The Urban Screens conference which took place in Amsterdam on the 4th of December this year is the fourth in a series of events which has been organized around the theme of display screens (LED signs, plasma screens, projection boards, intelligent architectural surfaces, etc.) in urban spaces. It supports the idea of using public space as a platform for creation and cultural exchange, strengthening the local economy and encouraging public discussion. Since the first Urban Screens event in 2005 in Amsterdam, related international conferences have taken place in 
Manchester in 2007 and Melbourne in 2008. The series of events encourages the exploration of opportunities to employ the growing infrastructure of large digital displays in public space currently used mainly as a tool to influence consumer behavior through advertising, and expand them by displaying cultural and artistic content with the purpose of revitalizing public space, and generating public engagement and interaction.
Light as Artistic Medium: Paul Klotz (and the Meaningfulness of Interactive Features in Media Artworks)
Paul Klotz is an applied art engineer and light designer who specializes in interactive light installations for public spaces. By means of light and sound installations which create a feedback loops between the passerby and the installation upon physical interaction with the artwork, he attempts to set up in public spaces artistic zones which captivate, entertain and enrich human experience. The Tunnel Vision installation for example is a light and sound installation which responds to the individual’s hand movements within it by sound and light alterations.
Juha Van ‘T Zelfde on the Role of ‘Urban Informatics’ and The ‘Cloud City’ in Urban Redevelopment
Juha Van ‘t Zelfde spoke at the Urban Screens conference in Amsterdam (December 4, 2009) in behalf of VURB, a foundation located in Amsterdam which focuses on policy and design research concerning urban computational systems. His presentation focused on what might be called ‘urban informatics’. VURB endorses the development of ‘urban informatics’ as a potential discipline concerned with the issue of management of all the data related to urban environments generated by inhabitants and visitors of a city, now mobile technology users. This content generated by means of ubiquitous computing, sensor technologies and mobile media transforms the urban environment by adding another virtual layer to the urban space. The foundation is involved in investigating precisely how these networked digital resources are changing the way we understand, build and inhabit cities and attempts to find creative ways to manage and use all the user generated data related to urban sites and include it in the process of shaping future cities.
In investigating the role of all the user generated data adding another dimension to the city space in shaping the city of the future, VURB is attempting to create an interactive platform to accommodate, administer and make available and searchable all this data. Juha Van ‘t Zelfde mentioned something like an app store, a platform on top of which people can build other applications.
VURB does not only attempt to provide a framework for policy and design research but it envisions itself also as a connector linking municipalities and other actors interested in the theme of the city as interface. The foundation is also involved in promoting the theme by means of public events. One of these events will take place in 2010 and will be a one day marathon on the theme of the ‘cloud city’.
Theo Watson: Start Your Own Graffiti Research Lab!
Theo Watson is one of the members of Graffiti Research Lab, an art group which brings together hacking and graffiti writing into digital graffiti as a form of communication in urban spaces. The organization is based in New York and now has other nodes Mexico, Vienna, and Amsterdam, where Theo is located.
The group experiments with digital technologies, L.E.D. lights, software, projectors and magnets as tools for artistic expression at urban level. Their projects, which were exhibited at several modern art festivals, are detailed by videos on their website. The L.A.S.E.R. Tag project for example enables writing on urban surfaces such as building facades or walls by means of computer vision technology, projectors and a laser pointer:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFWcAkxzkv4]
But what makes the group’s activity truly valuable is the fact that the artist – engineers develop free tools with open-source technologies which can be used by graffiti writers. Their website documents all their projects and offers the tools for free download. The group has even posted tutorials on the DIY website instructables.com on
This does not make digital graffiti accessible to anyone however because a certain level of practical understanding of the technology is necessary to operate and adapt the tools. The pratice is more of a ‘geek’ – oriented graffiti, to use the words of one of the founders of the group, Evan Roth. Moreover, the high prices of acquisition for some of the equipment, such as the projectors, which can get to 7000 euros, make them still inaccessible to many.
Mettina Veenstra on How Public Screens Can Help Build Social Capital
Mettina Veenstra is principal researcher and coordinator of the theme public screens at Novay Research. Novay is a Dutch research institute for ICT driven innovation. Her presentation at the Urban Screens conference in Amsterdam on the 4th of December this year focused on what public displays can do for public space in terms of stimulating encounters and interactions between people in public spaces. They envision the role of public digital displays as external stimuli for encouraging contact between people, with art being an important type of stimulus. But why is it important to foster social interactions? According to Mettina Veenstra social interactions lead to social capital which is important for our well being and our economy.
The speaker identified eight functions of public displays: information, entertainment, art and culture, advertising, communication, better services, e-participation (the stimulation of discussion on environment and other local issues) and influencing (colors or imagines that can improve the mood of people). The speaker presented a series of projects for public screens which incorporate these functions and ideally aim to generate social capital. For example, a game projected in neighborhood public digital displays, the main target audience of which are youngsters, permits any individual who owns a mobile phone to play with the main character of the game, a dog, along with other people who access the game trough their mobile phones. A social networking site which links you to people whom you played the game with has also been set up. Other projects aim at encouraging the practice of performing arts in public spaces, while others are designed for public areas of office spaces with the purpose of stimulating workers to get in touch with each other by means of a constant flow of messages related to their activity.
The ‘recipe’ for fostering social capital which Novay puts in practice emphasizes the ‘locality’ of content and it’s direct relevance to the individual (personalized content), as well as allowing people to interact with the screens. The personalization of content is enabled by the integration of sensors and facial recognition technology in context aware applications.
This year’s Urban Screens conference in Amsterdam focused less on theoretical aspects and more on showing some of the actual artistic and non-commercial projects and installations which have been developed for digital displays in public space, and Mettina Veenstra’s presentation was one of them. I could not help noticing with surprise the great gap between theory and practice in what producing applications and installations for digital interfaces in public space as platforms for creation, cultural exchange and social interaction are concerned. While the growing number of such projects is certainly a step in the right direction, an issue that deserves more attention is a more informed and critical integration of new technologies, such as surveillance technologies, in these projects. For ambient intelligence enthusiasts, a recent exhibition which took place in New York, The Sentient City, provides a useful source for reflection. The Too Smart City section of the exhibition contained a series of artworks which amusingly explored potential technological failures of augmented objects, as a way to generate reflection about the transformations and effects of living in an intelligent urban environment.
Another concept which has been extensively and uncritically used today in the presentations with implicit positive and ideological connotations directly related to the applications’ potential to foster social change is the concept of ‘interaction’ in relation to media applications. However, interaction with digital environments is often not the much celebrated ’empowerment’ of the individual now an user/participant, to replace the passive consumption of traditional media, but simply reaction and individual configuration of a technological environment with a limited number of already defined potential paths. Moreover, the participant’s agency in artistic environments is not meaningful in itself in relation to social change but only when it “sets empathy in motion toward responsible interaction and constructive change.” (Stiles and Shanken, forthcoming: 93).
I am convinced that The Urban Screens Reader which has been launched today and which will soon be available for free download on the INC website, will be an useful tool in bridging the gap between theory and practice.
Notes:
Kristine Stiles and Edward A. Shanken, Missing in Action: Agency and Meaning in Interactive Art, forthcoming in Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, Victoria Vesna, eds., Context Providers: Context and Meaning in Digital Art (University of Minnesota Press).
Nanna Verhoeff: Mobile Digital Cartography from Representation to Performance of Space
Nanna Verhoeff, associate professor in the department of Media and Culture studies at Utrecht University, had one of the very few yet very welcomed theoretical presentations at the Urban Screens conference which took place on the 4th of December this year in Amsteram.
Her contribution focused in particular on mobile screens (such as mobile phones, PDA’s and GPS devices), and their role in urban screen culture. She discussed the specificity of these screens in relation to the concept of mobility, an often encountered trope in the history of screen media.
The first question which the speaker addressed was: how are these mobile screens different from the large digital displays in urban space? And, in relation to a broader range of screen media, how do mobile screens influence the relationship between the user, the screen and the space outside the screen?
As Nanna Verhoeff points out, one of the differences between mobile screens and traditional static screens is the fact that mobile screens are ‘application based.’ The mobile screen serves as an interface for the convergence of various technologies and software applications: they can act as cameras, interfaces for online communication or surfing the web, as well as GPS devices. While the relationship between user and screen as material object may remain ‘static’ and unchanged in the context of the mobility afforded by the use of mobile digital screens, what changes and deserves attention according to the speaker is “the relationship to the off-screen space, the world surrounding the screen, [which] is perhaps becoming at once more intimate, more flexible, and more mobile”:
“Because of these characteristics (application-based hybridity + “intimate” closeness) mobile screens put forward practices of a mobile and haptic engagement with the screen that fundamentally revise the spatial coordinates of large, fixed and (paradoxically) distancing televisual, cinematic, and architectural screen-dispositifs. When the screen is becoming an interactive map, camera, and a networked communication device all-in-one, these mobile (touch)screens and practices of mobile screening problematize set boundaries of agency, between making, transmitting, and receiving images (who “makes”, “programs” and watches them). Moreover, these devices turn the “classical” screen as flat and distanced window on the world, into an interactive, hybrid navigation device that repositions the viewer central within that world.”
Equipped with mobile screens we therefore become a sort of ‘postmodern’ cartographers: we produce space by navigating through and interacting with an augmented space. But unlike traditional cartography which is concerned with the systematic and objective rendering of space and space relations at different scales, creative cartography in 4D enabled by mobile screens is a subjective, flexible and open-ended practice of personalized space mapping.
What are some of the applications which enable this practice? GPS navigation, for example, in which the movement produces the map, is one of them. Another example of subjective/ creative production of space is geo tagging, through which geographical identification data is added to media such as photos. In mobile augmented reality, reality browsers or ‘layar’ applications, the information enhanced map fluctuates according to our position.
In conclusion, Nanna Verhoeff points out to a new notion of cartography which is being revealed by the use of these applications, by means of which we are not only navigating space but also constructing space. According to her cartography:
“it is not a precondition only, but a product of navigation, and as such, cartography is becoming more than a systematic representation of space: it is a performance of space in a true sense: a making and expressing of space.”
With this notion the media theorist emphasizes the necessity of a shift in discussing some of the contemporary media practices from the notion of representation, which received criticism in modernity for its potential to produce alienation and engender passive consummation, to the notion of process, performance, performativity, more specifically “the process in which representation comes into being” through the embodied experiencing of space.
Social Network Sites as Stages of ‘Dramaturgical Performance’ – Interpretation Sketch
A study of the University of Georgia describes as more likely to be narcissist those Facebook users who have a large number of friends and wallposts, narcissism in this case being defined as an emphasis on self-promotion and quantity of friends. The use of Facebook to emphasize self-promotion, that is considered to be narcissism in psychological studies of social network sites, is given another interpretation in a related discipline, sociology, who analyzes the individual’s identity in the context of symbolic social interactions with other individuals, as acts of dramaturgical performance, to use Goffman’s methodology.
Regularly in everyday life we shape our behaviour and appearance in order to determine and control the way that the others perceive us. This behaviour trend is part of what sociologists analyze as impression management. Much of the understanding of the process is attributed to the sociologist Erving Goffman and his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), who conducted an innovative observational analysis of the component parts of the human interactional process from the theatrical performance perspective. Goffman focuses on a dramaturgical approach, and defines the individual as an actor, and his social interactions as dramaturgical performances shaped by environment and audience, aimed at creating specific impressions according to the desired purpose of the actor. The result is a “face”, a mask that varies according to the social situations. The face according to Goffman is “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact” [1]. A face is therefore a successful staging of an identity.
Goffman’s analysis of social interactions as dramaturgical performances can be applied to humans’ social interactions online as part of social network sites (SNSes) as well. According to boyd, a social network site is a “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system”[2]. Thus, the concept of a SNS, is to create a micro-society centred around the user, offering him the possibility to link with other users, in Goffman’s terms, offering the user, the actor, a stage where he can perform in order to model his identity. The SNS stage, the webpage, is divided in three regions, in Goffman’s terminology: “front”, “back”, and “outside”, according to the relationship of the audience to the performance. The audience has access to the front stage of the performance, to the information that the actors want to display. On Facebook the frontstage is comprised of the profile page, which displays personal information about the user, the wallpostings, the friend network and the photos. The backstage is reserved to the actor only, in Facebook this being the information available only for the actor after login in, such as the inbox, for example. To be “outside” the stage means to have no access to the performance, which is the case of users of the same SNS who are not “friends” of the actor.
The segregation between audience and non-audience ensures optimal results of the performance in impression creation. Specific performances must be given to specific audiences, in order for the actor to be able to deliver the right front (face) to match each audience and preserve proper relationships in interaction.
An optimal segregation would prevent the bringing together of different publics, for example work colleagues, school mates and family for the same performance, which would be sensed as an intrusion and would cause problems to the actor, as boyd also notes, tendency often noticed in humans’ everyday life. The segregation within audience becomes problematic in some of the SNSes. For example, in Facebook there is only one category of public, the so-called “friends”, which does not correspond to the denotation of the term according to boyd[3], and brings together different categories of public for the same audience, which leads to the inconvenience of staging one face, one presentation for all types of audiences: family, friends, colleagues. The non-segregation policy is stated in the website description: “Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them”. There are SNSes though that are constructed on the principle of audience segregation, as for example LinkedIn, which is a network for professional to establish connections with other professionals.
Another inconvenience as far as crossing the boundaries of typical regions of social interaction, is that the internet blurs the distinction between frontstage and backstage, which leads to concerns about privacy and abuse of personal information online. danah boyd notes as a consequence of these concerns the doubtful quality and truth of profiles, in light of the fact that a personal profile is public.
Another concept of Goffman, the face, develops specific tools within SNSes. An actor within an SNS can make use of different tools to create his face, a mask that changes according to the actor’s role, the audience and the social interaction. Facebook for example offers a series of tools: social network profile (SNP), made up from cultural signs: favourite books, movies, etc., the wall and the friends network. Donath and boyd speak of friends as part of the online performance of self: “a user’s friend connections speak to their identity—the public display of friend connections constitutes a social milieu that contextualizes one’s identity. The act of “friending” others, and choosing the subset of these friends to display in the so-called “Top 8,” constitute identity performances, because they are willful acts of context creation”[4].
Actors can develop two types of faces: a positive face shows the desire to be appreciated, approved, etc., and a negative face is the desire to preserve autonomy of self, not to be imposed upon or intruded. Researchers that examined the patterns of gendered identity, discovered that “females tend to turn to others for validation in contrast to males, who are more apt to maintain their individuality and whose relationships are more of an extension of their already-complete selves”. In the light of this finding, it can be stated that females are more likely to develop a positive face on SNSes as well, and males a negative one.
The performance is the process of social interaction that has as a result the creation of a face. Any performance tends towards idealization, either positive or negative. The positive idealization can be interpreted as narcissism in psychology, by emphasis on self-promotion. Performance on SNSes like Facebook is focused on the demonstration of the actor’s social competence in presentation of self, and establishing interactions online, in which association with popular or attractive users is an important tool of identity definition.
A more in-depth analysis of SNSes using Goffman’s methodology may lead to a better understanding of online social interactions and the ways they differ from everyday interactions, due to the mediation of the technological platform. From this brief interpretation, one can conclude that SNSes are online stages which allow actors to emphasize their social network of relations, using their audience for self-promotion purposes. The limitations of an SNS like Facebook, following Goffman’s description of dramaturgical performance, come from the fact that the user is compelled to display only one face to a variety of audiences simultaneously, which results in a “cynical” performance in Goffman’s terms, or an untruthful profile in boyd’s terms, due to the incapacity to more accurately define and segregate the audience. A cynical performance is also the result of privacy concerns and abuse of personal information online.
Bibliography:
Goffman, Erving, Viata cotidiana ca spectacol, translation of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Comunicare.ro, Bucharest, 2003
[1] Goffman Erving, in Lemert & Branaman, The Goffman Reader, www.googlebooks.co.uk/the_goffman_reader,
[2] danah boyd and Nicole Ellison (2007, October). “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (1), article 11
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
Book review: “Media Work” by Mark Deuze
As technologies develop, media diversifies its platforms and products, and becomes more and more present and involved in our lives, building barthesian myths around every object surrounding us, which consequently turns our every act: production, purchasing, consumption, etc., into a cultural experience. But the changes that media has been undergoing due to the development of new technologies, have turned not only the media practitioners but also the media consumers into creators of culture. This phenomena, called convergence culture is one of the main factors of change in the nature and practice of media today, that shape the analysis that Mark Deuze, Assistant Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University and Professor of Journalism and New Media at Leiden University, presents in the book Media Work.
The main focus of the book is the media practitioner and how his work and life style are being changed by new social, cultural, economical and technological developments, that give birth to new paradigms, such as convergence culture (Henry Jenkins) or liquid life (Zygmunt Bauman), which Deuze uses in order to explain the changing nature of media work. The media work is described as a very complex reality, a mix of sometimes contradictory elements that need to work towards convergence: “content, connectivity, creativity and commerce” (Deuze). The collapse of the power system determined by the dissolving distinction between the traditional well established roles and relations between producer and audience, which characterizes the convergence media culture, as well as the consequences of this new pattern of behavior on individual life, which results in a convergence of all aspects of existence, enumerated by Deuze as: “work (production), life (consumption) and play”, determines some of the current features of working in the media.
Thanks to this mirror of the media work, that Deuze’s analysis creates, the book is a useful guide for anyone interested in working in the media, for example, for media students that want to know what to expect and what is expected from them as media practitioners, and for media professionals who want to have a critical view on their work environment, in order to better understand and adapt to the changes that the industry is going through. The main question that this book answers: What does working in the media really mean and how does it look like to work in the media?, receives a comprehensive yet rather discouraging answer. The insecurity, fragmentation, precariousness, exploitation, especially in the case of new comers, that characterizes working in the media these days, due partly to the globalization of production and outsourcing, is far from the dreams, expectations and enthusiasm with which media students prepare to enter the industry.
What makes the book very actual and practical is that the data sources for Deuze’s analysis are from within the industry: practitioners’ blogs, publications, interviews with media professionals from various parts of the world: Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States, from four key fields of the creative industry: advertising (including public relations and marketing communication), journalism, film and television production, and game design and development.
The book is divided in eight chapters, starting with an overview of the main theoretical paradigms, such as convergence culture and liquid modernity, and the macro-factors: social, technological, cultural, etc., that influence life and work styles in the media industry nowadays, and continuing in separate chapters with an analysis of the institutional, technological, organizational and cultural aspects that determine the work style of professionals engaged in creative industries, in the four main fields mentioned above. Leaving aside the differences that may come from the different products, missions, audiences, technological tools, locations, etc., the media practitioners involved in all these fields seem to be facing nowadays the same challenges that result from the convergence culture. The media practitioners seem to find it difficult today to define their audience and preserve it, as the audience empowered by technology switched from the status of passive receiver towards active producer of media content. Each discipline and practitioner seems to find their own ways to cope with it, and the ones most willing to let go of power and control, both as far as content and the used medium are concerned, and to actively share the creative power with their audience in what is called participative media, seem to have most to win from the current situation, in Deuze’s opinion. This tendency can be most noticed in the game design and development industry.
Deuze does a good job at describing today’s media reality and the new work style pattern, which promotes flexibility, project-based work, multi-skilling, soft-skills, rotational work style, informal networking, in various proportions according to the industry, in what seems to be a transition period from the clearly defined unequal relations of power from the time of traditional mass media, towards the convergence media culture and the new power relations, that are in course of negotiation today. He leaves the picture a bit blurry though, as far as future tendencies are concerned. Is today’s insecurity and fragmentation the new media reality or just a transitory stage towards a new reality? Where will the current negotiation of power between creator and audience lead? Will we still be able to distinguish between the two categories in the near future? We hope the author will share more of his visions in a future book.
Media Work was first published by Polity Press in 2007, as part of the Digital Media and Society Series and is available for purchase on amazon.com.
Control Rates in User Generated Content: PoliticalBase.com, the Moderated Political Wikipedia
Technological developments, resulting in free user-friendly interface applications, led to the second step in the evolution of the World Wide Web, the Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 reflects a paradigm shift, from the “read web”, another platform of mass communication, whose advantages over the traditional media were in terms of functionality: better storage of large amounts of data, better manipulation and selection by means of hypertext and linkage, towards the “read/ write web”. The Web 2.0 is a typical manifestation of a new paradigm, convergence culture, a space where the concepts of author and audience/user cannot be distinguished, a space of horizontal co-authoring, augmented by the use of technology as platform of communication exchange.
Although the main purpose of the Web 2.0 is to empower the users who group themselves in online social networks, the degree of control of the user generated content in the Web 2.0 space depends on the application. PoliticalBase.com is a comprehensive application that defines itself as an “user-powered online community providing bi-partisan commentary, information and conversation about US Politics”. It is thus an online community of interest, gathering collective knowledge by means of user contributions, centered around the topic of political news in the US.
The application offers various tools. The front page of PoliticalBase.com highlights news submitted by Political Base users. The most innovative tool is the Money Track, which allows you to see how much money U.S. political candidates have raised, from what states, counties and even persons they have raised it from, by building diagrams based on data collected from the Federal Election Commission. This is however not a Web 2.0 feature, as only the administrators can introduce data. The other tools offered are topic centered wikis, focusing on several categories: political people, political issues and political groups, that are edited by users and evaluated by moderators. The application also has a forum section. The difference between PoliticalBase.com and Wikipedia as far as control over content is concerned, is that the structure of the wiki created by PoliticalBase.com compels users to enter specific types of content in fixed categories, the content being afterwards review by staff moderators. For example, on the page for Democratic candidate Barack Obama, you can vote on your perception of this politician in different areas, see his political affiliations, and find out where he stands on the issues, as a result of the data introduced in the wiki categories.
In spite of the good ranking as far as data and functionality are concerned, PoliticalBase.com is a quite hierarchical and undemocratical online community, since the moderators have veto power: “For brand new users Political Base moderates all new content submitted into the system. The content is either added or deleted within 24 hours after the submission is made. As users submit quality content, they earn points which rank them in the community and open up more editing options in a less strict environment, often earning live edit access to the majority of the site. Submissions made are moderated by an internal staff and by high scoring users from within our user base. At any time you can view your point score at the top-right of your “my base” section.”
The application distinguishes thus between two categories of contributors: moderators and users, and places the evaluation of the moderators above the evaluation of the readers, which may lead to biased information, especially if we take into account the political nature of the website. From this point of view the application disregards the aspect of socialization of the web 2.0 applications and maintains the traditional hierarchical structure of collaboration, aspect that may push away potential users. On the other hand, the meritory system of gaining editorial liberties by means of votes, can be seen as a method to make users responsible of the content placed online.
PICNIC 08 – “Homophily Can Make You Stupid” by Ethan Zuckerman
In a presentation given yesterday at Picnic for the Bloggers Lab, organized by the European Journalism Centre, Ethan Zuckerman brought up an interesting concept that has quite remotely been discussed over the internet for a while now.
Today we are all enjoying this second step of the web evolution, the web 2.0, a read/write space where we can actively participate and create content by blogging, we can meet individuals that we would otherwise not have access to, by registering in social networks and creating online communities, and where we can use a lot of other interactive tools. The internet thus has the potential to largely expand our informational and relational capacities in a multitude of directions. Nevertheless, humans’ behaviour online seems to disregard the real capacities and potential of the internet. The behaviour of individuals online seems to be following an intrinsically human principle of behaviour that guides our actions in real life, defined by sociologists as homophily. Homophily refers to humans’ tendency to associate and connect with individuals similar to them in certain aspects, people who share their interests, values, culture, who have the same demographical, racial characteristics, etc., which leads to one of the main characteristics of a social network, which is homogeneity. This principle of homophily is the foundation of the most various human relations and networks, from marriage, to friendship, work, information exchange, and others. Homophily, a concept that can be expressed by the saying: birds of a feather flock together, plays an essential role in shaping our individual and collective view of the world. Sociologists acknowledge that “Homophily limits people’s social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience”.
The same principle is guiding our behaviour online and there are several types of applications that exploit it. One example are online social networks. On Facebook, Hyves, MySpace, etc., individuals connect with other individuals that they know in real life, and with whom they presumably have common interests or other socio-demographical, behavioural, and intrapersonal characteristics, and then with the friends of their friends, and with potential friends that are automatically suggested to them by the application, based on common profile characteristics. Although the web 2.0 does amplify the broadening of our network with people whom it would be unlikely to meet in real life, it is said to also amplify the narrowing of our spectrum of knowledge in other fields, if our actions online are aimed only at reinforcing our own ideas, by, for example, registering in groups that share our interests or subscribing to feeds on a particular subject that we are interested in.
Another type of online application that reflects well homophily, upon which Ethan Zuckerman drew attention in his presentation yesterday, are the media aggregators. Media aggregators are online applications that maintain subscription to feeds of media content coming from various sources: blogs, vlogs, etc. The content of these media aggregators is determined most of the times by user votes. It would not be surprising, if we were to analyze the profile of the users that are involved in the voting systems, that their profile is similar to ours, individuals who subscribe to feeds through these websites. And Zuckerman draws attention on this aspect in one of his interviews by raising a question: “If you look at sites like Digg and Reddit, these are sites that promised the future of journalism, where we would all get together and decide what’s important. …But that begs the question: Who’s ‘we?’”. And the answer to this question would be: people who have similar interests to ours. Zuckerman further develops this idea in another one of his declarations: “Cass Sunstein, an amazing legal scholar, says that one of the dangers of the internet is that we’re only hearing like voices, and that makes us more polarized […]. What’s incredible about the net is we have this opportunity to hear more voices than ever. But the tools we tend to build to it have us listening to the same voices again and again.” Zuckerman makes it clear that it is not the internet that is intrinsically wrong, but that individuals tend to use it in limitative ways: searching and selecting information and individuals mainly to reinforce their own ideas: “Encountering new ideas isn’t a supply problem in today’s internet – it’s a demand problem. There’s a near infinity of people unlike you creating content and putting it online for you to encounter. But it’s entirely possible that you’ll never encounter it if you don’t actively look for it… or unless the systems you use to find ideas start forcing you outside your usual orbits into new territories.”
Zuckerman takes a strong position against homophily: “Homophily can make you really, really dumb”. He opposes to the effects of homophily another concept, serendipity: “Search in the future needs to lead us to people, to places, to voices. My hope is that in the future we get over homophily and we start looking for really productive serendipity – the sort of serendipity when you go to that shelf in the library and you think you know the book that you’re looking for, but you actually find the book you’re really looking for within 2-3 shelves of it. You think you’re looking for info on the US elections, but you end up finding info on how the Jamaicans are viewing the US elections. You think you’re looking for info on network security and you end up finding information on why Pakistan is so afraid of YouTube.”
On the other hand, homophily is seen as a good aspect by communication theorists from certain points of view because it facilitates communication. It eliminates communication barriers coming from various types of differences between individuals, that lead to misunderstandings or distortion of messages. It leads to effective communication, effective collaborations between individuals and collaborative development of ideas. The downside of homophily derives from the fact that, although we efficiently and “comfortably” communicate with like minded individuals, we have the tendency to avoid contacts that take us out of our “comfort” zone, which can be a field that we are not in control of, have few information about, or are unaware of: “We know so little about one another, and what we do know is generally so wrong, that our first instinct is to try to shut each other off.” Fighting the homophily instinct is an effort that will lead us to the better or full use of technology: “We can’t just assume that being connected [via the net] solves these problems. If you let us work it out on our own, we tend to reinforce our own prejudices and stereotypes. . .”
The tendency towards homophily in the selection of information is a fundamental aspect that individuals that use new media should be aware of, as a first step towards fighting it. But, although indeed some applications of web 2.0 tend to polarize and reinforce our opinions even more, the discussions about homophilous behavior online tend to take a very critical position and leave aside the fact that some web 2.0 applications specifically encourage divergence of ideas by allowing unrestricted feedback. Placing a posting on your blog or on a forum brings your ideas into the public sphere and automatically attracts opposite reactions by means of comments for example, pushing you towards expanding your comfort zone.
Ethan Zuckermann is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society of the Harvard University, co-founder of Global Voices Online magazine. He is involved in several other projects that focus on the impact of technology on the developing world and the encouragement of bridge blogging (including people in developing nations in global dialogues).
More sources:
Why Internet is Making Me Stupid
Homophily, serendipity, xenophilia
Why Everyone You Know Thinks the Same as You
[1] http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2007/12/19/social-software-serendipity-and-salad-bars-mmm-sybillance/
[2] http://www.contentious.com/2008/04/20/breaking-out-of-the-echo-chamber/
[3] http://www.contentious.com/2008/04/20/breaking-out-of-the-echo-chamber/
[4] http://www.contentious.com/2008/04/20/breaking-out-of-the-echo-chamber/