Interrupting my conference coverage to try catching up some of the other stuff I’ve been doing. This piece of art by Florentijn Hofman is out in front of Worm (about which I’ve written quite a lot already). I love the duck, but also I was interested to hear from Hajo that because Worm had some connection to the artist, they were able to have the piece anchored there for a few weeks at a much lower cost than was usually charged.
There are so many ways that social networks impact these scenes!
So here I am, we are in the last paper session before the wrap-up and I’m still trying to come up with some thoughts about emerging themes. Hampered a bit by the fact that rather than reading the proceedings yesterday after dinner, instead I stayed late at the dinner talking to David Krebs and enjoying the warm evening. But here are some things I notice keep coming up:
Data collection is especially tough because companies don’t give away the data, and user surveys have all kinds of limitations. It seems the best way for a number of platforms is to design an application users would like to add for somereason that also collects data on them for the researcher.
Distinctions –all agree we need finer distinctions, but little agreement on what they should be, especially when ontological issues start coming in, or questions of whether or how online actions are carried into offline life. (to reiterate that stupid distinction!)
Collective memory is quite interesting because it’s so overtly influenced by the platform being used and in what way things are archived or not. So for example, messages can be reviewed later, but battled can’t (unless they were deliberately filmed.)
Disappearing distinctions –I was quite encouraged to hear from several speakers that use of technology seems more equal now except for age, and even around age, the issue is not so much using tech or not, but the manner of use. However, the gender issue in FLOSS communities is troubling because even though those communities are small, they represent an important measure of participation in creation. If women continue absent, then the tech developments will remain slanted toward what interests and works well for men, and the cycle continues.
Pausing now to hear a talk about blogging and identity.
Can’t write too much at the moment because I will be speaking myself in 27 minutes. 🙂
Some quite interesting talks here, but I am surprised (pleasantly) how broadly representative the panelists are. The conference is small–only one track of three speakers per panel for a total of 8 speakers including me! –Not counting discussants and the conference organizer, but still quite small. It leads to very interesting discussions between talks and I expect dinner will be quite nice that way as well. At least I hope so!
Some themes are emerging, but I’ll wait until I have a chance to digest the ideas a bit more and read the proceedings before I comment on that. I did not get my revisions done in time to be included, but now both the slides and paper or online at Scribd. I was especially interested in David Kreps‘ talk and hopefully will find his stuff in the reader.
One trend though, to whet your appetites–agreement that the virtual/real or online/offline dichotomies are unsatisfactory ways to undersatnd any of this stuff. Finally!
So now I am again visiting the Netherlands for the research and talks I mentioned earlier. I have been at the University of Twente visiting the Information Systems and Change Management (IS & CM) department, which is where I gave my talk, yesterday. It is quite interesting because when Elfi invited me I at first wasn’t sure how my research on Facebook would be relevant to the work she and her colleagues are doing, but actually, there is a surprising amount of overlap in the questions we are investigating. So the talk went well and also helped me to further refine my thinking about how participation in Facebook is affecting professional, in this case specifically scholarly communities.
A couple of points on that:
So those are some of the ideas I am thinking about, and now the question is how to gather data on them, since most facebook profiles are closed to non-friends, but I can hardly make any claims based only on what I see my own friends doing.
So, back to the visit; I had two very nice dinners, first at De Kater, where I had some amazing salmon stuffed with shrimp, and the next night at Sam Sam, where I had duck breast that was quite good too. While at Sam Sam I also tried a drink that combined beer and Sprite, and that was a little weird, but ok.
Silly to mention the food in the middle, but it was very good…. Anyway, I met a lot of nice people in the IS & CM department who are all working on interesting stuff. I won’t put all the individual links in with the names; they can be found through the department page linked above. But I enjoyed speaking at length with Bjorn Kijl, Michel Ehrenhard, Romana Aziz, Roland Muller, and of course Elfi. Also I had a very interesting talk with the head of the department, Jos van Hillegersberg, and I spoke a lot with Celeste Wilderom who was also hosting me at her house. Everyone has statements about their research on their homepages, though I’m not sure it’s all up to date, but anyway, some of them are looking at social networks in ways that relate to my work with Facebook, and some lokk at organizational change and communication, among other things. That actually has some connections to my other project on the institutionalization of new media in the Netherlands. I am looking at new media groups rather than business, but many of the issues are similar, particularly because now ICTs have such a strong effect on everything.
Staying with Celeste was a treat–she has a very nice house! But also, it was my first time to stay in in a family house and so I went with her to drop off her daughters at school and got to see a bit of Dutch family life. This post has grown quite long now, so I will end it here. I about an hour I go to the train station to make my journey back to Rotterdam. Hopefully when I return I can get my stupid chipcard sorted out (I managed to foul it up again) and I will have a chance to upload some pictures. –So the posts here will get a bit out of sequence as I back up to add those.
Right now I’m reading a book for which I will be writing a review any day now… Anyway, it’s called Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights, anthology that looks at how women use computer technology and ICTs in Scandinavian countries. The editors, Jenny Sunden (no website I could find?!) and Malin Sveningsson Elm argue that most books on ICTs, new media, etc, have been American/Anglo-centric in presenting the experiences and practices of users in the US and UK as universal, rather than framing those experiences and practices in a national context.
I absolutely agree with this, and in fact this belief is a reason for my own decision to focus on just one country for my own projects. And, now that this book has been published, I can now just refer to the very convincing argument they make about the need for research that considers national context, rather than assuming what is true in one Western country will be true in others. Thank you Drs. Sunden and Sveningsson Elm for so effectively constructing a step in the rhetorical ladder! 🙂
Now it’s official; I will give a talk at University of Twente on June 25th. Here’s the blurb:
A preliminary report on how scholars perceive their social network/audience on Facebook, and what effect the risk of and real border-crossing or transgressive behavior has for them personally and professionally with their colleagues. –So in other words shifting the focus the what students are doing or how they perceive us to what we scholars are doing and how we perceive each other. I make a rhetorical analysis of gestures that are exchanged between users, and in particular discuss how these gestures may help create a feeling of presence.
My own experience suggests that while perhaps there is some risk to the behavior encouraged by Facebook, there is also considerable personal and professional benefit to engaging in the prescribed playful actions of Facebook applications. They seem to encourage connections that are emotionally more intimate and stronger, which offers both personal and professional advantages. People with whom we have multi-valent relationships online may also become people with whom we might collaborate on research, or organize conference panels, or at least go to for advice when visiting their home countries/cities.
Thus I ultimately argue that along with the playful air pervading Facebook, there can also be a feeling of risk, and that users sharing experiences that give rise to this tension actually strengthen their social and professional bonds. In academic circles there aren’t many venues where play and risk are valued or even possible, which may explain why Facebook has been so attractive to many of us who by rights (as trained critical thinkers) ought to be the most resistant to its charms.
So basically people get a sneak preview of the talk I will give the following week in Germany at IFIP WG 9.5 and preliminary thoughts on the paper I’m preparing for IR 9.0
Here is the text of the speech with which I was honored for my creation of truly marvelous chaos:
I confess to aspiring for this award for several years and those of you who know me and have witnessed the temple of bureaucratic agglutination that I’ve created in L195D can bear out this aspiration. When Jim Payne popped in on me last week to discuss these awards, he mentioned the superior condition of my office, and I thought my position was secure.
But then we wandered around campus a bit, and we discovered a singular effort that puts to shame my own meager and sophomoric efforts.
Several distinguishing features clearly separate this office from the rest of the pack. The empty wrappers of food and water bottles. The stacks and scattered detritus of scholarly work and the assessment of student performance. The bag of drawings clearly encrusted with what appears to be mud.
This office represents the highest example of what we can achieve given the proper inspiration, and desire, and temperament, and equipment. What makes it so is not merely all of these details, but its comprehensive vision, its theory and practice of chaos so profound, so deeply and thoroughly considered, so assiduously studied and carefully elaborated in all its possibilities.
You may see this stunning effort in L195N. I am humbled, and I bow to its greater glory.
Please join me then in congratulating my colleague in English, and this year’s winner of the distinguished Desktop Structural Achievement Award, Dr. Kim De Vries.
I must thank Dr. Scott Davis for so generously allowing me to publish his speech. He did make a good effort, but I think was unwilling to sacrifice his own or his students’ ability to walk into his office! 😉
I can remember back in 1999 or so I was first making friends online, and at the time people around me expressed surprise that I would really count any of these online acquaintances as friends. And of course not all them were or became friends, but some did. Now, almost 10 years later I am still friends with some of them, even close friends. Along the way people really stopped asking if net friends were real friends, and I have many many friends now whom I mostly connect with online–scholars lead an itinerant life, or at least I do.
But of course it’s not exactly the same.
There are people I see almost every day or every week in my immediate locale whom I consider friends, a few of them close friends. But even those that are not so intimate emotionally I know quite well in other ways just because I see them often. So I know what they typically eat, or whether they prefer coffee or tea, what kinds of clothes they like to wear, whether they are morning people or night owls–and this is all without explicit discussion. I just observe it.
I know these things about some of my online friends too, but only if we talk about it. I don’t know about others, but when I am taking time to email, or IM, or chat, I don’t usually spend time on these little details unless for some reason they become important as part of a larger point. But even as I write this I experience the same problem of what I would describe vs what might be observed–there are some people, a few, with whom I am in such close contact that even though we are only connected via skype or email, these details come through. But when describing our daily lives through an online medium, we all make choices about what to leave in or out. These choices create some picture of us for readers that really is only a thin slice of our lives, so in some ways our online friends almost inevitably have a distorted picture.
This is not to say people we see in person don’t have pictures of us that are distorted in other ways, but I think the distortions may be less exaggerated because a broader range of information is available. Online we have mainly text, maybe some pictures or videos, and almost all of that is chosen by the author (leaving aside for now the issue of involuntary publishing that afflicts people with highly public identities). So it seems to me that this may serve to concentrate the distortions.
But does this actually matter? I don’t know. As I said, some of my online friendships started 10 years ago and those that have lasted always lead to meeting in person at least occasionally. So maybe this is really no different from the largely epistolary relationships that were common before the telephone, or before rapid travel became fairly accessible to large numbers of people. But having both kinds of friendships does sometimes make me feel in an uncomfortable way that there is some kind of disjunction between those with whom I feel closest and those whom I might guess have the widest range of information. Are those closest friends closest to the “me” that I think of as “me”? I suppose the question has always been there, but now technology makes me really notice it often. Damn computers and ICTs. 😉
So my college (humanities and social sciences) had the end-of-term meeting and awards ceremony.
The recent (and ongoing) stress of budget cuts, and the just-this-week-resolved stress of the Retention/Promotion/Tenure (RPT) process has left people pretty punchy, so while most of the awards were quite serious, a few were NOT. –And really everyone was giggling through almost the whole event, without having had even one “adult beverage.”
I was honored to have my efforts recognized in winning the Desktop Structural Achievement Award, conferred every year on the faculty member who, well, I think the picture says it all. –Taken immediately after the ceremony and, I must say, after earlier this week cleaning up a little. (seriously).
Of course I’s prefer it to be neater, but I find that when I am working really hard, I naturally generate some kind of chaotic field. At least that’s my story. And honestly I may agree that neat people are just too lazy to look for things. 😉
I will reassure any future hosts that I never treat other people’s spaces this way! As soon as I can I will post the text of the speech honoring my achievement, and a picture of the trophy, which is enormous!
And here is the cabin itself, still standing 101 years later. My great great grandfather was an engineer, and this house fits together so tightly that even after all these years, it has hardly shifted. Amazing compared to the way things are built lately.
The window on the second floor looks out from the little room in the attic where I slept as a teenager, finally entitled to my own space. I was the only one who didn’t care if a bat or two swooped in. 🙂
