Social Media Experiments
- Graduate students' facebook profiles are quasi professional
- Selectively oversharing or behaving weird/erratically could potentially be damaging to their future careers
- There is more at stake depending on where you are at in your career and what social media you use
- As a graduate student you become friends with professionals and faculty on facebook who might view the norm breaching behavior
- For graduate students texting advisors, friending professors, etc have become normalized already
- Seniors are in a similar position as they get to know more professionals in the field they hope to join
- One option is to create a separate category in friends for professional friendships and blocked them from most of facebook
- Facebook is like a time capsule
- Some people do not want to clean out their facebook and sacrifice the preservation of their childhood just for the purpose of creating a more professional profile
- One manner of partitioning your personality on one profile on facebook is from a certain point on, say after graduation, one can moderate their posts to make sure they are more applicable to a graduate student audience
- When posting on social justice issues, a point is made to make the post public no matter how inflammatory it is
- Some people are just worried about their friends thinking they are weird because of the assignment
- One person did the flickr assignment because it was more anonymous
- Asked about a dog and wedding photos
- It was also mentioned that sometimes one might not be sure when to friend people on facebook sometimes. For example when discussing class work with a classmate should you friend them again? These people even if you are in the same class you will often never talk to them.
- What do we mean by friend and how does that differ from facebook friend?
- It can also be awkward when you've known someone for a long time and have been friends in person for a long time and realize that you are not friends on facebook yet
- Solely online friends
- Someone got married with a stranger that they met off of skype
- Our reactions were all along the lines of "omg", "why", "this is weird"
- Our reactions demonstrate the standard assumption that online relationships, specifically relationships originating and maintained completely online, seem to be less valid than in person relationships or even long distance relationships that at least began in person
- Penpals
- Sharing neopets
- Personal connection through parents
- Balloon penpal
- Was this person real or created by the parents?
- Trolling/social media norm breaking
- Commenting on white womens photos on instagram of them wearing headdresses
- Hard to decide who to troll
- Partitioning
- Some people partition who they interact with by app
- One experiment: chose to do the assignment with family who would definitely forgive her for her social media norm breaks
- People chose many different routes over who to pick
- Some prefer familiar people who will forgive them or understand
- Some people chose unfamiliar people who they would not have to interact with again
- Social media is usually thought of as a platform to connect with others
- Alternate use of instagram- private platform to create a history of one's year
- Interesting that it's private within the app but at the same time "public" simply by being on a website or social media platform
- Anarchist librarians
- Is it worth taking the steps to be more secure
- Does taking the steps to be safe suggest that you're doing something wrong?
- Incognito mode is a sham
- Joke- "be careful of people standing behind you"
- Use incognito when searching flights so they can't track your cookies and bump prices
- More paranoid after going to china about internet security
- Use of VPNs
- Hiv epidemic in villages in China
- 20-30 years later professor song's friends book about the scandal still can't be published
- Frightening not knowing when your online information might become relevant and possibly have a negative impact on you
- Its a habit to give information now
- Simply attending a birthday party required personal information
- Why is giving this information necessary and what will it be used for?
- Is online consent informed or coerced?
- Some websites don’t even have a check box for agreeing to their terms of use anymore, they just assume that by using the website you agree
- Girl on buzzfeed who got people to buy her pizza
- Another girl got her car dug out of the snow
- Someone tried to use yikyak to do their laundry for free
- Post disappeared instantly
- Someone on national television posted a sign saying "venmo me money..."
- Creation of venmo makes the process of sending money really easy even to people you don't know
- Youtubers have also used venmo in order to get donations from viewers/subscribers
- Patreon is like venmo but the money is more designated to specific ventures
- Is patreon online panhandling?
- Patreon is about building a brand which distinguishes it from panhandling
- We live in a world where you can start on youtube and end up on a legitimate tv show
- Lines blurred between reality and the online world
- Social media creates a hybrid existence of our lives in reality and our lives in the virtual world
- Second life
- Boellstorff challenges idea that things in virtual world are not "real"
- Is it about virtual vs real or about questions of authenticity and experience
- In a sense all of us are cyborgs
- Your own body acts as a mediator of the information you're trying to communicate
- Elon musk
- Starting a new enterprise that is rumored to implant things in the brain to create screens that can come up in your eyes
- H+ show- posthumanism?
- Are we already at this level?
- The tools we use are "extensions" of our brain
- Calendars
- Apple watches
- How are our norms of body being transformed?
- A lot of discussion of exposure to screens for infants because they don’t know how this will affect brain development in infants
- Elon musk and steve jobs did not allow their children exposure to iphones
- Very hard to cut them off though
- You can't trust what you are perceiving- fight club
- Neuroscientist at dartmouth who studies video games and perception
- Stressed that the human brain evolved without the outside impact of the screen
- Black mirror
- People lived to relive their past through the technology input in their brains allowing them to replay memories
- Technology provides a route to escape life
- But at the same time it opens up the possibilities because you can meet more people, do more things, etc
- Not necessarily meeting more people but meeting people differently
- Were airport bars more interesting before the development of cellphones?
- Nowadays people are less likely to even consider the idea of putting down the phone and meeting people in person
- Basketball- hometown advantage is lessened because tinder creates the opportunity to hook up with anybody no matter where they are
- Is online research ethics any different from normal research ethics when people view their online selves and tools as extensions of their person
- There is a piece on hyper reality and the speeding up of online interactions
- Relevant to why cyber bullying is such a big thing
- Real life interactions that might take years to get to that point, cyber bullying achieves in merely a few lines of text
- Online ethics are not necessarily intuitive but learned over your life because of your personal experience with online social media
- Can you make a statement that there is no real life separate from technologically mediated real life and that everything is all just real life and then make a separate research ethics
- Yes you can do unethical things online that arent possible or facilitated by face to face interactions
- But that is outside of the field of research(cyber bullying)
- Publishing thoughts online is more public than voicing it out loud
- IRB
- There are exemptions for observing public behavior
- What is considered public behavior online?
- Is lurking alright online or no?
- To what degree do you have to declare your status as a researcher, especially in studying past online activity and posts
- What protections can people expect to have?
- With in person speaking, you can see who is seeing you but online you can not see your audience and their motivations
- Publishing a book is more akin to publishing something on a forum
- Publically available and you do now know what future people will observe it
- However people do not view social media use as publishing in a book
- Online posting is viewed as a current discussion not necessarily a publishing of a writing
- End goal of online positing is not the recording of it but the messaging of it
- Research ethics is different from legal requirements but they are conflated in the end
- IRB is designed to protect institutions form liability
- University is merely concerned with abiding by laws
- What is allowed while doing research on something can be different from what is allowed in publishing research
- Ashanti wrote a book on love letters
- People who gave her the letters were the receivers not the writers of the letters
- Acute ethical questions there
- Each press has different standards for permissions and ethical issues
- There is a lot of red tape on even simply things such as publishing photos on instagram
- People have to be asked permission and can also request at any point for it to be taken down but they must be aware that someone else might have recorded it by that point
- Only way to change what is in a book on the other hand is that the book has to sell enough copies to warrant a second edition in which you can remove a photo
- More unethical?
- Are research ethics easier to manage online?
- Even if something is okay according to IRB it might not be okay by other ethics
- IRB works by a white ethical standard and does not always agree with indigenous ethics
- Inclusion and exclusion criteria
- Confirming tribe identity can be seen as a challenge of their identity which can be problematic when studying people's identity and their understanding of their ties to their tribe
- IRB didn't care about the ethics when the research population was not american
- In the lab ethnography it was typically hard to lurk without sticking out
- Ethical challenges of lurking online
- Need to recognize there is a body of lurkers in the group already
- Need to look at specific context, can't make a blanket statement that lurking is always bad
- Can you do an ethnography on the people who are absent/lurkers on websites
- Webmasters- digital keepers of archives
- Ask people offline? But how would you identify them
- Google now has a tool that allows you to track the number of searches on a term over the years
- Is constructing a false profile wrong?
- Can't make a blanket statement again
- Are our facebook profiles "fake"
- We are constantly curating our online personas
- Is curating equivalent to lying?
- Bump.com
- For expecting parents or new parents
- Just by making a profile and not even including details there will be an immediate assumption that you have some relation to pregnancy
- Should youre "fake" profile be grounded in truth?
- One way of determining ethics is looking at whether the use of this false profile would motivate someone to be more honest with you in a way they normally wouldn’t
- Curating vs putting on mask
- Catfish
- Internet facilitates certain types of misrepresenting yourself
- Gold farmers are being exploited
- Dont have power
- But they also have a sense of empowerment
- Ge Jin stated that they gamers enjoyed the job
- Does the fact that gamers derive enjoyment from their work in these "sweatshops" change how we view these gold farms?
- Content moderators
- Gruesome and psychologically damaging
- Like the gold farm sweatshops
- The gamers don’t have any other options
- Vulnerable
- Many lie to their parents about what they are doing because their parents do not view gold farming as true work
- What right does someone from an outside group to decide whether someone is vulnerable
- Everything is relative
- Relative socioeconomic levels
- Important to consider context that they live in
- Power dynamics
- Gold farmers are subverting the game
- Not playing authentically as a player
- Controled by company
- People who are punished for subverting the game are the gold farmers and not their buyers
- The gold farming management system is similar to banking management systems
- Bankers are not punsihed but the middle management is
- Graduate students
- Exploited to do grunt work for advisors
- Starts as a job that sounds cool but ultimately it can be compared to the situation of the gold farmers relatively
- Is the gold farming a restricted agency that is an inherent system of inequality
- Within the world of the game the attackers targeting gold farmers are angry because of the inequality brought into the virtual world by these gold farmers
- Cell phone use at the job can be positive and negative
- Some social media platforms such as tencent in china also serve as news platforms
- Can news circulated on facebook be trusted
- Facebook curates your facebook to you in addition to your curating of your profile
- Fake news has always existed but we merely didn't bring attention to it before
- Onion
- Satire but not everyone realizes it
- There was a tumblr dedicated to family responses to onion articles
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