cultures and 'community'

This page considers questions about authenticity, appropriation, denigration and other concerns.

It covers -

• community
• sociology

     community or commodification?

In looking at the networks it is difficult not to recall Jonathan Zittrain's tart 1997 comment that

"Online community" is used by Internet companies the way a motivational speaker uses "excellence," an academic uses "new paradigm," or a lawyer uses "justice": it represents something once craved and still invoked (if only as a linguistic placeholder) even as it is believed by all but the most naïve to be laughably beyond reach. Since it's applied to almost anything, it now means vague warm fuzzies and nothing more.

The uptake of the networks has been driven by two factors.

The first is adoption by self-conscious tastemakers or elites who've used mechanisms such as uploading their address books or CRM databases and who appear to have been impressed by measures such as 'equaintance'. One UK contact encapsulated that by commenting that his network demonstrated that he knew more cosmocrats than his rival in New York.

Those early adopters have been followed by a broader population, often enticed by 'funky' features such as the various online personality tests offered by Tickle and complied with suggestions that they provide the contact details of friends, ie new members. For network operators that is more cost effective than buying a standard contact database: 'friends' usually supply accurate contact details and an approach in connection with a 'friend' is often more palatable than traditional spam.

Both groups have commoditised who they know. It is a phenomenon that isn't new - for example underlies membership of organisations such as Rotary, the Freemasons or Melbourne Club - but the potential involvement of commercial third parties poses concerns for some people.

Danah Boyd asked

what these tools do to the old, low-tech concept of friendship. In some way, with their numbers and lists and classifications, these services can subtly make a social network into a trophy collection. Technology has made it easier than ever to count your friends - but that doesn't mean you should.

     sociology

Social network services have provided a rich environment for colonisation by academia, including sociologists and analysts of a more mathematical bent.

Salient works include Zeynep Tufekci's 2007 Can You See Me Now? Audience and Disclosure Regulation in Online Social Network Sites (PDF), Frederic Stutzman's 2006 An Evaluation of Identity-Sharing Behavior in Social Network Communities and 2006 Our Lives, Our Facebooks (PDF), the 2006 Rhythms of Social Interaction: Messaging within a Massive Online Network paper by Scott Golder, Dennis Wilkinson & Bernardo Huberman, Paul DiPerna's 2007 The Web Connector Model: New Implications for Social Change (PDF), the 2007 paper by Nicole Ellison, Charles Steinfield & Cliff Lampe on The Benefits of Facebook "Friends": Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Networks, Matthew Boogart's 2006 thesis Uncovering the social impacts of Facebook on a college campus.

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