Social networking book

I was pleased to be asked to contribute to Kurylo and Dumova's volume Social Networking: Redefining communication in the digital age and flattered to be in as Chapter 1, apparently acting as a 'launching pad' for the rest of the book. In my chapter Together and Apart: social and technical works, I attempt to locate social networking in the much larger network of material, discursive and semiotic practices in a way that some have suggested is more like actor network theory. In fact I draw on Latour's work to make some points about the wider ordering of things in which social networks, and particularly online social networks, sit. But I'd shy away from calling that an ANT approach, but let's not get into that here! Anyway there's some great chapters in the book that explore a range of contemporary social networking issues including self-disclosure, social movements and networked activism. This makes this whole topic area very live and very relevant, and as far as I'm concerned - the more scholarship on this, the better. Buy the book!

Professor Hashtag @GuyMerchant

If anyone was in any doubt that written language is changing, or that children are active members of writing communities they need look no further than this story on the use of hashtags in their work. Asked by the BBC to comment on this phenomenon I was unremittingly positive, although as you'll see I refused to be drawn on predicting the shelf life of the hashtag! The origins of the symbol itself are interesting, and you can trace its history as a way of denoting a number through to its adoption by early programmers. Bringing the hash symbol to the practice of tagging (from meta tags) has been an interesting user-driven innovation. Hashtags weren't written into Twitter, they have just become a useful convention. Of course it makes your tweet, or your post on Instagram, searchable and also helps to define the audience, topic or conversation you are addressing. There are many other uses, too and I'm sure linguists have coded the various functions that hashtags perform. For me it's their adoption into language that is intriguing, and like @GuyMerchant the hashtag is primarily a written form. But new writing features do seem to enter spoken language, too. It's not uncommon to hear people saying 'lol'. And 'confused.com' has become quite popular. I've also recently witnessed a four year old asking 'go to the park hashtag orange slide?'. We live in interesting times!

Threads

Social networking sites and the ways in which they are folded into the socio-technical arrangements that frame the everyday lives of an ever-growing population are situated at the confluence of new forms of social organisation and a cultural imaginary that now extends beyond the limits of nation states and jurisdictions. Although to a large extent this is attributable to the adoption and reach of technologies it is also the product of a desire for new or enhanced practices of communication and connection, in its turn dependent upon the spread of a particular ideology of connectivity in the guise of an aspiration to be always present in the lives of others, and to be continually producing a sense of identity through a sort of restless activity of consumption and self-publication. It might almost seem that to be in the 21st century, is to perform a continually present and continuously updated social identity dependent upon making visible one's connections with others (boyd & Ellison, 2000). Take Instagram as a case in point. Here the image-trail that we leave is addressed to the other, is validated by family and friends, and is wittingly enacted on a canvas that is patently larger than the connections themselves, always cognisant of the wider network in which it is located. In this sense those who participate are repeatedly improvising and embellishing the @ reference point that they inhabit, that blue dot on the virtual map, always in relation to other @s and from time to time in relation to #things, #places, and #events. This may be the brave new world that we have created, but in itself it does not give us a full enough picture of contemporary social networks, because these are inherently promiscuous and perhaps best conceived as an assemblage of activity, a restless updating of lived experience, attitude and belief in textual threads that meander across multiple sites, and platforms both on- and off-line.

Twitter paper

In retrospect I think Julia Gillen and I managed to capture something of the essence of microblogging in studying how Twitter was used in what you might now call 'the early days'. But it was still great to see that the paper 'Contact Calls: Twitter as dialogic social and linguistic practice' was the top downloaded article in Language Sciences, and as a special deal it's now available free till 31st October! The paper has a natural partner with one I wrote with Julia Davies on blogging. Both are insider accounts of how we as academics have taken up social media and used it for our own purposes. Trying to describe the approach we used is quite hard - insider account is probably the best, but we've also tried 'dual autoethnography' to try to capture the idea of a parallel and reflexive endeavour. Neither study really has the depth and nuance of autoethnography, but the idea of a two-handed approach in looking at adoption/ early adoption has its advantages. See what you think!

Mobile literacy

I've been reading David Parry's call for what he calls ‘mobile literacy’ (here). He identifies three areas of focus. These are understanding information access, understanding hyperconnectivity and understanding the new sense of space. The first is about encouraging students to use mobile devices to search for (and presumably evaluate) information, and to appreciate the differences and similarities between this and desktop searches. Hyperconnectivity is about using and understanding how social media can connect learners with those outside the immediate classroom context in advantageous ways (selective use of Twitter is offered as an example). And finally, the new sense of space is about developing an appreciation of how mobiles can be used to mediate one’s experience of the material/physical world through so-called augmented reality applications and the whole gamut of data-enriched geo-location.

Mobiles

Mobile practices in everyday life

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I really enjoyed speaking at the SoMobNet roundtable - it was great to be part of the conversation. You can tune into some of the debate on cloudworks, but I think you have to join to comment. I learnt about some interesting work across European and in one instance beyond Europe. Joining together perspectives from learning, Web 2.0, media and technology made it a rich fare. My slides probably make little sense without the narrative, but that's how it should be!

Mobiles on the train

Mobile technologies suggest mobile subjects, and it may be that we best see these devices springing into life, as it were, when we too are mobile. Take railway journeys, for example, they are punctuated by the beeps, pings and buzzes of mobile message alerts - the ringtones that are familiar, more or less the same, or perhaps unusual - but still recognizable as such.

Mobile social networks

The October issue of Orange’s Explore magazine is out! Pictured above, you'll see that the background image is a dense mesh of intersecting fibres. Their fiery yellows, oranges and reds criss-cross to form an image that calls to mind familiar diagrammatic representations of social networks. The device itself - the Blackberry Curve - appears to glow, as a live hub, in the centre of these interconnections. It promises that you will be ‘always connected to your social networks’, and you can be sure that the social networking icons of Facebook and Blackberry Messenger (BBM) are displayed on the screen. They are; and what's more, the icons are tagged with the white star on a red circle that indicates that new messages have arrived! You consume. They produce.

Technology and things

I'm back on Verbeek now, and quite appreciating the critique he makes of Latour. There's no doubt that he knows his way around the old actor network stuff, and there's a good survey of the ideas. I like the basic quote he pulls out from Latour: 'You could as well imagine a battle with the naked bodies of the soldiers on the one side and a heap of armors and weapons on the other' (1997:77). And he uses this to summarise why it is so problematic to separate humans from technology. This is the point on which Ihde builds when he says: 'Were technologies merely objects totally divorced from human praxis, they would be so much 'junk' lying about. Once taken into praxis one can speak not of technologies 'in themselves', but as the active realtional pair, human-technology.' (Ihde, 1993:34). This line of argument allows Verbeek to shift our attention to the ways in which humans and their devices shape each other. Good stuff.

Government may try to disrupt social media

The idea that the government or the police should have the power to disrupt social media in the event of further civil unrest seems to me to be more like the action of a totalitarian state than a liberal democracy. I'd be particularly worried that a power such as this might be evoked to control legitimate protest or even the everyday communication of innocent citizens in times of unrest. Ironically, the advice to us at the university ran like this: 'For up to date information about the situation in Sheffield please monitor the South Yorkshire Police social media channels, which are regularly updated. Follow them on Twitter @syptweet or on Facebook For national Government guidance about the situation please visit http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Nl1/Newsroom/DG_198958'.

Are we still nodes?

The network metaphor is everywhere. Yesterday I travelled down to Oxford on the rail network; most of the time I could use my mobile (I'm on the Orange network). In the book I was reading Gilbert told me that in my brain 'millions upon millions of new connections are formed....in increasingly complex networks.' It seems that networks are both inside and outside me. That's a distinctively 20th century metaphor suggesting as it does desktop computers tethered together and interconnected. So a network is a connection between points or places, a channel of communication. But what happens when the metaphor is applied to the social? Actors are reduced to points - not even points of view, but nodes connected to other nodes. In the fluidity of everyday life we make and break ties, the signal breaks up, the network goes down - do we cease to exist? When we flicker in and out of communication, when we become more mobile are we still nodes? And how does the network metaphor consitute us as human subjects? Perhaps there's a better way of imagining communication and connectivity...

Advantageous practice

In an article co-written with my colleague Cathy Burnett we've been problematising the notion of critical literacy - particularly in the context of social media. We've drawn on Greenhow and Robelia's notion of 'advantageous practice' which raises all sorts of interesting issues. One thing we're keen to avoid is the idea of teachers telling students what they think is best - a pitfall, as we see it, of some critical approaches. They end up by being uncritical to the extent that they try to force particular ways of reading texts, and particular ways of seeing the world. So advantageous practice is perhaps best seen as a dialectical process, based in an enquiry into how one is positioned in and positioned by social context, with a view to seeking ways in which these positions can be influenced in a positive and worthwhile way - one that is likely to benefit the communities and social networks of affiliation. Advantageous practices are then likely to be situated and often localised in character, although they may well relate to larger national and transnational concerns.

Crowdsourced music

Imogen Heap's latest composition has a creative take on music in the digital age. Making extensive use of social media she has encouraged audience involvement in her latest work 'Lifeline' by incorporating the sounds and words sent to her. Now you could be picky and say that this is just a sophisticated marketing ploy, an easy way of gathering material and highly dependent on free contribution rather than open participation - but that would be unfair. The whole process springs from a different way of looking at the world, and one that reminds me of Colin and Michele's idea of mindset 2.0. In essence there's a distinctively new relationship between producer and consumer here, and a radically different take on where ideas come from and who owns them. Crowdsourcing is an interesting way of describing this because it leads us to ask for more precision in determining who the crowd is in the first place. The crowd here isn't 'the public' but it is 'a public'. It's not everyone, but it could be anyone. Similarly the crowd is not the audience but it may be part of the audience. No, the crowd is composed of a fluid coming and going of people who are part of a transient and distributed network - inhabitants of what Gee calls an 'affinity space'. There are clearly some resonances with other emerging social and political groupings, but I suppose the distinctiveness is around leadership and authorship (or ownership). Heap's achievement is, after all, still hers albeit with a little help from her friends, but it's framed by new ways of thinking about things, new practices and shifting networks of connection. Sell our sounds back to us, Imogen, or set them free: that's the question.

Getting mobile

In his careful exploration of the role of the mobile phone in contemporary life, Gergen (2003) uses the metaphor of the ‘floating world’. Historically-speaking the floating world refers to the urban lifestyle associated with the Japanese Edo period – an unregulated social world devoted to everyday pleasures and pastimes. The similarities between this informal social world and the floating world of mobile phone users is carefully sketched out, but the contrast lies in the conceptions of space and place that are involved. Geography is clearly less significant for networked communities and as Gergen poetically suggests these communities are ‘elevated from the physical terrain’ and each mobile ‘is a sign of a significant nucleus, stretching in all directions, amorphous and protean.’ It’s a vivid image of a pealing apart of place and space, and it also suggests that those who really count aren’t there. They are the ones that you left behind, because in the final analysis a mobile device presumes a mobile user. And in this way we are positioned as people on the move dependent on our phones for navigation, for orientation and most of all for connection. That seems strange when only ten years ago we thought that technology would allow us to travel anywhere without even leaving our terminal.

Networks of the world

As a way of describing social interaction, the metaphor of a network is appealing in a number of ways - after all, it suggests connection between points, as well as a sense of fluidity; but it also invites a sort of abstraction of the social which is perhaps best captured in the diagrams that are a common characteristic of network analysis. It is also a peculiarly 20^th century metaphor, one that readily associates with the network, itself synonymous with the online world of digital connection. The concept of a social network reduces the human social actor to a point, not even a point of view, but a point that connects in various ways to other points and in this way it speaks to the patterning and flow of communication and interaction by drawing attention to relationships, social groupings, friendship, intra- and inter-group behaviour as they are enacted in and across different geographical locations and over time. It has become quite common to use the term 'social network' to describe online social networking, and to assume that they are the same thing. Of course, they co-exist and overlap but I think its important to make a distinction, and that's what I've been writing about recently. In this post I commented on the mistaken idea that Facebook was connecting the world, but Vincenzo Cosenza's world map of SNSs quickly illustrates its broad appeal as well as its limitations in the global market.

Raw or cooked?

I finally managed to finish writing about SNSs. Towards the end I started dwelling on the network metaphor itself. It's a distinctly 20th century metaphor which easily connects with the idea of networked computers and the world of digital connection even though social networking is itself a broader concept in the social sciences. In some ways the concept of a social network reduces the human social actor to a point, not even a point of view, but a point that connects in various ways to other points. Reading Wilcken's fascinating biography of Levi-Strauss made me see it as a structuralist concept, one that in extreme leads to an erasing of subjectivity and a reification of abstraction. Interestingly the small stuff, the detail in SNSs, maybe banal and largely regulated but the grander aspirations of the social graph pull in another direction altogether.

New media news

I missed my blog’s anniversary. It’s not that I’m sentimental or anything, but I’ve been writing here for 7 years and that seems quite a long time for a blog that deals with new media. In a week in which the news has been dominated by the Wikileaks affair, in which Twitter was reported as being worth $3.7BN, and in which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was named Time magazine’s person of the year it seems that small niche interests have quickly become important features of the social, cultural and political landscape. Wikileaks was founded 4 years ago, Twitter 4 years ago and Facebook 6 years ago. So what’s new? Maybe it’s the level of over-exaggeration and misunderstanding. Time commended Zuckerberg on connecting the world. ‘In less than 7 years’ they said he has ‘wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the US.’ Facebook’s success should not be under-played, but to claim that it has created a ‘single network’ or, for that matter, ‘a social entity’ is simply wrong. Perhaps underneath it all is the simple fact that old media types, in their attempt to understand what’s going on and play it to their advantage, have fallen under the spell of new media.

Social networking and protest

Ever since Howard Rheingold wrote about smart mobs we have been aware of the potential of social media to mobilise people in acts of resistance. In the UK the history of flashmobs has been limited to leisure spectacles such as iPod parties and the occasional activities of technology-enabled eco-protest. Things have changed with the latest round of mass student disturbances. Opinion is divided on the impact of SNSs in mobilising activists, but as this enthusiastic reportage from the BBC illustrates, old media are clearly excited by the possibilities of harvesting citizen journalism to present breaking news.

Networks and silos

I liberated this fabulous image from the great information silo of the university's VLE. I thought that was quite appropriate since nothing else seems to be able to get in or out on account of severe weather. Snow to be precise. Last week saw large-scale disruption to the transport network. Most academics were virtually working at home and managed desktops were groaning under the strain. I eased that particular burden by reading Gillian Tett on data silos, and in so doing confronted the irony of living in a highly connected world which is at the same time deeply segmented (I mean what exactly do I know about banking?). So while I'm chewing over some theoretical issues about networking, and online social networking in particular, I started to wonder just how much a space like Facebook has its users locked-in, generating a rather large data silo which can be partially explored from within but not from outside. It's networking, Jim but not as we know it!

Multiple threads

I've got multiple threads going at the moment and I'm beginning to wonder if they'll coalesce into a single theme. So I'm half way through writing a theoretical piece on the relationship between SNSs and wider social networks and really enjoying some of the reading I've been doing, and at the same time I've been hot on the trail of pinning down my ideas on critical media literacies. So here's a big shoutout to Colin and Michele for pointing me to the book Digital Content Creation (in their series). In particular, the debate set up between David Buckingham's cautious offering and John Hartley's digital optimism is really interesting. More on this when I've got the time, but for now this is just a strong recommendation!