Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

Google+ a “sociologically simple and elegant solution”?

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According to one reviewer, Google+ takes advantage of sociological principles with its circles:

You also don’t have to ask anybody to be your “friend”. Nor do you have to reply to anybody’s “friend request”. You simple put people into the discrete/discreet spheres they already inhabit in your life…

Now, if you had asked me which company I considered least likely to come up with such a sociologically simple and elegant solution, I might well have answered: Google.

Its founders and honchos worship algorithms more than Mark Zuckerberg does. (I used to exploit this geekiness as “color” in my profiles of Google from that era.) Google then seemed to live down to our worst fears by making several seriously awkward attempts at “social” (called Buzz and Wave and so forth).

But these calamities seem to have been blessings. Google seems to have been humbled into honesty and introspection. It then seems to have done the unthinkable and consulted not only engineers but … sociologists (yuck). And now it has come back with … this.

Why exactly do algorithms and sociological principles have to be in opposition to each other? It is a matter of what informs these algorithms: brute efficiency, sociological principles, something else…

Ultimately, couldn’t we also argue that the sociological validity of Google+ will be demonstrated by whether it catches on or not? Facebook may not be elegant or “correct” but people have found it useful and at least worthwhile to join(even if some loath it). Perhaps this is too pragmatic of an answer (if it works, it is successful) but this seems to make sense with social media.

This reminds me as well of the idea expressed in The Facebook Effect (quick review here) that Facebook wishes to reach a point where people are willing to share their information with lots of people they may not know. If this is still the goal, Google+ then is more conservative in that people can restrict information by circle. I suspect it will be a while before a majority of people are willing to go the route suggested by Facebook but perhaps Facebook is being more “progressive” in the long run by trying to push people in a new direction.

Pondering 24+ hours of no electricity

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I recently wrote about a question that could garner some interesting responses from students: “what does civilization as we know it rely on?” I suggested electricity would be high on the list of technological advancements and after a 24+ hour period last week without power, I have some additional thoughts about something we take for granted.

1. Having no power even for a few days had me wondering about premodern and modern sleeping patterns. Without electricity, one would really benefit from getting up with the sun rising and going to sleep at dark. Were there night owls before electricity or is this a modern condition?

2. Having refrigerators and freezers helps remove us from the process by which food is made. The daily process of purchasing or producing fresh food is unnecessary with electricity but is more likely if one can’t store food for long periods of time.

3. Most of our modern entertainment and information gathering relies on electricity.

4. Natural light within a house becomes much more important without the possibility of electrical lighting. The trend in recent years is toward more natural light and while this may be aesthetically pleasing and more green, it also provides some insurance when there is no power.  

5. If we get to a point where we all have electric cars, what happens then in a power outage? Is this an added bonus of the Chevy Volt which also can run on gas?

6. I would be interested in knowing how the electrical grid is set up. While I know this is secret information (trade secrets plus avoiding mischief and crime), I wonder how redundant the grid is. That is, how many homes and businesses are connected in such a way that electricity can reach the building by several paths meaning it would be more difficult to knock out the power?

7. Why not include short-term, a few days or so, backup systems or small electricity generators (solar, gasoline, etc.) in new homes? Between electricity outages and people worried about a collapse of modern society, might there be a market for this?

The unpredictable nature of Twitter cascades and social marketing

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Tim Harford in the Financial Times discusses mathematical sociologist Duncan Watt’s research on why certain information in social media catches fire among a large group of people (like in a “Twitter cascade”) and other information does not. Watts suggests several factors are important: we tend to see what becomes successful and what is not, popular posts are small and uncommon, and “it’s impossible to predict which tweets will start cascades.”

There are lot of people who would like to take advantage of social media to share information and sell products. This sort of research suggests it is more difficult to do this than some might think. On one hand, having a lot of friends or followers means that more people could see your information. But on the other hand, this does not necessarily mean that people will pass along your information to their own set of friends. If Watts is right, does this mean that companies or organizations should change their strategies or even limit social media marketing?

This is not just a problem in studying social media. It is also difficult within other fields, such as film, music, and books, to predict what will become a success and what will not. A common solution there is to simply produce a lot of material and then wait for a small percentage of products to generate a lot of money and help subsidize the rest of the material. This also seems to be the case with social media: there are a lot of people sharing a lot of information but only a small part of spreads through a larger population. This might also mean that gatekeepers, people who have the ability to sift through and analyze/criticize content, will continue to be important as the average user won’t be able to see the broader view of the social media world.

Could some of this problem be the result of the actual design and user experience of Twitter? If so, might companies and others work toward creating different forms of social media that would increase or enhance the sharing of information across a broader set of users?

Social inequalities in accessing open government data

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Some governments are providing more open data. But, this may not be enough as citizens don’t necessarily have equal access to the data or abilities to interpret the information:

At least 16 nations have major open data initiatives; in many more, pressure is building for them to follow suit. The US has posted nearly 400,000 data sets at Data.gov, and organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and MAPlight.org are finding compelling ways to use public data—like linking political contributions to political actions. It’s the kind of thing that seems to prove Louis Brandeis’ famous comment: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” But transparency alone is not a panacea, and it may even have a few nasty side effects. Take the case of the Bhoomi Project, an ambitious effort by the southern Indian state of Karnataka to digitize some 20 million land titles, making them more accessible. It was supposed to be a shining example of e-governance: open data that would benefit everyone and bring new efficiencies to the world’s largest democracy. Instead, the portal proved a boon to corporations and the wealthy, who hired lawyers and predatory land agents to challenge titles, hunt for errors in documentation, exploit gaps in records, identify targets for bribery, and snap up property. An initiative that was intended to level the playing field for small landholders ended up penalizing them; bribery costs and processing time actually increased.

A level playing field doesn’t mean much if you don’t know the rules or have the right sporting equipment. Uploading a million documents to the Internet doesn’t help people who don’t know how to sift through them. Michael Gurstein, a community informatics expert in Vancouver, British Columbia, has dubbed this problem the data divide. Indeed, a recent study on the use of open government data in Great Britain points out that most of the people using the information are already data sophisticates. The less sophisticated often don’t even know it’s there.

This touches on two issues of social inequality that are not discussed as much as they might be. First, not everyone has consistent access to the internet. It may be a necessity for the younger generations but for example, there are still problems in doing web surveys because internet users are not a representative cross-sample of the US population. Making the data available on the internet would make it available to more users but not necessarily all users. This ties in with some earlier thoughts I’ve had about whether internet access will become a de facto or defined human right in the future.

Second, not everyone knows where the open data is or how to go through it. Government information dumps require sorting through and some time to figure out what is going on. There may or may not be a guide through the information. As someone who has worked with some large sociological datasets, it always takes some time to become acclimated with the files and data before one can begin an analysis. This should legitimately become part of a college education: some training in how to sort through information and common databases. If we get to a point where the average informed citizen needs to be able to sort through government information online, wouldn’t this be a basic skill that all need to be taught? As the commentator suggests, the trained and sophisticated can take advantage of this data while the average citizen may be left behind.

The idea of having more open government information should cause us to think about how the internet might help close the gap between people (though I don’t hold any utopian expectations about this) rather than sustain or exacerbate social inequalities.

The troubles with studying Facebook profiles at Harvard

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Many researchers would like to get their hands on SNS/Facebook profile data but one well-known dataset put together by Harvard researchers has come under fire:

But today the data-sharing venture has collapsed. The Facebook archive is more like plutonium than gold—its contents yanked offline, its future release uncertain, its creators scolded by some scholars for downloading the profiles without students’ knowledge and for failing to protect their privacy. Those students have been identified as Harvard College’s Class of 2009…

The Harvard sociologists argue that the data pulled from students’ Facebook profiles could lead to great scientific benefits, and that substantial efforts have been made to protect the students. Jason Kaufman, the project’s principal investigator and a research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, points out that data were redacted to minimize the risk of identification. No student seems to have suffered any harm. Mr. Kaufman accuses his critics of acting like “academic paparazzi.”…

The Facebook project began to unravel in 2008, when a privacy scholar at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Michael Zimmer, showed that the “anonymous” data of Mr. Kaufman and his colleagues could be cracked to identify the source as Harvard undergraduates…

But that boon brings new pitfalls. Researchers must navigate the shifting privacy standards of social networks and their users. And the committees set up to protect research subjects—institutional review boards, or IRB’s—lack experience with Web-based research, Mr. Zimmer says. Most tend to focus on evaluating biomedical studies or traditional, survey-based social science. He has pointed to the Harvard case in urging the federal government to do more to educate IRB’s about Web research.

It sounds like academics, IRBs, and granting agencies still need to figure out acceptable standards for collecting such data. But I’m not surprised that the primary issue that arose had to do with identifying individual users and their profiles as this is a common issue when researchers ask for or collect personal information. Additionally, this dataset intersects with a lot of open concerns about Internet privacy. Perhaps some IRBs could take on the task of leading the way for academics and other researchers who want to get their hands on such data.

It is interesting that these concerns arose because of the growing interest in sharing datasets. The Harvard researchers and IRB allowed the research to take place so I wonder if all of this would have ever happened if the dataset didn’t have to be shared where others could then raise issues.

I understand that the researchers wanted to collect the profiles quietly but why not ask for permission? How many Harvard students would have turned them down? I think most college students are quite aware of what can happen with their profile data and they take care of the issue on the front end by making selections about what they display. The researchers could then offer some protections in terms of anonymity and who would have access to the data. Or what about having interviews with students who would then be asked to load their profile and walk the researcher through what they have put online and why it is there?

Nevada opens path to driverless cars

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Even though driverless cars are not a common product yet, Nevada has opened a legal path for driverless cars on the road:

Assembly Bill 511, the first such legislation in the country, allows the state’s Department of Transportation to draw up rules that would authorize driverless cars. The regulations would include safety standards, insurance requirements and testing sites.

A driverless car is defined by the bill as using “artificial intelligence, sensors and global positioning system coordinates to drive itself without the active intervention of a human operator.” That includes technology such as lasers, cameras and radar…

Stanford University robotics professor Sebastian Thrun, a project leader on Google’s effort, said that nearly all driving accidents are due to human error rather than mistakes by machines.

“Do you realize that we could change the capacity of highways by a factor of two or three if we didn’t rely on human precision on staying in the lane but on robotic precision, and thereby drive a little bit closer together on a little bit narrower lanes and do away with all traffic jams on highways,” he said in a speech at the TED 2011 conference this spring.

So how long until this becomes a reality? It seems like we have been hearing about these possibilities for years. Here are a few things that could be holding up the process:

1. The legal side of things. Perhaps Nevada is really a pioneer here and will get the ball rolling.

2. The technology is not quite ready yet. It doesn’t sound like this is the issue.

3. We were waiting for a few companies to really push this. It is interesting that Google seems to be getting a lot of the attention. Obviously, their main business is not driverless cars but they had the resources and interest.

4. The cultural side: are people ready to see driverless cars on the road? Even if they are proven to be safer, will people accept them quickly or will it take some time?

Facebook information and privacy: enticing or overwhelming?

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There are a lot of users of Facebook and similar sites. One of the primary concerns of users is privacy: who can see their personal information and how it might be used. Two commentators talk about how users respond to this issue:

Sociologist Nathan Jurgenson has an interesting post about Facebook and his skepticism about proclamations of the end of privacy and anonymity. He deploys the postmodernist/poststructuralist insight that each piece of information shared raises more questions about what hasn’t been said, and thus strategic sharing can create different realms of personal privacy and public mystery.

We know that knowledge, including what we post on social media, indeed follows the logic of the fan dance: we always enact a game of reveal and conceal, never showing too much else we have given it all away. It is better to entice by strategically concealing the right “bits” at the right time. For every status update there is much that is not posted. And we know this. What is hidden entices us.

I think this is missing the point. I feel like I need to use all caps to stress this: LOTS OF PEOPLE DON’T WANT ATTENTION. They don’t want to be enticing. Privacy is not about hiding the truth. It’s about being able to avoid the spotlight…

Social media confronts us with how little control we have over our public identity, which is put into play and reinterpreted and tossed around while we watch—while all the distortions and gossip gets fed back to us by the automated feedback channels. Some people find this thrilling. Others find it terrible. It’s always been true that we don’t control how we are seen, but at least we could control how much we had to know about it. It’s harder now to be aloof, to be less aware of our inevitable performativity. We are forced instead to fight for the integrity of our manufactured personal brand.

Jurgenson seems to be referring to the impression management work done by users who are able to craft their image. Most users know that certain pieces of information can hurt them, such as unpleasant photos, so they don’t include that information. Even more so, users try to present a positive image of themselves with generally happy pictures and an acceptable set of interests and activities. And there is a lot that is hidden: I would guess that a majority of users post pretty infrequently. This impression management, reminiscent of Goffman’s front-stage/back-stage dichotomy, has been well established by researchers.

Rob Horning, responding to Jurgenson, suggests that Facebook exposes “how little control we have over our public identity.” This may be true: even small pieces of information might present problems. Additionally, I think he is right in saying that a lot of users don’t want attention: they simply want a low-maintenance way to connect with current and past friends.

But, I would argue that users have a good amount of control over their “public identity” on the Internet. To start, they don’t have to participate and a sizable minority does not. It seems like the easiest way to lose control over what is available on the Internet is to post it yourself, whether on Facebook or a blog or Twitter feed or somewhere else. Second, even if one does participate, Jurgenson suggests that much still remains hidden. There are few people who are willing to reveal everything and few who actually want to. (I’ve always wondered if Facebook users are mostly annoyed with those people who do seem to present everything, good and bad, through their profiles.) Third, one can be friends who they want, limiting who is going to see and possibly use this information. I think a lot of the genius of Facebook is that users feel like they are in control of these aspects and generally resist efforts that use their information in ways that they may not desire. In the end, there are ways in which one can participate without doing much or exposing much.

Horning’s conclusion is interesting: “It’s harder now to be aloof, to be less aware of our inevitable performativity. We are forced instead to fight for the integrity of our manufactured personal brand.” Perhaps this is the real issue, not privacy: since we know that there are others crafting their personal image, we now have the choice to keep up or not. It is not quite a competition but rather mediated social interaction where we can see how others (and they can see how we) “put ourselves together” online. The SNS realm is now another social realm to worry about and it is hard to get away from: did I post a witty enough comment? Is that picture flattering of me? Should I be Facebook friends with that person I never really talked to? These decisions may be consequential…or they may not.

The (terrible?) world of “professional” Amazon reviewers

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A recent study of some of Amazon.com’s top 1000 reviewers has PC Magazine writer John Dvorak questions the validity of their reviews:

In the first academic study of its kind, Trevor Pinch, Cornell University professor of sociology and of science and technology studies, independently surveyed 166 of Amazon’s top 1,000 reviewers, examining everything from demographics to motives. What he discovered was 85 percent of those surveyed had been approached with free merchandise from authors, agents or publishers.

Pinch, who also found the median age range of the reviewers he surveyed was 51 to 60, a surprise said Pinch, because the image of the internet is more of a young person’s thing. Amazon is encouraging reviewers to receive free products through Amazon Vine, an invitation-only program in which the top 1,000 reviewers are offered a catalog of free products to review…

This is the fraud aspect of the process that cannot be tolerated. And now to find out they are in a much older demographic makes me think they are just product hoarders who will say what they need to say to get more products. This conclusion is hinted at by the professor.

I do not like man on the street reviews. I never have, and I’ve always thought they could be easily corrupted by smart public relations folks who have already dove into what they call social media. This includes phony personas on Twitter and Facebook that are used to sway public opinion, shipping free goodies to “influential” bloggers, and things like this Amazon scandal.

Dvorak is not really arguing that reviews are not valuable but rather that because Amazon does not fully disclose how these reviewers operate, customers could be duped. The problem here is trust: Dvorak and others might assume that reviewers are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts but instead they are “professionals.” Instead, these reviewers are being “paid.” This is a classic gatekeepers problem: how do you know that a reviewer is trustworthy and giving unvarnished opinions? There are plenty of critics these days for various media outlets and websites. I suspect many average citizens have to read through multiple reviews from a single critic to see if their thoughts line up with their own or to see if they are consistent.

Of course, Amazon relies on a crowd sourcing approach, just like aggregator websites such as Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. Do these top reviewers really sway people’s opinions about products since there are often many others who provide reviews of the same products?

Why not ask Amazon whether critical reviewers have been kicked out of these programs? Dvorak is suggesting that these reviewers would speak positively about products just in order to receive more – couldn’t Amazon fight back against this?

My first thoughts when I saw this study a while back was that how confident could Pinch be about his findings based on 166 reviewers. Why not go for a larger sample out of the 1000 Top Reviewers?

(Side note: at the end, Dvorak applauds Pinch for tackling this topic:

By the way (and off topic), you should read my writings over the past 30 years, because I have been hounding sociologists around the world to begin to study these sorts of computer and Internet activities. Give Professor Pinch an award, will you! Maybe that will encourage more studies.

Maybe so.)

Job for sociology majors: online “community managers”

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Rawn Shah, “an expert in collaboration and social computing methodologies within organizations and on the Web,” suggests that sociology (and other social science majors) can fill some tech jobs:

Social science brings much more than just this one technique; it reaches particular personalities who are keenly interested in understanding human relationships in its many forms. By interacting over online environments, we lose some key elements of how we communicate and understand each other, in particular, body language and facial expressions. Instead we have to discover the new ways of understanding communication; rediscover the hidden conversations, feelings and emotions in verbal communication now that non-verbal signals may be missing. This leads to just the kind of personality characteristics and skills that are crucial to Community Manager job roles…

Consider this, jobs that involve relationships with groups of people, whether customers, employees, partners or otherwise, are rapidly on the increase as more companies build online communities and participate in social environments online to interact for business reasons. They aren’t simply looking for people who know how to use Facebook; they need people who can interact well, understand relationships, and in particular understand what is not being said, and sense the feel of others. For businesses, these are the roles that make collaboration on the larger scale across the organization happen.

However, I have yet to see the art and science of managing online communities become a regular aspect of college curriculum. I should say I have tried: in 2006-07 I taught the subject as a guest lecturer at the Eller College of Business at University of Arizona. However, the college did not continue the subject after I was not available. In discussing this point with other Social Business and community thought-leaders, they suggested that it was just too early then. Five years later, the demand is there and we don’t seem to have enough of a supply to fill it.

Certainly any company wants candidates who are well experienced with being Community Managers because the best ones have fine tuned their skills through the many interactions. There are many hard skills that you can definitely apply to the job, but quality comes with experience. Every community is different and hence the job can be very pragmatic and audience specific. However, to get to this point we need community managers who understand and practice the basics first. Let’s really start looking into social sciences as one source of supply for the future of work.

I would suspect that many sociology majors wouldn’t even know that these sorts of jobs are possible. But the description should fit what sociology majors can do: “people who can interact well, understand relationships, and in particular understand what is not being said, and sense the feel of others” and promote collaboration within organizations. These are marketable, practical skills that sociology majors should know something about.

Shah suggests there is a matching problem: sociology students and tech companies need to develop a method by which they can find each other. Perhaps it is because there are not many college courses that make this clear, as Shah suggests, but I wonder if it could also be that sociology as a discipline is behind the curve in tackling the burgeoning tech realm.

The age of “neophilia”

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A new book cites a sociologist who says we are in a world of “neophilia”:

We are addicted to new products, say Botsman and Rogers. They cite Colin Campbell, a professor of sociology at the University of York, for the diagnosis – that we suffer from ‘neophilia,’ where novelty seeking is the new phenomenon. “Pre-modern societies tend to be suspicious of the novel. It is a feature of modernity that we are addicted to novelty.”

As a stark example of how obsolescence was built into our minds, the book traces the tale of how GM’s Alfred Sloan launched Chevrolet by convincing his team ‘to restyle the body covering of what was essentially a nine-year-old piece of technology under the banner of product innovation.’ The Chevrolet was a remarkable success and the idea of ‘perceived obsolescence’ and ‘change for change’s sake’ was born, the authors note.

“GM went so far as to define its strategy as choreographed cosmetic ‘upgrades’ to ‘Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.’ In 1929, Charles Kettering, director of research for Sloan, wrote an article declaring, ‘The key to economic prosperity is the organised creation of dissatisfaction…’”

Of course, this obsolescence means more products are sold. It would be intriguing to be privy to some of the conversations corporations must have about particular products: “do we make it a little cheaper so the consumer has to buy a similar product sooner or do we aim for a higher reliability rating in Consumer Reports“? (Do the reliability rankings in Consumer Reports necessarily correspond with the longevity of products or how long consumers hold on to them?)

The contrast between the pre-modern and modern world is interesting: we moderns are skeptical of tradition and conservatism. Does this mean “neophilia” is a product of the Enlightenment?