Context Deficit Disorder

Worried that there might be too much information about you online? Microsoft researcher and social media expert danah boyd says it's better to worry that there may not be enough. "The material that is being put up online is searchable by anyone, and it is being constantly accessed -- out of context and without any level of nuance," boyd told attendees of the Supernova conference in Philadelphia on Friday. "That kind of spotlight on people can be deeply devastating, and a type of exposure that may not be beneficial to society."

Put simply, boyd said, "we can't divorce information from interpretation ... or we risk grave inaccuracy." Example: the online record of a woman that lists her arrest on charges of sodomy against a minor. "I think everybody would think, just by seeing this bit of information, that this person is not somebody we would want anywhere near us," boyd said. "But when I tell the story about a 17-year-old in Georgia who was arrested because she was forced into having sex with a 15-year-old classmate in the school and now has a permanent record of sodomy against a minor, we then have a very different image of what's going on."

Okay, so who gets to decide whether the information we see about ourselves and others online is (or isn't) complete? That's where it gets really uncomfortable, boyd says. We don't have complete control. [According to algorithmic data, boyd said, some data profiles of her list her as a truck driver, presumably "because of all the Motel 8s I stay at" as she travels across country doing field research, she says.] "(Anyone) can put together massive amounts of dossiers on people, but where are the ethics and responsibilities around doing this? Journalists have had an interesting and long-standing discussion about ethics and privacy but that same concern doesn't necessary pervade the blogging culture. People who don't see themselves as journalists now have the same rights and the technology to speak really loudly."

A big part of the problem, boyd says, is that people can't agree on a definition of privacy. [Author Jeff Jarvis (What Would Google Do?), who joined boyd on stage to talk about privacy, agreed.] "We don't know what we're talking about (when we use the term privacy)," boyd said. "Companies don't know and the media don't know." But boyd took a stab at it:

"What I have found from talking to a lot of people is that privacy is about understanding a social situation and how information will flow -- and then making decisions that will recognize this. ... People scream 'privacy fail' when they feel they've lost control of the context of what is being said; when they feel as though the system has told them the information will flow one way but then they find out it will flow differently ... and it's also important to realize that people see privacy as something related to the different actors they care about -- or don't (such as parents or other local authority figures like teachers, college admissions officers, employers and social influencers.) I promise you that come fall, we will be debating what notions of privacy we care about as we think about regulation."

Jarvis agreed. "What forces our fears about privacy are very important to deal with," he said. "...but the social Web is (triggering) Gutenberg-like changes here, so we don't know where this is all headed."

For more on the evolving privacy debate, see Radical Shock on this blog, along with Machine Rule and Google Oogled.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Joaquin Croxatto for istock.com)

Tweckling

Social media are triggering new forms of group behavior—for better or worse, and this past week's Web 2.0 Expo in Manhattan offered up a fresh example of the dark side. On Day Two of the conference, twittering audience members formed a digital swarm to heckle keynote speaker danah boyd while she was delivering her keynote. The Twitter pile-on was ironic: boyd was talking about how social media are having the effect of shortening audience attention spans and "motivating individuals to make their personal content more readily available."

While boyd spoke, a live, real-time Twitterstream was being projected on a large screen behind her back, pulling everything tagged #w2e. At first, the audience began sending tweets criticizing her delivery, and then they began ridiculing it. Boyd might have altered her presentation if she had seen what was happening behind her back, but she never got the chance. She was facing the audience and was only able to hear the audience laugh. [Read her response to it here.]

@billyger: danah boyd from microsoft is talking way too fast. It's hard to follow and I have no idea what she is talking about #w2e
@dandam: Danah Boyd loves coffee. #w2e
@andybudd: Wow, people are bleeding out of danah boyd's somewhat dry and academic lecture.

And so on. It got worse. Since boyd's talk Nov. 17, there has been some hand-wringing in the blogosphere over whether to ban live Twitterstreams at conferences, or have organizers moderate the live Twitter streams for rude remarks. Maggie Fox, CEO of SocialMediaGroup.com, called the incident "an extremely uncomfortable experience" which "frankly ... pissed me off." Michelle Riggen-Ransom, a writer and cofounder of Batchblue Software, blogged that "this livestream Twitterbashing (tweckling?) seems a bit like the bully in my Spanish class who used to reflect a circle of sunlight glinting off his watch onto the teacher's bottom while she was writing on the chalkboard, just to make the class laugh." David Beaudouin, a communications strategist with DB+C, asked his blog readers: "Can civility and transparency co-exist within this social medium? Sure, there will always be trolls and flame wars, but behaving badly in public forums, as opposed to productive candor, simply lowers the collective level of useful discourse."

For their part, some of the people who participated in the Tweckling have since apologized to boyd, but their comments also provide insights into other ways social media are changing us. Web 2.0 conference-goer Daniel Damkoehler posted this on danah's Web site Saturday:

"...I was following along with what felt like a bit rushed, more scholarly-than-sales-oriented talk (unlike those that preceded you) until the person next to me gave me a nudge and pointed to the Twitter graffiti wall. I admit to laughing, quipping, and completely falling out of the flow of your presentation and I apologize for my lack of attention and decorum as well as my snarky comments. ...It seems that the more subtle the speaker's point, the more impatient and nasty the audience became. While it's easy enough to blame the new tech in the room for this shoddy behavior, I'm not sure we're seeing anything new here at all. It certainly didn't feel new to me from where I sat.

Consider the recent Town Hall meetings around health care—substantive discussions of important issues were subsumed in cat-calls and shouted rumors. That said, having participated in this bad behavior, I noticed something else about the way it felt to put something on that wall. The Twitterwall subverted Twitter's more symmetric conversation model of communication. Posting to the wall was like creating and sharing a public secret about the speaker (a little like political graffiti except it wasn't anonymous). The wall made a spectacle of the crowd's impatience and anxiety feeding on the speaker's inability to respond. That spectacle united us, not as a single group receiving challenging ideas from a thoughtful orator but as quite separate individuals struggling to listen, read, respond, and make sense of the event. We moved from Web conference to Twitter circus..."

The boyd Tweckling is just the latest example of the phenomenon. At the Shorty Awards in February, a group of panelists sat on stage dumbfounded while the audience used a projection of the live Twitterstream to make fun of them behind their backs. More famously, former BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy, during a 2008 SxSW interview of Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, got pummeled "when the back channel on Twitter caused the crowd to turn against Lacy and made for a fairly hostile Q&A," Riggen-Ransom recalls. A more recent example, she says, occurred earlier this month at a HighEdWeb Keynote speech in Milwaukee, "where even non-attendees jumped on the bandwagon (possible now with live-streaming.)" [To read Riggen-Ransom's full post, go here.]

Sure, speakers who read their speeches or who don't seem comfortable addressing a crowd have never been popular with audiences who have paid hefty registration fees just to hear them speak. People attend keynotes to be enlightened and entertained. But does the advent of Twitter—and the existence of a digital back-channel—make it socially permissible to virtually boo people off stage?

Like Riggen-Ransom, I'm all for the back-channel. But I'm also for civic spaces. Way back in the '90s, people used to laugh at Beavis&Butthead, the original back-channel snark-mongers—often to the point of losing interest in the videos they were skewering. To be sure, the audience is the stage in this new era of social media. As social media continue to redefine our notions of public spaces, public behavior—what's considered acceptable—is evolving. Transparency changes things, and not gently.

—By Marcia Stepanek

(Photo of danah boyd at Web 2.0 Expo New York courtesy of O'Reilly Media)

Twitter-bashing

Here's the latest bit of Twitter-bashing that's roiling the social media/social advocacy crowd: U.S. market researcher Pear Analytics' short-term study of Twitter labels 40% of the messages sent over the microblogging service "pointless babble." Only about 8.7% of tweets, Pear says, have "value" as they pass along news of interest to others.

It's been enough to prompt some high-profile social media experts and advocates to rush to the defense of microblogging (again). danah boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, weighed in with a post shared on the Progressive Exchange network:

"I vote that we stop dismissing Twitter just because the majority of people who are joining its ranks are there to be social. We like the fact that humans are social. It's good for society. And what they're doing online is fundamentally a mix of social grooming and maintaining peripheral social awareness. They want to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn't viable. They want to share their state of mind and status so that others who care about them feel connected. It's a back-and-forth that makes sense if only we didn't look down at it from outer space. Of course it looks alien. Walk into any typical social encounter between people you don't know and it's bound to look a bit alien, especially if those people are demographically different than you."

Josh Nelson, with The Hatcher Group, a communications and nonprofit consulting firm in Washington D.C., suggested on Facebook that "if you scanned thousands of random emails or phone calls, it would probably be mostly irrelevant 'babble' as well." Tomorrow's headline? "Ninety-five-plus percent of all telephone conversations are irrelevant to outside listeners," Nelson wrote.

Meanwhile, Elana D. Leoni, the online membership coordinator of The George Lucas Educational Foundation, added in a post, also shared on ProgressiveExchange.org:

I think it's all about how selective you are when you decide to follow someone. I run my company's Twitter account and I've found Twitter to be one of the most effective ways to reach out to experts, get opinions, promote our content, and do some great market research.

Still not convinced of Twitter's power? Hollywood studios are on edge because blistering, critical word-of-mouth via Twitter and other social networks is cutting—from days to mere hours—the time during which word of mouth can make or break a film at the box office. Bruno and G.I. Joe, for example, experienced an unexpectedly fast tumble within their opening weekends. "People will be Twittering during the opening credits—and leaving when they don't like the film," Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures told The Washington Post.

Twitter can also help to save a production. Just ask Damian Bazadona, president of Situation Interactive, an online marketing and advertising firm. Bazadona was part of the team behind the novel marketing, via Twitter, of the Broadway play, Next to Normal. In early May, six weeks after the show opened, the production began what New York Times contributor Andrew Adam Newman said was, by all accounts, a Broadway first: over Twitter, a special version of the show began to be tweeted out to people, one line from one character at a time—over 35 days. "About a week into the N2N tweetstream, Next to Normal had 30,000 followers; when the show ended June 7, about 145,000 had signed up. Then, as the cast began texting followers, their numbers continued to grow, recently topping 550,000," Newman wrote. "...According to the tracking site Twitterholic, N2Nbroadway is ranked 210th, attracting more Twitter followers than celebrities like Paris Hilton and Stephen Colbert and brands like Starbucks."

Bardona told Newman: "You wouldn't go to a social event and start selling someone something. The content itself was doing the selling for us, so we didn't need to bang someone over the head and say 'Here's how to buy tickets.' That would have smelled so advertising."

What do you think? Is Twitter mostly uncontrollable babble—or a new way to find power and safety in numbers?

—Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Jayesh for istock.com)

"White Flight" Online?

(I first wrote this post for PopTech and am reposting it here with permission)

For years, many people have been saying the Internet will be a “great social equalizer.” Give everyone access to technology, and social boundaries built on differences in race, class, and income will start to blur, right? Not necessarily, cautions Net researcher danah boyd.

Speaking at this week’s Personal Democracy Forum in New York, boyd said that even among people with access to the Net, long-held social divisions of race, class, and income are beginning to play out online, particularly among teens now choosing which social network they prefer, MySpace or Facebook. “Social media don’t eradicate social divisions,” says boyd, an expert in NextGen behaviors for Microsoft and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “[Social media are] making the old social divisions obvious in totally new ways.”

Consider the perception in the media that MySpace is losing its rivalry with Facebook, boyd says. The numbers tell a different story. ComScore data released two weeks ago show the two social networks running neck-in-neck with about 70 million unique users each, boyd said. So why the disconnect? boyd, who has spent the last four years traveling the United States and talking to teens about their use of social media, says it probably has something to do with how MySpace is being perceived by teens in society.

boyd said it used to be that most kids were on both MySpace and Facebook, but then, during the 2006-2007 school year, boyd started noticing a trend: teens were starting to decide whether to stay with MySpace or jump to Facebook. They were making that choice based on the social categories in which they placed themselves offline. “Increasingly,” says boyd,” (teens) were choosing the site that reflected who they saw as being ‘people like me’ and seeing the ‘other site’ as the place where the ‘other’ people go.”

Here’s one quote from a teen she interviewed, Anastasia, 17, from New York:

“My school is divided into the ‘honors kids,’ the ‘good not-so-honors kids,’ ‘wangstas,’ (boyd says “they pretend to be tough and black but when you live in a suburb in Westchester you can’t claim much ‘hood”), the ‘latinos/hispanics,’ (boyd says “they tend to band together even though they could fit into any other groups”) and the ‘emo kids’ (whose lives, boyd says, “are always filled with woe”). We were all in MySpace with our own little social networks but when Facebook opened its doors to high schoolers, guess who moved and guess who stayed behind?… The first two groups were the first to go and then the ‘wangstas’ split with half of them on Facebook and the rest on MySpace… I shifted with the rest of my school to Facebook and it became the place where the ‘honors kids’ got together and discussed how they were procrastinating over their next AP English essay.”

Teens also are making the choices based on perceived values, tastes, and cultural perceptions, boyd said. Here’s an excerpt from boyd’s interview with Craig, 17, from California:

“The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook. It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace. Any high school student who has a Facebook will tell you that MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious. Like Peet’s is more cultured than Starbucks, and Jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop, and like Macs are more cultured than PC’s, Facebook is of a cooler caliber than MySpace.”

But here’s what boyd says should really “scare the hell out of us.” As teens choose one site over the other, she said, “it’s clear that it’s not just anyone” who leaves MySpace and goes to Facebook. “What we’re seeing is a modern incarnation of white flight,” boyd says.

“Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. …Those who deserted MySpace did so by choice but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.”

And one more thing? “In looking through my data,” boyd says, “I found that teens who prefer Facebook are far more likely to be condescending towards those who use MySpace than vice versa… Teens who use MySpace may (consider) teen Facebook users as ‘stuck-ups’ or ‘goodie two-shoes’ or the ‘good kids.’ But they’re not nearly as harsh in their language as Facebook users are of those who use MySpace.” And only last month, boyd says, she was doing field work in Atlanta where she found a heavy usage of MySpace “among certain groups of youth. They knew of Facebook but had no interest in leaving MySpace to join Facebook.”

Bottom line, says boyd? “…When people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another and they do not communicate with one another, which can and does breed intolerance.” Social network sites are not like email, where it doesn’t matter if you’re on Hotmail or Yahoo. When you choose MySpace or Facebook, boyd says, “you can’t send message to people on the other site. You can’t ‘friend’ people on the other site. There’s a cultural wall between users…and if there’s no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.”

“…If we don’t address this head on,” boyd told the Digerati in the PDF09 audience, “inequality will develop deeper roots that will further cement the divisions in our lives.”

For more on boyd’s survey work about teens and their use of social media, see her blog. Her research papers are listed at danah.org/papers. Another resource is Eszter Hargittai’s article, Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites.

—Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by istock.com)