Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

Talking about Twitter language and what it reveals about the world

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It may seem like common sense that people’s regional dialects show up in their online communication. According to a new study that examined “380,000 messages from Twitter during one week in March 2010,” people in California say “coo” for “cool,” southerners still say “y’all,” and New Yorkers are more apt to say “suttin” instead of “something.”

But I think the study does just go beyond common sense in some of its other conclusions:

Eisenstein said some of the online “accents” mirror those in the spoken language, but not all. For example, many people in the Great Lakes region tend to have similar accents when speaking, but that wasn’t necessarily found to be true in the study, he said.

“One thing I think that it shows is that people really have a need to communicate their identity — their cultural identity and their geographic identity in social media,” he said.

This is interesting: how exactly do people portray their identity through their online language? On mediums like Twitter, people make very conscious choices about how to speak. People of different regions and dialects can choose to use their typical speech patterns or not. And why do they make these choices?

A broader question to ask is how much do posts on Twitter represent reality? What sort of picture of the world does Twitter deliver? This study can help us understand what Twitter behavior is like but can it tell us much about the broader world?

Quick Review: The Social Network

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Much has been written about the movie The Social Network since it was released earlier this year. Adding to the positive buzz about the movie, commentators think it will be up for some Oscars and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was recently named “Person of the Year” by Time (more on this shortly). While sagescape has already offered his views (from Harvard itself), I have some thoughts after finally seeing this movie in the theater:

1. This story revolves around two primary themes and plot devices: social status and two court cases.

1a. Social status. Zuckerberg is portrayed as a computer genius who is desperate for social acceptance on a campus where the rich, beautiful, and athletic get attention. The movie begins and ends with this as he tries to reestablish a relationship with his one-time girlfriend. He is shown wanting to be accepted into Harvard’s prestigious social clubs and is petty when his friend Eduardo has an opportunity to enter one of these clubs himself. Ultimately, the story is not that different than any film about high school or college: people have cliques and personal vendettas, nerds and the rich/beautiful don’t travel in the same circles, and all of them spend years trying to get a leg up on others.

1b. The two court cases involve people suing Zuckerberg regarding Facebook. On one hand, this is a useful plot device as we see all of the pertinent characters providing testimony at depositions as they retell how Facebook began. On the other hand, this seems to make the court cases out to be particularly important moments in Facebook’s history. These court cases tie back into the issue of social status as those suing Zuckerberg suggest he was out to improve his own status and Zuckerberg still seems interested in knocking them down a peg or two.

1c. As others have noted, these two themes seem to be quite dependent on the book used as the main source for this film. Since this book details one of the two court cases, this is what may be responsible for the plot structure. However, other texts, such as The Facebook Effect, are much more favorable toward Zuckerberg and treat these issues as minor irritants on the way to Facebook’s success. Both court cases were settled out of court with money payouts and non-disclosure agreements so we may not really know what happened.

2. Zuckerberg is not a likable character in this film. But we don’t really learn much about his background or what makes him tick. The most we know from this film: he is eccentric, doesn’t have many friends, likes his own ideas, and tells it as he sees it. This does not endear him to many people in the film.

3. I imagine the story of Facebook’s origins will be up for more interpretation as time goes on. And I think these stories will depend heavily on the angle of the storytellers and the relationship the author/interpreter/commentator has with Mark Zuckerberg.

4. Because of the emphasis on these two issues, we don’t see much about how Facebook grew. We see a lot of the initial work in the dorm and early on in California but not much after Facebook has its one millionth user. Obviously, much has happened since then as Facebook has now over 500 million users and has spread around the globe.

5. Much has been said about Justin Timberlake’s role as Sean Parker. He is an energizing figure but doesn’t play a huge role. In fact, his character has an ignominious end with the company toward the end of the film. And this final stretch of the film featuring Parker seemed to drag on a bit.

6. Without this film, I don’t think there is any way Zuckerberg would have been named Time’s Person of the Year. Yes, he helped found a company that has grown incredibly quickly and become a part of people’s lives. But in terms of being consequential for human events or world history, does Zuckerberg really rank up there? And why pick him out this year as opposed to previous years when Facebook was also gaining popularity? But perhaps once You were named Person of the Year in 2006 (yes, I mean You), Person of the Year lost some of its gravitas.

Overall, this is an interesting film about a popular social phenomena. Whether this is the real story or not, it is an engrossing look at an enigmatic former Harvard student whose website idea has changed how people connect.

(This film received positive reviews from critics: the reviews were 96% fresh, 248 fresh out of 257 total reviews, at rottentomatos.com.)

Malcolm Gladwell: “the revolution will not be tweeted”

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Malcolm Gladwell has been recognized by sociologists at being adept at combining social science and journalism. In a recent New Yorker piece, Gladwell is at it again, this time tackling the issue of whether participation in phenomena like Facebook and Twitter can lead to substantial social movements. Gladwell is skeptical:

But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.
Gladwell argues that the kind of weak ties (citing Mark Granovetter’s important article from the 1970s) that social networks are built upon are not the kind of networks that lead to substantial action.
I would be interested to hear how social movement theorists would respond to this piece. Could social media be adapted or altered in a way that could lead to substantial change?
Also, Gladwell is contributing to a larger debate: can the Internet be harnessed for social good? There is little doubt that Internet access gives people a lot of information and perhaps the opportunity to build a weak-ties network. But does it typically lead to more productive citizens or more engaged citizens? Where does WikiLeaks fit into this – is that activism or something else?

If you want to model the world, look into these online databases

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MIT’s Technology Review lists 70 online databases that one could look into in order to model our complex world.

Having used several of the social sciences databases listed here, I am impressed with several features of such databases:

1. The variety of data one can quickly find. (There is a lot of data being collected in the world today.)

2. The openness of this data to users rather than being restricted just to the people who collected the data.

3. The growing ability to do a quick analysis within the database websites.

To me, this is one of the primary functions of the Internet: making good data (information) on all sorts of subjects available to a wide cross-section of users.

Now, with all of this data out there and available, can we do complex modeling of all of social life or natural life or Earthly life? Helbing’s Earth Simulator, mentioned in this story, sounds interesting…

A reminder that information overload is not just limited to our particular era in history

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There is an incredible amount of data one can access today through a computer and high-speed Internet connection: websites, texts, statistics, videos, music, and more. While it all may seem overwhelming, a Harvard history professor reminds us that facing a glut of information is not a problem that has been faced only by people in the Internet age:

information overload was experienced long before the appearance of today’s digital gadgets. Complaints about “too many books” echo across the centuries, from when books were papyrus rolls, parchment manuscripts, or hand printed. The complaint is also common in other cultural traditions, like the Chinese, built on textual accumulation around a canon of classics…

It’s important to remember that information overload is not unique to our time, lest we fall into doomsaying. At the same time, we need to proceed carefully in the transition to electronic media, lest we lose crucial methods of working that rely on and foster thoughtful decision making. Like generations before us, we need all the tools for gathering and assessing information that we can muster—some inherited from the past, others new to the present. Many of our technologies will no doubt rapidly seem obsolete, but, we can hope, not human attention and judgment, which should continue to be the central components of thoughtful information management.

As technology changes, people and cultures have to adapt. We need citizens who are able to sift through all the available information and make wise decisions. This should be a vital part of the educational system – it is no longer enough to know how to access information but rather we need to be able to make choices about which information is worthwhile, how to interpret it, and how to put it into use.

Take, for example, the latest Wikileaks dump. The average Internet user no longer has to rely on news organizations to tell him or her how to interpret the information (though they would still like to fill that role). But simply having access to a bunch of secret material doesn’t necessarily lead to anything worthwhile.

They have us by the “face”

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TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook just got one step closer to trademarking the word “face.” While there are a number of technical legal caveats,

[f]or all intents and purposes today’s status update bodes well for Facebook’s hold over “Face” usages in “Telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter, none primarily featuring or relating to motoring or to cars.”

I guess one day it may be difficult to speak of providing “face to face” electronic meetings through an Internet service.  Unless, of course, the entity in question is Facebook.

Making big money in real estate in the online world

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A number of stories in recent years have highlighted the increasing amount of real money changing hands in online games or environments. A recent example comes from the Entropia Universe where a gamer sold his property for over $600,000:

Take, for instance, what just went down on Planet Calypso, where one of Entropia’s wealthier players has sold off his interests in a “resort asteroid” for an eye-popping $635,000.

The seller is Jon Jacobs, also known as the character ‘Neverdie’. He originally purchased the asteroid in 2005 — eventually converting it into the extravagant resort ‘Club Neverdie’ — for the then-record price of $100,000. For those keeping score, that’s a gain of over $500,000 in just five years. In nerdier terms, that’s an ROI of 535%. Match that, Citibank.

And we’re not talking about Monopoly money here. Launched by Swedish developer MindArk in 2003, Entropia Universe features a real-world, fixed-rate currency exchange that works just like chips at a casino: players trade real cash for in-game funds called PEDs (Project Entropia Dollars), which can at any point be redeemed back for real, spendable cash — minus a transaction fee, of course.

Jacobs was making money from the get-go, however, having earned back his initial hundred-grand investment in just eight months. How? By selling rights to hunt and mine on the asteroid, as well as selling off bits of real estate. He worked it much like any real world landlord, really, but with a lot less red tape and a lot more graphics.

With that kind of a return on investment, will more people flock to these realms to make money? How many people in the world make a steady income based on online gaming?

There has to be a good sociological study being done out there about these types of transactions…

Claim: “Facebook knows when you’ll break up”

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There is an interesting chart going around that is based on Facebook data and claims to show when people are more prone to break-up. Here is a quick description of the chart:

British journalist and graphic designer David McCandless, who specializes in showcasing data in visual ways, compiled the chart. He showed off the graphic at a TED conference last July in Oxford, England.

In the talk, McCandless said he and a colleague scraped 10,000 Facebook status updates for the phrases “breakup” and “broken up.”

They found two big spikes on the calendar for breakups. The first was after Valentine’s Day — that holiday has a way of defining relationships, for better or worse — and in the weeks leading up to spring break. Maybe spring fever makes people restless, or maybe college students just don’t want to be tied down when they’re partying in Cancun.

Potentially interesting findings and it is an interesting way to present this data. But when you consider how the data was collected, perhaps it isn’t so great. A few thoughts on the subject:

1. The best way to figure this out would be to convince Facebook to let you have the data for relationship status changes.

2. Searching for the word “breakup” and “broken up” might catch some, or perhaps even many ended relationships, but not all. Does everyone include these words when talking about ending a relationship?

3. Are 10,000 status updates a representative sample of all Facebook statuses?

4. Is there a lag time involved in reporting these changes? Monday, for example is the most popular day for announcing break-ups, not necessarily for break-ups occurring on that day. Do people immediately run to Facebook to tell the world that they have ended a relationship?

5. Does everyone initially “register” and then “unregister” a relationship on Facebook anyway?

The more I think about it, it is a big claim to make that “Facebook knows when you are going to break up” based on this data mining exercise.

Race as a lesser factor in forming friendships on Facebook

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A new study in the American Journal of Sociology finds that a shared racial identity was less important than several other factors when making friends on Facebook:

“Sociologists have long maintained that race is the strongest predictor of whether two Americans will socialize,” said Andreas Wimmer, the study’s lead author and a sociologist at UCLA…

In fact, the strongest attraction turned out to be plain, old-fashioned social pressure. For the average student, the tendency to reciprocate a friendly overture proved to be seven times stronger than the attraction of a shared racial background, the researchers found…

Other mechanisms that proved stronger than same-race preference included having attended an elite prep school (twice as strong), hailing from a state with a particularly distinctive identity such as Illinois or Hawaii (up to two-and-a-half times stronger) and sharing an ethnic background (up to three times stronger).

Even such routine facts of college life as sharing a major or a dorm often proved at least as strong, if not stronger, than race in drawing together potential friends, the researchers found.

Interesting findings – perhaps Facebook is a new world or younger generations don’t pay as much attention to race.

Additionally, it is interesting to read about the methodology of the study which took place at a school where 97% of students had Facebook profiles and the sociologists measured friendships in terms of photo tagging (and not who were actually listed as “friends”).

A couple of questions I have: is behavior on Facebook and choosing friends reflective of actual social patterns in the real world? Is there a selection issue going on here  – not all students or people of this age use Facebook so are college students who use Facebook already more likely to form cross-racial friendships?

The future of textbooks: online and free?

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Traditional textbooks can be problematic: they often are costly, hefty, and have difficulty keeping up current research and trends. But a new biology textbook may be paving the way for a change in the textbook field:

Within 2 1/2 years, the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, named after the naturalist and founder, hopes to complete a 59-chapter digital textbook about biology called Life on Earth. As each chapter is finished, the foundation plans to put it into the hands of anyone who wants it. For free…

“No publisher is doing what we’re doing, which is developing, from scratch, a serious digital textbook,” Patterson said. He added that only $1 million of that funding — half of it from Life Technologies Foundation — is in place, and the remaining $9 million remains to be seen from private and public donors. “It’s expensive, but once you’re done you can keep it up to date across time, globally, essentially free of charge.”

The foundation plans to sell university-level editions for about 10 percent of the cost of the average print textbook, in part to fund that continuous updating. Kindergarten through 12th grade editions will be free.

Patterson said the idea is to provide any student in the world unprecedented learning tools, but acknowledged imminent backlash from profit-seeking publishers.

In some ways, this seems like a mash-up between traditional textbooks and Wikipedia: a constantly updated online text that is authoritative and offers video and other Web 2.0 features.

If the online version is to be used with classes, is there also an assumption that students will have the textbook open on their laptops? This would require all students to have some sort of viewing technology and there are other problems associated with laptops in the classroom.

It sounds like a major issue here might be funding: who is going to pay for all of this writing and computer work? What happens if the foundation can’t raise sufficient funds from donors?