I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience

The first paper that danah boyd and I wrote together based on our research at MSR last summer has been published!

Social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation. This article investigates how content producers navigate ‘imagined audiences’ on Twitter. We talked with participants who have different types of followings to understand their techniques, including targeting different audiences, concealing subjects, and maintaining authenticity. Some techniques of audience management resemble the practices of ‘micro-celebrity’ and personal branding, both strategic self-commodification. Our model of the networked audience assumes a many-to-many communication through which individuals conceptualize an imagined audience evoked through their tweets.

If you have access to a university journal subscription, you can access it here. If not, you can download it here [PDF].

I am very proud of this paper and would love to hear feedback on it.

The Kindle

A short piece I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the Kindle.

When you pay for a Kindle book, you’re purchasing a license to read content on a single Kindle for as long as Amazon or the publisher allows. Some authors make their books available through free licenses on Creative Commons, but they are a small minority. Sure, you can find books to download in the public domain, but thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, those are restricted to books published by authors who died more than 70 years ago. Anything more recent, you pay for. You can’t transfer a purchase, copy it, print it out, or do anything else without violating at least the Kindle terms of service and at worst the copyright act. Naturally, there is a thriving trade in pirated e-books, as well as in software that converts files so that they can be read on the Kindle. That is all highly illegal.

Right after this was published, I left my Kindle in the seat pocket of an airplane and it was promptly stolen. Thanks, Delta.

I’ve gotten some push-back from my assertions that you can’t annotate documents on the Kindle. You can. Here’s how. I personally would not do this, because it’s not the way I read or annotate articles. I do them with pen and highlighter. But I do recognize that this works for other people, which is great for them. I still maintain that the Kindle is not designed to be a note-taking device, but an e-reader, and I think there are significant issues with how it handles the ownership of books.

Still, the editors deleted much of my positive commentary on the Kindle, which I absolutely loved. I miss mine and look forward to buying a new one once I have a real job.

Work-in-progress on fashion blogging

I have been doing a lot of press lately after I was quoted in the NYT about haul videos (my first post-dissertation project is going to be about fashion bloggers, and it’s hard not to start working on it as a procrastination device.. but I’m really trying not to!). This week, in her review of Sidney Lo’s Taking Pictures of People Who Take Pictures of Themselves” Beth Hughes quotes me:

“The No. 1 use of digital photography is self-portraits,” says Alice Marwick, a doctoral candidate in media, culture and communication at NYU. The portraits posted online reveal “the unarticulated frustration of people who feel their needs are not met by mainstream fashion magazines.” The portraits, with the ensuing comments - nasty and nice - create “a community of fun and creativity in fashion.”

While the majority of the online fashion interaction is among women, often from underserved populations such as those who are plus-size or minorities, Marwick pointed out that the men participating in Superfuture also “are a good example of an underserved population.”

The “#1 use of digital photography” stat, which is overstated, came from two great pieces: Nancy Van House on Flickr, and José van Dijck on digital photography [PDF].

In terms of my unborn work on fashion blogging, I’m interested in several different things: the aesthetics of digital photography and the relationship to traditional fashion photography; conspicuous consumption and what it looks like in the digital age; and how women of color, women of size, feminists, members of religious communities, eco-activists, men, etc. take up fashion blogging as a way to create new discursive formations around fashion, or to serve a need that goes unfulfilled in mainstream fashion magazines. I am starting this research by reading a lot of fashion blogs. My favorite is Threadbared, a blog by two academic women who write about the culture, aesthetics, and discourse of fashion brilliantly. I also like fashion for writers, fashion for nerds, the glamorous grad student and academichic (notice a theme?).

In other news, the dissertation is going well. I’m working on my chapter on self-branding, for which I have been reading a lot on neoliberalism (my favorite book: Aihwa Ong’s Neoliberalism as Exception), the relationship between work and identity, and of course, critical studies of self-branding. There’s a disconnect between what I want to say and what I’m currently saying, which is to say that I have a pretty good descriptive chapter but the argument isn’t really coming together. It’s hard to resist the temptation to put every smart thought I’ve ever had in the dissertation, but it’s bloated enough already.

Onwards!

References:

Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as exception. Duke University Press.

Van Dijck, J. 2008. Digital photography: communication, identity, memory. Visual Communication 7, no. 1: 57.

Van House, N. A. 2007. Flickr and public image-sharing: distant closeness and photo exhibition. In CHI’07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2722.

Berkman Center Literature Review: Youth, Reputation and Privacy

I am delighted to announce that a review of the literature on youth, privacy, and reputation that I co-authored with Diego Murgia-Diaz and John Palfrey has just been published on SSRN. This is part of the Youth and Media Policy Project, funded by MacArthur Foundation, for which I am a research assistant. This was a somewhat massive undertaking, but we’re all very pleased with the result.

Youth, Privacy and Reputation (Literature Review)

Abstract:

The scope of this literature review is to map out what is currently understood about the intersections of youth, reputation, and privacy online, focusing on youth attitudes and practices. We summarize both key empirical studies from quantitative and qualitative perspectives and the legal issues involved in regulating privacy and reputation. This project includes studies of children, teenagers, and younger college students. For the purposes of this document, we use “teenagers” or “adolescents” to refer to young people ages 13-19; children are considered to be 0-12 years old. However, due to a lack of large-scale empirical research on this topic, and the prevalence of empirical studies on college students, we selectively included studies that discussed age or included age as a variable. Due to language issues, the majority of this literature covers the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Canada.

Here’s the introduction:

Many adults worry about children and teenagers’ online privacy, predominantly due to a perception that youth put themselves at risk for harassment and solicitation by revealing personal information, usually to marketers or on social networking sites (Aidman 2000; Giffen 2008; Read 2006). First, commercial websites and advertising networks are said to manipulate children into providing personal data which is bought, sold, and used for monetary gain (Cai & Gantz 2000; Montgomery & Pasnik 1996; Moscardelli & Liston-Heyes 2004; Youn 2009). Second, recent privacy worries are centered around secrecy, access, and the risks that “public living” on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube poses from educational institutions, future employers, pedophiles, and child pornographers (Palfrey et al. 2008; Lenhart & Madden 2007; Youn 2009). These concerns can translate to blaming youth for their carelessness, with the frequently-cited maxim that “youth don’t care about privacy” (Kornblum 2007; Nussbaum 2007; Moscardelli & Liston-Heyes 2004). At the same time that youth are castigated for their openness, children and teenagers are under increasing surveillance at home and school, facilitated by Internet filters, mobile phones, and other monitoring technologies (Berson & Berson, 2006; Hope, 2005).

Often, young people are viewed on one side of a generational divide (Herring 2008). “Millennials” or “digital natives” are portrayed as more comfortable with digital technologies and as having significantly different behaviors than their “digital immigrant” parents (Palfrey & Gasser 2008; Solove 2008; N. Howe & Strauss 2000). There is a risk of this discourse exoticizing the experience of young people from an adult perspective, given the fact that adults perform most of the research on young people, create the technologies that young people use, and produce media commentary on children and teenagers (Herring 2008). Much of the popular media’s commentary on young people lumps children and teenagers together using a “generational” rhetoric that flattens the diverse experiences of young people in different contexts, countries, class positions and traditions.

For many of today’s young people, peer socialization, flirting, gossiping, relationship-building, and “hanging out” takes place online (boyd 2008; Ito et al. 2008; Herring 2008). Young people primarily use online technologies to talk with people they already know. Sharing information through social network sites or instant messenger reinforces bonds of trust within peer groups.

The idea of two distinct spheres, of the “public” and the “private,” is in many ways an outdated concept to today’s young people. Much of the studies of privacy online focus on risk, rather than understanding the necessity of private spaces for young people where they can socialize away from the watching eyes of parents or teachers. These seeming contradictions demonstrate how understandings of risk, public space, private information, and the role of the Internet in day-today life differ between children, teenagers, parents, teachers, journalists, and scholars.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Citation:
Marwick, Alice E, Murgia-Diaz, Diego and Palfrey, John G., Youth, Privacy and Reputation (Literature Review) (March 29, 2010). Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2010-5. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1588163

Note that like all literature reviews, it is impossible to be entirely comprehensive. I apologize if your fine work in this field was left out (but please do comment and leave citation suggestions!).

Job Announcement: Microsoft Research New England postdoc

It has been a LONG time since I posted anything in this blog– I used to be so conscientious! But I have some very exciting news. In September 2010, I will be joining Microsoft Research New England as a postdoc, working with danah boyd for the next two years. I will be finishing my dissertation this summer and moving to Boston in late August.

Danah has been an enormously significant mentor and friend during my academic career. I interned with her last summer, and we wrote two terrific papers, both of which have been accepted for publication, one in New Media and Society and one in Convergence (more about that in a future post). She is serving on my committee as an outside reader, and we have appeared on many panels together. I have learned an enormous amount from danah, not only about technology, but about professionalization, ethnography, method, and ethics. She is a superlative scholar and I am super lucky to be working with her.

I have worked with Microsoft many times before, starting as an intern on Windows CE 1.0 in 1997! Microsoft Research could not be a better place to work - the researchers are fantastic, the resources are unbelievable and I will have a great deal of freedom to design my own wacky research projects (last summer, as an intern, I studied celebrity and micro-celebrity on Twitter). Danah and I plan to do a lot of fieldwork and continue to write together, and I will be pursuing my own research agenda as well (I am so caught up in finishing the diss that I am not entirely sure what that will be).

In summary: yay! I need to thank my committee, Marita Sturken, Helen Nissenbaum, and Biella Coleman, for being tremendously helpful, and my partner, Harry Heymann, for helping me figure everything out (and serving as a beta reader for my dissertation). And of course all my other colleagues, mentors, and friends. I am confident that MSR will be a great place for me to begin my post-PhD career and I look forward to what the future will bring.

“There’s No Hiding on Facebook”

I was asked to write an editorial for the Guardian’s Comment website about Facebook and privacy. Here’s an excerpt:

Facebook has been repeatedly criticised on privacy grounds. While the company claims it doesn’t sell user information, details are made available to third-party application developers, who account for much of the site’s profits. And researchers have found that personal data can be “leaked” to advertisers and data aggregators, who already collect browsing and behavioural information about people as they move about the web. Just last week, Facebook announced a multi-million dollar deal with Nielsen, known for their meticulous tracking of television ratings and internet metrics.

Even without these partnerships, Facebook makes privacy advocates uneasy. University of Wisconsin professor Michael Zimmer accurately identified an “anonymised” Facebook dataset from the description that it was a private college in the northeast (spoiler alert: it was Harvard). Similarly, the “Project Gaydar” research team at MIT found that gay men’s sexual orientation could be identified based solely on their friends. It’s not just information you make explicitly available – age, partner’s name or favourite film – that identifies you on Facebook. Close analysis of a network of friends can reveal deeply personal details, even with a private profile. These studies suggest that it’s impossible to retain complete control over personal information within a detailed, publicly available network.

I’m happy with how it came out and I look forward to hearing everyone’s comments. The Guardian website right now has a majority in favor of “if you post your personal info on Facebook you deserve whatever you get,” so if your understanding of online privacy is slightly more sophisticated, feel free to leave me feedback.

American Prospect article on the death of Geocities

Phoebe Connolly quotes me in an excellent American Prospect article about the death of Geocities:

Other online platforms began to spring up, and soon GeoCities became a fond memory for most users. Blogger was introduced in 1999 (and purchased by Google in 2003), making it easy for anyone to start a blog. MetaFilter, a community blog, was launched in 1999. The social networking site My-Space was founded in 2003. These services also marked the entrance of a very public form of socializing–where, unlike email or listservs, the conversation, and content, was accessible to those not part of the conversation. In offering a platform for creating online identities, GeoCities started a trend that has been replicated by companies ever since.

But once those online identities are created, are they the property of the users or the corporations that host them? David Bollier, author of Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, calls corporate-controlled spaces like GeoCities and Facebook, “faux commons.” For him, true online community spaces are defined by users having control over the terms of their interaction and owning the software or infrastructure. Corporate spaces come with “terms of service” agreements that lay out the rules users must abide by and what control they agree to surrender in exchange for using the product. “Oftentimes corporate-controlled communities are benign, functional, and perfectly OK,” Bollier says. “It’s just that the terms of services those companies have or the competitive pressures of business may compel them to take steps that are not in the interest of the community.”

I really enjoy internet history and although Geocities was something we all made fun of at its peak, it was a useful free hosting solution, and it certainly has a place that should be remembered. It’s sad to think of all those Backstreet Boys fan pages and web diaries disappearing for good.

Transcription: Do not use MT-Stat

So I’m spending a lot of time reading over my transcripts from interviews and meetings. I used two companies. I would absolutely recommend CastingWords for any non-confidential transcripts; they use Mechanical Turk and do a generally excellent job for very little cost.

I would not, at all, recommend MT-Stat transcripts. Their work is very shoddy. I’ll have to redo most of the transcripts myself. It clearly hasn’t been edited, checked, or in any way proofed by anyone, because the transcripts are incoherent. Here’s an example:

Interviewer: I’m constantly finding new areas of stuff that I didn’t know with the children. I’m like, “That’s what I should be working with Mr. Jason.” In fact, massive reaming, he has uh.. he took out bull or cow—

Interviewee: Yeah.

Interviewer: One of them is like, they’re the picker of like, you know, he’s kind of sad rabbit wearing his shoe, you know, grinding some sad rabbit and it’s like.. how do we know… how to postpone the fear of not getting a job and finishing graduate school and duh, duh, duh, duh, and play, what kind of dissertation is that, read another book. [LAUGHS]. It’s totally true like you can.. you can spend.. I can spend five years doing reading just some sort of that as long.”

Useful, right? Clear and precise, well-edited, right? No. In contrast, here’s the ACTUAL transcript, which I did myself, and which didn’t take very long:

Interviewer: Oh God, I mean, I’m constantly finding new areas of stuff that I didn’t know existed, I’m like, “That needs to be worked into the dissertation.” In fact, Matt Groening, he has a– this book called School is Hell –

Interviewee: Yeah.

Interviewer: –and one, it goes through every single, I mean, have you read it? like, anyway, there’s one…it goes through every single year at school, there’s one page for graduate school and every single thing on that page and I’ve had this…I got this book when I was like thirteen, and I got…I constantly think about because they’re all 100% true. One of them is like, there’s a picture of like, you know, his kind of sad rabbit wearing a suit, you know, the Groening sad rabbit and it’s like, how to, how to postpone the fear of not getting a job and finishing graduate school and da da da da da, and by working on your dissertation is that, read another book. [LAUGHS] It’s totally true like you can…you can spend…I could spend five years doing reading just on social status alone.”

I’m not saying this is particularly scintillating material. It’s chit chat. But the transcript provided by MT-Stat is just awful. And I paid them more than $400 for a series of transcriptions (I will also mention that they quoted me a specific number, and then a month later tried to charge me more than $300 more than that, and then claimed that they had never given me the original quote, which I obviously had in my email). Please do not work with this company Mt-Stat (aka MT Stat or MT-S.T.A.T). They’re terrible, especially when a company like CastingWords will do far superior work for the same price.

(I do have some issues with the use of Mechanical Turk, but I suspect that Mt-Stat also uses them and isn’t upfront about it. Either that or they’re using non-English speakers. They are definitely not using professional transcribers. CastingWords has an extensive editing process which contributes to the superior quality of the manuscripts.)

Status and Attention

I just read a good short paper on Crowdsourcing, Attention, and Productivity [pdf] by Bernardo Huberman, Daniel Romero (who’s an intern here at MS Research with us this summer) and Fang Wu at HP Labs. They used a big dataset from YouTube to measure content contribution and attention.

Thesis: People contribute more to content sites like YouTube when they receive positive attention, and a lack of attention causes people to uploading less content and, in some cases, to stop contributing altogether.

Those contributing to the digital commons perceive it as a private good, in which payment for their efforts is in the form of the attention that their content gathers in the form of media downloads or news clicked on

This isn’t an entirely surprising study. There’s lots of evidence that status is a major motivator for online participation– not just academic studies, but in general game and social software design (see my Tumblarity and FourSquare posts for recent examples). That’s why every arcade game has a leaderboard and why Yelp has an elite classification and why I’m writing a dissertation on the topic.

But Huberman et al. use “status” and “attention” synonymously, which interests me. They operationalize “attention” as “number of views.” On YouTube this makes sense, since the highest-viewed videos bubble up to the index pages, and videos that crack the top 100 in their category get “honors” that appear on the statistics part of each individual video’s page. So on YouTube, attention maps fairly neatly to status. And I think this is true for most sites that have quantifiable status metrics based on views, followers or whatever the site labels it.

On other sites, of course, status might be linked to skill (high scores, artistry, writing reviews of new restaurants), looks (clothing choices, aesthetics, makeup skills), wealth, whatever. But if I’ve created an amazing Polyvore collage, it’s only a status symbol if other people see it (and I’ll be more likely to create more if people view my existing collages). Similarly, although time doesn’t map directly to attention, having a low Slashdot number or an “oldschool” Upcoming badge is meaningless if nobody knows about it. I need to have recognition for my wealth, skill, or looks in order for them to function as status within a group.

I’d argue that attention is an important part of the status metric; but I don’t think more attention always translates to more status (the term “famewhore” comes to mind). But perhaps the attention is what encourages people like Julia Allison or Nick Starr to continue living public lives, even as they receive a great deal of negative attention at the same time. I would be interested to see if attention of any kind correlates with participation, or whether it is only positive attention; if the YouTubers had thousands of hits, but an equal number of vitriolic comments, would they continue to post videos?

Finally: We hear a lot about the “attention economy” or “publicity culture,” in which the most valued skills are those which increase attention. And many people decry this culture for bubbling-up sensational, sexual, or violent content– or just short bursts of info-nuggets– rather than meaningful, thoughtful, difficult ideas. I’d argue that what attracts attention is culturally specific and so we can’t automatically assume that an attention economy leads to lowest-common-denominator content. (Another assumption I’d like to see tested.)

It’s a beautiful day today and all I want to be doing is riding my bike around outside.

Technological Woes, Continued

… And now my Twitter account got suspended, probably because I have a link to tiara.org on my Twitter page. It’s under review, but Twitter doesn’t have the greatest appeals process for suspected spammers. I must have really pissed off some patron saint of technology out there.

We’ll see how long it takes for my iPhone to stop working or my laptops to explode.