Networked: The New Social Operating System
Notes from: Raine, Lee and Barry Wellman. 2012. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
PART II: HOW NETWORKED INDIVIDUALISM WORKS
CHAPTER 9 – NETWORKED INFORMATION
Introduction
Information has a social life and it wants to be free and networked.
- In 1945, Vannevar Bush had an idea for linking and physically associating information. He referred to this idea as the “memex”: a memory index for information
- Several decades later, Ted Nelson’s notion of “hypertext” inspired Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web.
- Information is now composed in digital form, and in the process is “unleashed” to take on a new and never-before-seen social life in the network operating system.
The News Then and Now
- The digital format of information allows for its mediums to assume entirely different forms.
- In the printing press age of reading the news, stories could be comprised of only so many elements, such as headlines, photos, and sidebar stories. In digital format, news stories can take on entirely different lives of their own with hyperlinks, comments sections, and audio and video material.
- With this, there is a new type of “linked” experience which allows for browsing and a “horizontal” reading of the news, where one might compare multiple accounts of a single story, as opposed to the linear and “vertical” formats associated with traditional print news stories.
- The experience is altogether much more interactive.
- Like never before, networked individuals can now communicate with online news editors and writers of news stories through digital lines of communication such as email and twitter.
- Compared to the print environment of the then era, data in the digital environment of the now era are denser, broader, and deeper. And this applies not only to the news.
- See: "State of the News Media 2015" by Amy Mitchell from the Pew Journalism and Media Research Center.
The Changing Information of Media Ecology
- The Internet, Mobile, and Social Network Revolutions have created a pioneering information and media ecology.
- Seven key technological changes have given rise to how this new ecology is being networked through social processes tied to networked individualism:
- The dramatic growth of information has led to exponential increases in bits and bytes. IDC predicts that by 2020, the “Digital Universe” will grow to 35 trillion gigabytes.
- The differentiation of information permits users of mobile devices and cloud computing to access, use, and consume media and data with much greater freedom and choice.
- The greater variety of information has afforded networked individuals using internet, social networking, and mobile technologies more opportunities to “bump” into more diverse information.
- The acceleration of information flows have changed how media and data are searched for, downloaded, and disseminated. Information funnels into and out of our lives more rapidly now than at any time since most people lived in small villages. Could this phenomenon be connected to a fear of missing out (FOMO)?
- The ability to find relevant information with greater ease has radically transformed our quest for intelligence. Convenient and connected media and search engines such as Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook make digging for data a walk in the park.
- Pew Internet (2011) found that 92% of online Americans were search engine users.
- The emergence of new signposts of credible and trustworthy sources has changed the source material environment. In contrast to citing print or electronic publications such as The New York Times, the rise of networked information has fostered the use of ranking, rating, commenting, and tagging systems to cite sources of news and information.
- Offering product and service reviews and using “like” and “recommend” features offered on a variety of websites have given rise to a new regularity of establishing credibility and trustworthiness of information.
- The intermixing of information and communication allows the social experience underlying the consumption of networked information deeply connects it to communication. Internet users are able to dialogue with one another through written text.
- The Greek philosopher Socrates viewed recorded information (e.g., text written on a page) as dehumanizing and the death knell of dialogue and knowledge. Was this a revelation?
- Or is the new social operating system and internet communication opening up new forms of dialogue and knowledge acquisition?
- The internet has added a layer of complexity to information dissemination. The two-step process, characterized by receiving information from mass media and discussing it among friends and family, has been replaced with a multistep process, where information is now checked and amplified on the internet.
- Institutional information and interpersonal information are now cyclically woven together.
TMI: Too Much Information
Is there just too much information to keep track of and digest in the contemporary world?
- Historian Ann Blair found that this idea, in the form of a complaint about TMI, can be traced as far back as 1550, when scholars complained about a “confusing and harmful abundance of books.”
- Social networking sites such as Facebook, microblogging sites such as Twitter, news alerts, and tagging are used to manage the abundance of information we are exposed to from day to day.
- These strategies only help gathering and disseminating information, not assessing it.
- Assessment skills are developed by networked individuals, as they exploit by institutional and interpersonal information to help them in their everyday decision-making.
The “Veillance” of Personal Information
As the “Digital Universe” expands, much of the content being diffused at unchecked speeds is personal information.
- Sensitive details about our personal lives, such as marital and relationship statuses, contact information, and work and home addresses now suffuse the public domain of searchable intelligence. According to Pew Internet (2013), of internet users:
- 66% know a image of them is available online—up from 42% in 2009
- 50% know their birth date is available online—up from 33% in 2009
- 50% are worried about the amount of personal information about them that is online—up from 33% in 2009
Surveillance
Giving a social life to information brings benefits, but it also affects privacy. Governments, firms, and other organizations can now more easily monitor the behaviors and actions of the citizenry.
Coveillance: We Watch Each Other
- 2009 Pew Internet survey (“Reputation Management and Social Media”) found that a large proportion of internet users use search engines and social networking sites for “coveillance”—observing one another.
- 46% searched for someone from their past
- 26% searched for coworkers, colleagues, or business competitors
- 19% searched for someone they had just met or were about to meet for the first time
- “Facebook stalking” and “creeping” have been coined to describe these forms of searching activities, and they have become very popular among teens and young adults.
- In 2010, 23% of American online daters engaged in data triangulation—checking public records and cross-referencing and comparing profiles on multiple websites.
- One consequence of “coveillance” is that it makes us as coveillants aware of very weak ties. That may alter the way in which we mobilize our networks.
Sousveillance: Watching the More Powerful
In opposition to the style of panopticon surveillance of governments, firms, and other organizations, where they observe people from on high, “sousveillance” is observation from below, where citizens monitor the behavior of larger governmental and organizational entities.
- Wikileaks.org is an example of one of the most controversial and publicized sousveillance enterprises.
- In October 2010, Wikileaks.org leaked approximately 400,000 private and classified documents that became known as the Iraq War Logs.
- Networked information is bound to privacy concerns, as the various modalities of “veillance” show.
- Exploiting the wealth of online information may come in different forms and be implemented for different reasons, from governments ensuring the “stability” and “security” of the state, to large corporations collecting data on consumer behaviors to make a profit.
Dealing with Zero Privacy
Is dealing with zero privacy the new social norm of networked individualism?
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg remarked, “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”
- In 2011, Facebook moved forward with their controversial plan to sell user information to third party application developers.
- A 2013 Pew Internet survey reveals that 86% of internet users take measures to remove or mask their digital footprints to secure their privacy and identities. These users reported that they clear cookies, encrypt their email, avoid using their names online, and use virtual networks to mask their internet protocol (IP) addresses.
- 55% have taken steps to avoid observation by specific people and organizations
- 68% believe current laws are not good enough in protecting people’s privacy online
- The data suggest that the majority of internet users take deliberate steps to protect themselves and their identities amidst this new “social norm” of information sharing and gathering, suggesting that it may not be as much of a social norm as it is a consequence of adapting to surveillance and coveillance.
Lifestyles of the Rich in Networked Information
- The relationship between networked individuals and networked information represents a key part of their lifestyle in the new social operating system.
- From Vannevar Bush’s “memex” solution for a “library problem” to the Triple Revolution, the processes of creating and distributing information have become interconnected network activities, bearing all the satisfactions of sharing and all the dangers of disclosure.
Chapter 10: Thriving as a Networked Individual
Back to The Networked Society Lecture Notes
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