History does repeat itself…over and over and over again

Welcome back chain letters!  Gotta love the “25 random things” trend blowing up Facebook right now- in short, you write 25 “random” facts about yourself on a “note” and tag at least 25 people, indicating that you want to know more about them and here’s their big chance!  This feels like a  throwback to the “send this email to 50 people in the next 24 hours or your first born child will have a facial mole in the shape of massive fart” forwards I used to get back in the day.  I remember being mystified by their existence, not to mention survival and successful propagation.

While my initial response was surprise at this apparent regression, I realized that the 25RTAM lists, particularly within the Facebook context, have the allure of ambiguity, something that’s at risk when communication technologies allow people to say what they want to who they want when they want in a variety of formats.

The personal/impersonal duality of these lists makes them attractive to people who may not want to deal with one-on-one communication or, more importantly, to those who don’t know if target recipients want to deal with them one-on-one.  Despite the impersonal usage of notes (a private tool as opposed to a wall post that everyone in your network sees) as a broadcast tool, 25RTAM lists also have  personal layers.  1) You’re communicating within your network 2) you’re only tagging some of your contacts from that network and 3) instructions to tag someone to show them you’re interested in learning more about them, personally, and all the other people you tagged, personally…sort of.  Though SNS’ and such are commonly understood as vehicles that allow people to connect more, I think that in a lot of social  situations, ambiguity and non-commitment is a welcome relief.  These lists are both responses and requests, another duality that excuses the publisher from making a real statement about their intentions.  “someone else requested I do this,” and “my request to you is required by the ‘game’ we’re playing here” are valid and built-in excuses for publishers who want to share and have others share but aren’t sure if everyone’s on the same page.

While I’m not going to jump on board here, I think I understand a little through my own use of technology and its culturally acceptable standards to avoid social clarity when it’s convenient.  Gotta keep ‘em guessing.

Blame Google?

Upon  consideration of my own ignorance, I’m thinking that my dismay with new media research may be misplaced.  At this point, when I sign up for  something online, I  generally assume that:

• I’m already violating the EULA in some way
• I’m giving up rights to some, most, or all of the content a create/post using that service/product or while I’m logged in at all
• I’m giving company X the right to use or sell my information, from my email address to online behavior patterns, or use it for their own means

(When) I don’t have the time or energy to actually read EULAs so  I assume the worst.  On those occasions when I do take some time, my assumptions are usually confirmed. Even when regulations are disputed or revised to reflect users’ ownership and privacy concerns, like Google Chrome’s  content ownership regulations, at the end of the day we’re still handing over rights to an incredible amount of information.

Because its possible to collect and store massive amounts of useful information about individual and group behavior online, I assume that researchers have access to a vast, at least semi-centralized  body of behavioral  data tied to online personas.  In my data-paradise, researchers simply have to arrange and manipulate this information in order to get accurate statistics on anything.

Anyways the more I think about it the more I realize that the information I’m “giving away” all over the internet is just that: all over the internet.  Researchers probably don’t have access to my entire online history, just bits and pieces, perhaps tied together but perhaps   But Google comes close.  Real close.  Show me the research Google!

NEWs Media

Yet again, I find myself encouraged, yet disappointed with efforts to monitor and synthesize useful information from the web. The PEW Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism recently launched a New Media Index based on analysis of lists of outbound links from Technorati and Icerocket.

“Staff captures the top five linked-to stories on each list (50 stories in all each week), reads, watches or listens to these posts and conducts a content analysis of their subject matter, just as it does for the mainstream press in its weekly News Coverage Index.”

The realization of the importance and relevance of new media in the news sector and the creation of a team dedicated to studying its development is a step forward for the PEJ team. What worries me is the telling descriptor, “just as it does for the mainstream press.” If the Index is a recognition of burgeoning and influential alternative to mainstream news outlets, why are the same ideas and practices being applied to its analysis?

When you’re talking about print newspapers, television network coverage, or radio shows, it makes a lot of sense to monitor what’s being broadcasted each day or week: that is actually what people are seeing/hearing/reading. The end. The ways in which people are interacting with these mediums are limited to the point of being negligible in comparison to the content itself. Online news consumption, on the other hand, is not a passive activity and drastically shifts the role of content in the overall process of how people interact with news media. PEJ’s usage of links as a metric for subject coverage is a step in the right direction; they recognize that relevance can be measured by examining the pathways that people use to access news. However, the index still prioritizes the content at the end of these pathways over the journey istelf as well as a handful of trackable factors, such as user comments and previous and following page visits, that have increasing relevance to news media in a digital era. When the end goal is to investigate the impact of media on society and the producer-consumer ratio of that media is high enough, coverage is a justifiable research subject. However, as news becomes a far more interactive process, producer-centric monitoring systems can’t accurately represent the role of news media in peoples lives. Researchers, how about some new methods for new media?

Why I don’t blog

While I’m tempted to let this title stand on its own, I’m going to go ahead and…well…blog about it. Blogging makes me nervous. So do profiles. Despite, or perhaps because of, my relatively hefty amount of research and writing on online communities, I’m a piss-poor publisher. I know that when I get dressed in the morning, what I choose to have as my voicemail message, and if/which expletives I use when I’m upset at work or at a bar or with my parents are all examples of personality performance. I know that. And I’m ok with the Sonya show. I love the Sonya show…when I control the curtains.

Allow me to indulge myself. You don’t see people wandering in and out of broadway musicals, staying long enough to judge a song or two then heading off to the next stage. And while I’d jump at a couple of tickets to The Lion King, you won’t catch me humming along to the script and stage directions any time soon. So here I am, 22 years into my performance career and suffering from stage fright. Just because the stage is different.

As a postophobe, I was interested to hear that YouTube recently added a feature that allows users to delete comments they’ve made in the past. What I was even more interested by was the discussion that followed:

It’s nice that can delete stupid stuff but be forewarned: Social media monitoring applications like ours are based on a massive database of conversations that we collect constantly (we have over 1.2 billion so far) including YouTube comments and Tweets that we gather in real time- so those public statements you’ve made are still in our social media warehouse even if you delete them. It’s important to keep in mind that this is public discourse

That’s right. The cautionary voice of Mr. Martin Edic resonates with my postophobic nature and makes the following comment all the more poignant.

ohhh, look at you, spamming attention whoring wretch!!

piss off!

Put that in your social media warehouse and smoke it! But really, this is a great comment. Besides making it clear that “poster’s remorse” isn’t at the top of everyone’s worry list, Emma, our vehement replier, turned what could’ve been a simple caution (with a small plug, I suppose) into a more complicated issue. If Martin’s warehouses are indeed as comprehensive as it seems, then the conversation he and Emma and other TechCrunch commenters had on the subject would also be stored for analysis. And seeing as the first direct response to Martin was a spammer accusation, one could argue that he should heed his own advice. He was probably expecting a thank you, and instead he ended up with an archived and public attack on him and his company.

This stage is scary.  End scene.

3…2…1…blog!

Welcome to APOCalypse’s inaugural post.  You can memorialize this historic milestone with  a personalized, commemorative plate.  In fact, you can memorialize anything if you have enough dishes and Sharpies.  But enough gems of wisdom , let’s talk about me.  Let’s talk about me and, oh I don’t know,  my personal goals and how they relate to APOC:
I adore the internet.  I do.  And even more than I want to hold its hand and buy us matching PJs and write it little notes that I hide in its suitcase when it goes on business trips, I want to understand it.   I have no hope or plans of understanding the intricacies of the codes that make it all happen, but that’s not what stole my heart.  Not on its own.
I want to know, or at least try to know, how individuals and computers and industries and governments and all the rest have somehow managed to create this dynamic thing, this techno-human creature, that has captured my heart.  And then I want it to pay my rent.

I wish I could provide a detailed and directed account of what I want to know about online communities when I graduate from APOC, but my main goal is to clarify my goals.  Particularly in the intro class, I want to investigate a variety of issues to ascertain where my interests and strengths lie.  Then I want to investigate where the interests of consumers/users, investors, policy-makers, and programmers lie. Then I want to investigate how technology, existing and potential, can bring those two together.
And then I want to memorialize it all with a commemorative plate.