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!).

“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.)

Foursquare, Locative Media, and Prescriptive Social Software - Part One

This is the first in a three-part series. Part Two discusses Brightkite; Part Three discusses Loopt.

Today I went to a local coffee shop to eat soup and read my 40+ pages of notes (so far) on what is supposed to be a 10 page chapter of my dissertation. I’m a frequent user of the iPhone app created by foursquare, location-based social software that lets you check in to venues (restaurants, bars, clubs) and broadcast your whereabouts to a network of friends.

Foursquare is not the only software out there that does this; similar applications include BrightKite, Google Latitude, Whrrl, and Loopt. What interests me about foursquare is that it’s a terrific example of prescriptive social software: applications that encourage particular social behaviors and provide very clear rewards for behaving in the “right” way.

Let’s start with foursquare. When I “checked in” at The Grind, here’s the feedback I got:

Foursquare gives you points depending on when, where, and with who you check in, and keeps a weekly leaderboard of high scorers in each city. In this instance, I get 5 points for checking in at a new venue (don’t ask where the 22 points comes from; I didn’t check in anywhere last night after midnight [Edit: apparently this is a bug that's since been fixed]), and I’m told that Jay A. is the Mayor of The Grind, which means he’s checked in there more times than anyone else in the last 60 days.

So I go check my place in the Leaderboard:

Social butterfly Charles G. has checked in 18 times since Sunday (it’s Wednesday), with a grand total of 114 points. Naomi M. has checked in more times (20) but gotten fewer points, so she trails Mr. Charles for second place. (Don’t give up, Naomi, you’ve still got four more days!)

After a month of using foursquare, I’ve found that it rewards the following:

• Going to new places : you get a 5 point bonus every time you check in somewhere new.
• Going to multiple places in one day/night: 3 point “travel bonus”
• Going out after staying home for a few days: “First night out in a while” bonus
• Going out many nights in a row

There are also badges, which reward particular things, such as checking in at 10, 25, and 50 new venues; checking in X number of days in a row (”Bender”); checking in at X number of venues in one night (”Crunked”); checking in at the same place three times in one week (”Local”); and checking in with multiple members of the opposite sex (”Playa Please,” which I got at the Austin airport). You get fewer points for checking in somewhere you go frequently.

Given that the application presumes moving one’s way up the leaderboard is a good thing, the model of social life valued/rewarded by foursquare involves going out a lot, in urban areas, to many different venues (bars/clubs/restaurants), many days of the week (”exploring” the city, presumably with a group of suitably soused friends). This is a very urban, American, and youthful model of socialization. If you’re the kind of person who likes to stay home and play board games with your two best friends, or go to the same bar every night, or if you live in the suburbs, or if you’re done with the phase of your life when bars and clubs seemed exciting, you’re not going to find foursquare very useful, and foursquare isn’t going to encourage your type of socializing. Foursquare values going out a lot; it doesn’t place value on catching up with your reading. But then again, if you don’t like to socialize or don’t like going to bars, clubs, and restaurants, foursquare wouldn’t have much utility for you, either.

[Edit: apparently you don't get points for checking in during the day on weekdays, which obviously, prioritizes socializing at night.]

So does this prescriptive social behavior actually change people’s social behavior? While I have zero empirical evidence to believe this is true, I have plenty of anecdotal evidence, like any good blogger. A quick search on Twitter for foursquare found the following in the first page of results:

@rogersmithhotel I’ll be there, going for the local badge on @foursquare by tomorrow. Oh, and I’m mayor too :D

GushueIS: Wow i just realized I.m 1 in sf on @foursquare now i feel all this pressure to go to new places!

creasian: HAHAH I’m the new Mayor of the San Jose International Airport on playfoursquare.com !!! Sweet! #foursquare

There’s something here worth examining. What assumptions about “good” and “bad” socializing are built into social media? Locative social media is especially interesting because it directly affects how people move through the city. It can be terrifically fun and useful for people who fit its prescribed social model. Here in San Francisco, where I’m doing ethnographic work on social media users, foursquare has positively affected my social life. For example, on Monday night, I went to dinner with a friend. After dinner, I saw that two of my closest friends were at a local bar. We met them there, and over the course of the next four hours, about 10 other people showed up, all of whom found us through foursquare. Whether or not it’s wise to have a party in a bar on Monday night is arguable, but it was really fun. Likewise, last night, on my way to meet my friends at Cafe Du Nord, I detoured through Dolores Park to say hi to two friends who’d checked in there. We watched the sunset together and I went on my way.

Foursquare also contributes to ambient awareness. Like Twitter, you feel part of a group of people, but whereas you can follow anyone on Twitter, foursquare restricts the displayed information to people in your city, and friendships are bidirectional - nobody can friend you if you don’t friend them. People tend to be fairly picky about their foursquare friends, precisely because of the type of specific locative information that it provides. This creates a social map of the city - my friend Jane is at work, John is at the park, Josh is climbing, Jen is having brunch - which can be comforting and helps to provide a sense of social context.

But it’s important to remember that the social models built into social software are not value-neutral. In the second part of this post, I will look at the types of social behavior that other locative media services prescribe.

Disclaimer: I’m friends with the guys behind foursquare.

We Didn’t Start the Flame War

CollegeHumor takes on contemporary Digg/YouTube/etc. comment culture. Full of meme references, internet wins, etc. Warning, this video is full of profanity and is not safe for school, work, or your mom:

Tumbling

I finally signed up for tumblr, and I’m trying really hard to understand what all the fuss is about.

I often find that I have a very strong negative reaction to new trendy technologies. This is strange as I often end up using and liking them (Facebook and Twitter being prime examples, although I never took to MySpace as much as I used it). I think the best way to describe it is as a form of jealousy: I feel left out by customs I don’t understand.

Tumblr is a lot like LiveJournal, less robust but easier to use. The barrier to entry is pretty much zilch for anyone familiar with social media: sign up, drag a bookmarklet, start Tumbling things. It’s basically a blog without commentary, or a LJ without real comments. I find that I tend to post lots of pictures and quick links to Tumblr, whereas on this blog I try to post substantive entries (or at least I will now that my del.icio.us links aren’t it’s primary content), and I feel like I have to stick pretty strictly to technology. Whereas on Tumblr I feel totally comfortable posting pictures of dresses I’d like to buy or completely personal, superficial viewpoints on pop culture.

The culture of “reblogging” on Tumblr (which substitutes for commenting, although you can hack together comments with a third-party product like disqus) seems to incite a lot of drama. Basically, you can copy anything anyone else writes and add your own commentary on your own Tumblr. Then a link to that commentary shows up on the original post. This is basically exactly the same as comments on a blog or LJ. However, recently Tumblr CEO David Karp deleted a bunch of Tumblr blogs that mocked Julia Allison, justifying this as “anti-harassment,” but in reality just annoying a lot of his users (he overturned the decision two days later). Apparently Allison was annoyed that links mocking her showed up on her own blog. Finally, Tumblr introduced a “blocking” feature, which allows users to block links to reblogs. I think.

Tumblr’s culture is very young. LJ has a culture leftover from the late 90s; it’s sort of mired in netiquette and FAQs, and attracts nerdy fandom nerds and 30 somethings. Tumblr seems, from my limited perspective, to have a culture more akin to the American Apparel, no-politics-more-irony, everything is ripe for mockery hipster viewpoints of the late 00s. It’s also firmly embedded in early 20something New York and San Francisco social life (and much, much more popular in the former city).

I’m sure social status on Tumblr would make an excellent case study for the dissertation, but I still find it all a bit distasteful. I’m Tumbling away, hoping that one of these days I’ll fall in love with it like I have Twitter. So far, not so much.

Summer Job 2009

I’m excited to let everyone know that I’ll be working this summer at Microsoft Research New England with danah boyd. I’m expecting to have a really awesome summer, as two of my fellow interns are Sarita Yardi and Scott Golder, two amazing PhD students.

This job has several nostalgic elements for me. First, it’s in Boston, and I went to Wellesley, which, while not in Boston proper, is close enough that I spent quite a bit of time there. Second, it’s at Microsoft. I first interned at Microsoft in 1996, when I was a college sophomore. It wasn’t my first experience at a big company — I was a secretary at IBM during the summer of 1995, after my freshman year– but it was my first experience at a modern software company, and it introduced me to such concepts as “project management,” “ship cycles,” and “betas.” I interned again in 1997 and took three short-time contracts there in 2001, 2002, and 2003 (HTML production and content producing, before graduate school). So this is my sixth sojourn at Microsoft; I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve such long ties with the company that I always knew I’d be back again. But this time I’m in research, and I couldn’t be more excited. I’m also stoked to be close to all the great people I know at Harvard, MIT, and the Berkman Center.

And, of course, I’ll be only a four-hour bus ride from my boyfriend, rather than a six-hour plane ride.

So what’s there to do in Boston during the summer?

Bear with me

While I work on getting this blog back to a workable state. Something seriously sinister happened to it a while back, and it’s been sadly neglected since.