Online Discussion

The concept that intrigued me the most from the two articles was the idea of trust and how it is used to shape the marketability of the product. In these two articles, the products are books and eBay.

The Six Degrees article discussed the types of influence that online book reviews give to the readers. I actually don't really read book reviews online - I usually only read books that are recommended by my friends or that are on the Times bestseller list. After reading these articles, I guess I do this because I trust these reviewers who have proven themselves to be accurate in the past, and I don't trust the online reviewers who I don't know. But perhaps other people do listen to these reviews - the article discussed how some publishers actually pay critics to write reviews of their books for others to read, and how plagurism is also a problem on some websites, which I didn't really think about. It would be interesting to see if these positive or negative reviews actually affected the sale of the book, or if the book was truly good or bad...

I found the eBay article interesting as well, in that the entire "community" is built on trust and reviews alone. I had never actually heard of the 5 basic values of eBay and I wonder if those values really do affect the trust that seems to have been built around the community. I find it interesting that for the most part, users are quite legitimate and I think that the reviews in this situation play a huge factor on whether or not a user decides to purchase a certain product. Since the entire situation takes place online where you just "meet" people online, you have to have some basis of standards in order to feel that that sense of trust exists, and that's why these reviews are essential.

Final Project Proposal

What I really want to do for my final project is create a Facebook campaign in conjunction with my job at Columbia. Part of my job is to promote and market special events in the Dining Hall, and we are having an event on Tuesday, December 11 called "Have a Greener, Learner Holiday." I want to create Facebook campaign to get students to come to the dining hall on that evening using Facebook as a marketing tool. Although I don't have a Facebook account, so the media will be new to me, I want to try to incorporate some of the ideas that we talked about in the social networking classes, about the different nodes and connections that can be formed, to market this event. My mid-term assignment was on viral marketing, and I'm hoping that my Facebook account will be clever enough to spread news of this event virally through the undergraduate dining community.

One of the broad questions that I will be exploring is how can one use social networks to promote their own agenda. Some other questions might be what makes a campaign a success or a failure, how is community/identity represented in the social networks that I use and how does that affect the campaign, (for example, if the leader of a dining group sends out the Facebook invite versus a random student, how does that affect who attends the event), and how does my Facebook account represent communitity and identity within the Columbia Facebook community.

Some of the resources I plan to use are basically any article I find on Facebook, including some of the recommended readings for our class, face-to-face interviews, and some of the articles I have found on viral marketing from deli.cio.ios on the components of creating a successful viral campaign.

I realize that this idea might be a little "out there," so I wanted to send it along tonight in case I have to come up with another idea before class tomorrow. :)

Interaction

I really like the article called "None of this is Real." Going along with my interest in identity, I loved how the author made me think about ways that identity is constucted. I realize that identity is created online in one's profile, in the groups that they join, in their digital photos, in their interests and hobbies. But I didn't realize that accepting or declining friends would also indicate a level of identity as well. I love the statement "People convey impressions and these are usually deliberate." If you want people to know who you are and what you are about, you can do so in many different ways, and the opposite is true as well. If your profile only features "friends" who are attractive and you always decline people who are unattractive, what is that telling the other users and what are you trying to convey?

I also found the fact that there were 300,000 Friendster users in June 2003 and then 3.3 million by October 2003. That is an AMAZING jump - thanks to blogs, other social networks, the media, and viral marketing, Friendster is a great example of what word-of-mouth marketing can do. 3 million more users in 3 months and not really doing any work at all - that's my kind of marketing! I would be interesting to see if Friendster really did do any kind of marketing for this product, or if it was just the nature of the product in general that lured people into creating accounts.

I also enjoyed the onling dating article. Even though I feel like you should expect some sort of desception when you sign onto these accounts (and why not when 86% of users are deceptive!), it's also easy to see why people do it. Maybe they think that the other person won't really notice - 5 pounds here or there and an inch or less may not really be that noticable and does it really matter? Or maybe they think that once the date comes, the deceiver might be able to win the other person over with his sparkling personality.

I also thought it was funny that the article basically said to lie in certain ways - "In online dating profiles, women should lie more about characteristics related to youth and physical attractiveness." That seems kind of funny. It would be one thing to say that men like young women, but it's another to say that women should lie about their age. HA!

Social Networks

I still think that it's funny that I think that all of this social network stuff sounds really interesting and is a great way to market people (which is part of my job), but I am not involved in any of the social networking sites! I think part of the reason is because I don't want people to know everything about me and that I don't want to appear vulnerable online, and I think another part of it is just laziness! I actually am involved in linkedin, but I don't really know how to use it and only accept friends when they promt me first.

Anyways...

I enjoyed The Fifth Link article the most - I actually had no idea how the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon game got started, and how IMDB.com got started either, which I go on everyday to check on the latest gossip. It was also interesting to see that that was one of the first examples and a great example of how a social network actually works and can be utilitized.

I liked the ideas behind why people are involved in these social networks with complete strangers - the "Public Displays of Connection" article touched on the points that perhaps that person wants the most links, they want to feel connected, or their profile is very attractive.
One phrase that I have never heard before was "She's not my friend, she's my Friendster," which I thought was really clever - it acknowledges that the meaning of friend and online friend can be completely separate identities, which is one of the concepts that I was most interested in during the beginning of the class.

In conjugation with identities, I also liked the part in the article about how sometimes people can be ruder online than they typically are in real life. I manage an online student feedback portal, and some of the comments that we get are quite rude! One of the managers told me that if someone is particularly irate, I should invite them to come to speak to me in person, where they will most likely be more polite and sensical.

Final Project

After reading this week's articles, I feel like I may change my focus a bit. The article about the Virtual Ethnography was really interesting to me, and I am really intrigued about the response that the community gave when the judge decided to release his verdict online. I was amazed at the number of websites and the way that the release got so much attention - sparking new websites, web chats, petitions, along with the traditional media outlets.

I'm do marketing for Housing and Dining at Columbia, and I am very interested in the marketing aspect of the Internet - such as how the judge's decision caused so many people to follow the trial online. One similar such incident that comes to my mind is the Blair Witch Project, in which the filmmakers created a marketing scheme to convince people that they had footage of a horrible event that occured, caused a huge number of people to go to the movies and see the footage first hand. I love this type of marketing and I'm interested in how this occurs and why people do "fall" for it or believe the hype. Although I think it all stems from the same areas that we were speaking of in class, about identity and community.

So as far as things that I need, I feel like I want to talk to Sarah about my thoughts for the final project, including this marketing aspect, and I would also like to find some more articles, similar to the one about the virtual ethnography. I also want to do a few interviews with some of my friends that are frequent MUD users.

The Reoccuring Theme of Identity

For me, it seems that my reoccuring theme is identity. I am constantly wondering how identity is defined and determined through the internet, and how one's online personality is different from one's real life personality, or if it is indeed different. In my second post, I also talk about isolation and I wonder how one's online personality can affect their real personalities. Does talking online and playing games online affect their RL personalities. Could talking online everyday make a person more confident in RL because of the "friends" and experiences that each person has, and does that mean his or her personality has changed?

I guess one of the questions that I have, which actually arouse in my last blog, was how "I've just started to wonder where the line is between one's online personalities and one's real life personality." Is it true that "you are what you pretend to be"? I am also curious, like I said in my previous blog, if we are just characters, acting out a role in our online games, or do these different personalities actually exist and extend over to our RL's?

Kind of a lot of questions, but hopefully I will find out some answers this semester :)

Identity

I really had no idea about MUD's before I read this article. I knew that one of my co-workers was constantly staying up late playing a virtual game, but I didn't realize what exactly that entailed - that there were interactive characters with personalities involved.

My only experience with the virtual world is when I had to play Sims for this Urban Planning class I was taking during undergraduate at Columbia. We had to build cities throughout the semester, using different techniques and report on what worked and didn't work. I could never get into it though because I just felt like it wasn't real - I didn't care if my city was successful or if it failed. I think that this is one of the more important points about logging into the virtual world - that the world and the characters in it became what you make if it. Just as "Aspects of the Self" quotes, "you are what you pretend to be."

I think the part that I disagree with the most is the notion of the various identities in the article about "Identity in the Age of the Internet." The author claims that "Identity, after all, refers to the sameness between two qualities, in this case between a person and his or her persona. But in MUDs, one can be many."

I guess I've just started to wonder where the line is between one's online personalities and one's real life (or RL, I've now learned) personality. Maybe there are many different types of personalities, such as the virtual one and the multiple self on page 17, but when do these personalities eventually become a part of you? Do these personalities only exist online - but what if you spent the majority of your time online? Does that mean that technically you have embodied these characteristics, and that your online personality has now become your RL personality?

Also, how can you distinguish between you, as the personality, and you, as the creator. Just because you create a character who exhibits certain behaviors does not mean that you are that character. Which also disagrees with my first notion that you are who you pretend to be :). So are we just characters or do these different personalities actually exist?

Personally, I think that everyone is different. Some people go online and can separate themselves from the virtual world, like myself, and some people choose to embody the personoa of certain characters and actually believe that they have these characteristics as well. And maybe they actually do...

As a side bar, I think that blogging is funny because I feel like I just type with such a stream of consciousness and it almost feels random to me. As an English major, I would never turn in a paper with these rambling statements, but somehow in a blog, it seems ok.

CMC!

Computer-Mediated Communication - my favorite topic!

To be honest, I had no idea about Second Life - I really had never heard of it until this last semester at TC, and I had no idea that companies were actually coming up with virtual shoes and products to market on Second Life. I still don't exactly understand how it works - so the Linden dollars work in Second Life, but you can convert them to real money also? Does that mean you have to sign up and use your credit card?

I think all of the new legal issues that are arising because of Second Life is also very interesting - the issues involving virtual sexual and verbal harassment and rape. Does this count as a real act of rape, is it punishable and if so, how is it punished and who decides all of this!? I know the Linden company puts the disclaimer on the page before you sign up that they cannot control what goes on during the session, but does that really absolve all issues? Maybe a court system and police force will have to be neccessary in the future, or maybe offenders will lose their privledges within Second Life.

I also thought that Sean, the young man with the cerebal palsy, is a prime example of the potential benefits that CMC can have for people. One of the reasons that people like online chatting and creating online personalities is because they can hide their real life personality behind this "second" one. People who automatically get judged on a daily basis just by appearance can understand what it feels like to not be judged in this virtual world. They can create their own selective self-presenation and display that to others as they see fit. But I think that one of the things that everyone should keep in mind is that this selective self-presentation is possible. So the "person" you are chatting with might not exactly exist in real life. And do you care?

One of the things that I think people are fearful of when they think about online personalities is that some people may convert all of their energies into this virtual world and not venture into the real world to make real life friends. You can essentially live your life through Second Life by going sky-diving, going to clubs, and meeting new people without ever having to leave your house! But how are these experiences different from real life experiences?

I think that this is actually the point - that the experiences, while the act may be similar, will not exhibit the exact same experience and emotions that a real-life action would. But is that necessarily bad? Just because it's not the same experience does not mean that a degree of these emotions exist - when you are verbally abused in real life, you feel hurt, and the same goes for the online community. It's just a different level of hurt - it might not be as intense, but it still exists.

In regards to the Walther article, one of the aspects that I found interesting was the cues-filtered-out theory in CMC. One of the questions that I posed in my first blog entry was "how is technology changing the way we define things, such as friends.?" While I understand that online chats do lose some of the physical cues, such as smiling, nodding, and hand gestures, that do take away a portion of the communication indicators that exist in real life, the techology has found new ways to include these type of gestures to indicate emotion. Just like I said in the previous paragraph, it may not be the same level of the experience or emotion, but it still exists in its own way. New ways of communicating feelings, such as with the emoticons and abbreviations like lol and ttyl are ways of giving off cues without actually having to give them physically.

PS I also did not know that the smiley icon has been around for 25 years!

Most Intriguing

The concept that intrigued me most from our readings this week was Norman Nie's quote about how "The internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that further reduces our participation in communities even more than television did before it." I agree with Amitai Etzioni's argument that claims that "the internet increases our social isolation are wholly unsupported."

Based on our conversations from last year and the first week of class, I would have to say that the internet actually increases participation in communities. Perhaps Nie thinks that the isolation stems from staying indoors and working on a computer in an individual aspect. Technically, the physical activitiy of using a computer is an individual activity - logging on, typing, clicking the mouse - is all individual activities. However, the opportunity to interact with people through the internet is infinite. Perhaps a person who is a loner and has a hard time interacting with people in real life can find a chat room that features only people who consider themselves loners as well. This would give them the chance to participate in community-based activities that they would otherwise not have in real life.

This concept contributes to our discussions from last week because it shows that people are responsible for the user potential of the internet. The websites exist, the chat rooms exist, and its up to the users to determine if they want to use them, how they want to use them, and how often they want to use them. If the users only want to play individual computer games on the internet, against the computer, they could be contributing to this isolation that Nie speaks of. But many websites promote interactions with other people - even ordering from places like Amazon.com allows users to provide feedback profiles of other users that are viewable by everyone. And its up to the user to either read or ignore these profiles. Nevertheless, these possibilities are infinite. Even if the user decides not to use the profiles or interactions, others around them do, which still affects the user in some way - maybe they see the profile and ignore it, but they still acknowledge that it exists and that the potential is there.

3 Questions...

I cannot believe that I actually have a blog. For years I have resisted many popular technological mainstreams, such as Facebook and MySpace, only to finally succumb to my first online identity for this class. And so far, I have to say, it's not half bad :)

1. I am very interested in the concept of the online identity and how it can be different from one's identity in real life. For example, one of my friends who is painfully shy loves being online - she had hundreds of friends on Facebook and spends a lot of her time on Instant Messenger, but refuses to talk to any of her peers in her classes! I have another friend who started an online relationship through Match.com and felt the relationship was going well through emails, but once she met the person, she said they didn't get along at all. I'm sure that many things can contribute to someone's online personality, such as time to think of a carefully-planned response and have the ability to actually behave the way he or she really wants to come across to someone. Which brings me to my next topic...

2. Online dating is such a big phenomenon these days. Suddenly the idea of "finding your soulmate" became potentially a lot easier - people can just create profiles and you can find your "match" (on paper) in half an hour! I wonder how this concept will change the criteria that people find to be important in a mate. If you met someone in real life who was fun and nice, but maybe lives far away from you, you might still date them. But online, you don't even have to talk to anyone who lives too far away from you - here you can decide to disregard all of these potentially nice people because they do not match up to your online criteria.

3. How does technology redefine certain words? For example, a friend is "a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard." However, a Facebook "friend" for some people may be only close friends, but a "friend" for someone else may be just a person who they met in a class or who they thought was interestingl, but have never actually met or spoken to. Thus, how do we define the concept of friendship within this technology era?