Social Aspects of Social Computing

Reading the assigned articles this session was interesting because I can constantly juxtapose the questions, answers, analysis, and statements from the author with my own experience and understanding of social computing and the Internet. Some of the elements in the readings go hand in hand with own opinions and experience while other elements are completely off and opposite my arguments and personal examples.

I was exposed to the wonders of the Internet in mid-1990s and at around the same time, I started to learn and join online communities, mostly through MIRC, ICQ, and to a lesser extent, email correspondence. At the time – I was in middle school, my circle of friends were still contained to the same location/city. Most of us would be meeting face to face during school time and afternoons, then at night or weekends, we would go online. Other friends might be those who went to the same elementary school but moved to different middle school than me and we still kept in touch via the channels mentioned above. Through these friends, I was also able to make new friends from other schools nearby, in the same city.

After high school, the situation changed because friends spread out of the city to pursue higher education, some stayed, while I followed the ones who went outside the city and the country. At this point, online communities helped us to keep in touch. Even though the avenue changed – from MIRC and ICQ to Friendster, emails, and mailing lists, the friendship kept going strong.

With that rather-expansive-personal-Internet-history, I would like to respond to the assigned readings. Even though I enjoyed reading Galston (2000), I could not identify much with the article because I think it is a very American/Western experience centric. It might not apply to other societies. That was my reaction to the early parts of the writing. As he goes back and forth defining community and not-community, he concluded with a paragraph that I can agree with. Basically, online communities do strengthen the community. It strengthens an already existing social element; i.e. online group for high school friends, Facebook as a means to keep in touch long lost friends.

There are some things I observed from reading Galston. First, in terms of online communities, there seems to be a generational gap that perhaps will shrink as we go along or maybe not. I noticed when I was into MIRC and ICQ as a teenager, adults were using listservs and newsgroups. As my peers switched to Friendster or MySpace, older adults might still be using listservs and emails. Later on, a move to Facebook was only followed by adults after Facebook removed the university-email-only policy. Separate from the generational factor, there are also online communities based on work and this normally takes the form of Intranet, employee only type of discussion forum or even more.

I also noticed that most of my online interaction started with an offline one, then continued online for convenience and other purposes. In other words, they could be considered place-based as I would not normally engage with people I don’t know offline.

Lastly, from Galston’s article, I noticed from my time living in the States that [I could be wrong but] many people, especially the younger ones, tend to be less accommodating to circumstances. Instead of meeting halfway, they might just walk out [or do it grudgingly], be apathetic about it, or find a group to complaint about it. Not much were done to be part of an offline community, they could enter an online community with shared interest. Once conflict arises, they could easily exit as the entry/exit barrier is low instead of acting to make things work.

Moving to Weeks (2009), it is another story about the perils of TMI/too much information on the internet, to express feelings freely or to avoid scrutiny by the online anonymous community. We’ve heard it before about the fired employee for bad mouthing the boss in Facebook, or the future employee who did not get the job due to racy pictures, distraught individuals announcing the end of their lives to receive sarcastic comments, ignored, or sometimes [thankfully] a concerned comment and follow up. I was more tickled by B.J. Fogg’s “We are connecting two people largely through text. Text is an impoverished medium for communicating emotion, intent, real meaning." My reaction was no… we are moving away from text heavy communication to more audio and video exchanges. I can think of Skype, Google Video Chat, Apple’s Facetime on iPhone, MMS, Instagram, infographics, and many more. Then I realized I was forward thinking, meanwhile back on earth, SMS, emails, [text] chat, IMs, and BBMs [Blackberry messages] are still the very prominent.

Another observation I made was a link between Galston’s and Weeks’ articles where online communities have low entry and exit cost that encourage exit more than accommodation. Using Thordora’s example, she could just ignore the comments she received and move on, i.e. close the account and open a new one. And following my discussion and comments from last session, the article talks about social media’s public commentary as similar to town hall debates: "it fosters increasingly extreme opinions the longer it goes on,"…"which has long been known to make people express radical views." Thus, as the commentary goes on and on for pages, viewers [my guilty pleasure] and commentators lose sight of the real issue and instead championed his/her views while discrediting the opposing views. This polarization is getting familiar these days, as even the mainstream media are guilty of this charge too. In some ways, the Internet enhanced this matter, i.e. the Internet does strengthen community, to borrow Galston’s article title.

LaRose (2001) posits that novice internet users have stress with internet usage and obstacles like slow connection and cost might enhance the stress. I remembered when I first learn to use the Internet there were frustrations as dial up connection is slow and tend to drop. At the same time, I was intrigued to learn more about the Internet and reach the learning curve. I observed that once someone got a hang of something, not necessarily tech-related, the thing became very significant for awhile before s/he learn to integrate it as part of life instead of it taking over. Many people I know got hooked to Facebook when they first use it and became attached to it for sometime – the time varies for everyone. As the need to use it levels off, people become more secure and stress level goes down as other activities in life are no longer neglected.

Many games nowadays are dubbed social games, requiring social virtual interaction with ‘friends’ to achieve goals, i.e. World of Warcraft, many other MMORPG, Second Life, FarmVille, Mafia Wars, etc. This can be good – fostering social interaction virtually, or bad – ‘lonely crowd’. Going online these days can be a 24/7 ordeal where you can indicate onlineness via chat features. Sometimes this can feel like people are looking at you while you go around online. There is always the invisible button. Or the chat function can be turned off. Furthermore, as humans, I think we still need physical/off line interaction with other human beings as we are social being, it is our nature.

Albrechtslund (2008) opened convincingly, laid the foundation to the concept of participatory surveillance extensively, but after reading, it felt like eating plenty of appetizers but with no main course. He mentioned geotagging, a trending concept which I am looking into for my project, and how it bridges on and offline connections. At the same time, this is a major privacy concern at least in the western hemisphere as people in Asia, i.e. Indonesia are more than happy to inform the world via FourSquare, Gowalla, Koprol and what-not about where they eat, vacation, or work.

Bernstein (2010) is the latest published article for the session but seems obsolete because Collabio, the social network app discussed in it, is no longer available. So I don’t really feel that the article is useful as the Microsoft initiative was tried and no longer continued. Perhaps the app was ahead of its time. Perhaps it drowned and saturated among many other apps that has similar functions (Socialgraph, Friends on a Map, etc). Facebook itself used to have similar feature when user add/confirm a friend, they can specify when and where they met, along with other details. I tried to find those connections but I think they were taken down already.

In closing this first section, the question that lingers in my mind is perhaps not addressed here but came up as an issue when reading Galston (2000), ‘what is the difference of online experience between western and eastern hemisphere users?’. Of course, the concepts of east and west needs to defined more precisely but as someone transplanted from Southeast Asia to the United States, I am interested in knowing more about this and later on, how being mobile [have lived in several countries] would affect this online experience.

Online Community

Most of my communities are based on my experience (school and college friends) and not so much interest. The only one I can think of is ‘Library Related People’ Facebook group, the only group I subscribed to that is unrelated to where I came from or where I am but more towards professional development. There is newbie support document – LaRose (2001):

This online community is also a proof of low entry/exit cost (Galston, 2001) as users can add friends or leave group by clicking buttons on the right side on the members section. Please click on the images to get better resolution picture.

What did this experience allow you to do that you couldn't have done offline? As shown in the screenshot, there about 400 members in this group, all coming from different parts of the world to discuss about Library related matters. Joining this group enhanced my professional network and knowledge a lot as I am exposed to not only American-based librarians but also folks from Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world. In some ways, it serves as curator for my professional readings and updates.