Shaping Network Society

As we are realizing that network society is contingent on technology, but not on specific technologies (such as email, friendster, myspace, facebook, twitter), we are learning to work and play across and beyond specific social media. For me, the integration of my blog with twitter and facebook has led to a conversation that takes place in hyperspace online and offline in lectures, at conferences, and on trails in the Alps. So as an exercise in such intertextual hyper-reflexivity, let me mirror my last 20 tweets (often links to my blog) on my blog and then twitter about it:

1. @zephoria is calling for epistemological open-mindedness when analyzing social networks: http://tinyurl.com/nel2k5 #networksociety2 minutes ago from TwitterFox

2. @chr1sa Will professional journalists become extinct? The Spiegel interviews Chris Anderson with naive indignity: http://tinyurl.com/macgqfabout 21 hours ago from TwitterFox

3. @arenda @rmmdc @tocat @kohenari thank u for ur tweets on socialtheory/socialmedia: http://bit.ly/muSyo need more constitutive theorizing!10:21 AM Jul 25th from web

4. Do social media need political philosophy and social theory? http://tinyurl.com/kmvyk7 #opengov #gov20 #radicaltransparency #socialmedia11:15 PM Jul 24th from TwitterFox

5. @ U Beck’s #Future-of-Modernity Symposium: fine-grained analysis of contemporary society, completely ignoring the social media elephant.9:47 AM Jul 24th from TwitterFox

6. discussing the IDC-Framework (ideation, deliberation, collaboration): http://tinyurl.com/q74b7d #gov20 #social media #ogi #opengov #web2011:19 AM Jul 23rd from TwitterFox

7. Radical Transparency as Management Strategy? http://bit.ly/9Z6e5 #gov20 #opengov #enterprise20 #web20 #transparency #radical transparency4:04 PM Jul 21st from TwitterFox

8. I will address the ESPP Graduates tonight (www.espp.de). What should I tell these future public policy entrepreneurs from over 20 countries?11:57 AM Jul 17th from TwitterFox

9. CDC has a chilling year-by-year visualization of obesity trends from 1985 to 2008: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/…11:11 AM Jul 17th from TwitterFox

10. A necessary reality check on the Government 2.0 Hype by A. Schellong: http://www.iq.harvard.edu/b… #gov20 #opengov via @schellong11:25 AM Jul 14th from TwitterFox

11. Carl Malamud and the struggle for open sourcing the code of law: http://tinyurl.com/leqvxd #opengov #malamud #vivek kundra11:11 AM Jul 14th from TwitterFox

12. When the world is changing, we need to re-learn how to read-write engaging manifestos: http://tinyurl.com/lhavfj #generation m #manifesto8:49 PM Jul 13th from TwitterFox

13. How to structure governmental online deliberation processes: http://tinyurl.com/mthmov #deliberation #collaboration #gov20 #opengov11:17 AM Jul 13th from TwitterFox

14. Learning by Historical Analogy: Lessons from Information Revolution 1.0: http://tinyurl.com/ns63rq #infosociety #web20 #gov2010:48 PM Jul 12th from TwitterFox

15. Reflecting the Rise of the Ideation Platform (with Justus Lenz) http://tinyurl.com/lc8hl2 #opengov #gov203:14 PM Jul 11th from TwitterFox

16. Sofia Elizondo (BCG) on the End of Classical Strategy: http://tinyurl.com/mrwzq4 #enterprise20 #strategy #BCG9:24 PM Jul 7th from TwitterFox

17. Aristotle Reloaded: Beth Noveck challenging representative and deliberative democracy: http://tinyurl.com/neym7u #opengov #gov201:18 PM Jul 7th from TwitterFox

18. Do RSS our family-stream at: http://picasaweb.google.com… and write a guest blog for http://www.shapingnetworkso…8:44 PM Jul 6th from web

19. Will teach gov20 strategy to 70 austrian mayors in 1 hour. Anything specific I should say? #socialmedia #gov203:29 PM Jun 26th from TwitterBerry

20. Is engineering finally permeating governance? http://tinyurl.com/lx79an #gov20 #engineering #governance #techcrunch #auren hoffman12:12 PM Jun 24th from TwitterFox

Is there an added value in such an exercise? Or is this just part of the new recycling game we are playing?

Probably we overstretch the metaphor of literacy when we want to talk about what it means to participate in networked societies. However, as the amount of media that we can use explodes (think twitter, facebook, dropbox, wordpress, or typo3), we see the world through the eyes of a toddler. Questions to think about: What are the limits of specific media in doing specific things? What are the limits of our imagination how we can act collaboratively? How much time should we allocate to learn new modes of interaction? What do we do with the people “that just do not get it?” What does this mean for society? Do we need a 19th Century type of literacy/schooling campaign? Howard Rheingold argues,

I see that the use of Twitter to build personal learning networks, communities of practice, tuned information radars involves more than one literacy. The business about tuning and feeding, trust and reciprocity, and social capital is a form of network literacy that we discuss in my classes. Knowing that Twitter is a flow, not a queue like your email inbox, to be sampled judiciously is only one part of the attention literacy I started to blog about  knowing that it takes ten to twenty minutes to regain full focus when returning to a task that requires concentrated attention, learning to recognize what to pluck from the flow right now because it is valuable enough to pay attention to now, what to open in a new tab for later today, what to bookmark and get out of my way, and what to pass over with no more than a glance, are all other aspects of attention literacy that effective use of Twitter requires. My students who learn about the presentation of self and construction of identity in the psychology and sociology literature see the theories they are reading come to life on the Twitter stage every day – an essential foundation for participatory media literacy.

Last month Aryn Karpinski, a doctoral student at Ohio State argued in an unpublished draft article  that College students who use Facebook spend less time studying and have lower grade point averages than students who have not signed up for the social networking website, based on a pilot study at one university. This bit of news hit the main stream fast and you could find articles based on the article in any outlet from CNN, BBC, the Chronicle of Higher Education, to Der Spiegel.

In less than one month Josh Pasek, eian more, and Eszter Hargittai responded in First Monday, a peer reviewd online publication with an article titled Facebook and academic performance: Reconciling a media sensation with data (First Monday, Volume 14, Number 5 – 4 May 2009), where they

attempt to replicate the results reported in the press release using three data sets: one with a large sample of undergraduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, another with a nationally representative cross sectional sample of American 14– to 22–year–olds, as well as a longitudinal panel of American youth aged 14–23. In none of the samples do we find a robust negative relationship between Facebook use and grades. Indeed, if anything, Facebook use is more common among individuals with higher grades. We also examined how changes in academic performance in the nationally representative sample related to Facebook use and found that Facebook users were no different from non–users.

On her blog Eszter recounts, how academic production changes in a hyper-mediatized environments:

On Sunday, April 16th I went to bed realizing that a story would likely spread like crazy the next day as it claimed a negative relationship between Facebook use and academic achievement. I looked up what I could about it and was concerned as it didn’t seem like the study offered solid evidence of the claims, but it was precisely the time of piece the media love.

By the time I woke up on Monday, April 17th, people among my Facebook contacts had started posting the story.

At 7:55am ET I tweeted the following:
Based on my UIC data set (representative sample of 1K+): no correlation b/w any Facebook use or # of hrs of SNS use & students’ grades, fyi.

Siva Vaidhyanathan responded soon after (at 8:18am to be precise) with this tweet:
@eszter will you blog prelim results of sns/grade correlation?

I would have preferred not to, mainly because it was the first day in a long time that I had a full day for my own work. But throughout the day, an increasing number of media outlets (first in the UK then in the US and elsewhere) picked up the story. Following all that media coverage were people’s tweets plus blog and Facebook posts about the study.

I decided I should blog about it after all and posted an entry here a few hours later. There is only so much you can say in 140 characters allowed on Twitter, after all, and I decided this was worth more elaboration.

Soon after, my blog post was automatically reposted on my Facebook Wall. My contacts started commenting on it including Josh Pasek who noted that his data also did not suggest the purported relationship between Facebook use and grades (see Facebook snippet above).

Twenty minutes after posting on my Facebook Wall, Josh sent me an email asking whether I was interested in “working on a report” about all this. I said I’d be up for working on something more formal.

Josh brought on eian more from the University of Pennsylvania, we had a conference call a few hours later and Josh started writing the first draft of the paper. Dozens of emails and about ten drafts later, we sent the paper off for consideration and peer-review to First Monday. A few days later it was accepted and a few days after that, it was published.

in May 2009 many of “us” are getting social media and do believe that “web 2.0″ has the potential to be a game changer. However, the critique of the new way of organizing collective action is to be taken seriously. Some of the points policy makers from Austria, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, and the United States have voiced to me in the last weeks are:

- in my country/company, labor laws do not allow government officials to work at 10 pm at night and if the write an email from home, we have a serious problem.

- in my country/company, journalists do not get social media, so we had to buy them 100 copies of Clay Shirky’s Here comes everybody (2008) so that they would understand our politicians point.

- in my country/company, maneuvering the tension between privacy and transparency is so complicated, we would not be able to profit of increased transparency.

- in my country/company the politicians do not get what they could gain from increased transparency, collaboration, and participation.

What are the main objections you have heard in the last months? What are your counter-arguments? What will happen?