybe he/she enjoys the eateries of Surry Hills.)

But it goes to prove the case. You can't just post what you like on Wikipedia. Sooner or later, someone will see it and do something about it. All articles are indeed just "works in progress".

More on Blood and Blogs

Prompted by Gwynneth Peaty's Discussion Board questions, I think Blood's ideas are standing up pretty well in 2009, with at least a small fraction of bloggers doing high quality work and being taken quite seriously. Professional journalists must be feeling threatened by the strengthening competition from the WWW, mostly in blogs. It's notable that mainstream media are making increasing use of blogs themselves, probably to try to claw back market share appeal to a younger audience.

I'm older than most, and still enjoy reading the newspapers. But the page I've always liked the best is that of "Letters to the Editor", because that's where the public had a slight but very limited ability, highly moderated at that, to (a) comment on the news, but more tellingly, to (b) comment on journalists' treatment of the news. Blogs have freed up the citizen journalists from the agenda and bias of that editor and his or her publication.