Bill Giang "ImNotAsian" 41078422
Technology today is an ever growing realm of new age gadgets, fancy designs and the race to capitalise on the next big craze. It seems that in earlier years, it was more about power and performance as users who were more up to date with the current technological advances were able to perform tasks more efficiently. However, what happens when that power was no longer needed to perform the tasks people wanted today?
The emphasis has greatly shifted from dependencies on the technology at hand to the users who will interact with it. As great as a high end PC is, that can run the newest games with all the settings set on maximum when you can’t play WoW, which would be completely redundant if there were no users. It would simply defeat the purpose of the MMPORG genre.
If we were to dumb the technology down further and really focus on the users, what type of interactions would occur that would cause what could be seen as a revolution in technology? At this point, the term “social technology” can be introduced, as the middle ground for these interactions with the aid of technology. What we are more interested in are the types of interactions that occur here and how they may differ from real life interactions – the good, the bad and the strange.
In today’s society, most (if not all) people are at least novice users of computers for either work or leisure. It is difficult to move about your regular routines without having been exposed to some of the current fads and internet crazes, one of which being facebook.
With major corporations worldwide offering up to $1 billion for purchase of the social networking application [4], it was clearly confirmed that facebook had become quite revolutionary in its field and far exceeding the creator’s intention.
What exactly does facebook do that can generate this $1 billion interest? Facebook is a social networking website that allows its users to interlink between various networks. With the base functionality of searching and adding friends, messaging, and profile updating, it also offers much more with custom applications custom created by its users, most of which having one thing in common: a method of social interaction.
Even for myself, I originally signed up to facebook just to play tetris (now known as Tetris Friends [5]) and beat all my friends’ scores (which I did by a large margin in the end). I am not the type to sign up to any or all of these social networks but an external application within facebook gave me incentive to… that is, to play a game I liked with friends.
Initially, I had no intention of utilising any other functions that were available but now I find myself somewhat reliant on facebook to keep me up to date with what my friends’ status, activities, and announcements. I use facebook now as a segway between my friends simply because I don’t have the time to see everyone.
Having said that, this then presents the question of what or why do people use facebook? I see my own use of facebook as common and I would fall into the category of the typical user. Many of my friends are what I would describe as facebook addicts who spend much more time mainly for purposes of socialising and to a much lesser extent, exploring other applications.
“Social network sites provide simple, inexpensive ways to organize members, arrange meetings, spread information, and gauge opinion. As more systems emerge, there will be greater capacity for groups to organize and participate in collective action, a hallmark of civil society.” [6]
Since then I have signed up to various other social networking websites sampling what other services may appeal to me. These include Delicious (social bookmarking), Flickr (image sharing), Last.FM (music recommendation), Yahoo! Pipes (combining RSS feeds), FriendFeed (combining other social networking feeds) and Twitter (microblogging).
Of those listed, I found delicious and Yahoo! Pipes to have almost no social activity. Delicious would serve as a more powerful tool within interest groups as a method of sharing online resources. Yahoo! Pipes on the other hand just seemed redundant as FriendFeed offers similar results with less setup time. Perhaps this just deterred me (and possibly other users) to using it.
I could already share images and photos with facebook so Flickr was also made redundant (unless I wanted to share high resolution images – which I never did anyway). Last.FM was interesting as I could share music with users of similar music tastes without having any personal connection to them. It was purely for interest in the music. I did not generate any relationships with anyone nor did I care to. It simply served its purpose and continues to do so with minimal social interactions.
This brings me to the last two in FriendFeed and Twitter. As a social aggregator, FriendFeed was created late 2007 in order to consolidate updates from multiple social networks via RSS feeds.[7] It can already aggregate content from most of the major social networking websites such as facebook, MySpace, twitter, Last.FM, Delicious., just to name a few.
Although having limited experience with FriendFeed, I can see its potential in aggregating content from many sources in an incredibly efficient manner. However, with the amount of (personal) information available, this does present issues of privacy and security.
At first glance, Twitter seems to be facebook’s status function on its own – a smaller tool within a larger one. But at a closer look after sampling its functionality, it brings a whole new dimension of interactivity as updates are now sent to my personal mobile phone.
Founded by Jack Dorsey in 2006, Twitter allows users to send and receive others’ updates known as tweets [8]. These are displayed on their online profile for anyone to see. Users may then elect to receive these updates straight to their mobile phones, thus increasing the level of social interaction. Updates can be made via the Twitter website or through various other applications such as Tweetie, Twitterific, TweetDeck and feedalizr.
With all the other social networking websites, the one thing that kept me from getting too immersed into each world was the fact that it was still being accessed through a computer where the interaction stays. Twitter however forces its way past the realm of a computer terminal and straight to the user wherever they are.
Of course there are other things that do this but since twitter was the first to do it, it had a much bigger impact on me. Was my own personal space being invaded by a random message from someone via twitter? Obviously I am over dramatising the actual events but one can imagine the possibilities.
My first exposure to Twitter saw particular users, not only expressing their stalker-like behaviours, but embracing it as this marvelous tool opened many doors for their “extracurricular” activities.
This issue being raised here is the same for any tool whether it is a physical object or a virtual application: what type of restrictions or control is required or enforced on tools possessing the means to harm others? In reference to a physical object, it is unfair to blame the manufacturers of any vehicle if a motorist was to speed and inadvertedly be the cause of an accident resulting in fatalities. That is why road rules are set in place to control the drivers of the vehicles.
However, what are the implications of enforcing such strict rules for the use of social networking websites like Twitter, FriendFeed and even facebook? Users can raise the level of security of their accounts by not allowing others to follow them without their consent but what happens to those who do not have that setting in place?
In the design of Reno, a location enhance, mobile coordination tool and person finder [9], researchers investigated two security related issues; one of which focused on “the usage of the application within deception and denial practices common to mediated social communication.” [10]
Essentially, the design Reno supported acts of deceit that abused privacy features of the medium in an unauthorised manner. This matter was dealt with by interviewing test users of Reno. These interviews revealed that users would have been able to use Reno within denial and deception practices. With the control that Reno provided, it was sufficient for achieving plausible deniability.
This of course would not hold for misuse of all these social tools given the amount of control imposed on its use and the implications on the users. The only suggestion I can offer, with my limited knowledge of the laws or regulations that govern internet related non-compliant behaviour, is to protect your own interests at hand as information is so readily available at your finger tips.
References
1. "Executive Bios", Facebook.
2. Seward, Zachary M. (2007-07-25). "Judge Expresses Skepticism About Facebook Lawsuit". The Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118539991204578084.html?mod=googlenews_wsj. Retrieved on 2008-04-30.
3. Williams, Chris (2007-10-01). "Facebook wins Manx battle for face-book.com". The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/01/facebook_domain_dispute/. Retrieved on 2008-06-13.|
4. Delaney, Kevin (2006-09-21). "Facebook, Riding a Web Trend, Flirts With a Big-Money Deal". Dow Jones. p. 1.
5. Tetris Friends, http://apps.facebook.com/fbtetris/play.php
6. Nicole B. Ellison, Cliff Lampe, Charles Steinfield, “Social network sites and society: current trends and future possibilities”, ACM, Volume 16 Issue 1, January 2009.
7. “friendfeed.com” , FriendFeed.
8. Strange, Adario (April 20, 2007). "Flickr Document Reveals Origin Of Twitter". Wired News (CondéNet). http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/04/flickr_document.html. Retrieved on November 5, 2008.
9. Giovanni Iachello, Ian Smith, Sunny Consolvo, Mike Chen, Gregory D. Abowd, “Developing privacy guidelines for social location disclosure applications and services”, SOUPS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Usable privacy and security, ACM, July 2005
10. Giovanni Iachello, Ian Smith, Sunny Consolvo, Mike Chen, Gregory D. Abowd, “Developing privacy guidelines for social location disclosure applications and services”, SOUPS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Usable privacy and security, ACM, July 2005 p.8
5 comments:
I find the high lighting of the texts quiet handy when reading through your article. It helped me understand the main thing you are trying to tell us.
The whole article has a certain depth that would need some kind of refference to make it standable, and you have done that.
Great job :)
Great post, fantastic flow in language, and no doubt the highlighting was effective. Couple of thoughts about stalking:
Clearly, negative things like stalking can take place in the context of social networking (like drunk driving?). However, as users we are the ones selling the alcohol here.
There's a little confusion. If we were friends, I would share many things with you that I wouldn't normally let the public hear about. So there's a clear distinction for me between online and personal interactions.
In social networking, we're merging these two. We're mostly unaware (till something bad happens) that interacting at such intimate level is unwise as information flows freely on the Internet.
So we're to blame for encouraging the stalking. For posting our personal businesses all over the net.
We need a more elaborate privacy model.
You raise a good question: should manufacturers be blamed for using their products in a harmful way? For instance, would car makers be so innocent if the cars they made were designed to go hundreds of km/h over posted speed limits? The recent Pirate Bay trial springs to mind where the owners of the site were convicted for the actions of the users on the site.
In terms of this reflection however, you can raise security or just not participate and you are almost guaranteed not to have a bad experience. I agree with you, ultimately the user is the one responsible for the amount of information they put out there.
As a side note I actually found the highlighting distracting, I am a little colour-blind and I can't read the lighter colours very well on the white background.
@Sam: Thanks... that's what I was going for. Sometimes reading clumps of text is difficult for me. I was trying to highlight key words that would give readers more understanding about what the paragraph means in a couple of words rather than having to read the entire thing.
@Dineth: I had some trouble writing this since I started out with only a social view point without the technology side, which as we know, is a completely different ball game.
There are a few things that I would have liked to elaborate more in the privacy issues with both Twitter and Facebook and what we can do to protect ourselves, but in the end, assignment deadlines got the better of me :(
@Imbenarion: Can you imagine what would happen if manufacturers were to be held accountable for mishaps or illegal activity? When you look at how almost anything can potentially be used as a murder weapon, pretty much no one would be producing anything in fear of getting sued, etc...
About the colours, I tried bolding first but had trouble making distinctions with particularly points. I did try all darker colours at one point but they all looked the same to me. Apologies for the difficult read.
I like the comparison of a vehicle to the social technological tools. Very interesting way to denotate the way users interact with these tools by representing abusing of tools with speeding.
Privacy of users on public feeds has always been an issue and there has never been an absolute answer to it like there isn't any to the mobile phone turning itself off or silent.
So like i expressed in my entry, the only way a user can balance between privacy, avoiding stalkers and expressing themselves to others is how much they want to control and display about themselves online.
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