I have an article running on gnovis right now about privacy, Facebook, and its third-party partners. Facebook has a new system called “Facebook Connect” which is attempting to do a number of interesting things on the internet, but with the history of Beacon’s privacy debacle haunting Facebook’s reputation, it will be interesting to see if Facebook can expand into other services on the net.

This leaves me with the following question: What is the price of our privacy? Or, more to the point, when do we decide that our privacy is valuable? No one seems to mind the potential privacy issues surrounding social networking sites until something horrible like Beacon happens. So who is responsible for our privacy? And how can Facebook and its partners make sure that these mistakes don’t happen again?

Read more here >>
gnovis Journal – Facebook and the Price of Privacy

So my inauguration was great… but apparently I wasn’t the only one. This lovely Missed Connection (aka Some Jewish inauguration debauchery in craigslist form) floated my way when it popped up in the Washington D.C. channel.  Love in D.C. is, well, so D.C.

You: Jewish, attractive and drunk

Me: Not Jewish (Gentile), dashing, gazelle on the dance floor and drunk

In case you were as blacked out as I think you were, I feel as though I should reintroduce myself… (more…)

In a broad stroke of interdisciplinarity, I am an organizer of a seminar entitled Intertechnical Bodies at the American Comparative Literature Conference this Spring with my good friends Megan McCabe and Theodora Danylevich. We have just finished sending invitations to some amazing papers and the seminar looks like it is going to be great. So what is an “intertechnical body” you ask?

This seminar considers how the term “local culture” relates to concepts of embodied subjectivity. We argue that the embodied subject is a manifestation, distillation, or representation of local culture, and subsequently ask: To what extent do global communications and global technologies constitute a threat not only to “local cultures” but also to individual (human) bodies?… This seminar invites both a literal and a broad interpretation of the term “technology,” following Heidegger and Foucault with respect to discourse and philosophical heuristics.

My contribution is entitled Authoring the Single-Use Identity: Intertechnical production of the non-persistent subject on craigslist Missed Connections, and takes a look at some of my current work on Foucault and attempts to account for the role of the technology as a collaborator in the production of digital identity. (more…)

What will happen to your Facebook account when you die? What about when you try to kill it? gnovis is running a post of mine on the topic of “user death”. This article considers the implications of death in online environments, and emerged out of conversations at CSCW, and the insightful work of several of my (now) peers.

Here is a taste to wet the pallet:

When online, what counts as a “body” or “identity” emerges out of the coconstruction, negotiation, and even contestation of users and technologies. While users may prove their existence with each Cartesian account (i.e., “I login, therefor I am”), the terms of their existence is often preregulated by the technology. Moreover, these jealous applications may go to extremes to prevent you from leaving. Technology does a great job of enabling our own sense of immortality.

Read more here >>
gnovis Journal – Death of a User: The Overlooked Use-Case

I just got to San Diego for CSCW 2008, and am totally stoked. Not only is there conference (stay tuned!), but a number of professors and students from prospective PhD programs are here, so I am excited to see what their work is like in person. The best part? Well, Morgan Ames, my good friend from high school, is here as well! We were such strange, troubled kids back then (who wasn’t, really), and it has been a delight to reconnect with her recently (thank you Facebook), only to realize how much our academic lives overlap.

I suppose that might be one reason why staying at the Hilton on Mission Bay is trippy. The last time I was here was during high school during an obligatory Concert Choir tour to Southern California. To this day, I can’t figure out what the purpose of taking the school choir on tour was, aside from a random vacation for students, and major headaches for teachers. This, however, is totally off topic.

Some might be wondering what “CSCW” stands for. I have told coworkers and academic colleagues that it stands for “Computer Supported Cooperative Work”, which, of course, does not good, as this is equally confusing. From Wikipedia: “CSCW focuses on the study of tools and techniques of groupware as well as their psychological, social, and organizational effects.”

For now, I am off to go have some fun!

The internet allows billions of people to communicate anonymously each day, “and boy, are they pissed off!”

CNN ran an article today entitled #@*!!! Anonymous anger rampant on Internet, considering everything from cyber bullying to flaming, and all of those less then polite and less than identified treasures around the net.

“In the [pre-Internet era], you had to take ownership [of your remarks]. Now there’s a perception of anonymity,” said Lesley Withers, a professor of communication at Central Michigan University. “People think what they say won’t have repercussions, and they don’t think they have to soften their comments.”

The basic theory is that computers obscure cues that can be used to identify an individual and their behavior. But does that turn us into different people?

Markman is quick to observe that he doesn’t believe there’s more anger out there. But, he said, “there are more ways of expressing it on the Internet.”

“We’ve all had interactions with unpleasant people, but we don’t confront them. We take it out elsewhere,” he said. “What the Internet has created is groups of people where there are no repercussions with being too aggressive.”

I, however, remain skeptical. Interpersonal communication shapes our understandings of ourselves. Narrative psychologists Pasupathi and McAdams have shown this over and over again. The structures (aka “technology”; see Yates and Orlikowski’s Adaptive Structuration Theory) in which those interactions occur, then, must play a role in the types of conversations that occur, and they types of people we become. Now, I am far from a doom sayer when it comes to the internet (quite the opposite, actually), and it may be that these anonymity/anger effects are contextually bound to communication on blogs and chat rooms. Either way, it is interesting to consider how anonymity is used as a tool, regardless of the objective. In the words of laywer-brother when I asked my family why they thought people go to chatrooms, “[there are] limited repercussions for participatory benefits.” Makes you wonder what makes one a “participant.”

CNN’s article is worth a readYou can find it here: #@*!!! Anonymous anger rampant on Internet

As frequent readers know, the New Media team at gnovis kicked off the academic year with a four part series on why we blog. The perspectives were each interesting and provocative, and certainly worth revisiting.

These types of belly-gazing blog posts are common around the web. However, following a link from Steve today, I was surprised to see this conversation in in the Atlantic as well.

Andrew Sullivan (of the Atlantic and on his blog The Daily Dish) has written a compelling piece that situates the act of writing a blog post next to more formal writing. I have been a fan of Andrew Sullivan’s writing since I first read Love Undetectable in high school, and was delighted to see that same prose here. Starting with antiquity and moving forward to Montaigne, he attempts to represent the very ethos of blogging:

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

While in the gnovis peice I argued that a personal obligation to participate in a community was my reason for blogging, I have to admit that it is a dynamic community that may constantly be reshaped by the items to which I can only hope I add “nuance and complexity”.

A study on Facebook and narcissism conducted at the University of Georgia was published in this month’s issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (which coincidentally was the first journal I ever subscribed to).

“We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others,” said lead author Laura Buffardi, a doctoral student in psychology who co-authored the study with associate professor W. Keith Campbell.

It seems that everyone is always joking that Blogging/Twittering/Facebooking is about as narcissistic an act as we can think of, but apparently it can get clinical.

“bleedin obvious,” writes one commenter on Physorg’s site. But whether obvious or not, it still is worth investigating.

“We’ve undergone a social change in the last four or five years and now almost every student manages their relationships through Facebook – something that few older people do,” Campbell said. “It’s a completely new social world that we’re just beginning to understand.”

I just have one question: If narcissism is when an individual “has an excessive need for admiration and affirmation” (thanks Wikipedia), then how does narcissism behave in asynchronous forms communication on the web such as Facebook?

(thanks Katie for the link!)

They say the one thing you are never supposed to do on a blog is go “silent”. Sorry about that. This semester has been so crazy busy that the blog got pushed to the back for just a bit there.

So what has been stealing all of my time? Well, on top of thesis proposals, chapter edits, preparing to launch the MCAT for the 2009 year, and regular course work, I also will be giving two presentation/lectures in the next two weeks on issues of anonymity and identity online, and computer mediated communication (CMC).

Given my obsession with practices of anonymity and self-identification via technology and communication, these two lectures are a perfect opportunity to share a bit of that crazy passion around campus.

In Communication Theories and Frameworks, I will be providing a veritable smorgasbord  of CMC theories including:

• Cues Filtered Out Theory
• Social Identification Mode of Deindividuating Effects (SIDE)
• Social Information Processing Theory, and
• Hyperpersonal Theory

Of course I am giving the lecture, so there will be plenty of conversation about how anonymity and self-presentation might be understood (or not!) in each of these theories.

In Netspeak, the linguistically oriented CMC course I am taking this semester, I will be leading the class in considering all of the ways that anonymity problematizes our understanding of communication. This is not to suggest there is a deficit, in fact quite the opposite. We will be examining various practices of anonymity and self-identification, and evaluate the utility of the resulting identities across different technologies and user practices.

Hold on to your hats, and I will let you know how it turns out.

Well this was flattering. The Buzz Bin, Livingston Communication’s blog, gave a shout-out for one of my posts on gnovis.

Why blog? There are many reasons and many types of blogs. Jed Brubaker of gnovis says, “Blogging is just one way in which to assist the collaboration and dissemination of knowledge.” Brubaker argues that at a time when schools aren’t sending kids home with textbooks, it’s important to provide an outlet where information is widely available and “every voice” can be heard.

This was after Geoff Livingston himself dropped by gnovis and shared his thoughts (check out the comments on gnovis).

Thanks guys, I am sure I speak for all of gnovis when I say that it is great to have you keeping an eye one us.