continous partial social awareness

Drifting through my infoverse this week has been the phrase “what if the signal is the noise?” I can’t figure out where it was first coined, unfortunately, as I couldn’t find it in Google, del.icio.us (where I believe I first encountered it) or Technorati. (Plz help.)

Anyway, I’m ignoring “real work” this morning in favor of catching up with my del.icio.us bookmarks and Google Reader items while monitoring Twitter, Pounce and Gmail. There is usually a pretty decent signal-to-noise ratio with these mechanisms, because my friends and I tend to have somewhat similar interests. My del.icio.us network is heavily tipped towards other people investigating or studying social media, for example, and my Twitter friends tend to post memes that I enjoy. But this still assumes that the importance is the “noise” in the “signal”, finding the “importance” in the big cloud of links, comments, reviews, memes, essays, YouTube videos, etc. that we’re all confronted with daily.

For example, in the last hour I:
- Checked my LJ friends list
–Watched the new Kanye West Video based on a friend’s LJ post
— and posted a comment on the interplay of black and white culture on the LJ of my friend who posted the Kanye West video, based on a book (”The History of Hip”) that I’m reading
–Checked out the “Way of the Awesome” blog
–Read danah’s new essay responding to comments on her Facebook/MySpace issue, and thought very briefly about the class implications of my status project and how to best integrate class analysis into the proposal; then thought about how tired I am of the privileging of quantitative data and how many shoddy quantitative studies there are; then contemplated blogging about that, then decided it would not be in my best interests
-Checked Twitter
–Read through Metroblogging LA’s “famous fictional Los Angelenos” (and was happy to see Weetzie Bat AND Hiro Protagonist on there. Love!)
-Checked Pownce
–Found out that there’s a third leaked episode of Weeds pre-air on the torrents
–Made mental note to download it later while I’m making lunch
-Checked del.icio.us
–Noted that Fred had tagged my blog post on Echo Chambers from yesterday

.. and so forth and so on. I bet each of you reading this could put a similar chart together, maybe even in Visio if you’re real geeks. The web is hypertextual. It’s about linking and exploration. It’s not about linearity. It’s more like a game than a causal journey. It’s about leaving pages, learning about things, returning to places where you started, discovering new things, getting distracted. This is the antithesis of what we think of as “work”.

The “what if the signal is the noise” post/essay/blog seemed to be about how all the ephemeral social data we collect from blogs, LiveJournal, Twitter, dodgeball, Pownce, Facebook’s feed, etc. IS the point of all these applications. We don’t check del.icio.us so that we can get a neatly organized list of what’s important. We want to see what kinds of ideas are gaining currency and what people are talking about, to connect to a larger community. I was trying to explain to someone the other day that LiveJournal, for me, is about knowing that my friends are there, that we are co-present, even if we’re not talking. It is the location of self in a larger context that is the antithesis of the alienating internet.

But I also think that consuming all of these small, little pieces of data (music videos, microblogs) is part of gathering data to inform our views of the world. The Kanye West video gave me another example to think through a book that I’m reading. Skimming my del.icio.us network links list enables me to see what my peers are thinking about in terms of social software. So it’s not just connection and location but using hundreds or thousands of sources to build up pictures of things or ideas about things or philosophies or paradigms. My boyfriend reads tons of economics blogs every day. I mostly read blogs about social software, fashion, and consumerism. All the data we consume over the period of a day influences our overall outlook. It keeps us sharp and constantly changing.

Is this an overly optimistic view of meme-land? Of Wired’s snack-size info-bits? Perhaps. And I am probably in the minority of infojunkies in that I also read lots of lengthy essays and books as well, which sometimes means I have no idea what the latest, coolest idea is. But there’s something about this idea of the “infocloud” which creates an almost osmotic understanding of certain concepts. This doesn’t substitute for traditional knowledge or learning, but it is another form of it, perhaps “continuous partial social awareness”? With apologies to Linda Stone, and thanks to Tantek Çelik who I had a great conversation with about this stuff a few days ago.

Technorati Tags: signal to noise ratio, continous partial attention, infoclouds

Papers and Presentations

I am working on getting PDFs of all of these– but it is hard given the lengthy review cycles of the forthcoming articles! I will do my best.

PUBLICATIONS

Refereed Journal Articles

Marwick, A. (Forthcoming). “There’s a Beautiful Girl Under All of This: Performing Hegemonic Femininity in Reality Television.” Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Marwick, A. and boyd, danah (Forthcoming). “To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter.” Convergence.

Marwick, A. and boyd, danah (Forthcoming). “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media and Society.

Marwick, A. (2009). Book Review: Human Rights in the Global Information Society. Information, Communication & Society 12(6): 958-959. [PDF]

boyd, d. and Marwick, A. (2009). “The Conundrum of Visibility.” Journal of Children and Media, 3 (4): 410-414. [PDF]

Marwick, A. (2008)“To Catch A Predator? The MySpace Moral Panic.” First Monday. http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2152/1966 [HTML]

Book Chapters

Silver, D. & Marwick, A. (2006) “Internet Studies in Times of Terror.” In Silver, D. & Massanari, A. (eds), Critical Cyberculture Studies: Current Terrains, Future Directions. New York: NYU Press, pp. 47-54.

Thurlow, C. & Marwick, A. (2005). Apprehension versus awareness: Toward a more appropriate conceptualization of young people’s communication. In Williams, A. & Thurlow, C. (eds), Talking Adolescence: Perspectives On Communication In The Teenage Years. New York: Peter Lang. [PDF]

MA Thesis

Marwick, A. (2005). “Selling Your Self: Online Identity in the Age of a Commodified Internet.” Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. [.doc]

Whitepapers and Reports

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

Marwick, A. (2009). “The Value of Positive User Experience: Return on Investment of User Experience.” Momentum Design Lab Whitepaper.

Marwick, A. (2008). “LiveJournal Users: Passionate, Prolific, and Private.” LiveJournal, Inc. Research Report. [PDF]

Marwick, A. (2008). “Current and Developing Practice in the Use of Web 2.0 in Higher Education in the United States of America.” In A Review of Current and Developing International Practice in the Use of Social Networking (Web 2.0) in Higher Education, J.A. Armstrong & T. Franklin, Eds. For Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience, U.K. [HTML]

Editorials

Marwick, A. (2009). “There’s No Hiding on Facebook.” The Guardian, October 5. [HTML]

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS

Internet Identity: Women in a Virtual World. With Gesel Mason and Michelle Rowley. Creative Dialogue series, University of Maryland, March 1, 2010.

“Celebrity, Microcelebrity, and the Future of Internet Fame.” The Future15, South by Southwest Interactive, Austin, TX. 2010.

“Why Kids Do Care About Privacy.” Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, New York, NY, 2010.

“The Playboys of Tech: Gendered Entrepreneurial Narratives in Social Media Creation.” Society for the Social Studies of Science, Washington, DC. 2009.

“Hating on the Twitter Snobs: Status and Microcelebrity on Twitter.” Tweeting it Out: Critical Examinations of Twitter across Disciplines (panel organizer). Association of Internet Researchers, Milwaukee, WI. 2009.

P2P 2.0 and the Future of Digital Media. South by Southwest Interactive, Austin, TX. 2009. With Adam Fisk, Ian Clarke, Wendy Seltzer and Aaron Ray.

Is Privacy Dead Or Just Really Confused? South by Southwest Interactive, Austin, TX. 2009. With danah boyd, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Judith Donath.

“Becoming Elite: Status in Social Media.” Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program. Oxford, England, August 2008.

“The Fabulous Life of Microcelebrities: The Cultural Logic of Internet Fame.” ROFLCON Keynote. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, April 25-26 2008.

“I’m Internet Famous: Status in Social Media.” South By Southwest Interactive, Austin, TX, March 9-11 2008.

Okay, Facebook me: Exploring Behavior, Motivations and Uses in Social Network Sites. With Frederick Stutzman, danah boyd, and Clifford Lampe. iConference, Los Angeles, CA. 2008.

“Elite: Social Status in Textual Internet Media.” Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies Workshop, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. November 2007.

“The People’s Republic of YouTube? Interrogating Rhetorics of Internet Democracy.” Association of Internet Researchers 8.0. Vancouver, Canada. October 2007. Winner, Student Paper award

“Production and Participatory Culture in Online Reality Shows.” Media in Transition, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. May 2007.

Mystery Science Web 3000: Combinatorial Media. With Sean Kelly, Rick Webb, and Lilli Cheng. South by Southwest Interactive, Austin, TX. 2007

Marwick, A. (2006, November 14). “Feminist Blogging: An Academic Perspective”. (Web)Sites of Resistance, Barnard College, New York. [Notes: Word doc] Also see this crib [PDF]

Marwick, A. (2006, November 10). I Can Make You a (net) Celebrity Overnight: Fan Production & Participatory Culture in Online Reality Shows. Department of Culture and Communication Graduate Conference, New York Hall of Science, Queens, New York.

• PowerPoint
• Notes: Word doc

Marwick, A. (2006, September 29-30). “Selling Your Self: Examining Values in Identity 2.0.” Identity and Identification in a Networked World. New York University, New York.

• PowerPoint [.ppt]
• Talk outline [.doc]

Marwick, A. (2006, September). “Selling Your Self: Examining Online Identity.” Media Change and Social Theory, St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, September 2006.

Marwick, A. (2006, June 9-11). “The Myth of User Control in Identity 2.0.” Ethical Design of Surveillance Infrastructures Workshop, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

Women, Action & the Media: Making, Noise, Making Change. Boston, 2006. Panelist, “(Web) Sites of Resistance.”

Marwick, A. (2005). “I’m More Than Just a Friendster Profile: Identity, Authenticity, and Power in Social Networking Services.” Association for Internet Researchers, Chicago, IL. [.doc]

Liveblogging the UNC SSS: David Weinberger and Thomas Vander Wal

David Weinberger, author of Cluetrain Manifesto / “Everything is Miscellaneous” (Times 2007): Folksonomy as symbol.

Folksonomy as political: what right do other people have to tell us how we should think about information? (Obviously expert-based folksonomies have value –> I think he said this b/c there’s a lot of (potentially) indignant mils in the room)

Not just “emergent”, but “ours” b/c emerges from us

Emergence is a fascinating phenomenon because it explains complexity through intrinsic simplicity. E.g., termites build complex towers by following rules so simple that they fit in a termite’s brain. But there is also a political side to our interest in emergence, beyond its explanatory power. Emergence is hope. It says (or we take it as saying) that left to ourselves, without extrinsic structuring or regulation or governance, we will be magnificent. This is beyond the hope implicit in democracy, that says a group will be able to live together if all are given equal power. We won’t just live together, but something far beyond the capabilities of any of us will emerge. Simply by being together, cathedrals will emerge.

I also like his point that folksonomies work best w/ excess: lots and lots of tags, lots and lots of clusters. Author of “ambient findability” (-> a book still on my shelf, unread) worried that there are too many tags, and this will end up in non-findability (bogged down, poor signal to noise ratio), but this hasn’t been held up by actual experience. Folksonomy says the “more the better”.

Rejection of essentialism: if we use a doll as a doorstop, we know we’re not making the “real” use of the doorstop - we know there is a “real” sense. We want to preserve this sense of the real and the absolute. There’s something intuitive about this, but when you take this to essentialism — this is the way it really is — requires “an impossible metaphysics” (not sure what he means by this exactly, as essentialism remains extremely prevalent and the idea of fixity of meaning is very strong– how can it simultaneously be strong and be unenforceable?).

Thomas Vander Wal
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Online Identity Bibliography

Online Identity Bibliography

A collection of academic papers and books about identity online and online identity.
Last Updated August 18, 2006

This is a work in progress! I will be collecting citations and organizing them throughout January and February 2006. ha ha! August-September 2006.
Please email me with suggestions, additions and corrections.

Key:
Note that if I find a free, full-text source I don’t bother looking for the other options

[HTML] - Link to free, full-text HTML
[PDF] - Link to free, full-text PDF (requires Adobe reader)
[Paywall] - Link to journal/database where you can buy the work
[GPrint] - Link to Google Print’s page for the work
[Amazon] - Link to Amazon.com’s page for the work

Other related bibliographies:

• Ethnobase bibliography : “a web resource for ethnographic approaches to studying Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).”
• Fragment.nl :: Cyberculture, Identity and Gender Resources: excellent and extensive
• BlogBib: An Annotated Bibliography on Weblogs and Blogging, with a Focus on Library/Librarian Blogs
• Draft Bibliography on Blogging, with links
• Master List of Blog Articles, includes non-academic sources, frequently updated
• Concepts of Self and Person in Philosophy of Mind, and Cognitive Science: not internet/tech specific, but useful for general theories of identity
• The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies has lots of excellent book reviews and resources for people studying the internet from an academic perspective.

Adams, Josh (2005). “White Supremacists, Oppositional Culture and the World Wide Web.” Social Forces 84(2), December, 759-778.

Armstrong, J. (2004) `Web Grrrls, Guerrilla Tactics: Young Feminisms on the Web’, in Gauntlett, D. Horsley, R. (eds.) Web.Studies. 2nd Edition. London: Arnold. [Amazon] [Gprint]

Atkinson, S. & Nixon, H. (2005). “Locating the Subject: Teens online @ ninemsn.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. September, 26(3): 387-409.

Baker, P. (2001) Moral Panic and Alternative Identity Construction in Usenet. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 7 (1) October. [HTML]

Baym, N. Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000. [Amazon] [GPrint]

Bechar-Israeli, H. (1995). From bonehead to clonehead:Nicknames, Play, and Identity on Internet Relay Chat. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 1(2). [HTML]

Belausteguigotia, M. (2003). The Zapatista Rebellion and the Use of Technology: Indian women online?. Indigenous Affairs, 0(2), 18-25. [Paywall]

Bolter, J.D. & Grusin, R. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999 [Amazon] [GPrint]

Bortree, D.S. (2005). Presentation of self on the Web: an ethnographic study of teenage girls’ weblogs. Education, Communication & Information, 5(1), 25-39 [Paywall]

boyd, d. (2004) “Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networks.” Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems (CHI 2004). Vienna: ACM, April 24-29, 2004. [PDF]

Bromberg, Heather. (1996) “Are MUDs Communities? Identity, Belonging and Consciousness in Virtual Worlds.” Rob Shields (Ed.) Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies. London, Sage. 143-152.

Bruckman, A. “Gender Swapping on the Internet.” In Proceedings of the Internet Society (INET ‘93) in San Francisco, California, August, 1993, by the Internet Society. Reston, VA: The Internet Society. (18 February 2004).

Burkhalter, B. (1999). Reading race online: Discovering racial identity in usenet discussions. In M. A. Smith & P. Kollock (Eds.), Communities in cyberspace (pp. 60-75). London: Routledge.

Butcher, M. Transnational Television, Cultural Identity and Change. London: Sage Publications, 2003.

Calvert, S. L. (2002). Identity Construction on the Internet. In S. L. Calvert, A. B. Jordan & R. R. Cocking (Eds.), Children in the Digital Age: Influences of Electronic Media on Development (pp. 57 - 70). Wesport, Connecticut: Praeger.

Calvert, S. L., Mahler, B. A., Zehnder, S. M., Jenkins, A., & Lee, M. S. (2003). Gender differences in preadolescent children’s online interactions: Symbolic modes of self-presentation and self-expression. Applied Developmental Psychology.

Campbell, Alex. (2006). “The search for authenticity: An exploration of an online skinhead newsgroup.” New Media & Society, April 8(2): 269-294.

Campbell, J.E. Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press: 2004.

Campbell, J. E. (2005). Outing PlaneOut: Surveillance, gay marketing and internet affinity portals. New Media & Society, 7(4): 663-683.

Caspary, C., W. Manzenreiter. (2002). From Subculture to Cyberscubculture? The Japanese Noise Alliance and the Internet. In Gottlieb, N., M. McLelland (Eds.), Japanese Cybercultures. New York, London, RoutledgeCurzon: 60-74.

Chan, Brenda. (2006, May). “Virtual Communities and Chinese National Identity.” Journal of Chinese Overseas (2)1:1-32.

Chandler, Daniel (1998), “Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web.” [HTML]

Cheng, V. J. Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004

Cherny, L. “Gender Differences in Text-Based Virtual Reality.” Proceedings of the Berkeley Conference on Women and Language. April 1994, (28 January 2004).

Cherny, L. and Weise, E. R., eds. Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace. Seattle: Seal Press, 1996.

Chopra, Rohit. (2006). “Global primordialities: virtual identity politics in online Hindutva and online Dalit discourse.” New Media & Society, April 8(2):187-206.