Thinking about socio-technical
Posted 7/16/2008 11:44:00 AM |

In a few days I'll be heading off to the Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems in Ann Arbor, MI. This is the inaugural institute, and from the looks of things it is going to be great. In preparing for the event, we've been asked to think about what socio-technical means to us. I've actually found this to be a challenging experience; not because I haven't thought about socio-technical, but rather because it is simply built-in to my research paradigm.

When I arrived in the program at UNC's School of Information and Library Science, I already knew that I would study a socio-technical interaction. Social software's trajectory clearly pointed towards increased mediation, and the past few years have validated that bet. My long-term research goals now involve studying the social/informational aspects of this mediation; how are our informational processes changing as we offload elements of social management to the network?

The concept of a socio-technical system was developed decades ago, and largely used in industry where technology mediated work processes, management and organizational capacities. In fact, mediating technologies played a crucial role in the birth of the modern organization (see Standage, Ch. 6). As technology got smaller, as it proliferated, as we started hacking and repurposing it, as some technologies were successes and others failures, we sought to understand the construction of socio-technical systems.

I've often just accepted that uses of technology are socially constructed. Growing up on the web, and now studying it, how could one feel any other way? Taking a historical view (see Adas), one can see that it took a leap to understand that the uses of advanced machines could be subjective and socially constructed (Turkle, 1984 and 1996). Applying such thought to a different domain - say biotechnology or genetic sciences - is instructive. Perhaps in 20 or 50 years genetic manipulation will be common, but at this time it is hard to imagine normative relations to such science as anything other than objective.

Back to the social web. Rob Kling (1992, others), the father of social informatics, argued that socio-technical systems have trajectories, paths through which the uses and applications of technologies are contested and negotiated. This approach fits the spaces I study well; the networked publics (boyd, 2007) frequented by youth are hotly contested grounds, with parents, legislators and users attempting to shape use and practice.

Rather than focusing on explicit actors (legislation, interfaces), I attempt to explore the contestation of trajectory in terms of process. I've found both cultural and spatial studies particularly useful in my work. These "networks" are better understood as spaces of discourse, with unique processes of representation and production. This only becomes more evident as we move away from explicit, first-gen social networks, to spaces where identity is imagined.

Critical to socio-technical studies are the roles values play in the evolution of technologies. This is particularly important for social networks, and any other mediated space of discourse. What values are being inscribed into an increasingly global, but diffuse, network? We can also ask these question of Web 2.0: When Google sends its street-view cars through bad neighborhoods on Sunday mornings, what kind of representations are being created?

I look forward to exploring these issues in greater depth in Ann Arbor. As it looks like we're going to have very busy days, blogging will probably be light, but I'll attempt to update as the week progresses. In the meanwhile, if anyone has any don't-miss recommendations for Ann Arbor, leave them in the comments!

Works Cited:
Adas, M. (1989). Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Boyd, D. (2007). Why Youth (heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. In Buckingham, D. (Ed.), The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (pp. 119-142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kling, R. (1992). . In Cotterman, W. and Senn, J. (Eds.), Behind the Terminal: The Critical Role of Computing Infrastructure In Effective Information Systems' Development and Use (pp. 153--201). John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Standage, T. (1998). The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's Online Pioneers. New York: Berkley Trade.

Turkle, S. (1984). The second self: computers and the human spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Turkle, S. (1995). Life on The Screen. New York: Simon and Schuster.


Permalink | | to this post
View blog reactions | Post to


Information Budgets and Shared Cognition
Posted 7/10/2008 11:47:00 AM |

Compared to some people, I probably appear to be an extreme consumer of information. I follow a few hundred RSS feeds, 60-odd people on Twitter, belong to more listservs than I should, and so on. Compared to others - say uber-bloggers Robert Scoble or Mike Arrington - my information diet hardly registers. I'm always impressed by information omnivores, but I realize that my skills and time availability place me at a different space on the information consumption continuum.

Lately, I've been thinking about information consumption as a budgeting process. This is certainly not new - the earliest theories of information explored uncertainty reduction and budgeting. In the early days of the telegraph, Morse's code, and the machines designed to use the code, were adopted because they transferred information more efficiently than Cooke's machines. How we can fit the most information in the littlest amount of space/time is the essential challenge for many in the field.

Feeds - be they an RSS stream, Twitter or Facebook Newsfeeds, have driven the concept of budgeting home. Unlike an inbox, to which anyone has access, our feeds are managed, pruned, scoped and, most importantly, gatekept. When we subscribe to an RSS feed, or follow someone on Twitter, the information they send is equated into our budgets. If the person posts 100 blog posts or twitters a day, it is likely that we're overloaded with information, that our budget is blown.

In the early days of Twitter, I noticed that my information budgets were consistently being blown. As new users joined the service, unaware of the norms and necessary economy of information, my personal information budget was a mess - I couldn't keep up with the small number of people I tried to follow. However, over time, I've noticed a shift. Call it an acculturation, a calming, or perhaps an evolution - but information budgeting seems to have evolved among Twitterers. Of course, this does not apply to publicity-seekers, but I think that more or Twitter's users are considering their followers information budgets when they cast off a new message.

Of course, short of data collection, I don't have any way to prove my hypothesis, but it has stuck with me long enough that I thought I might investigate the cognitive underpinnings. In a chapter from Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, Krauss and Fussel write about Constructing Shared Communicative Environments. In a nascent communication environment, the communication process is influenced by the development of common grounds; our knowledge of our self, audience and context influence the communication processes. According to the authors, we "do indeed take the informational status of a listener into account" in creating messages.

In a face-to-face conversation, we're always taking our audience into account. We watch for body language - rolling of the eyes, scrunching of the brow. These cues inform what we communicate and how we go about the communication process. How, then, do we read Twitter? Twitter is full of cues - we know who follows us, how many followers we have, we get direct messages. At the same time, Twitter is new. It is more a living discussion forum than it is a person-to-person IM conversation. With this new form, new behaviors must emerge.

Have we evolved our communication processes in Twitter? I think this is inarguable. We Twitter differently than we did six months ago, and new behaviors and fads are constantly emerging. But are we budgeting our communication, reflecting our desires for a more sensible information space? Has Twitter become more sensible to me because I've developed literacies, or have we simply decided that the space works better if we post less and stay on topic more? Again, I'm not sure this is happening, but I do think that our shared cognition - of our identities, the information budgets of self and others - affects our perceptions and behaviors.

The process of communicative evolution in social spaces is fascinating, and instructive for those who study information and communities. One wonders if processes of Gemeinschaft inform information budgeting, or vice versa. Krauss and Fussell note that our communication processes are continually informed by knowledge of audience and the rules of interaction. Notably, both of these are inherently evolutionary, a theory that fits nicely into our always-changing and ill-defined online spaces.


Permalink | | to this post
View blog reactions | Post to


Ongoing Analysis of YouTube-Viacom
Posted 7/07/2008 01:13:00 PM |

News has moved quickly since Wednesday's ruling by Judge Louis Stanton in Viacom et. al. vs YouTube et. al., the landmark ruling ordering the transfer of all YouTube user histories. Foremost, Google has indicated it will not appeal the ruling, choosing instead to fight the battle in the court of public opinion. To that extent, Google lawyers have reached out to Viacom, offering to anonymize the transferred logs. Viacom attorneys seem to be open to the option, but have not agreed to anything binding.

Viacom attorneys have stated that they won't be able to follow the RIAA model and suing individual users. In an article posted today, Saul Hansell of the New York Times disagrees, stating: "Viacom says that it isn’t going to use the information from Google to sue individual YouTube users for copyright infringement, but there is nothing under the law to stop it from doing so." This wealth of information, tied with a ribbon and presented to Viacom, will present intriguing, appealing options. Why not sue YouTube users, demolishing trust in the net's eminent video-distribution brand?

What role does Google play in this mess? While not a viable option for a public company, Google could have settled the lawsuit in lieu of turning over our information. Additionally, Google's practices of storing information for 18 months - far longer than necessary - compounds the snakebite here. If Google regularly expunged or anonymized our records, damage could have been minimized.

As Google rolls over, it is hard not to be angry about the situation. Why does Viacom get a record of every legal video I've watched? What right do they have? Wendy Seltzer writes about the dangerous precedent being set: "I worry that this discovery demand is just the first of a wave, as more litigants recognize the data gold mines that online service providers have been gathering: search terms, blog readership and posting habits, video viewing, and browsing might all “lead to the discovery of admissible evidence” — if the privacy barriers are as low as Judge Stanton indicates, won’t others follow Viacom’s lead? A gold mine for litigants becomes a tar pit for online services’ user."

Furthermore, this class of data - one generated in a seemingly private transaction between one's self and a server - should be recognized and protected as unique. Not only for the particularly private nature of the information, but the scope of the information that comes with these log transfers. It is one thing to subpoena phone records, it is another thing to get a digital recording of every phone call one has made. This transfer is both content and history; that the information Viacom is receiving is federally protected only adds to the terrible irony.


Permalink | | to this post
View blog reactions | Post to


Notes on my Fall Class
Posted 7/03/2008 11:51:00 AM |

This fall I'll be teaching a new course - its title keeps evolving, but we'll be looking at the technologies and processes we use to mediate relationships online. The course will be held Monday evenings, from 6-8:30 in Manning 307. Apparently there was a little confusion over the date/time, so I wanted to set the record straight.

Aside from the title, there are a number of other things evolving about the course. Originally, I had designed the course as a semi-structured seminar, with a significant amount of dense reading. Doing my literature review, I'm officially tired of dense reading. I've also been inspired by a number of other educators, so I'm re-positioning the course as a much more hands-on, experimental tour of tools and technologies. We'll still be examining the same themes, just using some different means to accomplish the ends.

Who has inspired me? Without a question, spending time with David Silver was deeply influential. His course on digital literacies opened my eyes to new ways to teaching and learning. Howard Rehingold's series of videos on attention have helped me rethink classroom interaction. Trebor Scholz's documentation and sharing of his course has opened up new perspectives (I was also always impressed with Trebor's PPT's - those must have taken forever to assemble!). Obviously, the list goes on - but all of this great work has inspired me to try something new, to break out of the traditional model, and to experiment a little.

More notes as the course progresses.


Permalink | | to this post
View blog reactions | Post to


YouTube's Privacy Catastrophe
Posted 7/03/2008 09:38:00 AM |

In a decision catastrophic to digital privacy rights, a federal judge has ordered that Google turn over the video-consumption histories of all YouTube users. The order, which represents the decision of Judge Louis Stanton in the ongoing YouTube et. al. v. Viacom et. al., stipulates that Google must turn over the following:


The only videos that are granted protected under Judge Stanton's decisions are those explicitly private; Google will be compelled to turn over all of the records of every other public video you've watched. The EFF states that the order is in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act, a law enacted following the disclosure of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's video rental records.

That the court failed to understand the privacy implications of such a disclosure is astounding. YouTube's records capture the viewing habits of a wide swath of the web's users. Such data should be considered personal and private, such as search data, log data, and telephone records. Such disclosure, public or private, is a clear violation of privacy rights, and sets a dangerous precedent going forth.

In a moment of hubris for the behemoth Google, Judge Stanton cited Google's own public policy blog, that foolishly argued that IP's are not personally identifiable information. Indeed, IP's, usernames and histories are identifiable, certainly in corpora the size of YouTube's.

I'm certainly not a lawyer, but there are a few procedural questions I'd like answered: What processes or procedures exist for the judge to amend this opinion? Even if the case can't be made against the transfer of data, can he amend his ruling to allow for anonymizing the data? Additionally, what protections follow the data, post transfer? In the worst case, do the logs become public record? Can Viacom et. al. analyze the logs, using them for business or future legal action?

And what can we, the internet, do to convince the judge of his error? I know that I wave my arms about Google and privacy a lot, but this is not the time to gloat. This is a dangerous precedent, and I hope that we can harness the collective to see if we can put it right.

Other smart people writing about the issue:
Update: Via Siva Vaidhyanathan, this quote from Michael Froomkin:
While it may be the case that some of these videos are trying to share copyright protected materials under the radar, it is undoubtedly the case that many of these videos are (1) truly private and of very limited distribution and (2) the author would be identifiable from the associated information ordered to be disclosed. (The order also is opaque as to what sort of precautions if any Viacom would be required to take to prevent leakage of this data.)

There are some procedural obstacles to getting an immediate interlocutory appeal of this decision, but assuming they can be surmounted I think there’s a strong chance of reversal before the 2nd Circuit.
Update 2: The NYT has quotes from Viacom:
“We are investigating techniques, including anonymization, to enhance the security of information that will be produced,” said Michael D. Fricklas, Viacom’s general counsel.

Mr. Fricklas said Viacom would not have direct access to the data, and that its use would be strictly limited by the court order. Viacom would not, for example, chase down users who had illegally posted clips from “The Colbert Report.”

“The information that is produced by Google is going to be limited to outside advisers who can use it solely for the purpose of enforcing our rights against YouTube and Google,” Mr. Fricklas said.


Permalink | | to this post
View blog reactions | Post to


Data Portability
Posted 7/02/2008 08:47:00 AM |

From the Los Angeles Times, a particularly chilling story about social websites and third-party data:
Jane Yang, a 30-year-old marketing coordinator, was curious the other day to see what would turn up if she searched for herself on Reunion.com, a Los Angeles-based social networking site.

Sure enough, there was her name, which didn't bother the Oregon resident all that much. Nor was she particularly troubled that her husband's name was included under her "Friends & Family."

What did startle Yang was seeing the name of her 4-year-old son.
What happened?
Jeff Tinsley, Reunion.com's chief executive, said the company recently purchased records on millions of people from a data broker. But he said the broker, which he declined to identify, was instructed not to include anyone under 18.

"We have no idea how this happened," Tinsley said.
Buried in the terms of service and privacy policies of many sites are such third-party data collection agreements. For example, Facebook's privacy policy states "Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services..." Rapleaf, an upstart third-party data vendor, promises to "find information about people on the social web, on behalf of businesses and consumers."

Information leakages, such as the one discussed in the LAT article, provide insight into the scope of third-party data collection operations. Amassing data from public and private sources, these databases correlate identities based on facets such as names, birthdates and location. Unlike credit or background databases, there appears to be no special regulation of these archives. Perhaps that will change, the more we're confronted with our information.


Permalink | | to this post
View blog reactions | Post to


Google Debuts Personalized Adverts
Posted 6/27/2008 10:01:00 AM |

From Saul Hansell at the NYT:
Google acknowledges that it is now testing ways to use some of the data it has been gathering to better aim search ads at Web surfers, although it won’t say how.
Hansell continues (bold mine):
This is important because it marks the first time Google is using the store of data it collects about people to target its advertising.

Google is upfront that it places a cookie on the browser of all of its users. And it records the number of the cookie, along with what the user searches for and some other information.

A few years ago, Google changed its privacy policy to warn users that it might capture personal information about them for reasons that include “the display of customized content and advertising.” Yet despite this broad disclosure, Google has told me and others it doesn’t use the data about what people search for, or any other information they provide, in selecting ads.
Finally:
Google is quick to point out that some of these systems are not connected to each other. And most of the information it gets is not what is generally considered to be personally identifiable, like a name or e-mail address. But the issues are not so simple. Once a user chooses to provide personal information to Google, say by signing up for Gmail or Google Checkout, that information can be linked to much of the information that had been until that time collected anonymously.
This is the real singularity.


Permalink | | to this post
View blog reactions | Post to


Google's Ad Planner, TechReview on Web 2.0 and Facebook's Business Network
Posted 6/25/2008 10:38:00 AM |

A few links for Wednesday morning:

The New York Times reports on Google's new Ad Planner, a streamlined analytics client for ad buyers. TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld and SearchEngineWatch ask if Google Toolbar data is being used in these new aggregate data. I'm not sure why this is surprising or noteworthy - one would have to assume that Google is utilizing all of its identifiable data sources - Toolbar, Analytics, Adwords, Properties (yes, including this blog). Perhaps it is Google Toolbar's unique scope of data collection that is interesting - unlike session- or cookie-based services that can only track you across properties, Google Toolbar allows for total monitoring. If you need a mental image, session-based tracking is akin to being caught on surveillance tape, whereas use of the Google Toolbar is like wearing the surveillance camera.

Technology Review has posted a new edition exploring Web 2.0. There's a lot of content here to digest, including articles on The Business of Social Networks, Facebook's technical architecture (a true skill of the company), Twitter, medical data and so on. Dive in and enjoy.

Finally, news that Facebook has partnered with Visa to create a network for small business. Obviously targeting Facebook's emergent 35-plus population, you're supposed to use the Visa network to schmooze business contacts and so forth. I'm not sure if this was leaked before embargo, because as I clicked around the Visa network on Facebook I got a bunch of 404's. Even though this is the opposite of exciting, I'm going to keep my eye on this - a big success here could be a huge validation for Facebook. I'm skeptical, though; huge, impersonal idea and networking markets are often races to the bottom, as opposed to the spaces of proper discourse executives imagine.

Post-script: Check out Lilly Nguyen et. al.'s new invention, Twitflicks. Using Flickr images, Twitflicks visually represents public Twitters. Fascinating.


Permalink | | to this post
View blog reactions | Post to


Web 2.0's Breakpoint
Posted 6/24/2008 09:08:00 AM |

This was big news Friday, but I'm still processing the fact Joshua Schacter has left Yahoo, and del.icio.us. I've never met Schacter, but I've been a fan of his work for a long time. Memepool distracted me endlessly when I was working for TMF during the first dot com, and Del.icio.us has profoundly shaped my lens on Web 2.0. I'm also hopelessly addicted to del.icio.us - I use it extensively for academic research, it has shaped my thinking about all things social, and Terrell and I employed its design patterns for ClaimID. As Joshua leaves Yahoo and Del.icio.us, I wanted to acknowledge his work and the legacy he leaves behind.

It also strikes me that Schacter's exit, as well as the exit of Flickr co-founders Butterfield and Fake, create a nice breakpoint for Web 2.0. In 2005, we saw the success of Flickr and Del.icio.us as beacons of hope - not only that the web remained monetizable, but that people still cared, that "web people" hadn't just been chasing false hopes and dreams. Looking back from 2008, the frenzy of Web 2.0 looks more like gentle turbulence. Web 2.0 marked a change, in which our software enabled participation, identity and peer production. Perhaps it is now time to realize those facets are no longer novel, as the web turns and searches for its next transformation.


Permalink | | to this post
View blog reactions | Post to


Looking for Ning
Posted 6/24/2008 08:27:00 AM |

Do any employees of Ning read Unit Structures? I've got an issue that isn't getting solved through the normal channels. Rather than writing up a public complaint, I thought I'd reach out here to see if anyone's listening. My email address is in the sidebar.


Permalink | | to this post
View blog reactions | Post to