John Robb has this list:
There are three ways to build a hot weblog.To be a connection machine (people with huge blogrolls and/or RSS lists that point to other weblogs -- they do add their two cents and sometimes their thinking).
To be a name dropper (people that imply they understand what is really going on -- and you don't -- given their personal connections that they constantly let you know about).
To be an ideologue (people that support a single cause with unquestioned faith).
Here are the ways to build a second tier (but still popular) weblog:
To be a thinker (people that delve into topics with intelligence and/or wit).
To be a topic owner (people that own a topic and report on it with unquestioned knowledge and depth).
To be a voice of outrage/affirmation (people that critique others as often as they can or are on the bandwagon).
To be a cool hunter (people that find the newest of the new or the strangest of the strange).
They all sound reasonable to me. Any others?
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html
From the website:
"This is an atlas of maps and graphic representations of the geographies of the new electronic territories of the Internet, the World-Wide Web and other emerging Cyberspaces.
These maps of Cyberspaces - cybermaps - help us visualise and comprehend the new digital landscapes beyond our computer screen, in the wires of the global communications networks and vast online information resources. The cybermaps, like maps of the real-world, help us navigate the new information landscapes, as well being objects of aesthetic interest. They have been created by 'cyber-explorers' of many different disciplines, and from all corners of the world.
Some of the maps you will see in the Atlas of Cyberspaces will appear familiar, using the cartographic conventions of real-world maps, however, many of the maps are much more abstract representations of electronic spaces, using new metrics and grids. The atlas comprises separate pages, covering different types of cybermaps. "
Today, Prof. Nardi talked about Personal blogs, Publishing blogs, Punditry, and Product-related blogs. Am I missing any major categories, or do I get to go with my all-too-cute "critical Ps"?
--
That's not my point. My point is really that there are a couple of interesting technological recurrences that are worth discussing. One of them is literary form of the epistolary tradition. (Which is also in keeping with my usual attempts to explore the non-exceptionalism of new media.)
I'm not the first to tie email to the epistolary tradition: see essays like "Email and Epistolary technologies: Presence, Intimacy, Disembodiment" for--I think--fruitful discussions of how people literarily concieve of themselves within letters. It would be easy and interesting to tie many of the ideas in this article into blogs--indeed, blogs are sometimes more nakedly confessional than the essay discusses.
At the same time, there was a parallel tradition of persons sharing their opinions publically:
I would suggest that these forms are both important to get at the gist of how a blog functions as a series of literary persona.
Agre's chapter "Information and Institutional Change: The Case for Digital Libraries" seeks to identify ways to characterize the interactions and relationships between technology and social institutions and he uses the idea of a digital library as an exemplar to give voice to his ideas. That's the "cotton candy" view: it looks good, it tastes good, but it's hard to chew productively. At least, I found it so...
NOTE: I'm intentionally outlining and simplifying here because I don't want to replace one item of fluffy prose with another item of fluffy prose.
DEFINITIONS
Section 1 - Introduction
SUMMARY
Agre puts a lot of interesting ideas into this paper but he seems to lose focus after Section 2. I can guess that his intent is to characterize the future of digital libraries as a meta-institution with a goal of providing a hyper-mediated analog of the scholarly space/public sphere, which requires the development of standards that aren't rooted in any institutional field but which supports them all. The role of future digital librarians will be less about managing representation than dynamically designing these standards.
However, these guesses are from me and not Agre ... I wish he could've supproted some of his claims better and connected more of the "dots" to actually make this argument rather than imply it.
Wanted: personal social network coordinator (You can't make stuff like this up!)
Seriously, though, is delegation or automation of web logs the future?
How about a presence tracking system that posted to Paul's blog that he was in his office for an hour, met with two students (20 minutes apiece), received three phone calls, and wrote three emails to his classes in that time frame?
We have the technology to do this, but I think the biggest concern would be privacy (hinted at by the Donath paper, I think). But, could this make ethnographic studies easier?
For blog and news junkies: I cobbled together a little AOL chat bot that monitors a bunch of RSS feeds and periodically sends me new news items as instant messages.
Get it here (tar.gz file).
There's a README in there that tells you what to do. You'll need a recent version of Python on your system. Feedback appreciated.
The author examines various aspects of "identity" in virtual communities, and in particular, the role of multiple and deceptive identities. Why is "identity" so important? Because in any community, evaluating information is deeply influenced by its source, and the reputation of its members is what makes a community. The author looks at various ways that identity can be perceived in virtual worlds, despite the lack of physical clues. The particular virtual community studied is the world of USENET newsgroups.
There are two kinds of signals in any communication system. Assessment signals are those which actually require that a sender possess a trait to send a signal. E.g. a man spending money is a reliable signal of him being rich. Such signals are said to follow the handicap principle. On the other hand, for conventional signals, the sender need not possess the trait to send a signal. E.g. a man wearing a shirt saying "I am rich". While the chances of deception are obviously higher with conventional signals, they are also less costly, both for the sender and receiver.
USENET posts can reveal identity in subtle ways. The domain of the poster says something about his environment (is it from a .edu address or a aol.com address?). An institutional account is easier to trace to a real person than a commercial account.
One of the strongest hints of identity is a writer's "voice". This is a signal that is built and recognized over a long time, and regular readers can usually spot a particular poster's "style". In some cases, this "voice" is so strong that people can identify is regardless of the "From:" line of a post.
Other cues to identity can be inferred from signatures at the end of messages. Is it a geeky signature with pseudo-code snippets? Does it have a quote? An organizational disclaimer?
Yet, all these signals are easy to fake. One can fake categories (male, female, professor, student), impersonate particular individuals, or even simply omit their identity. USENET is full of trolls that pretend to be legitimate members of a group but actually want to disrupt discussions among other members. Trolls are harmful not only because they make provocative comments and give bad advice, but because they ultimately heavily dilute the level of trust in a group.
USENET and blogs are different in important ways --- blogs have a clear separation between "message" (the blog post) and "discussion" (the comments), and are generally much less chaotic and free-wheeling than newsgroups.
The most relevant part of this paper when thinking about blogs is the building of a "voice". I think the single most defining characteristic of a blog is its voice. A newsgroup is an open round-table --- a blog is a speaker at a podium. Even in group blogs, shared values among the authors result in some sort of a coherent "message". How is this voice built, and recognized? Over a period of time, just like in newsgroups.
There is one clear parallel with trolls --- comment spam. This has become an increasingly common problem over the last year. Comment spam takes the form of either outright insulting and provocative comments, or completely unrelated comments that market some product or website. Initial solutions blocked IPs of offending posters --- with dynamic IPs this was easy to get around. Newer tools use content-based comment filtering.
Politics / Economics blogger Billmon just got sent up to the world economic forum in Davos, where people who are far richer than you and I talk about how they'll spend our money in the next year.
Interestingly, Davos had a forum on blogs. Billmon reports:
The truth, of course, is that blogs are doing more than just about any other modern institution (if institution is the right word for something as anarchistic as the blogosphere) to recreate a common communication space, and encourage maximum public participation.
Just because the web is decentralized doesn't mean it's fractured. Thanks to the miracle of Google (not to mention the even more powerful search tools coming on line) any piece of information or artistic content that exists anywhere on the web is also accessible everywhere on the web. This is why experiences (Dean's yeaaahhh!!!) can shared so widely. And the sharing is two-way. I can sit here in Davos and make fun of the scream, and others can flame me for helping destroy the greatest presidential candidate in American history.
(but read the whole thing!)
Hi,
I am looking for a partner to work on the project in this class. Anyone who needs a partner can email me (jkotak@uci.edu).
Blogging Agre
Agre's "CYBERSPACE AS AMERCIAN CULTURE" attempts to evaluate the effects of cyberspace on the standing institutions around it. Starting with the common rhetoric that the internet changes everything, dismantling institutions and rethinking interactions, he attempts to push back, instead contemplating ways that the internet can and does support existing institutions. Indeed, he suggests, the internet's major uses have been largely supportive of existing institutions, rather than disruptive.
(To be sure, he refers to "cyberspace" rather than the "internet", and distinguishes the two terms--but it is clear that currently, at least, the internet IS cyberspace.)
He attempts to trace the history of the anti-institutional thought around the internet, relating it to anti-intellectual (particuarly, anti-masonic) movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. He finds close parallels between the rhetoric then and now against the institutional elite which accuses them of being unpatriotic, sexually promiscuous, and in control of the media.
So, too, has the internet both become a symbol of that elite--developed, as it was, by military and educational complexes--and a symbol of defeating those elites, with the libertarian rhetoric that surrounds it.
Instead, he suggests, that the actual developing state of the internet is far more complex than either stereotype might suggest.
He concludes with a call to "unpack" the internet, to remove the ideology and to examine the potential uses of the medium itself. We should realize that it is loosely coupled to institutions; that culture pulls on the internet as it needs to.
--
I find this last call surprising and, in many ways, empty.
I see that Agre has worked hard in this article, but I remain unsure of what he actually accomplished. I don't come out of it feeling sure about a particular research direction.
In his great sweep against ideology, he reads to me as dismissive. It is undeniably true that research HAS shown organizational changes that occur as a result of electronic communication, that some hierarchies are changed in favor of networks. Perhaps the rhetoric is exagerated--but so, it seems, is his dismissal.
There are places that others have gone from here. Lessig, following many others, has persuasively argued that technological structure encourages particular uses of systems. The internet's content-neutral "end-to-end" property is a thing in itself; it espouses a particular ideology and allows certain things that could not have come about without that ideology. (To contrast, the telephone system and the cable television system are both neither end-to-end nor content-
neutral, at least as built, and have very differnet properties.)
Similarly, McLuhan famously claimed that the design of media says much about the messages that are carried over it. While he was comparing "hot" television to "cold" print, other theorists have attempted to apply McLuhan's ideas to the internet.
In total, then, I disagree with Agre's studied indifference. He tries to be above ideology, but it rings false.
This paper “The Presentation of self in Electronic Life: Goffman on the Internet” describes various process of self presentation online. The author also juxtaposes presentation in “real” world vs. presentation in the “virtual” world in context to self presentation. In writing this paper, the main goal of the author is to use definitions of “presentation” produced by Goffman for the “real” world and verify if they exist for the virtual world.
According to the author, the most important goal is to appear acceptable, while presenting one’s self. The primary indicator of failure in presenting themselves is embarrassment; it also acts as a motivation factor for people to present effectively. While face-to-face presentation has the drawback of leaking information involuntarily; nonetheless the problem of acceptable self remains in both paradigms.
The author claims that Goffman might not consider web as a medium of interaction as it is not “fact-to-face” since the communication does not take place in the right “frame”; that is the context and the intentions are unknown; while the interaction might be limited if not non-existing it solves the requirement of interaction, which is to establish contact. Web also saves the presenter from embarrassment. Another prominent feature of the web is that it provides the user with full autonomy. They can choose what information to receive and what to discard, unlike face-to-face interaction. Also, unlike conversations, the only information available to the user is the information content on the web page.
The author categorizes WebPages encountered by him that introduce themselves in some way or another; he also provides real world analogies of the categories. The categories include, “Hi, this is me” which introduces the person directly, and the real world analogy is penpal letter. “This is me” kind of home pages are displayed by faculty. The clues to the person may not be in what is said/done, but in how that relates to the structure defined by others who are doing the same thing; analogy to the real world includes student handbook. “Hi, this is us” is a category which entails family homepages and they resemble company report or family circular. “This what I think is cool” are extreme instances of “Hi, this is me” category and contain less about themselves and more about what their interests are. “An advertisement for myself” encompasses categories such as “Cool style”, “The electronic curriculum vitae” and “An advertisement for the service I can provide”. This category is an over-arching category for all the web-pages purpose of the pages is “self promotion.”
The author reinstates that Goffman would not consider Electronic self as a means to interact because self is developed, maintained and presented in an interaction. The closest electronic interaction can get to face-face interaction is via email. The author puts forth the notion that EC might not be rich enough to support interactive development. Also, most of the addendums to EC might be to make EC more like face-to-face interaction; which hints that EC should be developed in a different context.
In conclusion for web to be interactive, we have to wait till we can have an implicit understanding of “frames” that can be applied to the communication on the web.
While not directly related to a weblog, this touches upon some community ideas we've been discussing in class.
So, as reported on many sites, Google has launched a social network website called Orkut. It's a new variation on Friendster. However, Orkut is by invitation only, but I swear that I know a ridiculous amount of people already on it. For example, after 24 hours since I created my account, I have 12 friends on it and I'm not adding anyone myself - everyone is adding me to their list.
Still, I have to answer a question though when I receive invitations: "Is this person really my friend?" Some of these people are indeed my good friends, others are people I've interacted professionally with for years, and others are those with whom I've hanged out with at conferences. And, most of them know me through my Apache involvement. Orkut has the ability to rank your friends, but I don't trust it with that sort of data.
My question is what's the point of these sites? Can they really achieve anything? I'm not adding anyone I don't know. With the current demographics, it's not going to be good to find women on either!
I've been having this conversation with some other folks as well. I also have an account on LinkedIn. But, again, do I really expect to have any value from this? Not really. My hunch is that these sites are a fad and will die in a few weeks/months. Could it irreparably harm social networks in the process?
I also think I've hit upon this in class and in my comments before, and I think I agree that Be My friend or else! might be the fatal flaw of formalised social networking.
What do you think?
Sorry that formatting in comments was broken. I was trying to turn on linking, but ended up turning things off instead. I'm still working on the right fix... but I'll apply it to a test blog instead.
... is to decode some of the imagery and rhetoric in this article on what's a blog...
“y do tngrs luv 2 txt msg?” by Grinter and Eldridge examines text message use among teenagers, attempting to sketch out typical patterns of usage and identify reasons for its popularity. The paper describes a study in which 10 teenagers in the UK recorded the details of their text messaging activity in logs. Data from the study is then analyzed in view of the questions: What do teenagers use messaging for? Why do they pick text messaging?
Among the findings:
-Teenagers use text messaging for 1) Arranging times to chat and Adjusting arrangements, 2) Coordinating plans with friends, 3) Chatting and gossiping, and 4) Coordinating with family.
-Teenagers pick text messaging because it is cheaper, quicker, and more convenient than other forms of communcation.
The paper goes on to suggest that text messaging makes new kinds of communication possible and changes the ways in which teenagers converse. For example, the terseness inherent in text messaging makes it possible to have short, blunt conversation. Text messaging also makes it possible to communicate in places or contexts where teenagers previously could not have conversations (in theatres, in the classroom, etc). Finally, the paper points out some problems with text messaging. These include problems that arise from its associated specialized language, difficulty in determining intent from content, and mis-addressed messages.
Some comments and questions:
-The paper examines why text messaging is popular with teenagers, pointing out that it is cheap, quick, and convenient. It does not, however, address why text messaging tools are relatively unused by adults. It seems that these very same factors would be important to adults as well. Then why is it that text messaging is relatively unpopular with adults?? Also, why hasn’t it taken off in the US?
I felt like the explanations for why teenagers pick text messaging to be a bit under whelming. Sure, it may be quicker and cheaper—but only marginally so. And, for example, is it really necessary to text message someone to arrange a time for a voice call?? It seems like there are other and more subtle reasons for the popularity of text messaging.
I'm not sure this makes sense, but the dynamics behind why teenagers text remind me a bit of genre theory and the recursive/loop diagram that we discussed last time. Certain factors such as the price and convenience of text messaging influence teenagers to choose text messaging as their communication tool. This then loops back, reinforcing and legitimizing the idea that text messaging is a tool that should be used by teens.
While this summary is really crude, I promise I will update it as soon as I get some time.
This paper "Instant Messaging in Teen Life" by Grinter ET AL is a survey a group of teenagers + one 20 year old guy to find out the importance of IM in a teenager's life.
First few sections are dedicated to introduction of IM and different kinds of IM services available. In the following sections, the author provides an explanation as to why their study is relevant in context of CSCW; how the study is conducted and a summary of participants involved in this study. The last section and also the most dominant section is categorized to describe the findings by the authors.
They begin with describing the features available in a chat service and the history of IM, which dates back to 22 years. Among several multi-way real-time text chat services were Multi User Dungeons (MUD), Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and zephyr. However, there is a distinction in use of the above mentioned chat services. Services like IRC and MUD were used to chat with "people who do not know each other in real space" on topics of common interest. In contrast zephyr communications were topic centered with constrained set of users. Now days, chat services are used to converse with "known others." The main advantage as pointed out by the authors is the convenience of conversing without being interrupted aids in workplace and to maintain social ties.
Following are the insights provided by the study in context of CSCW:
· Teenage use of IM demonstrates the adoption of collaborative technology in home and this study provides its role in the domestic ecology.
· This study shows the awareness of teenagers as private & public people simultaneously.
· The communication pattern allows us to predict what to expect from them in future.
The study reveals that technology plays the most dominant role in IM trends. Teenagers who are connected to internet via DSL/Cable chat more often than teens with modem. Also, peer-pressure dictates what services are used by the teenagers, as they feel left out if they don’t use IM. The primary reason for choosing to use IM is that is it free and many long distance friends can be reached with low cost.
Studies also found that teens don’t use chat rooms as they were “waste of time”. The peer group consisted of their real space relationships. If they did chat in public chat rooms, it is limited to topic organized topic.
Teens use IM primarily to socialize. Many teenagers used IM to chat after school about school as they had little time to talk face to face. The continuous use of IM developed a sense of expectation as to when their friends would be online. IM use by teenagers can be categorized into three categories namely socializing, event planning and school collaboration.
So here are some questions and I will refine them as I get time.
But I found some things in this survey rather strange.
1. The author mentioned that teens get annoyed if their friends don’t use IM. While this could be true, I find it hard to absorb that teens don’t use phone to converse with them. In fact, my first hand findings insinuate that the teens use phone much more than they use IM.
2. Teens are more “computer aware” then their parent, however, none of the teens mentioned anything about their IMs being recorded.
3. While the survey mentioned that IM can be both good and bad. However, there is growing annoyance in using IM these days, in regard to being offline while being online. That is sometimes you leave your machines and the IM is still on. When someone IM’s you they don’t get a response they tend to think they are being avoided.
4. Also, IM might be a way to communicate they don’t “show” any emotions and thus it is hard to understand what impression we are giving to the other person.
How do links propagate in the blogosphere? And how is credit given to the "original" linker, or writer?
William Blaze has a post up on Abstract Dynamics titled Amplification and Stratification, tracing the linkflow in blog space in which he analyzes how a link to Linton Freeman’s article, “Visualizing Social Networks” in the Journal of Social Structure, was passed from weblog to weblog until it had reached quite a few eyeballs.
BTW, that link is from Many 2 Many, "a group weblog on social software."
This paper is an examination by Ito and Daisuke into the use of mobile phones by Japanese youths. Each participant (some of whom are not 'youths', but are parents of 'youths') are asked to keep a diary for a few days about their mobile usage scenarios.
The key investigation is into 'power-geometry of space-time compression'; mainly a way of determining how ubiquitous access to email via mobile phone changes the structure of communication. As a class of subjects, youths were judged to be effective due to previous investigations into youth practices of mobile communication by Grinter et al (see our reading list). The youths in this study had approximately 2x more traffic than the rest of the population in this study.
The Ito paper is divided into three main discussions:
Here are the questions and comments I have from the paper:
danah boyd has a discussion on "what is a blog." It's getting to be an old favorite topic, of course, but I think it's still worth a link and a glance. In particular, a few of her commentators are interesting.
Summary:
This paper documents the range of communication genres found in a random sample of world wide web pages and attempts to identify new genres in the sample. According to the authors, the web is particularly interesting for genre studies because its rapid development encourages experimentation with new genres. There’s also the practical reason that many web pages are public, allowing a surveyor access to the pages for categorization. Last but not least, the web fosters communication between its many different users, and those users essentially bring their own familiar set of genres to the table, enabling a study of different genres and how they come together on the web to possibly form new ones.
Not surprising from the title of this paper, the authors explain genre change by breaking genres into two categories: reproduced and adapted. Reproduced genres are those that users already have experience with and now apply in a new setting. Adapted genres are those that have been modified to take on a new form and eventually become socially accepted as its own. According to the authors, the exact point of emergence of a new genre from an older one is hard to pinpoint. However, the important thing is for a genre to exist, it must be socially accepted in its communication setting.
In order to identify the genres in the WWW, the authors used Alta Vista and produced 1000 URLs of randomly selected single web pages from 1996, from which 837 actually existed by the time they studied them. They came up with a list of genres and subgenres, the results are included in the Appendix. When categorizing the genres (especially the emergent ones), they focused much on the use of links on a web page. For example, homepages and “hotlists” have their own patterns of inward versus outward links.
Finally, the authors state a practical use of their research results for web designers. In their opinions, web designers should draw from accepted web genres in order to better a reader’s ability to identify a site’s communicative purpose. They also make some practical suggestions on web page design for a single page.
Comments/Criticism:
In general I found this article to be well written and its discussion of web genres relevant (even if some of the results seem outdated). I just have a few comments.
I thought it was strange how the authors don’t acknowledge what I see to be a relatively big problem with attempting to identify web genres: the web is constantly in flux. It’s like having a moving target. By the time they went through their sample and categorized everything, the sample was already outdated as new genres emerge and old ones die. Blogs may not have existed when they took their sample, but it’s certainly its own genre now. It’s a good exercise, but I’m not sure the results are all that fruitful for the effort it took. Perhaps this kind of thing is perfectly accepted in the research community though.
Related to above, Yates and Orlikowski's paper (which this paper references quite a bit), suggests that "diachronic analysis is essential to observng the processes of genre emergence". Seems like these authors only focused on a snapshot in time, and therefore, may be missing the insight a study over a longer period may bring. Perhaps a more interesting study may be to take various samples over time and see how genres emerge or disappear (and the reasons for such changes).
Also, any attempt to list genre hierarchies will invite dissent. For example, should film reviews be listed on the same level as product reviews? or should they be categorized under product reviews? Some of their choices are more arbitrary and based on personal opinion (they acknowledge dissent even between themselves).
And lastly, do genres have to be adapted from existing genres? Or can completely new genres be produced in a communication setting without any precedent? I’m not sure if the authors really answer this question themselves, but I’m curious what you all think.
Though the most theoretical and, in my opinion, the most demanding read, Yates & Orlikowski’s paper appears to be undeniably influential and popular -- at least if the sample of papers we’ve read in class is any indication -- Genres of Organizational Communication has been cited 4 out of the 6 papers in 234c. So my approach in this entry will be first to explain, in laymen’s terms, what genres of organizational communication really means and second why and how it’s useful (the why and how become more clear after you’ve read Herring, et al., Crowston, et al. and Erickson).
As a preface: In general, I find that theoretical papers require more than one read to fully understand the topic at hand. These papers tend to introduce new vocabulary and use it extensively to describe new, complex ideas and theories. Fortunately, in this case, Yates and Orlikowski provide ample amounts of examples to elaborate and explicate their claims.
What’s a Genre of Organizational Communication Anyway?
We’ve certainly all heard the word genre – it’s a staple term in literary circles and is often used to describe movies as well. In these instances, genre is used loosely as a classification scheme (a romance, pulp fiction, a horror film, an “Adam Sandler”-like comedy). Thus, the classification is based both on form (e.g. pulp fiction) and topic (e.g. a horror film). In rhetorical theory, discourse/conversation is classified into genres (e.g. a eulogy, a dissertation defense, a sermon, etc.) by a variety of characteristics including form, subject, audience, or situation.
Yates and Orlikowski adapt the concept of genre found in rhetorical theory and use it to explain “organizational communication as a structuration process.” You might be asking (as I did), what exactly is organizational communication? Is it communication that is organized? Is it communication at an organizational (or community) level? How does it differ from ordinary communication? To answer these questions, I tried drawing from the context/definitions in the paper (though I did seek out and find this link as well). Essentially, organizational communication is any level of communication within organizations at the micro or macro level; formal or informal; internal or external. Some examples of organizational communication might be newsletters, memos, presentations, personnel meetings, performance reviews, resumes, etc.
By structuration process Yates is making a reference to structuration theory (which some of us have come across in previous Prof. Dourish classes). Structuration theory “involves the production, reproduction, and transformation of social institutions, which are enacted through individuals’ use of social rules.” Most interestingly, these rules not only influence/shape the action of individuals in organizations, but also by regularly invoking these rules, individuals reinforce the social institutions in a “ongoing, recursive interaction.” So, for example, by creating a blog that has dated diary-like entries in reverse chronological order and links to other webpages/blogs, I am reaffirming the appropriateness of the journal blog for this type of communication and helping to ensure that it will be used in future situations. Thus, my blog is both shaped by past blogs and will serve to shape future blogs.
By situating genres of organizational communication within structuration theory, the authors hope that their framework captures the continuing interaction between “human communicative action and the institutionalized practices of groups, organizations, and societies.”
To summarize the above points: the authors propose genres of organizational communication to investigate the production, reproduction, and modification of a variety of organizational communication over time and in different instances. The concept itself can be applied to a wide range of typical communication practices (memos, weekly business group meetings, e-mail, etc.) and includes temporality and the influence of social institutions. Note that a genre is not dependent on its communication medium (though it may have an influence). That is, a letter in the memo genre is still a memo whether it’s been sent electronically or on paper.
The Why and How It’s Useful Part To Come
At least part of this should be clear from the paragraphs above, but I want to include some examples and further explanations to drive the point home.
I think we covered this sufficiently in class, so I digress.
//second blog entry ever almost completed ;-) Time for bed.
Also, if I can be even more informal -- Happy Birthday Louise!
Okay, before I run into this political realm, a hi to all of you in the class...
So I was reading the paper assigned to us and after reading a couple I thought politics would be a nice topic on this blog along with the articles that we discuss on this blog.
So for the politics savvy people out there, do you guys think that Kerry will lead elections in New Hampshire? As for Dean, he had a great set back. Any ideas why he ran behind? Is it because he spoke trash about the Iowa caucuses.
I think Dean would be ideal opponent to Bush. Does any one think otherwise?
I'm writing about the Erickson paper "Making Sense of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC): Conversations as Genres, CMC Systems as Genre Ecologies.
In this paper the author examines text-based conversations in a CMC system called Babble. He explores characterizing these conversations using "genre theory", specifically mapping Babble "conversations" as genres, and the Babble system as a "genre ecology". He describes 3 properties to characterize behavior of the ecologies.
Roughly, a genre is a "patterning" of communication, a structuring which creates shared expectations. E.g. a resume. Aspects of interest are form, content, and participatory structure. In situated genre theory, emphasis is on the ways genres naturally arise from from a recurring communicative system (e.g. Babble). So one idea in the paper is to see if the conversations occurring in Babble can be interpreted as genres.
I'm not going to describe the babble CMC system in detail or the descriptions of the aspects of the "conversations" examined - it's in the paper. Instead, I'll focus on some confusions I had.
I had a consistent problem with the author's treatment of the Babble "conversations" as "genres". In my mind (which one can argue is often foggy :-) "kinds" of conversations would be akin to genres. Specific conversations would be instances of the genre.
So in the Babble system, I would not think of "commons area", "abusing Wendy", "bad jokes", "babble problems", and "Tom's office" as conversations. To me, they are containers of lots of conversations which are all of a particular genre. Further, I later found myself wondering if some of these 5 conversations/genres were really distinct. It seemed easy for me to think of "babble problems" as bug reports, which I can see as a genre. But e.g. "bad jokes" and "Tom's Office" seem to have a somewhat similar form (though I realize the purpose is different). Still, to me they seem similar.
I wish the paper had better definitions, e.g. "a genre ecology is...". After re-reading scattered descriptive bits of info, I came to understand a genre ecology to be a group of genres in a system, which are related by the 3 properties of global pull, topical pull, and conversational impetus.
Babble as an ecology is described in the paper. Comment: although the 5 chosen "conversations" were supportive of the author's description of Babble as an ecology, there were lots of Babble conversation topics not addressed, so I wonder if the ecology presented really represents the system.
Although I had some other difficulties with the paper (e.g. numerous editorial problems, conversational impetus mapping to arrows and circle size non-intuitive to me :-) I found the concept of genre theory and it's application to CMC to be very interesting. (I had never heard of genre theory before.) Lastly, I would be interested in how these concepts could be used to influence design of systems.
So that's my first blog entry ever :-)
One of the dangers of dealing analytically and academically with topics with which we're personally familiar is the inclination to reason from intuition or personal experience. Topics like privacy, for example, tend to yield a lot of reactions of the form "oh, but what I prefer is..." Similarly, as readers and writers of blogs, we are tempted to take our own experiences as a primary source of information, and then see other accounts relative to that.
There are many dangers in this. One is that our own experiences are, by definition, a degenerate sample (even if we think that we're quite "normal") -- especially true when computer scientists talk about phenomena of computer use. The second is that we are often not truly conscious of our own practices (the reason that we normally observe practice rather than just taking an informant's word about what they do.) The third is that, pretty much by definition, we generally lack perspective on our own practices -- the same reason that anthropologists don't rely on a single perspective, and why some concerned with qualitative methodology, such as George Marcus, have vociferously argued for "multi-site ethnographies."
Now, that's not to say that personal experience isn't valuable, and that intuition should be ignored. The issue is not to allow it to play any primary role. In fact, in any kind of qualitative work, we must work with our own intuitions, either to bracket particular interpretations of data, or to help identify questions that should be investigated further.
The question is how to use intuition to frame scientific questions. Our own experiences don't answer questions, but they can help us find out what questions to ask. When personal experience differs from that described in a study, we can use this different to frame empirical questions -- how widespread are these differences, what is the range of different practices, what different communities might encounter a technology, etc -- or to frame analytic questions -- what underlying factors might account for different uses or experiences, how are different approaches structurally related to each other, what further experiences might be expected, etc. Similarly, when our experiences tally, we should nonetheless use this to question the data -- by asking, for example, whether the similarity between our experiences and reported experiences might lie in certain common background factors which may turn out to be different in other circumstances.
I think it's important that we try to bear this stuff in mind when we are exploring questions of computer-mediated communication, blogging technologies and behaviors, styles of Internet use, personal disclosure, privacy norms, journalling practices, etc. One thing that I will insist on more in future sessions than I did this week is to maintain a scientific/experimental orientation towards the material, and not simply to juxtapose personal with reported experience (or, worse yet, to grant one primacy), but to use it to frame questions for further investigation (perhaps in the papers/projects later in the quarter.)
Was anyone else concerned about the methodology in the Herring et al. paper? For the coding under their "grounded theory approach", it took them 3 rounds to achieve only an 80% intercoder agreement.
"80%" is an awfully convenient number for this measure ... I would be more comfortable if the authors reported the actual value.
80% wouldn't bother me so much except that the categories the authors identified are all pretty objective (ie things for which the intercoder agreement should be pretty high):
structural features, such as number of links, images, presence of a search feature, and
advertisements.
type of blogging software used
the ability for readers to post comments to entries
the presence of a calendar, archives, and badges
frequency of links
links to other blogs and news sources
numbers of actual comments on entries
message length
recency of update
interval of update
age of the blog
The only subjective criterion the authors mention is the "overall purpose of the blog: filter, personal journal, k-log, mixed purpose, or other".
While it's true they don't list all of the 44 categories they claim to code for, does it bother anyone else that they don't report these categories that go into calculating the 80% value which, in turn, is supposed to convince us to trust their findings??
And which set of codings does the 80% apply to? the 10 blogs coded by 4 coders or the 40 blogs coded by 2? It's unlikely that they'd have the exact same level of agreement.
A second methodological issue is that they only report intercoder agreement. as far as I can see, all of the objective categories listed above can be coded ordinally (ie numerically, so that they can be ranked in order). The purpose and the type of software seem to be the only categories that are purely nominal in nature. As such, shouldn't have they presented an intercoder reliability measure for the ordinal data, in addition to the intercoder agreement? Then they should report the intercoder agreement only for the nominal data.
Finally, what measure of intercoder agreement did they use? We might assume that they used Cohen's kappa, if only for its popularity. However, Cohen's kappa assumes a single set of coders doing the coding; there are extensions to kappa (I forget eh name) that should be used when there is not a single set of coders (such as reported here).
Hey'all -- long time reader, first time poster...
I was thinking a new desk arrangement may be in order for this class (given its open-discussion format). I know I would personally prefer to look at people when they're speaking or vice versa. I'm thinking a circular orientation might do the trick.
j
//end first blog post ever
As I said in class today, I think it'd be more effective to replace our the earlier written summaries with blog discussion. So here's what I'd like to do for now.
As before, for each paper that we're going to discuss, I'll assign someone as "primary" discussant. That person is responsible for posting a new blog entry discussing the paper. The content of this is the same as before -- briefly summarise the most salient points (the most salient points of the paper may be different than the most salient points for our purposes) and especially the insights that you gained from it and the questions that it either raises for our discussions or leaves unanswered. Ideally, that would get posted before the next class.
Everyone is required to post at least one comment per class session... more than one is, of course, welcome. In comments, you may get the advantage that you get to point out commonalities or contradictions between different perspectives. I hope that these exchanges will help support our discussions in class.
Seems to me that this is a case of Tim Bray's Laws of Conversation. So, I question how well Joshua explained it to them.
Overall, I think the best analogy is a diary, except that it is in the most public of forums: the Internet. And, I think most non-technical people would understand that analogy. A diary written in another media can become a blog: see The Diary of Samuel Pepys.
Joshua's blog (and many others) also tend to be topic-specific (political, in his case; sports in some of my favorites). Those need a slightly better explanation, but once the diary analogy is understood, I think you can extrapolate the extra meaning inherent in the topic-specific nature.
There can also be commentary and interaction by complete strangers with your blog. I think that's an incredible shift in communication dynamics that make it more powerful than a conversation with just yourself that no one will ever read.
Perhaps one reason that a lot of open-source folks (who already have the technical wherewithal to make it all work) take blogging to heart - we're already used to having our technical discussions in public - so why not extend that to other aspects? See Planet Apache for a collection of Apache-centric developers and their blogs. (Just put on-line a few days ago.)
(If I could figure out how to get href's in a comment correctly, this would have been a comment. Oh, well; perhaps it is worth its own entry anyway.)
In the Blog "TalkingPointsMemo", the author attempts to explain to the historian Arthur Schlesinger what a blog is:
To be polite Schlesinger’s wife asked me to explain to them just what a blog is. And though I get this question pretty often, it turns out to be a rather challenging one if the people you’re trying to explain it to don’t necessarily have a lot of clear web reference points to make sense of what you’re saying. I ended up telling them that it was something like political commentary structured like a personal journal with occasional reporting mixed in.
Now, as I was explaining and watching the looks on everyone’s faces it was incrementally becoming clear to me that this was playing rather like saying that something was like a washing machine structured like a rhinoceros with the occasional sandwich thrown in.
This is just a reminder that tomorrow's class will be discussing the three papers in the "Blogs and Blogging" section of the class web page. Vivek, Brandon, and Thomas will lead the discussions for each paper; please come prepared with some thoughts on the papers (assumptions, methods, conclusions, perspectives, unanswered questions).
To get up to speed, it'd also be a good idea for everyone -- especially those of you less familiar with blogging -- to get a feel for the range of blog sites and activities out there. Sites like LiveJournal and Xanga host lots of personal blogs; a few well-chosen searches on Google should help you track down some other sorts of blogs with different forms of content, approaches, topics, etc. We'll share some of these tomorrow, or post pointers to particularly interesting ones here (along with comments on what you find particularly interesting about them.)
I've updated the class web page with all the readings that we're going to use. See the "links" section at the bottom of the page for a pointer.
Since a number of you haven't taken previous classes on social analysis of information systems, one of the documents I added was a brief intro to Strategies for Thinking Socially about Technology. This is a very superficial overview, but hopefully will provide some food for thought and some useful pointers for ways to go about examining technology from a social perspective.
See you all tomorrow for the first class meeting.
I just noticed that there was a configuration problem that was making the archives unaccessible. Apologies -- it should be fixed now, so that all our words of wisdom are preserved for all posterity. (Hmm, now it doesn't sound like such a good idea!)
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14354
Hi there!
For those of you who don't want to visit this website to see the updates, make sure you use a good syndicate reader (such as NetNewsWire) by pointing at:
http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogs/metablog/index.rdf
NetNewsWire is only for the Mac, but no one else uses anything else, right?