The question should not be ‘who’ is anonymous? but ‘what’ is anonymous?
Gabriella Coleman says- there is a set of iconography, ie characteristics. (http://gabriellacoleman.org/?page_id=10) People imitate that and become anonymous. Also interesting is that ‘anoonymous’ works in a self-police environment, it could be compared to wikipedia concept. They dont seek individual fames. Gabriells says self-policing is very common to hackers. Among hackers, they also have ethics for hacking.
Eve said in the presentation – “anonymous is creative commons of collective action” – which is very much aggreable. Anybody can be anonymous. And there is some condition apply. There is some good and bad side.
And thanks Eve for the picture, ppl can now see who anonymous are:
No more time for today, I am going to get anonymous now….need to get some work done….
Need to stretch out now….just putting down the summary of our favorite 10 Codas for today:
Repeated interactions lead to relatedness and homophily. This is why homophily is referred as a process as well as outcome. Sometimes the social norms can also change as a result. And, “Homophily is not necessarily a good thing” – it can lead to restrictions in information flow often.
Sociograms are really important to have a bird’s eye view of any social network. It can be important in early trend detections.
Triads are the true start of social systems, just like the molecules of networks, 16 possible combinations in a triad.
Motivations relate directly to Density, structural holes, bridges, Brokers, profit. Understanding of an individual’s networks beforehand can lead to making an offer that he can’t refuse.
Positions are related to the Degree, nominations, and “Betweenness”.
Because of the hierarchical nature of most Organizations, ‘short circuits’ are needed for better information flow.
Diffusion can relate to Friendship, love, money, idea, opinions, disease or so many things. It follows s-shape structure which can be very useful for monitoring trends.
Social capital can have both Positive and negative consequences, in either Individual level & community level.
And the book is done….yahoo!. Getting back to some other fun stuff for now. My presentation will be up in our wiki within minutes.
“Economic, political and societal structures…are simultaneously embedded in social networks and culture….[and] sometimes have culture and social feedback upon one another” (Kadushin, 2012, p183)
Adria Richards tweeted the picture of two men she heard making jokes behind her which later on resulted into one of the guys as well as her being fired from their jobs. Adria still is not back to the social work after this incident…that day created many issues in her life and risks….. And the other dimension of this story, nobody came to support in her side after the incident…
When people with likeminded beliefs congregate together, they collectively move to a more extreme position. (http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/richards-affair-and-misogyny-in-tech/) This is what the society wants now. Whether it be social life, online life or anything else, humans have to stick together for better future of mankind and for the better future of the Internet.
It’s not a game…It’s an overt display of angry misogyny on a massive scale…it’s not just gonna go away…. (Anita Sarkeesian, ref: http://youtu.be/GZAxwsg9J9Q) We have to act together, we are the parts of the network, we have to work towards cultural shift….slowly, painfully…if we work together, we can create a great digital world without any problems….just as Anita says.
When Chris (our guest for today’s class) told this, i started viewing privacy and surveillance in a different way than i was doing before. I don’t remember in what sense i heard that “internet doesnt exist” today. But now, i believe, the value that internet provides to us, is nothing compared to the benefits it provides to companies who use our social data. In that sense, Internet probably doesn’t exist, the benefits that social-data provides to companies and marketers has covered all the other aspects of internet. Data packets originating on our network device in our computer is protected at least till the ISPs receive our packets. But then…who knows.
So what?
only ‘technical’ option we have is to secure everything that passes through the network card in our computers….encrypt everything….use digital signatures in all the messages you send out…This will make sure that if the recipient receives any message from you, it is indeed what you had written to send to him. But, that’s like the feeling of playing football with a xbox and Kinect instead of playing in a football ground…there is just so much things to do…so much controlled environment to work in.
only “legal” option we have is to first talk to whoever (Facebook, Google) network is in question, if the claim seems valid, it may reach Ottawa somewhere….then goes somewhere outside…keeps going….finally reaches google/fb/whoever and they start the investigation…its a long chain…
Once upon a time, Om’s friend Tom was going for an election. The day before that, Tom was confused about whom he was going to vote. He called Om who told him that the candidate named Sean was heavily inclined to the software industries and he was willing to motivate the software developers in that community. Om and Tom worked in a popular software company in that place. The call ends. After that Tom checks his TV and finds something about Sean. He then checks internet if he can get some more info on the candidates. Finally, he decides to vote Sean.
So, what’s the morale of the story here? Why did Tom actually vote Sean finally?
1. Because Om told him some good things about Sean, Tom had some pre-disposition about Sean that he was a kind of guy that he should vote.
2. When he searched online, he found good things about Sean.
3. TV said that the other competitor to Sean was not technically inclined and he might not be of use to Tom.
4. Tom tosses his $1 coin and he gets a ‘Head’ – Sean gets a vote.
5. ….
6. ….
…
There can be so many reasons why Tom actually voted Sean. In this short story- Om, the internet, TV, …. all acted a role of influencer. Now how to we figure out why the vote was cast that way by Tom? Kadushin says “The early problems of the rural sociology and the personal influence schools remains”. Om might have impacted Tom’s decision because of homophily. This probably produced a favorable reaction to all the other media when Tom was researching about Sean (the election candidate). But there is also a lot of chance that it was not the case. “A correlation between friends and opinion may reflect differential association but not the direct influence of friends.” (Kadushin, p. 140) To declare that Om made an impact on Tom’s voting decision seems like a ‘randomized solution’ to the question as Kadushin mentions. For lab problems, we might be able to give a better causal answer for such questions, but not when social elements are involved in a real world situation. And the morale of the story is “Assessing the role of influence and homophily [still] remains a key intellectual problem in studies of diffusion.” (p. 140)
‘This essay raises more questions than it answers.”, so say Pool and Kochen in the start of their research abstract. And now does Om in his blog….. This topic is such…”The small world!” It deserves it.
Just few minutes back i noticed that i hit 700 for my friend list in Facebook. So does this mean that Om has got all the power now….? he owns sufficient social capital? I see so many ups and downs to answer these questions and I am happy that Kadushin (writer of the book ‘Understanding Social Networks’) has the exact same feeling.
If somebody knows 100 people, and those 100 people know other 100 people individually….condition apply – the list of friends don’t overlap each other, then in a 2 level friendship, that person has 10000 people, 3 level – 1000000 people and he almost hits the globe when it goes to the 6th level. This is the mathematical interpretation of ‘The Small world’ but the reality is, of course, a lot more complicated.
One thing which falsifies this calculation is the overlapping of our relations. Without overlapped relations, we would know no new/unfound friends in our social networks. We know them because somebody else knows them as well. An other important issue probably is the motivation factor (or intention) towards adding some new person in an individual’s network. He might be one of the person who likes having a huge network so he can benefit from his list of people. Or he might be looking for a job and he is adding someone who is in a higher position to help him. Or anything such. On analyzing such complicated networks, there is a high chance of wrong result to come up. Concepts like homophily and triad give wrong information in these cases. That’s why Kadushin says there’s a lot of technical and theoretical works remain. The macro-sociological theory should be explored (which is barely done as Kadushin mentions), connections among different systems of connection should be further studies, implications of new technologies like Facebook, twitter should be explored and so and so …
Richard Stallman says This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
So, we are talking about open source software here. The official definition of Open Source Software is “The software in which you can look at the source code.”
For free software or a free beer, you pay nothing as they are free…but it doesn’t necessarily mean that free software also is an Open Source Software. Sometimes you can’t view the code how the software was written or how the beer was made (just kidding with this). They are only free, no open source.
“People say that my Android phone has Android and it is open source, is that right?” Open source is only worried about the licensing of the software code, not the executable that comes out of it. Google Android OSs are open source. But the program that is installed in our phones is not modifiable. The source code that built the OS was open source but the executable program is only modifiable by the special company which built it. gnu.org mentions those android OSs as TYRANTS.So, this means, the android code that was written by someone is ‘Open Source’ but the program i have in my android is not, its a tyrant.
Main thing I am concerned about opensource – sometimes they can be bad if you dont know the nitty-gitty of it. Of course they are powerful. You can literally change the way the software application works – you can change the codes and recompile it. But, if bugs still remain there, this can lead you to a huge problem. There is a big open source software community which keeps finding issues and keeps fixing them. But, there is still some “fear of freedom” (gnu.org)
Most people involved with free software, Stallman says, especially its distributors, say little about freedom—usually because they seek to be “more acceptable to business.” Nearly all GNU/Linux operating system distributions add proprietary packages to the basic free system, and they invite users to consider this an advantage rather than a flaw. I believe, this is how software gets vulnerable. There is no more the worldwide open source community acting on that peoprietary software. This breaks the freedom from it. And so, powerful and reliable software might become bad.
May the world be free, and may the software world be free….
This has been a super confusing and time consuming topic for me. I welcome any comments if I am interpreting it in any wrong way.
I was first stuck with the ‘Nash Equilibrium’ which now I find really interesting and relevant to our topics in Social Networks. There comes some situation in life where whatever strategy you take for any situation, it will not make any difference in the results if the other person doesn’t change his strategy. This state is defined as ‘Nash Equilibrium’. This video seemed to be of some help to me – http://youtu.be/iIqGvZG0wQw .
Our book takes the concept of cliques where all members are connected to each other and there’s no any external connections. i.e. no interference from any external networks. Because people always have basic traits like motives of safety and rank, its more likely that the individuals in the clique will try to receive positive sentiments from their most desirable one who might be in a outside network. And if that doesn’t work, they will tend to direct the sentiments to the less attractive but best possible ones who are likely to return them some favor. The textbook also mentions of ‘Matthew Effect’ which is more likely to create higher popularity once joining the outside network if the individuals are already favored by the members in their closed systems.
Lets take an example of a person who wants to have more followers in his social network. Basically he wants to be popular in his social networks. So, what can he do for that target he has made now? He has to give away something for the benefits of others so people start trusting him. So he starts retweeting other’s tweets to show he is trying to help others. He comments on other’s blogs and advices on anything he is more knowledgeable. As a result of this move towards asymmetry from a symmetric group (though it might be somewhat painful as Kadushin mentions (p. 84)), other’s start trusting him and following him. And he becomes popular gradually.
Its really been an interesting experience to be using most of the popular tools like twitter and wordpress for these classes recently. These tools definitely provide a good sense of connectedness. Still, I don’t completely agree when people say that ‘world has become a small village’.
The study that was done on hunters (that Andrea discussed about today) reminds me of lots of other social networks that I saw in a village in the eastern side of Nepal where I was born and raised. There was no house in my town that I (as a less than 5 year old) didn’t know including all members in any house in that community. Whenever any incident happened in any of the house in the surrounding, there were people already ready to help out. This kind of connectedness (or togetherness) certainly doesn’t apply for our modern social networks…. For me, the modern digital networks of course provide a sense of connectivity, but they are still only virtual…people are connected only in the online world….only somewhere on the air. This makes me believe that the personal (physical) network is still the most valuable network that can ever exist. But certainly that’s only a one sided view of the modern social networks. These networks have a lot more to offer.
The benefits on using these digital social networks has a lots of benefits which (at least for me) outweigh the demerits it has (psychological factors like privacy, unwanted publicity, safety). That’s why, even though I was 100% not motivated towards creating a Facebook account….but still I had no way out….most of my friends who were not in my physical proximity were available in facebook. Now, in the present, even if I want to run away from the social networks, I cant run away. I will be abandoning all the people that I have networked so far. And I will be losing the social capital that I have gathered so far. This kind of fear creates hesitations when I almost click on ‘deactivate my account’.
So, the spring has started finally. Our MACT cohort is back together again. But, this spring is not just a newer spring than the last one, we are starting by managing our online spaces…..Let’s get online. This blog will move forward along with our course going ahead. I will be updating the blog as it will be possible.
I have my twitter account attached to this blog, check the right hand sidebar, and don’t forget to follow me. So, got to get back to work now. Keep connected!
Connect. Study. Socialize. 