brave new world!

"The names of the students found in the attachment below are to
attend an important briefing (conducted by Mr Chan, DP/ST)
immediately after the morning assembly tomorrow (28 Mar)."

Attached: list of GEPers.

They're finally going to exorcise finish the eugenics experiment they started twenty odd years ago! This is THE HOLOCAUST!

*giggles hysterically on lack of sleep* (Somehow I thought we'd left this behind?)

- quoth Fo

HILARIOUS

*goes off to make GEP babies*

thinking aloud

So I was trying to prepare a set of points for le COM125 presentation tomorrow, and I decided I would just write down my thoughts about my subject and see where it went, then summarise it. So here's the stuff I came up with while thinking about WHY people use online communities. Maybe one day I'll make it formal and organise it :P for now you can enjoy the ramble and the ladidah.

Function of Community
Community is a vital part of the social interaction of any individual. Humans have a natural affinity for community - beyond the close relationships between family and intimdate friends, we have a need to commune with the global community, with society at large, to connect with what we feel is a varied sample of humankind. Family and friends provide support in our personal lives, and interaction with them is invaluable, but we use community, society to discuss, debate, share information, have casual conversation, and otherwise express ourselves publicly. These casual interactions serve the function of stimulating our minds and creating cohesiveness in society - they create a loose web of relationships that hold a society together.

However, we seem to be seeing a breakdown in the traditional forms of community. As raised in the Fernback & Thompson paper, traditional forms of community seem to be disappearing. The paper suggests that this is due to our gradual shift from an industrial society to a post-industrial one. According to Cooke, community is functionally and geographically bounded based on the social division of labour. In other words our notion of community has been reshaped by our experience as an industrial society. Cooke proposes that industralism managed to change our perceptions of community to one that is not really viable in today's post-industrial society. Accordingly, our collective conceptualisation of community is undergoing changes to adapt to our developing society.

Online communities play a large part in this modern vision of community. The internet is unarguably an influential and sizable part of our lives, especially in relatively more developed countries. It's becoming an overwhelmingly popular communication medium, and more and more people are gathering on the internet and forming communities. Can online communities be rich enough to significantly supplement our offline communal interactions? And why do people use online communities, sometimes to the extent of preferring them over offline interaction?

Internet communities can yield a rich harvest of information, which can be very helpful to the discerning user. Communities online congregate based on similarity of interests, not shared locations or heritage, like offline ones. For the purpose of information sharing, interest-based communities are then an amalgate of people who are relatively knowledgeable about one subject. This group might have relatively heterogenous characteristics aside from their shared interest in that particular subject. This creates a rich and varied source of information. As cited in the Wellman and Gulia paper, in one large organisation, people were better able to solve problems when they received suggestions online from people with a wide range of social characteristics than when they received suggestions from a larger number of socially-similar people.

People also use internet communities for social purposes. There are many advantages to social interaction on the internet. For example, the internet overcomes geographical distance, linking everyone with access to the needed technology together, regardless of physical or social distances. But it could also be argued that it simply creates a new kind of boundary: that of access to technology.

Regardless, internet interaction also lacks a few elements from offline interaction that could promote a greater range of social options. For example, on the internet many social cues are hidden, such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, lifestyle and socioeconomic status. This can encourage contact between individuals based on similar interests and shared values, which might be hindered offline by preconceived notions about the abovementioned social cues.

We know that internet communities are usually formed around people with similar interests or goals. This alone encourages conversation. But can a casual, interest-based relationship develop into close personal emotional connections? From anecdotal evidence the answer seems to be yes. We know of people who get married to people they meet online, or develop close intimate relationships. More commonly, there exists on the internet many close-knit communities whose members were initially drawn together by common interests, but became involved in each others' personal lives too. This happens most often when the community is an informal one, where members are friendly and interested in each other as individuals, not just for the information each has.

Alarmists raise the issue of the internet replacing "real-life" communication. This view underestimates the validity of online communication and community. Despite the limited bandwidth of online interaction, online communities complement offline interaction. People use the internet to organise meetings, talk to people they know offline, and other things that are closely integrated with their offline actions. The internet is a medium of communication, much like the telephone, with its own norms and etiquette, true, but the focus is still on the individuals using it to communicate, not on the medium. Internet communities provide a platform for people to meet others, get to know them, and then decide if they want to take the relationship to a broader realm.

Qotw7: Why Twitter is NOT an online community

I was sifting through the blog entries that were submitted for this week, and I realised that an overwhelming majority considered Twitter an online community. I can't say ALL, because I admit I didn't bother to read many, but I'm pretty sure it's almost all. So I'm going to sacrifice this week's piece to playing devil's advocate just to open another perspective. There has to be ways that Twitter falls short of being an online community, and I'm going to look for them. (If you don't think Twitter is an online community either, join me my brother in the fight against groupthink!)

Firstly, to be able to discuss whether Twitter is an online community or not, I have to specify a definition of an online community. There are many, many opinions on what defines an online comumunity. Let's explore the concept a little.

Community is a slippery and amorphous concept, but I hope we can all agree that it has to involve at least more than one individual. The dictionary definition of "community" is "a group of people... with shared interests." (Crowther, 1995) This is what we understand by the word community. Let's not argue semantics and leave it at that for now.

The idea of community is a little more complex. Cooke (1990) claims that community is a residual consequence of modernity - that an egalitarian, heterogenouos community is unrealistic because, for example, different social classes rarely associated with one another (Fernback & Thompson, 1995). He proposes that the notion of community stems from an industrial society, and that interactions within a community are functionally and geographically bounded, and based on the social division of labour. Interactions in a community are then segregated and contractually-oriented.

Cooke's theory regarding the concept of community, derived from his understanding of its origins (in an industrial society) relates to how community is idealised in today's society, as opposed to how it truly is (as defined by its roots in industrialism). This is not to say that community began only with industralisation - but we must recognise that the age of industraliasation had a significant impact on how we view and treat public spaces and our communal interactions.

Similarly, the post-industrial age's wave of new technology and communication media is substantially affecting how the concept of community is viewed. Communities are no longer restricted to the physical realm. The internet has given us what phones, television, radio, telegrams, and letters could not replace in face-to-face communication: many-to-many communication in a convenient, quick and relatively easy way. This makes the internet a viable platform for communities as they were traditionally understood to be.

Still, just being able to contact a person (or people) doesn't make the internet a community. That would be quite ridiculous. I'd like to define community as a group of people with shared interests, yes, but also such a group that has formed mental or emotional interpersonal connections, and also has established group norms - etiquette, a set of customs that have developed over time that gently regulate the group's interactions. And this week's assignment asked whether I considered Twitter to be an online community.

So here's why I don't think Twitter is an online community exactly: the people on it aren't connected. When you start up on Twitter, you don't join a community of people interacting and forming connections per se. People on Twitter post information about themselves on their own little page, not to anyone else specifically. I suppose if you're interested by someone else's page, you could begin a conversation, but then how is the whole process any different from posting an ads in the personals section of a newspaper?

A true online community would primarily have people interacting with each other, communicating and talking about issues in a relatively public space. In contrast people on Twitter talk about themselves - in a public space, yes, but the feedback tends to be many-to-one, replicated over and over so it looks like many-to-many communication. A better example of an online community would be any forum, any multiplayer-gaming group, any chatroom or multi-user chat platform (e.g. IRC).

What, then, is Twitter? Twitter is a loose network of people: a database, if you will. Like the personals section of a newspaper, Twitter allows people space to express their individuality, in a way that other people may see and take notice of. Other examples of this include Myspace, personal weblogs, and Friendster. It helps connect people, but not directly. Instead it provides a single location where people can go to to find personal information about other users, to search for users who might interest them. It is a budding ground for relationships to be formed, but in itself does not constitute a community.

References:
Crowther, J.(Ed.).(1995). Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English (5th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cooke, P.(1990).Back to the Future. London: Unwin-Hyman.

Fernback, Jan & Thompson, Brad (1995, May). Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?. Retrieved March 17, 2007, from
http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html

Bonus Mission #1: Why Are You Watching Me?

This is a video of a man dancing silently in an MRT train car on the East-West Line taken late in 2006. This video was found on YouTube and not taken by me. I think that it is an excellent example of sousveillance and also relevant to the issue of privacy.

The video shows a man in an MRT carriage that's relatively empty. At first he's only walking up and down a little, bouncing from foot to foot jauntily. This progressively develops into more of a full-out dance. I hypothesize that he sized up the situation, thought that no one was watching, and so felt less inhibited and moved more freely.

However, his behaviour was captured on video by another passenger. This raises the question of privacy in public places: can it exist? Previously, the privacy of a location could be directly linked to the amount of people who have access to it. In that case, the MRT carriage in that video would have been a relatively private place. Firstly, as the train is moving, no passengers can alight or board the train. Secondly, the train itself seems to be almost empty (look down at the row of carriages extending). So we have a location that is almost devoid of other people, and which cannot be accessed for the moment. Seems to be to be a perfect definition of a private place.

With the introduction of technology, however, an element of surveillance is brought in. With just one other person in the train, the man's behaviour can be recorded, and then this disseminated later - which is exactly what has happened. Technology allows us all to be citizen journalists. We can capture, record, and playback everyday life that much easier (Sousveillance, Wikipedia, 2007). In this way the possibility of public privacy is removed. Nowadays true privacy is hard to find, unless you take pains to sequester yourself in a social vacuum.

References
Sousveillance. (2007, February 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 08:58, March 10, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sousveillance&oldid=106389703

QotW6: How to Win Friends and Influence People... Online?

Online privacy is such a tricky thing to manage. How much information is too much to give? We've all been told not to give personal information away over the internet, but that's hardly feasible if you want to maintain an online presence with any sort of significance at all. To establish a connection with your audience and catch their attention (Rosen, 2004) requires selective self-disclosure and giving out information that previously was reserved for intimates or friends, in order to create an emotionally memorable image of yourself for your hoped-for audience. If you want to present a strong online identity, you need to create a cohesive and consistent picture of yourself. According to some, this is best achieved by sharing personal details about your life in the hope of appealing to your audience emotionally.

The internet community at large doesn't seem to have any qualms about sharing personal information. Any casual user of the Internet will surely have come across gigabytes worth of personal information from complete strangers scattered across the Web - from blogs. On weblogs, people habitually disclose both the mundane and the profound. For example, what the author ate for breakfast may be listed alongside a recount of a failed relationship for all and sundry to read. The question then becomes whether we should or should not share this information publicly.

Studies have shown that talking about personal emotional experiences can have a positive effect when it lessens isolation by helping people connect to society, but if the disclosure is met with indifference or disapproval, there is a negative effect greater than any adverse effects from non-disclosure (Rosen, 2004). Picture the weblog owner writing about something deeply felt, and receiving positive feedback, sympathy, and encouragement from the virtual community. The writer in question will have his feelings validated and receive emotional support. Conversely, picture the same weblog owner in the same situation, met with silence instead. Silence, as a lack of positive feedback, can be construed as negative feedback - taken to mean that your content is not worthy of notice. Is this a risk we have to take when seeking social connections and empathy from a virtual community?

I'd like to think not. A weblog can be a lonely thing, but when you take advantage of the existing online social structures to hook yourself up to a greater community, online social interaction becomes a whole new beast. Take, for example, livejournal. Livejournal has been designed for optimal interaction. Its comment functions are such that when users comment and reply to each others' comments, comment threads are created, turning each post into a mini forum board. You can only choose to receive email notifications to replies, so that you don't have to check on old posts. Blogs posts from users on your friends list are also compiled onto your "friends page", which you can access from your journal page, making it easier to keep up with your friends, much like an RSS feed.

What sets livejournal apart from other weblog platforms such a blogger, however, is its community function. On livejournal, users are free to set up communities based on interests, beliefs, or anything at all. A community is simply a shared journal that many members can post to, with moderator and maintainer access levels being given to certain users. Some communities, such as support communities, lend themself to a high level of emotional disclosure. This level of disclosure is usually met by the majority of members, who then provide sympathy, support, encouragement, and advise in the form of comments. In such a community, the more you share, the more you receive. How does one show any genuine compassion or effectively help an online stranger who doesn't share any information about himself? In contrast, the user who talks freely about his personal emotional state is likely to get more detailed or relevant responses.

One often encounters like-minded individuals in a community setting. Moving past the "community" stage to form interpersonal relationships often requires greater disclosure, both factual and emotional. Most people don't have any problems with this, either. After all, you wouldn't form a closer relationship with someone that you mistrusted. It's hard to figure out who to trust on the internet, but a simple lack of physicality does not result in a vacuum of identity cues - they just become more subtle (Donath, 1996).

Take, for example, the online strategy game Utopia (yes, Utopia again). At the moment I've worked very closely with the same group of roughly six or seven people for almost two months, with approximately twelve more who are relatively newer or online less often. Because of the time-sensitive and co-operative nature of the game, we have to organise to be online at the same time to do certain things. Also, due to the nature of my own hobbies I'm online almost all the time, and I leave an IRC client running in the background. These people come from all over the world: the group includes Swedes, Canadians, a Norwegian, Americans, Malaysians, Singaporeans, and even an Israeli - this means there's always at least at least seven people online at any given time.

The result is that I've spent a lot of time talking with those six/seven people mentioned earlier and a great deal of disclosure has definitely been going on. Topics discussed range from the impersonal to the personal, the trivial to the profound. Players share opinions on politics, cultural and social issues, or tell each other about personal problems or triumphs, or just chat and joke. I have phone numbers (landlines and mobiles) of nine of these people stored in my contacts database. I'd like to believe that I have succeeded in "achiev[ing] emotional intimacy with strangers" (Rosen, 2004). The only problem with that is that as we progressed along the relational dynamic, they ceased to be strangers and became friends.


References
Rosen, Jeffrey (2004, July). The Naked Crowd. Retrieved March 10, 2007 from
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA5FF.htm

Donath, Judith (1996, November). Identity and Deception in the Virutal Community. Retrieved February 23, 2007, from http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html