On Social Media Adoption & Uses

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, 
and Scholarship

This is a great piece. I really like the remark by Wellman (1988) summing up the rise and proliferation of social networking sites: "The world is composed of networks, not groups" in reference to the way SNS's are networked publics that support sociability. Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellisong put together a great primer on social networking sites; a very succinct historical timeline of their evolution. I've only heard snippets about some of these SNS's as many of them got their 15 minutes of fame over the last number of years so I appreciate a narrative on how they all evolved, how some died, and why.

Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield in their 2007 study explored the relationship between profile elements and the number of Facebook friends, finding that profile fields that reduce transaction costs and are harder to falsify are most likely to be associated with larger number of friendship links. Can anybody explain to me what they mean by a transaction cost in this context?

The authors confirm a point I've noticed and thought about with my daughter on Facebook and why I don't really worry too much about her activity there. They reference this same study that suggests that most SNS's primarily support pre-existing social relations and maintain existing offline relationships (like classmates at school) as opposed to browsing for complete strangers. I think this is very true.

My daughter is so selective about her friends in the physical world, I'm hard pressed to imagine her getting close to someone she'll likely never meet. Connections with any faraway "friends" are all based on a commonality of interest such as Manga graphic novels and certain rock bands. Outside of their common interest, their relationships go no further. 

As the authors state, while most SNS's support the maintenance of pre-existing social networks, others help strangers connect based on shared interests, political views, or activities. My big sister was recently diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma cancer in her throat and will soon start radiation and chemo therapy. She doesn't know anyone who's gone through this before. Because of this class, I thought of looking into blogs for her. What a blog site I found at Blogforacure.com. Here is a community of folks with many different cancer types. A quick search and I found 11 people going through treatment for this very type of cancer, each with their own blog. My sister was happy I found this site. I hope it helps her through what's sure to be a trying, worrisome, often lonely experience to come. We'll see.

Using LinkedIn to Get Work

This was a great article by Rich Maggiani and Ed Marshall. It inspired and motivated me to get my LinkedIn profile in order. Before I read this article earlier in the semester, I had 3 contacts and didn't really care much about my profile. I now have about 30 with 3 recommendations and links to professional organizations (including the SE Wisconsin STC) and am getting regular correspondence from all of them. My network is growing. People are connecting with me that I haven't had contact with in years. I know there's folks out there with contacts in the hundreds, but I'm mighty impressed with the ones I have. I'm even linked with Drs. Pignetti and Watts now! That's big.

I was in a waiting room a few weeks ago and found a great article from the April 12 edition of Fortune magazine that takes the points from our article to another level, making an even more compelling case for the importance of being on LinkedIn. In How LinkedIn Will Fire up Your Career, author Jessi Hempel points out that,"If you're serious about managing your career, the only social site that really matters is LinkedIn." She provides pointers on practically every LinkedIn site feature with great tips on how to maximize their benefit. Being a novice to the site, these are great points. Consider reviewing this.

In a similar vein, Jack Molisani in his essay Is Social Media for You? brings up some great points about developing our online brand (p. 12). He remarks, "I'm a firm believer that if you are a professional in your field, you should have an 'internet footprint' that gives evidence of what you have done." He did a search for a colleague and couldn't find anything about her, pretty much implying her loss of stature in his eyes. Being proactive towards ourselves as brands is key. He remarks, "Just as you should build your professional networks before you need them, you should take time to build your internet footprint before you need it." Once I really liked how my LinkedIn profile looked, I had a real good feeling about how I would look to others coming to it. I feel a sense of confidence now - always a good thing with the job market.


I'm certainly not implying that LinkedIn alone will guarantee me ever getting a better job that I have now. But before I receive an inquiry from a potential employer, I'm pretty sure they'll come looking at my profile before they consider contacting me and I want it to look good and current. How can it hurt? I produced a program at MATC last year called Opening Doors with China, connecting our school with a college in Shanghai for a live cultural exchange. This was the first ever simulcast with another college from a different country in either school's history. A major technical accomplishment and very educational for all the students and faculty. I have the same link above on LinkedIn. How else could I get this out for potential employers to see?

On Technology, Society and Change

Technological Visions and the Rhetoric of the New
The Hopes and Fears That Shape New Technologies

I'm still waiting for this. . .

This was an excellent reading. Many of the issues brought up in this chapter are ones that I've struggled with about technology for quite some time. In Technological Visions, the authors, Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas first discuss the concept of binary thinking, a concept of polarization that implies (I think correctly) that we basically choose one of two ways of looking at technology: it's either going to save the world for future generations or ultimately destroy the world as we know it. There doesn't seem to be much grey area in between and certainly no consensus about it. My struggle is that as I witness tech advances, my longing for the past with less of it increases. Why is that?

Related to this, what seems to be funny about technology is that its benefits are never as good as prognosticators predict and never as bad as doomsday prophets would have us believe. I think technology will always fall somewhere in between, but we just can't seem to accept this. I think the authors are spot on stating, "Technological change continues at a rapid pace but the visions that define it remain caught in a repeating cycle of overly simplistic binary frameworks" (p. 2). I don't think we have a choice in this or by now, we would've changed our way of thinking. It's just how we're wired and besides, anything more complicated is too hard to comprehend.

Just like electricity was embraced as a transformative force that promised freedom, democracy, and enlightenment, I think it's just human nature that we seem to be stuck in this endless cycle of hope and disappointment with technology since it cannot possibly fulfill such expectations. Do you think this kitchen of the future is coming to us anytime soon? I love the authors remark (p. 3) that society's capacity to project concerns and desires on technology operates as a primary form of social denial; the belief that a new technology can solve existing social problems reveals a refusal to fully confront the deeper causes of those problems and the complexity of human interaction. What a gem.

We humans continue to hope that the "next big thing" will save us from ourselves, only to be disappointed again and again. But we seem to need this. We need these visions and the metaphors because they give us hope. I think this is where the concept of an afterlife comes in. Somewhere, someday, we'll be transcended to a place where we won't be constantly let down, our expectations crushed.

But, darn it, utopia always seems to be just out of reach. It's no wonder that technology is so closely tied with metaphors of transportation and mobility. They imply this transcendence, that we can be somehow lifted out of our worlds and be taken to a new spiritual height, to get to where we need to be - wherever that is - and get whatever it is that we think we need. In my favorite dreams (yep, even better than those kinds of dreams) I can fly like a bird. Oh, what a feeling. If technology could help me have those more often, it'd be all I need with tech.

I was unfamiliar with the concept of ahistorical visions until this reading. Ahistoric visions (those that transcend actual history) of technologies are directly related to the fact that in popular imagination, technology is often synonymous with the future (p. 6). This creates serious problems in predicting the future - and why we seem to get it wrong so often. An example that comes to mind was the paperless office, the office of the future, its first prediction made in Business Week in 1975. In the future, we wouldn't need a single sheet of paper, not even a Post-it. All handled electronically. Let me jot a note to look into that.

Walt Disney became a very wealthy man feeding us a future where everything was going to be perfect. 

A perfect tomorrow coming

I remember as a kid just loving Disneyland's Tomorrowland. Its theme: A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, Just a Dream Away. Particularly enchanting was General Electric's Carousel of Progress with the family being transported in four sequences through time (even the dog!) It was such a buzz I could rotate around that theater all day long, imagination ablaze in anticipation of a world surely to come, and soon. What happened to that future? The Carousel has since been moved to Yesterland.

I love John Perry Barlow's remark (p. 12) on The Future of Prediction. He says, "It is the rhetoric of predicting the future that brings it into being, that we create the future we believe we deserve." Barlow seems to imply that the future can be invented by setting into motion a vision of what it should and will be. What an optimist. If we just embrace this certain rhetoric of new technology, we can use it to to shape the future. I hope he's right, or wait, do I?

Convergence Culture:

Worshiping at the "Altar of Convergence"

Here might be that technological afterlife notion from above put into practice.

The New Orleans Media Experience in 2003 (p. 6) was a festival showcasing game releases, and a venue for commercial and music video concerts, theater performances, and panel discussions. As author Henry Jenkins wonders in Convergence Culture, was "worshiping at the altar of convergence" to a New Testament God threatening destruction unless attendees followed His rules? Here's that dystopian concept again. He, like the attendees had come to New Orleans hoping to glimpse tomorrow before it was too late. Stuck between the 1990's dot.com bust of moving too quickly and the dangers of moving too slowly (the recording industry's file-sharing dilemma, for example) all were there to get it just right this time with investments, predictions, and business models. Although the show pressed everyone into the future, roadblocks to convergence were apparent - it's harder than it sounds and people have to work together. Has it happened since the author's remarks of 2006?

On the hardware side, the iPhone and iPad seem to be getting it closer. While the old vision of convergence was that one central device does everything, I think the downside to this it that the device's original functional intention seems to get lost. As Jenkins states, it's impossible to find a phone for just phone calls anymore while saleskids smirk like my daughter does when I tell her I'm considering a Jitterbug phone because I can't see the keys on today's cell phones without my reading glasses. Try as we might to have a fully integrated system, if and when one part breaks down and needs repair, we're left with nothing, like an HP All-in-One printer on the fritz.

Hello. . . again.

I think the author gets it right when he remarks (p. 24), "Don't expect the uncertainties surrounding convergence to be resolved anytime soon." With our converged TV, internet, cell phone, and land line, a power outage from a storm this past summer put us out of commission - brought on by and now at the mercy of Mother Nature. I dropped my Uverse remote last week. A few buttons were pushed while it bounced off the corner of the coffee table. TV gone and wouldn't come back. Call AT&T. Perfect convergence ultimately is reserved for the afterlife, where all media is compatible and in the unlikely event of a problem, a technician picks up the line without going through a cumbersome phone tree to get him.

On the content side, true to Jenkin's word, media producers will need to renegotiate their relationships with their consumers. In the meantime, knowledge about important social issues still gets delivered to us in convergent ways. Time magazine's cover story last week was on Alzheimer's disease. This special report is a collaboration with Maria Shriver, whose study, The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Takes on Alzheimer's, produced with the Alzheimer's Association, investigates the disease's epidemic. (Her father, politician and activist Sargent Shriver, was diagnosed with the disease in 2003.) Shriver first discussed the report's findings on ABC's This Week on Oct. 16th. The full report will be available as an e-book from Simon & Schulster and details are posted on the als.org website. Although not delivered through a singular device, heightening Alzheimer's awareness through a magazine story, a TV show, an e-book, and the web, I think this is convergence culture at work. Not every pressing social issue receives this breadth of coverage from so many media outlets simultaneously, but this example does show we can move in this direction. 

On Technological Literacy

Becoming Literate in the Information Age 
Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology

Those were the days

This is a fascinating study by Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Being 8 years older than Melissa, I'm in between her and her father. I'm a lot like one of the study participants, Dean Woodbeck (48 at the time of the study), dealing with mainframes, Fortran programming language, and punch cards. In my early 20's, I was discouraged with computers not just because of their complexity, but with the method of learning. I wrote routines to punch cards, handed them in and had to come back the next day to see if my program worked. Then debug and repeat. It was the same with writing Basic programming. To me, it may as well have been Chinese.

I believe that part of what we're experiencing in this prolonged recession has a lot to do with technological literacy - or the lack of it. Many of the jobs that have been lost are gone forever. Many of them were positions requiring little technological literacy and this unemployed workforce hasn't the skill-set for this new world - a world that today bears little resemblance to 1978.

Retraining for re-entry

Our culture is indeed undergoing a profound transition from that of a superpower with manufacturing might towards a post-modern world of global commerce and "rhizomatically organized digital information exchanges." The value placed on younger workers possessing these skills (and receiving jobs utilizing them) will be seen more and more in coming years. It doesn't bode well for older workers either unprepared or unwilling to "change their stripes" and go back to school for retraining and re-entry into a profoundly different workplace that values completely different skills. There are many back to school at MATC but this is only a fraction of those that should be. IT professionals seem to always have their pick of jobs, recession or not. Technological literacy has a lot to do with this.

I'm a little surprised that the researchers are still finding gender to play a part in technological literacy and am willing to bet that since this 2004 study, it's a lot less today. Use of computers, the internet and social networking tend to, in my opinion and with first-hand experience as a father, level the playing field between males and females. As with Brittany (p. 668), remarking that being a girl seldom hampers her pursuit of digital literacy, I'm convinced my daughter feels the same. She has more than 300 Facebook friends and it's fairly balanced between gender.

This reminds me of a recent article by Hanna Rosin I read in the July/August edition of The Atlantic titled, The End of Men. By almost every professional measure, women are outperforming men and are being placed into positions traditionally held my men, including those at the highest organizational levels. If there are gender-based barriers to technological literacy, they are few and getting fewer. 

The internet has really become a gateway to the literacies of technology as the authors allude to (p. 670). If computers in the home weren't connected to a network and were simply stand-alone workstations for homework, games, and say, home finance like Quickbooks, we wouldn't have the opportunity for email and collaboration and community that comes from social networking. Although Melissa and Brittany learned a lot on their own, principally via their own individual initiative, it's through networking that technological literacy flourishes and indeed has exploded. Kids emulate other kids and nobody wants to be out of the loop. In this case, social networking is much like conventional social groups at school where being "in" is being someone.

Multimodal learning...  we're getting there.

In drawing a comparison to last week's readings, we continue with these readings to cover inadequacies of schools to address and promote teaching paradigms that offer students alternatively a "visually rich and multimodal" (p. 671) way of learning and being taught. Like Charles, most of the analytical thinking often prized in schools is done out of school. But schools would have to have truly individualized instruction to address / encourage every student's individual interests and aptitudes. I don't know how this can be done. Yes, the print-based and alphabetic literacies taught have much to do with how the teachers were taught, but I'm not going to get into it again in lots of detail that students still must know the traditional basics of these literacies. Maybe in 25 years, this will change, but not right now, despite what kids might be doing in their spare time.

Indeed, these are fascinating first-hand personal accounts which tell us much about how technological literacy can be shaped, but as the authors contend (p. 676), they cannot be considered indicative or representative of any larger population. The inequities of access to technology by race has parallels to the same inequities with other things. Mortgages, living in particular neighborhoods, and job advancement come to mind. Computers, as ubiquitous as they are today, in some segments of society, still denote privilege and power. And computer literacy certainly gives those in the know power. As with Brittany, I see a difference with my students. Many come from lower class families with a lack of access to computers. Having been on a computer since age 4, my teenage daughter is further ahead in many ways.

There's a Brave New World coming. Anybody can see it. But it's coming more gradually and more in fits and starts than scholars sometimes might have patience for. As a college writing instructor, it's a challenge to think of teaching in visually rich, multimodal ways when many students are entering college with woefully inadequate grammatical skills and ability to structure thoughts to a sheet of paper. This lands right at my door and I have to get these kids ready to enter a workforce where employers still and will for quite some time, value traditional literacy along with technological.