Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

Sociologist: phone call or text like “catnip” for humans

Posted on by

Amidst a larger conversation about using cell phones in vehicles, a sociologist gets at an interesting question: why can’t people resist the allure of cell phones?

The lure of multitasking may be, in at least one respect, more powerful for drivers than for other people, said Clifford Nass, a sociology professor at Stanford University who studies electronic distraction. Drivers are typically isolated and alone, he said, and humans are fundamentally social animals.

The ring of a phone or the ping of a text becomes a promise of human connection, which is “like catnip for humans,” Nass said.

“When you tap into a totally fundamental, universal human impulse,” he added, “it’s very hard to stop.”

Humans are indeed social animals and driving is uniquely isolating. On one hand, it is an oddly social activity as drivers must interact with other drivers and there is an interesting set of non-verbal interactions. On the other hand, one is in a sealed, moving vehicle and it may be one of the few regular moments people have where they are not near enough to talk to other people. Couldn’t someone examine this hypothesis by looking at how many cell phone caused or influenced car accidents took place when there was a solo driver?

It would be interesting to see how people respond to cell phones differently when alone opposed to in more social settings where they have opportunities to interact with people.

I imagine this could easily become a marketing campaign for cell phones: your phone is “a promise of human connection.” Indeed, a number of cell phone campaigns have stressed how they bring people together. The commercials might not add this but here is the kicker: sometimes this urge to make a human connection might be be problematic…

Why a small minority of Americans don’t use Facebook

Posted on by

The New York Times has a piece looking at why some Americans don’t use Facebook:

As Facebook prepares for a much-anticipated public offering, the company is eager to show off its momentum by building on its huge membership: more than 800 million active users around the world, Facebook says, and roughly 200 million in the United States, or two-thirds of the population…

Many of the holdouts mention concerns about privacy. Those who study social networking say this issue boils down to trust. Amanda Lenhart, who directs research on teenagers, children and families at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said that people who use Facebook tend to have “a general sense of trust in others and trust in institutions.” She added: “Some people make the decision not to use it because they are afraid of what might happen.”…

Facebook executives say they don’t expect everyone in the country to sign up. Instead they are working on ways to keep current users on the site longer, which gives the company more chances to show them ads. And the company’s biggest growth is now in places like Asia and Latin America, where there might actually be people who have not yet heard of Facebook…

And whether there is haranguing involved or not, the rebels say their no-Facebook status tends to be a hot topic of conversation — much as a decision not to own a television might have been in an earlier media era…

Some quick thoughts:

1. This is a relatively small percentage of Americans who don’t use Facebook. If 200 million Americans are on Facebook, that is the vast majority of people 13 years old and above. Roughly 15-20% of Americans are not eligible for Facebook (older 2000 figures here). The comparison made in the article is to the percent of people without cell phones which is roughly 16%.

1a. Because of its general ubiquity, perhaps it would be more interesting then to differentiate between people who it frequently (multiple times a day?) versus those who check infrequently (say once a week or less).

1b. Is this the activity Americans most share in common perhaps beside watching TV?

2. Privacy issues don’t seem to bother most Facebook users. Even though there may be little revolts when Facebook changes its privacy policy or makes a mistake, this isn’t driving people away in large numbers. And, as I’ve said before, if you want to remain private you should probably stay off the Internet all together. Another warning for non-users: Facebook may already have information about you anyway.

3. It would be interesting to see figures of how long people stay on Facebook. And speaking of getting people to see advertisements, this small study used eye tracking to see what catches people’s attention when they look at profiles.

3a. If Facebook does need to keep users’ attention, is there a line between always having to change things versus helping people feel comfortable with the site? I say this as we await the Timeline change and the inevitable negative responses.

4. As the article hints at by briefly looking at the pressure non-users get from Facebook users, there is a whole set of social norms that have arisen around the use of Facebook.

Sociologist discusses the problems of the publishing industry

Posted on by

A sociologist discusses the major issues facing the publishing industry:

One year ago I interviewed John B. Thompson in the Rail about the state of the publishing industry. Thompson is a Cambridge University sociology professor, and his 2010 book Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the 21st Century was the result of more than five years of talking to editors, publishers, writers, and agents in the U.S. and the U.K. about the rapid changes in the traditional structures of book publishing. Given that these transformations have only continued, I thought it worth checking in with Thompson a year on. An updated second edition of Merchants of Culture will be published in March by Penguin (U.S.) and Polity (U.K.)…

[Thompson:] There are two major developments that are having a profound effect on the publishing industry today and that are creating a situation of deep uncertainty about the future. The first is the continuing economic crisis that has metamorphosed since then into a deeper and more pervasive recession and that has created a tough economic climate for publishers and booksellers. Retailers are often operating on tight margins and reduce their liabilities by ordering less and stocking more cautiously. Booksellers will return more books to publishers in order to reduce the amount of capital tied up in unsold stock. But even these measures may be insufficient as many retailers have been and will be forced out of business. And when retailers close, publishers lose shop windows to display their books and are faced with substantial write-offs for bad debts. This further depresses profit margins that were already under pressure from static or declining sales. It’s an economic snowball effect…

Well, it’s the intensification of a surge in e-book sales, especially in the U.S. While physical book sales are static or declining for most publishers, e-book sales are surging ahead—it is one of the only areas today where trade publishers are seeing serious growth. And the growth is startling: For most U.S. trade publishers e-books accounted for 1 percent or less of overall revenue in 2008. In 2011 the figure is likely to be between 18 and 22 percent (possibly even higher for some houses). And, interestingly, the biggest shift from print to digital has been in commercial fiction, especially genre fiction like romance, science fiction, mystery, and thriller. For fiction as a whole, e-books accounted for around 40 percent of overall sales for some large trade houses by mid-2011. But in some categories of genre fiction and for some authors the percentages were even higher—60 percent for some categories like romance, and even up to 80 percent for some authors. Narrative non-fiction has also seen a significant but smaller shift to digital. Anything more complicated—such as books that use color, like art books or children’s books—has so far lagged far behind. This change is already forcing the key players in publishing to reconsider their positions. Practices that have become settled conventions in the field are suddenly opened up to scrutiny, and players who have interacted amicably for years suddenly find themselves locking horns in new conflicts where the rules are no longer clear (as happened, for example, when Random House and Andrew Wylie clashed over Wylie’s decision to launch Odyssey Editions). To what extent the game of trade publishing will actually be transformed by this development remains, at this stage, unclear. Much will depend on how quickly and effectively the key players are able to adapt to the new information environment that is emerging around them. We are living through a revolution of sorts, and one of the few things you can say for certain about a revolution is that when you’re in the middle of one, you have no idea where and when it will end.

New technology means that a lot of people need to adapt, producers and readers included. Two additional areas I wish Thompson had commented on here:

1. It would be interesting to hear more about publishers and other actors are trying out some new ideas in order to make money off e-publishing. Amazon now has a publishing wing. Are the major publishers really shifting major resources and people to this or are they trying to hold the line? Do the recent commercials on TV and radio for books (examples from James Patterson here and here) represent these publishers continuing to hold to the old model? How much overlap is there between the e-book and traditional publishing world?

2. Thompson talks a bit about the future role of books. I’d be interested in hearing more about whether how the “long tail” phenomenon and growing e-book sales in certain genres will change larger cultural meanings and understandings. Not so much whether books will matter (I think they still will) but how they matter. Will popular e-books really only matter if a movie gets made or the author makes it to a popular daytime talk show? What books will become “classics”? Fifty years from now, which books will form a “canon” for this era?

The “sociological significance of the boombox”

Posted on by

In case you were wondering, “the sociological significance of the boombox” has been reduced to a new app. A fun read that includes a lively “boombox parade through the streets of the East Village.”

Journalists need a better measure for when something has “taken over the web”

Posted on by

I’ve noticed that there are a growing number of online news stories about what is popular online. While many websites need to feed on this buzz, journalists need some better measures of how popular things are on the Internet. Take, for instance, this story posted on Yahoo:

This video from the California State University, Northridge campus has ignited controversy across the Internet this morning. In the video, reportedly taken during finals week, a female student loses her temper with her fellow students, accusing them of being disruptive.

Exactly how much “controversy across the Internet” has erupted? Phrases like this are not unusual; we’re commonly told that a particular story or video or meme has spread across the Internet so we need to know about it. But we have little idea about how popular anything really is.

I’ve noted before my dislike for journalists using the size of Facebook groups as a measure of popularity. So what can be used? We need numbers that can be at least put in a context and compared to other numbers. For example, the number of YouTube views can be compared to the views for other videos. Page views and hits (which have their own problems) at least provide some information. Journalists could do a quick search of Google news to get some idea of how many news sources have picked up on a story. We can know how many times something has been retweeted on Twitter.

None of these numbers are perfect. By themselves, they are meaningless. But broad and vague assertions that we need to read about something simply because lots of people on the Internet have seen it are silly. Give us some idea of how popular something really is, where it started, and who has responded to it so far. Show us some trend and put it in some context.

Required for political participation: “digital skills”

Posted on by

Here is an argument that African-Americans and Latinos could participate more in American politics if they had more “digital skills”:

Could the key to increasing civic engagement among Latinos and African Americans be computer classes?   A growing body of research is linking Internet use, particularly social network use, and increased social capital and civic engagement.  A new reportfrom the MaCarthur foundation finds that Facebook use is correlated with increased interest in and participation in politics. Scholars like Northwestern Sociologist Esther Hargatti [sic] speak eloquently about the information gap between rich and poor online.  This gap is less about access to technology and more about developing the skills to harness the technology for political and social gain.  The ability to do information searches, send text messages, tweet, share content and other on-line skills is a central element in becoming what Evegny Morozov calls a “digital renegade” rather than a “digital captive.”

The key to using the Web in democracy-enhancing ways is acquiring digital skills.  While this concept has been measured in lots of ways, the presence of digital skills can be measured by the level of autonomy the user has, the number of access points a user has to get online, the amount of experience a user has with different types of online tools, etc.

This should be an area of interest to a lot of people: how social factors, such as race, education levels, location, and other forces affect online use. “Digital skills” are not simply traits that everyone picks up on their own. It requires a certain level of exposure, time, and resources that not all have. See a video clip of Hargittai talking about this.

I wonder how much arguments like this are behind recent government efforts to provide cheap or free broadband to poorer US residents. Here is part of the statement from the head of the FCC:

“There is a growing divide between the digital-haves and have-nots. No Less than one-third of the poorest Americans have adopted broadband, while 90%+ of the richest have adopted it. Low-income Americans, rural Americans, seniors, and minorities disproportionately find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide and excluded from the $8 trillion dollar global Internet economy.”

As I’ve asked before, how close are we to declaring Internet access an essential human right?

Living Earth Simulator to model social world

Posted on by

Here is an interesting project, the Living Earth Simulator, that hopes to take a lot of data and come to conclusions about social life:

Described as a “knowledge collider,” and now with a pledge of one billion euros from the European Union, the Living Earth Simulator is a new big data and supercomputing project that will attempt to uncover the underlying sociological and psychological laws that underpin human civilization. In the same way that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider smashes together protons to see what happens, the Living Earth Simulator (LES) will gather knowledge from a Planetary Nervous System (PNS — yes, really) to try to predict societal fluctuations such as political unrest, economic bubbles, disease epidemics, and so on.

Orchestrated by FuturICT, which is basically a consortium of preeminent scientists, computer science centers around the world, and high-power computing (HPC) installations, the Living Earth Simulator hopes to correlate huge amounts of data — including real-time sources such as Twitter and web news — and extant, but separate approaches currently being used by other institutions, into a big melting pot of information. To put it into scientific terms, the LES will analyze techno-socio-economic-environmental (!) systems. From this, FuturICT hopes to reveal the tacit agreements and hidden laws that actually govern society, rather than the explicit, far-removed-from-reality bills and acts that lawmakers inexorably enact…

The timing of EU’s billion-euro grant is telling, too. As you probably know, the European Union is struggling to keep the plates spinning, and the LES, rather handily, will probably be the most accurate predictor of economic stability in the world. Beyond money, though, it is hoped that the LES and PNS can finally tell us why humans do things, like watch a specific TV show, buy a useless gadget, or start a revolution.

Looking at the larger picture, the Living Earth Simulator is really an admission that we know more about the physical universe than the social. We can predict with startling accuracy whether an asteroid will hit Earth, but we know scant little about how society might actually react to an extinction-level event. We plough billions of dollars into studying the effects and extent of climate change, but what if understood enough of the psychology and sociology behind human nature to actually change our behavior?

I don’t know about the prospects of such a project but if the BBC is reporting on it, perhaps it has a future.

A couple of statements in the description above intrigue me:

1. The simulator will help uncover “the tacit agreements and hidden laws that actually govern society.” Do most social scientists think this is possible if we only had enough data and the right simulator?

2. The comparison between the natural and social sciences is telling. The portrayal here is that the natural sciences have come a lot further in studying nature than social scientists in studying human behavior. Is this true? Is this a fair comparison – natural systems vs. social systems? How much “unknown knowledge” is really in each realm?

3. The coding for this project must be immense.

4. The article makes no mention of utilizing social scientists to help develop this project and analyze the data though the group behind it does have some social scientists on board.

On Facebook, it’s not 6 degrees of separation but rather 4.74 degrees

Posted on by

One effect of globalization is that people are more aware of world events and are better connected to others. A new study using Facebook data suggests the average user is separated from any other user in the world by just 4.74 degrees:

On Facebook, however, the average user is only 4.74 degrees away from any other Facebooker…

That conclusion comes from a non-peer-reviewed study of 721 million active Facebook users, released by Facebook in collaboration with the Università degli Studi di Milano, the blog post says…

The Palo Alto, California, company says 99.6% of all Facebook users studied were separated by five degrees or less from any other Facebook user; 92% were separated by only four degrees…

“The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74,” Facebook says.

While this is indeed an interesting finding (particularly since it is related to Stanley Milgram’s six degree studies decades ago), there are bigger questions at stake here. With people 4.74 connections away, how exactly does this impact a user’s life or positively influence their life? We know that information and culture passes through networks but how exactly does this work on Facebook? Can the life of a user in Siberia really affect the life of a college student in Arizona?

One issue here is that Facebook itself currently allow for limiting connectability between users. Sources like The Facebook Effect suggest that Mark Zuckerberg would really like a more open network where people could see each other’s information and actually interact with others beyond the “friends” structure. However, it doesn’t appear that most users would want this at this time – most Facebook friends are people users are already know and there are concerns about privacy. How does the company move people into accepting a more open network so that users can openly take advantage of those chains 4.74 people long?

Also, who tend to be the people in the networks that help connect people the most? College students? People who live in larger metropolitan areas? People with the most friends? People with the most diversity in their own friend lists?

What is “The Big Data Boom”on the Internet good for?

Posted on by

The Internet is a giant source of ready-to-use data:

Today businesses can measure their activities and customer relationships with unprecedented precision. As a result, they are awash with data. This is particularly evident in the digital economy, where clickstream data give precisely targeted and real-time insights into consumer behavior…

Much of this information is generated for free, by computers, and sits unused, at least initially. A few years after installing a large enterprise resource planning system, it is common for companies to purchase a “business intelligence” module to try to make use of the flood of data that they now have on their operations. As Ron Kohavi at Microsoft memorably put it, objective, fine-grained data are replacing HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinions) as the basis for decision-making at more and more companies.

The wealth of data also makes it easy to run experiments:

Consider two “born-digital” companies, Amazon and Google. A central part of Amazon’s research strategy is a program of “A-B” experiments where it develops two versions of its website and offers them to matched samples of customers. Using this method, Amazon might test a new recommendation engine for books, a new service feature, a different check-out process, or simply a different layout or design. Amazon sometimes gets sufficient data within just a few hours to see a statistically significant difference…

According to Google economist Hal Varian, his company is running on the order of 100-200 experiments on any given day, as they test new products and services, new algorithms and alternative designs. An iterative review process aggregates findings and frequently leads to further rounds of more targeted experimentation.

This sounds like a social scientist’s dream – if we could get our hands on the data.

My big question about all of this data is this: what should be done with it? This article, and others I’ve seen, have said that it will transform business. If this is just a way for businesses to become more knowledgeable, more efficient, and ultimately, more profitable, is this enough? Occasionally, we hear of things like discovering and/or tracking epidemics by looking at search queries or tools like the “mechanical turk” to crowdsource small but needed work. On the whole, does the data from the Internet advance human flourishing or concentrate some benefits in the hands of a few or even hinder flourishing? Does this data give us insights into health and medicine, international relations, and social interactions or does it primarily give entrepreneurs and established companies the chance to make more money? Are these questions that anyone really asks or cares about?

ASA pushing for better sociology Wikipedia entries

Posted on by

This news came out earlier this week in the American Sociological Association’s Footnotes: the ASA is hoping sociologists and sociology students will help improve Wikipedia pages pertaining to sociology.

In an essay on the association’s online newsletter (scheduled to be included in the next edition of its print newsletter), Wright this week announced the Sociology in Wikipedia Initiative: a formal call to sociologists to help improve and expand Wikipedia entries that might benefit from their expertise and consider assigning their students to do the same.

“Wikipedia has become an important global public good,” Wright writes in the essay. “Since it is a reference source for sociologically relevant ideas and knowledge that is widely used by both the general public and students, it is important that the quality of sociology entries be as high as possible. This will only happen if sociologists themselves contribute to this public good.”

Not only might Wikipedia benefit from contributions by students steeped in academic research methods, but the exercise might help students learn how to read the crowd-sourced encyclopedia in the proper context, said Wright.

“What better way to get students to understand that it’s actual people like them who have written this stuff, than for them to write this stuff?” he said.

Is this “public sociology” at work? I don’t mind this call as it would help ensure that Wikipedia has accurate and in-depth sociology information rather than just a bare bones outline. Actually, I’ve thought the sociology Wikipedia entries weren’t that bad already, particularly compared to other disciplines. For example, the statistics pages on Wikipedia are technically correct but it is very difficult for a layperson to understand what is going on.

But how many sociology faculty will spend much time with this since there aren’t many professional incentives? Even publishing in online journals as opposed to more traditional print journals is not well-regarded so what’s the point of helping improve Wikipedia entries? This may seem like a move toward embracing technology and toward a younger generation of sociologists but the discipline has a long way to go.

At least a few leaders of major academic groups are admitting that they use Wikipedia as a source. Not too long, admitting this would not have been good for one’s status. How far away are we from Wikipedia being an acceptable source?