Fascinating but flawed Pew report finding that people are not inclined to share controversial views (at least about Edward Snowden) on social media, and far less so than when talking face-to-face. Moreover, this carries over into face-to-face interactions. The ‘spiral of silence’ in the title is to do with how social media habits become social habits in our physical lives. It’s an evocative phrase that suggests harm is being caused. At least, that is how it is presented and how the press are reporting on it. I’m not convinced. Not at all.

The obvious findings

That people are reluctant to stir controversies on social media is not surprising. Most general-purpose social networking systems (which is the subset of social media that the researchers were looking at) indiscriminately connect us and our posts with everyone in our online social network on a given system. This is quite unlike face-to-face converstations where we are intimately aware of our audience and always addressing a smaller subset of the whole, so of course we are aware that some of our audience may not appreciate or care about those opinions. We therefore tend to express them more circumspectly on social media than we do in places where we can better control who we are talking with. This is especially true now that most of us have learned that things are easily misinterpreted online when expressed as text. Moreover, face-to-face, there is little chance that our comments may be happened upon by people some time in the future who are not yet even in our network. This particular problem equally affects social networking systems like the Landing or Google + that make a big point of the ability of members to selectively choose the circles of individuals with whom they share. Given the diversity of the audience and permanence of the result,  it is natural not only to wish not to offend or spark and argument, but also to not want to appear dumb, and to have that dumbness on (semi) permanent record. Face to face, we can correct ourselves when shown to be fools, and no one thinks the less of us but, online, our original foolishness has the same archival permanence as our correction. It is perfectly reasonable to be wary. Furthermore, the the particular issue that Pew chose to investigate (Snowden’s revelations) is far from neutral to the questions they were asking. Thinking about the Snowden/NSA case would likely encourage subjects to focus on the other shadier and malevolent people that might be looking at their posts without their consent or knowledge, not to mention on concerns about privacy on social media in general. Given the nature of the controversy, the survey questions give a reminder that opinions expressed on the subject online might well be used against us. The fact that the study relied upon self-reporting therefore makes it less reliable than it might have been about a less Internet-related topic.

Where it gets interesting

So far so obvious. However, the study goes further. The findings appear to show that social media users are more sensitive to the opinions and beliefs of others, both online and off, and are reluctant to share beliefs that differ from those of social media contacts offline as well as on. This is interesting. The study goes on to say that:

So, the suggestion is that engagement in social media sensitizes us to others in what might be seen as quite positive ways – social media users care more about what other people think. The downside of this is the fact that we are therefore less likely to challenge things that we see as wrong, less inclined to express dissent, and this may have deep unforeseen consequences for society as a whole. In effect, social media are making us all a little more Canadian! Well, maybe. The researchers laudably note that they cannot demonstrate this causation though, unfortunately and with far less good conscience, they put ‘spiral of silence’ into the title, suggesting that this is what they have actually found and making sensationalist headlines considerably more likely. Bad move.   

There is another interpretation.

I was surprised to discover that “an internet user is 1.63 times more likely to have obtained even a little news on the Snowden-NSA revelations from radio and television than a non-internet user.” So, not only are Internet users more sociable than non-users in real life, they also pay more attention to broadcast sources. This is particularly true of Twitter and Instagram users (3.67 and 4.02 times more likely than a non Internet user, respectively) and less true (though still true) of Pinterest and LinkedIn users.

Though it does discuss possible reasons for inter-media differences, the report does not provide much speculation on the reasons for the internet-user/non-user divide. I speculate (in Devil’s advocate mode) that it might be because it is increasingly hard to find people that are not Internet users, especially in America where this survey was conducted. In this particular case only 456 of 1801 participants were not Internet users, which is surprisingly high at around 25%, but still sufficiently small to make one suspicious. In a good number of cases the reasons for not being Internet-connected are undoubtedly economic, which in itself makes for a demographic that is far from representative. Also, there is probably some significant skewing due to the fact that those who intentionally (whether through fear or deliberate action) divorce themselves from the world of the Internet, even though they could afford it, may have a different attitude to electronic media in general. Either way, this is not comparing like with like. As an overall demographic, non-Internet users are likely becoming increasingly unusual and non-representative of the population as a whole, so perhaps willingness to discuss political hot potatoes is sympomatic of the same thing or things that prevent them from engaging online in the first place. It might well be that what we see on social media has always been the norm and that the skewing in this case is simply revealing that those who do not use the Internet are, on average, different, and they always have been. Maybe they care less what others think or feel. Or maybe their being offline proves that they are more critically atuned. Maybe (and very likely) the topic chosen is one that reinforces and confirms their deep suspicion of the Internet, about which they feel strongly enough both to avoid it and to make their feelings known to others. Whatever, the chances are that there are some common differences.

Equally, the fact that there are also differences between people that use different social media might be due to the kinds of socialization the systems support, rather than differences caused by the media themselves. For instance, most of us choose LinkedIn for professional contacts and information, while we use other sites for different kinds of social activity. People are almost certainly more drawn to social media that support how they tend to want to behave than those that don’t, notwithstanding the strong peer pressure and network effects that make some of them join in anyway. And, just because they join them, doesn’t mean that they use each of them for the same purposes. Those of us that use multiple social media tend to use them differently, with different (often overlapping) networks and different intents. Different levels of political debate are likely not caused by the social media and the networks that inhabit them: we choose those networks because of those differences.

I am not suggesting that any of my speculations are better than the conclusions drawn by the researchers or commentators on the research in the International press (that are, not unexpectedly, very selective about the findings they report on). The point is that this research does not appear to prove my speculations false.  I’m almost sure that the researchers are correct in thinking that different social media reinforce different behaviours, that we are affected by norms and behaviours of others on social media, and that our behaviour in social media has an effect on our behaviour in the physical world. It would be exceedingly odd if it did not. But I’m not at all sure that these results show that. To prove that point I think it would be a minimal requirement to at least do a longitudinal study that shows behavioural changes when people engage in new social media, rather than a snapshot of how they behave now in the context of a topic that is deeply relevant to social media use. It is irresponsible to suggest causation where all that has been found is correlation, with very good grounds for suspecting other causal factors play a significant role and the methodology itself introduces bias. That’s a crucial flaw and it’s a pity, because there is plenty of good information in this report and some thought-provoking findings. It does not need a gutter-press friendly veneer.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/08/PI_Social-networks-and-debate_082614.pdf

So, Robert Scoble has left the blogosphere. I’m not entirely sure in what sense his blog was not an instance of social media but I do know why this bothers me. It’s not just that he no longer owns his own space but that we don’t either. I am certainly not going to use Facebook to follow him – the company has neither his nor my interests in mind. I might catch the odd post via Twitter or Google+, but it will be lost in a sea of other things and won’t grab my attention, and any attempt I might make to organize and control the tide will be susceptible to the whims of the companies that own the sites, who are playing a much too large role in determining what I get to see in my particular filter bubble as it is.

If I’m going to be in a bubble then I want to be the one that makes it. The great thing about blogs is that they are distributed, not centralized, owned by individuals, not organizations. This is not just important to the individuals that they belong to, but to the individuals that read them, subscribe to them, aggregate them, remix them and learn from them. That’s why things like WordPress, Elgg (that runs this site) and Known (by Ben Werdemuller, who co-developed Elgg) matter more than all the glitzy social silos put together.

Address of the bookmark: http://scobleizer.com/?p=8494

Social Computing & Networking is an IEEE conference for those interested in how computers can affect and support social engagement. It is distinctly biased to the computing end of this spectrum and tends to have a lot of stuff concerned with social network theory and similar issues, but it covers some broader and more human-oriented ground too. The paper submission deadline is August 25th and the conference itself is in Sydney Australia, Dec 3-5 this year.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.swinflow.org/confs/socialcom2014/

I am often surprised at the occasional academic depth, reflectiveness and perspicuity of articles in the Art of Manliness website, which does have a slight tendency to (manly) frivolity much of the time and is as likely to discuss shaving as it is the meaning and value of ritual. This is article is definitely on the academic side and it’s a good read although, as this is an area I am a little familiar with, I do see a few flaws, fuzzy thoughts and shortcuts here and there. The authors Brett & Kate McKay, appear to draw rather heavily on John Taylor Gatto who, in his fine book ‘Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling‘, makes a rather curious distinction between networks, communities and institutions (that are, in his terminology, actually networks). While the book has many strengths and some excellent and powerful points to make, its curious and rather puzzling terminology, that perhaps made a little sense in the early 90s before the study of networks became a significant field, is not one of them. I don’t think this is a great starting point.

The distinction made by the McKays and Gatto between communities and networks is superficially the same as that made by Wenger, Trayner and de Laat, and seems similar to the distinction that Terry Anderson and I (and others, such as Barry Wellman and Stephen Downes) have made between groups and networks. However, the differences appear very early on. For the authors of this post, a community is an organic and autonomous entity made up of families bound together by geography and shared values – in short, they are talking about a community of place, in its traditional village/tribal sense, though they confuse the issue later on by blurring this a little with communities of interest and communities of practice when they exhort us to go and make our own tribes. While a community of this sort is easy to identify, and such communities do tend to share a few common features, the similarities between them are skin deep. Such communities can and do exhibit and encompass a wide variety of social forms, including actual networks, as well as groups and sets, along with clusters of those forms. Empirically, there is no idealized form or pattern that all exhibit – it depends on the context. They can be violent, exclusionary, isolating, and many other things that are far from healthy. While there is value in examining communities of place/practice/interest, they are really a starting point for further investigation, not an endpoint, and certainly not a particular kind of thing to be extolled in its own right.  The McKays (following Gatto to some extent) are using the term ‘community’ as a shorthand for a rose-tinted idealized kind of supportive, nurturing, small-scale society that has probably seldom if ever existed. It’s a thinly veiled ‘good old days’ argument that is based on belief rather than research. Dunbar’s Number doesn’t imply warm cuddly coziness of the sort described here.

Conversely, the McKays’ (and Gatto’s) concept of networks appears much closer to what I would recognize as a hierarchically structured group (in some of its guises) or a group-like set such as a religion or tribe.  The concept is used a bit fuzzily and appears to include sets and nets that result from product marketing as well as more formally organized tribal forms that certainly includes schools and universities, and that I’m guessing should also include religions, cities and nations. For the McKay’s, a network is designed for a purpose, has leaders, is deliberately nurtured, and is to some extent dehumanizing, inasmuch as it is not much concerned with caring and is deliberately divisive along functional/interest lines. The concept is elided with networks of the sort companies try to develop around their products, which is carrying things a bit far and a few miles from what I think Gatto had in mind when he used the term. I think this is a bit of an invented straw man. It is easy to define a kind of social collection that we don’t much like and point to many examples, but I don’t think it helps. It is self-confirming. Moreover, this is not the kind of network most of us mean when we think of networks. A network, for most of us researching in the field, does not have boundaries, nor purposes, nor imposed hierarchies, and is different depending on whose perspective you take: everyone has different networks from everyone else, though we may be share membership of the same groups and sets.  Networks operate through and beyond those idealized communities and, to a large extent, are what drive and bind them. We have strong (very strong) as well as weak ties, and these are as human and personal as they get.  I think that the McKays are actually talking about the difference between intimate bands and designed organizations/institutions here, though it is a bit blurry. Following a little from Dunbar, they are talking about ways that people organize communities when the communities become too large for everyone to know everyone else and so begin to develop organizational strata and foci that are designed (or evolve) to let people live together productively and safely.

While I find the conceptual distinctions fuzzy, the general thinking behind the article is likeable: that we should not exchange our physical communities for a technologized substitute for real human interaction. Such communities of real, supportive people are part of what make us human. As the authors admit, there is great value to be had from larger organizational forms, online communities, and relationships  at a distance, and such things can be a great supplement to, cradle for and sustainer of rich human connections, but that does not mean such things should replace our connections with those around us. Happily, most of the research I have read on the subject suggests that they do not and, if anything, they strengthen traditional bonds of friendship and kinship. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/07/01/communities-vs-networks-to-which-do-you-belong/

This story has been carried in numerous news outlets over the past few days, most with more hype than this one. 

The hype is a little premature: Facebook is not dead yet, though it is very interesting that it is no longer the network of choice amongst younger people, not only in the UK, and has not been for most of the past year. Though a billion or more users will take a while to leave, the ugliest company in social media will need to do something amazing really soon if it is to survive. If it does go under then it might happen surprisingly rapidly, thanks to the inverse of Metcalfe’s Law, especially as Facebook is already suffocating under its own flab. It is the biggest we have ever seen but it is certainly not too big to die and, once the exodus gains momentum, could happen in months rather than years. Like MySpace, Hi5 and others that have fallen out of favour, it will likely collapse in a big way but won’t totally vanish, especially given some sensible investments in things like Instagram that do make a lot of sense. Is this a bad thing? While mostly evil in its business practices, it has made some significant contributions to open source projects, but not enough to compensate for the harm it has done to the Internet in general: I won’t be sorry to see it go. It doesn’t need to be replaced. That’s not how things work any more.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.businessinsider.com/teens-in-the-uk-say-facebook-is-dead-2013-12

An article from Business Insider reporting on Benedict Evans’s compelling analysis of Facebook’s big challenge. Essentially, there is too much data, and Facebook’s algorithms cannot cope. In fact, algorithms are part of the problem…

“today, you could post that you’re getting married, but only half of your friends might see that posting because of the News Feeds’ algorithms.”

And algorithms are not the solution…

 “If you have 1,500 emails coming in every day, you wouldn’t say, ‘I need better algorithms.'”

So what next?

“By this time next year we could have 3,000 posts, links, videos, status updates, etc., all flowing through the News Feed. It’s a struggle to sort through 1,500; how will Facebook deal with sorting through 3,000?”

Basically Facebook is broken and, unless its henchpeople and minions can come up with something radically new, it is not going to be fixed and it will just get worse. Sure, Facebook as a central service is not going away any time soon (probably – Metcalfe’s Law works in reverse too, so I’d not want to place any bets on that) but it doesn’t work as a social network any more, precisely because of the avaricious, amoral, single-minded network-building design that made it what it is today. I think it did a very sensible thing in buying, but not fully integrating, Instagram, because it can only grow now by moving into other ecosystems and dissociating the core from the satellites. It probably needs to go on quite a big spending spree now.

Seeing Facebook begin to fail, at least in its core, pleases me because it rose to success by cynical exploitation. It went places other social networking systems that predated it, as well as most that have come since, feared or had no inclination to go. You can’t have too many predators or parasites of one kind in an ecosystem otherwise the whole system falls apart. Or, to look at it another way, Facebook got too fat eating its own users, and now it can’t digest them any more. Either way, we’re much better off without it.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-news-feed-benedict-evans-2013-12#ixzz2nqI8Zbzw

An interesting summary of the GlobalWebIndex for Q2 2013. 

Some takeaways are:

Google+ is catching up with Facebook in numbers, but not in active usage. This makes sense as Google has a very different and less unpleasant agenda than FB that is all about search, not lock-in.  Google+ gets by far the largest number of visits, which is exactly what Google is aiming for.

Pinterest is still the fastest growing social media system. The report calls it a ‘social network’ but I think that is a slight mischaracterization that doesn’t quite capture its distinctiveness – it’s at least as much about interest sets rather than networks between people, with a focus on content and themes far more than on individual’s connected with one another. Tumblr is not far behind.

The trend is towards increasing mobility, of course. As an aside, it is interesting that Microsoft recently redefined smartphones as PCs. Probably an unwise statement from the point of view of their shareholders as it reduces Windows PCs to a very small percentage of the total.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.jeffbullas.com/2013/09/20/12-awesome-social-media-facts-and-statistics-for-2013/