How Do People Display Social Networks in Everyday Life (That Is, Not Online)? Give 2 Concrete, Specific Examples
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
How do people display social networks in everyday life (that is, not online)? Give 2 concrete, specific examples. Why do they do this? Looking at this display as a signal, what is the quality it is inferring? What are the costs of making this signal? The benefits? Is there a cost to the receiver if it is not honest? One way people display social networks to others is by dropping names. For example, someone could say “I was talking to Alex Rodriguez the other day…” In these cases, signaling this information is meant to either attach oneself to a respected other or signal importance outright. While there are few costs associated with the actual creation of such a signal, the benefits normally involve an elevated level of respect (“Wow, Bob must be cool if he knows A-Rod!”). If the signal is discovered to be false, however, there could be severe social repercussions ranging from a public ridiculing to ostracism. From the receiver’s point of view, they may stand to be taken advantage of by the deceptive signaler in the form of underserved respect that may be abused by the signaler. Another display situation is when individuals use their social connections to help their friends. If someone gets their friend a job at their company they are displaying their social connections both to their friend and employer. Not only does this have the benefit of helping a friend, but it increases their standing with their employer, especially if the friend turns out to be a good employee. This action requires some amount of social capital, since the recommender is effectively extending their reputation to encompass their friend, and this reputation could be severely harmed if the friend does not work out as an employee. Describe or sketch part of a social network known to you (e.g. your friends, family, acquaintances in classes, etc. - feel free to use pseudonyms or describe a network from your past, such as high school, for privacy). Networking sites use unnuanced and symmetrical links - in your description, what more nuanced description of these links would you include? For instance, there are different types of relationships - parent-child, friend-friend - and different strengths, and different flows of support and information. What of these more nuanced descriptions could be used in a publicly articulated space, and which could not? One very interesting network for me is the overlap of my work and friend social networks in Boston. Since so much of my time is spent in the lab, there is a necessity for this kind of overlap. In addition, since my wife is also a student in the lab, there is little opportunity for us to meet new people through each other. From Granovetter’s strength of weak ties point of view this may be a weakness as far as information gathering goes, but research has shown that for tasks that require a large amount of coordination tightly coupled networks are best, and since I am involved in many group projects it may be seen as efficient. The amount of time that I spend with people seems like a very important feature of social ties that is not exploited by many networking sites. This is also fairly unbiased: spending 5 hours a week with someone is a fact, not an opinion. This feature also adds valuable information about a person’s social context, since on average you will be affected by someone who you spend 10 hours a day with rather that someone with whom you spend 10 hours a month. This is potentially sensitive information, and it would be difficult to infer from activity on a networking site alone. Thus it is probably better to keep this kind of information out of a publicly articulated space. Power dynamics are also an important feature of social links. Since it is often difficult to illicit favors from more powerful others, this would be a useful feature in sites such as LinkedIn where there is explicit functionality for introductions. It would be difficult to ask users to explicitly input this information, since it may be a matter of contention. A proxy could be who sends a friend request to whom, however. Feld proposes that people have particular interests, common friends and pursuits, etc. that function as "foci" - and that connections are made when people with common foci are brought together. Some foci are highly constraining (such as being in the same family or research group) while others are lightly constraining (sharing a neighborhood or a popular taste) . Re-examine the social network you described. Can you apply this model to explain some of the groupings? Feld’s model is definitely applicable to my situation since I am in such a constrained situation. The students in the Media Lab tend to have similar interests in creativity and human-computer interaction, and the fact that we are all collocated means that we will naturally encounter similar people over the course of normal activities. Identity in the real world is faceted: different aspects of our personality are expressed in different circumstances and around different people. For some of us, these differences are relatively minor, and bringing together people from different areas of our lives is not a problem. For others of us, these different facets are incompatible, and bringing them together is undesireable. How is this addressed in the design of today's SNSs? How might future designs address this? Many networking sites don’t explicitly address the multi-faceted aspects of our lives at all. Originally, communities inhabited specific sites (such as Burning Man participants on Friendster) but once these sites became more popular users were unable to prevent other facets of their life from spilling into this space. Other sites, such as LinkedIn, are meant explicitly for one kind of relationship. For future sites, it may make more sense to force users to specify groups of friends that each have certain restrictions on what information they can see. While this would require more effort on the user’s part, it would alleviate many of the problems of current sites. Donath and boyd look at ways that social information is encoded in social networking sites. Use those readings AND your own observations in one or more sites to answer these questions: What are the qualities people signal through their profiles and displays of connections? What makes these signals reliable, to the extent that they are? Do they function as a means of providing reputation information? What motivates people to participate in these sites? How would you redesign them - what purpose are you designing for? What would you change? What are the costs and benefits of making it more costly to add links in a social networking site? People display information about the kind of person they are through their social connections. These can be anything from musical tastes or knowledge of cultural fashions to university affiliation. These signals are kept reliable through the connection mechanism: one assumes that the friends of an individual will keep his/her profile honest since the friend rewarded them with a connection. Naturally this also supplies reputation information: if I look at your friends and discover that they appear very different from the presentation of you in your profile, then I may believe that you are falsely signaling your interests and downgrade your reputation. Not surprisingly, network effects exert huge forces on these networking sites: if all of my friends are on the site, then I want to be on it too. It is also an easy way to stay updated on friends that are difficult to reach because of geographic distance or time. A quick glance at a friend’s profile gets you up to date on their activities fairly quickly. People also use these sites to signal the qualities discussed above, although this may be a secondary reason for participation. I believe that designing sites that allow individuals to manage groups of relationships is crucial. While from a design perspective Facebook (in my opinion) trumps all of the other networking sites, it lacks the clarity of sites like LinkedIn that are very good at a single form of social relation. Sites should be designed so that it is easy to place friends into different contexts and each context should have a different feel. Casual acquaintances might see a reduced view of the profile page (say with comments from friends and most personal information removed) while work related acquaintances would see more professional information and comments from other colleagues. Family might see all personal information and some pictures but no comments. Finally, friends from other contexts would see the current Facebook-like view. Users should also be able to define their own groups and views, but layout control should be limited since sites like MySpace show that this often destroys the identity and design philosophy of a site. Facebook’s move to open their API was also huge, since it allows people to signal so many more things than a single developer could possibly design, and any new site should definitely incorporate this feature. Linking could be done in a similar fashion to Facebook, except it would be up to the user (not a reciprocal evaluation as it is currently) to decide what context to place their friend in. This may cause some conflicts (someone who thinks they are a friend is instead placed in the business group), but this will probably be a small issue. Increasing the linking costs would limit the usefulness of a networking site since you would only send requests to those that you know very well, and similarly undervaluing linking would be poor because it would put too much of a burden on the user to organize the links as well as reduce the signaling value of the profile.