Is Web 2.0 Turning Us All Into Robots or: How I Learned To Swallow The Pill And Let The Web Follow My Every Step

I was intrigued by a statement at the very beginning of the Gleave et al article that stated, “Social life has moved online. From discussion boards, to wikis, to social networking sites, people do things together through digital communication. Those interactions leave behind complex records of who did what, when, under what context, and with whom. In other words, the interaction order is now electrified and self-documenting (1).”

This “self-documenting” environment that we now find ourselves in has many interesting facets and I have been slowing evaluating them to find out if I am a fan or not. The amount of peripheral knowledge we now have about ourselves is massive. For example I could tell you the exact time and date of the last 8,613 songs I have listened to in my digital music collection. I could even list them all in order from most resent, which was about 10 minutes ago, to the oldest, which was on August 1^st 2009 at 5:18 pm. 

As our daily lives are being merged with electronic media a digital residue is being left behind. We must ask ourselves what we are going to do with all of this peripheral information about ourselves.

Websites like Amazon and Netflix have already shown how this can be useful information. Have you ever watched a movie or bought a CD because your computer told you too? I sure have. Netflix will say, “You have seen these movies and based on the viewing habits of the entire Netflix community you will probably like these other movies.” Amazon has a similar practice where they will auto suggest items for you to view based on what you have looked at and what other people have bought.

Facebook has the potential of working in a similar way. This is especially true of the way it was originally developed with finite communities. Ellison, Steinfield and Lampe stated, “Our participants overwhelmingly used Facebook to keep in touch with old friends and to maintain or intensify relationships characterized by some form of offline connection such as dormitory proximity or a shared class (1162).” For instance, joining a group on Facebook adds information to your profile that potentially make it more easy to be found. This happened more often on MySpace for me personally. Once I listed my High School and graduation year onto my profile I began to get friend requests from people I had not heard from in years.

But you all know this already! I’m not presenting any unique perspective that we don’t already encounter on a daily basis.

This week I chose to take this digital residue self-documenting idea a step further. I joined two SNSs that are specifically designed to let others (your friends or the general public) know where you are or where you have been. The two SNSs I used were Foursquare and Yelp. These are both SNSs that I only know about based on other people’s experience but have never used them myself. Both of these sites use geo-tagging to let people either know who is currently at a location or who has been there before. Though out the week I checked myself into as many places as I could remember to see if either my social interaction could be improved by logging where I have been or to see if I could find out information about the places I have been that I previously did not know. I also wanted to see if the social capitol gained in using these SNSs led to any better or different social interactions.

Both of these SNSs can interface with Twitter and Facebook and help me quickly find friends who use these sites. Yelp was much better at this then Foursquare. At the end of my first day of using Yelp I already had accumulated five friends (all people I know in real life) while after using Foursquare for a week I still have yet to gain any friends.

Both of these sites use badges to communicate my activity with other users. What this means is that the person who checks in the most at a particular location will either become the Duke (Yelp) or the Mayor (Foursquare). Once you achieve this rank your picture will be seen by anyone who checks into the location. Personally, I did not find this aspect to be the best part of these SNSs. The most useful feature is that on both of the websites users can leave tips based on their experience. This is where I was able to connect with users the most, though in a very static non-personal way.

 

These are both tips left concerning Hamilton library. Through some of the info seems humorous to those of us that might be in the library 2 or 3 times a week it would be useful information for those who might be visiting for the first time.

I particularly enjoyed the following screen concerning Hamilton Library which I found on Yelp:

This aspect of these SNSs got me thinking about the statement in Allen, Colombo and Whitaker that said, “Individuals restrict interaction to those with similar identity, periodically mutating their identity and copying the behaviors (neighbors and strategy) of those receiving higher payoffs. The result is that an incentive structure emerges where free-riders become isolated (2).” As a new user I did not feel compelled to become the next Duke/Mayor even though the site was encouraging me to do so.

You can see in the image on the left that I am 6 days away from becoming a Mayor.

Also, I was not all that interested in connecting with people who I did not already have an off line connection with. These sites could have become more dynamically layered if these two aspects were important to me. As a newcomer to the site I did not feel like I was at a distance for those who had been using the site for a while. I did not feel hindered or restricted in any way when adding new information to the sites.

Most people are familiar with Yelp as a review resource for things around town but adding a geo-tagging aspect to the site made it a much more interactive experience. With this being said, the beauty of using these two sites together was the way they interacted with each other’s strengths. My experience and opinion is that I would be more likely to choose a restaurant to eat at based on information on Yelp. I could then use Foursquare to figure out what specifically on that restaurant’s menu I would want to eat.

These SNSs are perfect examples of Williams’ statement, “Socializing online can never compensate for lost socializing offline…the online world is a site for social activity, both original and extended from offline life (596).” Neither of these sites would exsit without people wanting to log their offline life in an online format. It seems increasingly evident to me that my online status is 100% dependent to my off line activity. Having a way to keep track of what I have done in the past through an online means seems to have increasing potential. Though the trust issue is the hurdle we must get past. Never did I feel comfortable to check in to my own home but I did check into a public park after dark. When information is made public there is always a chance that it could be used in an unwanted way. There are probably things I do that I would not necessarily want or need everyone knowing (for example when I checked into Costco).

Gleave et al states, “As more of the social world becomes essentially self-documenting, social roles will increasingly be observable as a function of both social positions, as with early block modeling efforts, and content analysis and ethnographic methods (9).” The social capitol on both of the SNSs I joined this week are more or less defined by individual users. The models proposed by Ellison, Steinfield and Lampe carry over as most of the interaction takes place off line. As the self-documenting aspects of these websites leave behind information about ourselves and our friends, patters can emerge and information can be gleaned. I would be curious if the next step for these websites is to create an option to auto suggest places for us to visit. A button on Foursquare or Yelp that will suggest a place for me to eat based on my past experiences and reviews plus my current location could create accurate suggestions.

Both of these SNSs could be improved by incorporating either more social capital by making it easier for  newcomers to gain badges or by diversifying the badges. Below are the first badges I earned on the respective sites.

 

I was particularly surprised when I checked into the library four times in four days and did not receive a badge for it. 

The sites would also be more enjoyable if more of my friends on Oahu were connected with me. I can see where all of my friends have checked in but when they are all in Seattle it does not do much good for me while I am here on Oahu.

I titled this blog is web 2.0 turning us all into robots because as we are self-documenting information more potential is created to find things we may enjoy. We can also quickly communicate with friends what we have been up to. Yet with all this being said I must ask if we really want our computers understanding our sub-conscience better then we ourselves do.

Final Project Idea:

I have been wanting to look into the potential of social tagging on library OPACs. Could user generated lists based on particular communities (i.e. a college course) help students find highly relevant resources? What would the role of librarians be in helping to maintaining the quality of these lists and social tags?

Update (3/1):

Another project idea: I would like to explore the impact/potential of the externalization of our personalities and the humanization of technology. What I would like to look at is the interaction between the real self and digital self and how the two communicate with each other and other's real/digital selves. This study would include looking into geo-note taking and real time location sharing and how our digital selves and communicate with each other and inform us of what friends in our proximity are doing as well as recalling past experiences that are location specific. I know this is a super abstract idea so I am looking forward to some dialogue. My inspiration: http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/i-cyborg/Content?oid=3544597

In Search of the 'Green Weenie'

Half of the top ten websites visited daily rely on user generated content. Of these five websites none of them pay their users for their posts. So why do people keep coming back? What is the attraction? And what is in it for the user?

These are the basic questions being asked in all five articles we read this week. Java et al stated, “Microblogging fulfills a need for an even faster mode of communication. By encouraging shorter posts, it lowers users’ requirement of time and thought investment for content generation (2).” In this article, Twitter specifically was found to be a quick and useful way to communicate. Ridings and Gefen looked into why people join online communities and found that membership is retained for two reasons: 1) to gain a feeling of affiliation or belonging, and 2) to gain information and to “aid in goal achievement (14).” They state, “Virtual communities, like real ones, are joined not only because of utilitarian information exchange, but also because they serve the social need of having a friend and getting social support (15).” For Ling et al user generated material is motivated by an idea of a collective contribution. Tedjamulia et al looks at how website designers can promote retention by rewarding the user. Through these various types of rewards users are given incentives to continually collaborate on the site. Schrock aproched the issue from the perspective of gender and states that “males use SNSs to meet new people and expand their friend network (for example, for dating), while females use them for maintaining existing networks (9).”

I must now ask myself if I find myself within the findings of these studies. Of the ten websites mentioned above I use 6 of them regularly, the 5 sites that rely on user generated material plus Google, contributing content to 3 of these sites. I have minimally added information to Wikipedia but not enough to call myself a contributor. Personally, I use blogger to communicate my thoughts and ideas to others, twitter to get information from others and Facebook more as a many-to-many form of communication. 

In general I have a hard time disagreeing with academic articles. Maybe this is a fault of mine but I tend to think, “If it’s published it must be true.” Yet, with this being said, I struggled to agree with Ling et al’s article Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities. I struggled through this article because I never really understood what they were analyzing. I understood the basic premise behind the study and the website they were using but this study mostly seemed like they were encouraging the users to simply push buttons. I think that one thing that would have helped support their results was to list the movies the users were voting on and expressed if the users were required to have seen the film. On the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), through I’m sure a much larger collection of movies then MovieLens, if you were to click on the “rate movies” and limit it to the movies with the least number of votes you would find that nearly 100% of the films listed are movies no has/will ever see because they are either projects from film schools or super low budget independent films that never gained national distribution (among other reasons). Ling et al stated, “More than 20% of the movies listed in the system have so few ratings that the recommender algorithms cannot make accurate predictions about whether subscribers will like them (2).” This study would have been helped with a statement that explained why these films were not rated.

Yet the ultimate question is if we can move past this annoyance to find meaning in the results of the test. The outcome of their study does, in a way, mirror my online behavior. The beauty of Web 2.0 is the ability to collaborate with other users. Nearly 100% of all of my contributions on the web are not for my particular benefit but instead because of the ability to use information collaboratively with others. This works differently on various webpages. Relating this back to MovieLens, or even IMDb, leaving feedback about movies is to inform or influence other users. This parallels the idea that users contributed more when given a group goal (Ling, 23).

To take this a step further Ling et al asked if the information users post needs to be unique. According to their study it does. I wonder if this is really true. I believe that once again it depends on the website being used. If this was really true would Facebook have developed a “repost” button allowing users to repost links and photos contributed by others? Or what about the use of hashtags on Twitter? How unique are the comments when a hashtag is followed? Sometimes each post is unique but many times all the posts tend to be similar (non-unique) to each other or simply reposts of the original statement.

On the other hand, both Ling et al and Tedjamulia et al discuss the importance of rewards as motivators for online contribution. I like to think of this as the MySpace phenomena. The mantra would go something like: S/he with the most posts on a fairly unknown bands page is the biggest fan. Facebook does not really have a devise for this and my experience has been that the person with the strongest presents on my Facebook wall usually posts the most meaningless status updates. Yet rewards are a useful tool on some websites. Geosocial networking sites, such as Foursquare.com, work entirely on this principle. Badges are given for various tasks and the more badges you have the more you can brag about them. Tedjamulia et al state, “Non-monetary rewards like social recognition can be extremely powerful incentives so long as they are public, infrequent, credible, and culturally meaningful (8).” While it tends to contradict this quote, most of the badges on Foursquare tend to be arbitrary. By this I mean they could create a badge for almost anything and people would try to achieve it.

Personally, this reward system does not work for me. It is too arbitrary of a system and rewards people with heavy use without any way of evaluating the quality of the contribution. Instead the rewards that work better for me are recognition and praise. This is always generated by other users and not by mechanisms created by the designers.

A different form of reward I have recently found is national, or popular, recognition. Imagine if your contribution had the possibility to be made public on a network news show, would your contributions become more meaningful? Would you be more willing to come back and contribute more, less or the same? To help explain this theory, and to interact with the weeks readings, I will use Rachel Maddow’s blog properly called The Maddow Blog. This blog is maintained by the staff of the Rachel Maddow Show and is used as a way to diolouge and interact with viewers. It is also a way for the show to connect the viewers with important links and content from the show. The blog is hosted on MSNBC’s website and the comments on the blog are run through MSNBC’s social news website newsvine.

On the February 7th show, during a segment called "Debunktion Junction", Rachel Maddow made reference to a comment made by former Senator Alan Simpson. That comment being, “Stick your finger down your throat and give them the green weenie.” The question Rachel looked into was what Simpson meant by the term “green weenie”.

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The answers that Rachel received came pouring over the social media she uses (her blog and her various twitter accounts). Now I love Rachel Maddow but sometimes she focuses on the strangest issues, and this is a good example of that. However, one thing this story shows is how she was able to use her social media to get some quick answers to these questions.

The next day, Feb. 8th, Rachel reported on this story more in-depth and showed how she was able to find the information she was looking for using social media and the help of some librarians.

It is difficult to match the timeline of the blog with the timeline of the show, especially since we do not know when the staff last checked the blog before Rachel went on the air but for some of those who posted information quick enough their posts made it onto national television.

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After seeing that Rachel was quoting posts from her blog in her show I went back to the blog to examine the overall quality of the posts and to see how they support what I have been reading this week. Her blog that correlates with this story is called Tracking Down the 'Green Weenie' and was posted on Feb. 8th between the two shows. The idea here is that if posting on Rachel’s blog helps contribute to her show and also brings 15 seconds of fame to the writers of the comment then a majority of the comments should be of a high quality. I organized a majority of the posts into 5 categories that are listed below with the amount of times they occur:

1)   Information without a link (10)

2)   Information with a link (9)

3)   Commentary (9)

4)   Note to Rachel (8)

5)   No Information – No Commentary (7)

It was no surprise to me that nearly half of the post were presenting information is some manner. The quality of the information varied and often topics and links were repeated. The group I have called No Information – No Commentary were statements that did not add to the conversation:

Surprisingly Kaija has commented prolifically on the Maddow Blog many of which hold a lot more meaning then the comment above portrays. 


The group that surprised me the most were the notes to Rachel. To qualify for this group the posts needed to be addressed “to Rachel”. These surprised me because they were written as if they expected Rachel Maddow to read them and personally respond.

For the most part the comments that presented information concerning the 'Green Weenie' were substantive and often contained a link to further information.

The interface of the blog itself was very user friendly. If you look on the screen shot above you can see that you can quickly navigate to the users newsvine page by clicking their name in the upper left. You can also reply directly to the individual comments using the reply link on the bottom right. On some of the posts, next to the reply button is some text that says "1 vote". I have yet to figure out what this means and how the "voting" system is used on this blog. There is no feature on this blog to flag comments. All the blog posts on the Maddow Blog are posted by the staff of the show.

What I found on the Maddow Blog fell in line with Tedjamulia et al’s Proposition 5: “As ease of use and interesting content increase, more individuals will want to participate and contribute” and Proposition 10: “Participants with high commitment to achieving a goal will likely work harder to achieve the goal than individuals with low commitment”. The rewards for this particular blog post were two fold, first an informative blog helped to increase understanding of the ‘Green Weenie’ and second, there was a possibility of gaining recognition on the air during the show. Also, by recognizing that she values the contributions on her blog, Rachel reinforced informative responses.

I’ll be honest, before I began reading through the responses on her blog I was sure I was going to find some heated debates and Maddow bashing, which seems to be the norm these days. However, what I found was very little of that sort of rhetoric. There was little evidence of interaction or recognition between users on the blog which surprised me as well.