Sarah Wilson

Eng. 213/Dr. Newbold

Emerging Media Report

Article Link: http://hdl.handle.net/1961/4433

How many “friendships” does Facebook or Myspace say you have? 50? 150? 500+? Imagine this scenario: you log onto either of the two and a reminder that it is Henry Smith’s birthday pops up on top. Take my advice; if you feel weird writing a simple “happy birthday” on his wall, it’s time to defriend. Although this isn’t the greatest present, it’s the method used by me and many of my friends to determine our “weak ties,” “strong ties,” and “intermediary ties,” as discussed in the article [master’s thesis] “Facebook “Friends” How Online Identities Impact Offline Relationships” by Jessica Marie Vitak.

Vitak’s article explores the line that is currently separating digital relationships and more traditional, offline relationships and discusses how it is beginning to blur, thanks in large part to social networking websites. According to Vitak: “Strength of ties between two individuals can be evaluated according to the amount of time spent together, the emotional intensity of the relationship, the level of intimacy and the degree of reciprocity” (17). However, what if that tie develops outside the physical realm? If you are unlike me and write happy birthday to everyone, than your social networking sites are probably booming with “weak ties.” However, what I found surprising was that weak ties are most important and vital to the social network! These acquaintances or people we’ve never met face-to-face (“weak ties”) create local bridges between members of the network, which provide a person with a larger number of paths and shorter paths to information. Thus, information is much easily attainable and less work and time is spent gathering it. Plus, Facebook publicly displays your links to others, which can strengthen a tie such as between you and someone you have multiple mutual friends with. However, a large amount of links, or friendships, can create an illusion of popularity. Yet, these links can lead to groups where one can find others with mutual interest, such as animal lovers, car enthusiasts, and even Goths. 

Despite this easy access to information on millions, it is important to differentiate between one’s real world identity and one’s virtual identity. Vitak defines one’s real world identity as: “the sum total of that individual’s traits and interactions as presented in a typical social setting, whereas she defines ones virtual identity as: completely constructed through the information presented in his/her profile on the social networking website to which the individual belongs, as well as the communication between that person and his/her online friends. This construction of a virtual identity reminded me of the writing of McLuhan in his book, The Medium is the Massage. He wrote that we aren’t only shaped by our family anymore, but by several varieties of media as well. We have the ability to leave the “front-stage” parts of us behind, offline, and publish the “back-stage” parts of ourselves online. However, this isn’t always a good thing. These two separate identities bring me back to Shirky’s discussion on filtering and publishing.  With technology becoming such a vital part of life, filtering and publishing is becoming just as vital. A large majority of occupations expect a professional demeanor from their employees both inside and outside of work. As a future teacher, I understand this greatly. While close friends and family (“strong ties”) may ignore the misspelled words, incorrect grammar, and drunken pictures on your Facebook page, future employers, and newly established friends (“weak ties”), may not be as accepting.

We have more time to reflect on our thoughts when we use CMC communication. We are not put on the spot, but have time to pause and organize our ideas. I feel like this went against Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  He states that the internet is taking away our deep thought processes and making us lazy, but as the article I read states: “Those employing interactive strategies through email fond their partners’ rating their communication effectiveness much higher; and when asked personal questions, those communicating via email offered more detailed answers than those communicating face-to-face.” Could more clarity in our words positively influence our friendships in real life, as well as online?

This brings me to the next point discussed in the article: how social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace work and influence the strength of ties of offline and online friendships.  Facebook and Myspace allow anyone to submit their favorite books, movies, music, quotes, and even photos from childhood, Christmas, or last week’s movie night. Depending on each person’s privacy settings, this information might not be readily accessible to new future “friends” or onlookers. However, when the friendship becomes official, both friends can mutually learn about the other by reading their interests and browsing pictures. If a new friend recognizes the clash of the other friend’s virtual identity and real world identity, it might end up putting a dent in the real life friendship. Although, if two friends separated by distance choose to reconnect on a networking site like Facebook, strong ties may be maintained and even strengthened further. However, it is possible if one friend becomes sucked into the virtual world of Facebook and chooses to do a majority of his or her communication through that platform, a higher amount of weaker ties can develop.

Furthermore, the function of social networking sites and their influence on the strength of ties of offline and online friendships reminded me immensely of Chapter 3 of Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody. In this chapter, platforms such as Flickr promote “share than gather” activity. From reading this article, I feel as though Facebook and Myspace also promote “share than gather” activity. Not just by befriending each other first and then sharing information about each other, but by then copying and pasting links that pop-up on every friend’s network.  These can include current events, interesting blogs, personal blogs, or any informative information available online. Moreover, this allows every person to become a media outlet, like Shirky discussed in Chapter 3 of his book Here Comes Everybody.

Detecting Spam in a Twitter Network- Bridget Gelms

Technology is changing the way people communicate. Whether it’s by instant messenger, blogging, video chatting, or e-mail, people need to adapt to the ever-progressing forms of communication that the digital age is providing us with. One such way is Twitter. Twitter is a website where people can send out of a version of a text message from virtually anyway. With many different devices applicable to Twitter, this site makes it simple for people to send out a message. Unfortunately, if it’s easy for legitimate users it’s also easy for illegitimate users like spammers.

            Spam and spammer are words that were born out of the creation of the internet. Spam, as defined by Google, is the “abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk message indiscriminately” while spammers is said to be “a person or organization that sends spam.” Twitter and its structure allow spam to evolve with the times meaning that those junk-messages that used to be filtered through our e-mail account can now reach us through different modes of communication. Spam and spammers are constantly coming up with new and innovative ways to trick spam detectors and appear like they are normal everyday internet users. This, in turn, creates a need for researchers to come up with new and innovative ways to detect spam messages. Previously, spam was detected based on the content of the actual message. Now, spammers are beginning to be identified by how their spam is sent, which is harder to detect but is an element to spam that spammers can’t hide. This piqued the interest of researchers Sarita Yardi, Daniel Romero, Grant Schoenebeck, and Danah Boyd who conducted a study in an attempt to learn about spam on Twitter. 

The structure and functions of Twitter have changed the spamming game and this article identifies three main reasons. First, Twitter allows you to “follow” someone, even though they aren’t “following” you. Therefore, spammers can be connected to copious amounts of people without having to go through the work of having others follow them. This is something that sets Twitter apart from other social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace where both parties consent to being “friends” is necessary for someone to see your activity. Secondly, the ability to “re-tweet” (or “tweet” something that someone else has “tweeted”) gives them the opportunity to alter links that were originally to legitimate sites so that they now direct someone to the spam. URL shorteners are used so that links don’t take up the majority of the tweet (Twitter only allows its users to use 140 characters per tweet). These shorteners obviously don’t reveal the full name of the website, so those who click on the link trust it’s legitimate. This gives spammers a new way to conceal their spam links. Third, the user-generated aspect of Twitter means that tweeting patters change in regularity, amount, and circulation depending on its users. This allows spammers to use what’s being said on Twitter to their advantage.

            Another feature of Twitter is “hashtags”. By placing a hash mark in front of a group of words that describe what your tweet is about, it creates a link to all those other tweets that are also marked with that same hashtag. For example, someone might tweet “What is the deal with that smoke monster?!” and tag it “#LOST” in order to participate in a discussion of the popular TV show Lost. Twitter tracks what the most popular hashtags are and posts the top 10 list on the main page, making it extremely easy for thousands of people to engage in a conversation about the same thing, even if they aren’t “following” each other.

            This article reports finding of various research conducted about what users use Twitter for. While reasons vary, it’s been found that most people use Twitter for its “common ground” aspect. Even though they might only be following a few people that they actually know they are able to connect to many people that they don’t based on some sort of common ground, made possible by the hashtags.

            Specifically, this article tracks the growth of a hashtag- one that is generated solely within Twitter meaning its birth, life and death occurs only with Twitter. They give examples of #michaeljackson and #iranianelection as not being applicable to this study because outside influences could affect the progression of the hashtag. They use #robotpickuplines, a hashtag that started with user grantimahara, a user who has many followers because they are a host of the popular television show Myth Busters (and also a robot builder, hence the joke about robot pick-up lines). They track #robotpickuplines from the very first one, to everyone who participated in the conversation, all the way to the extinction of #robotpickuplines.

            Within two hours of grantimahara tweeting #robotpickuplines, it had become a “trending topic” and appeared on Twitter’s homepage (and remained there for at least three more hours) which gave the hashtag more viewership which led to new tweets with the tag #robotpickuplines and even re-tweets of existing ones. The study found that the most commonly re-tweeted robot pick-up line was “Hi my name’s Vista. Can I crash at your place tonight?” This study reports that they tracked #robotpickuplines over its lifespan of four days and found 17,803 tweets involving this tag which were generated from 8,616 different users. They also found that “user participation followed a power law distribution where 6,021 users tweeted one time, 2,595 tweeted two or more times, and a dedicated 205 tweeted 10 or more times using the #robotpickuplines.”

So where does information about spammers fit into this process? As I’ve identified before, spammers use certain tactics in order to infiltrate legitimate tweets such as including links to a URL, shortening the URL’s so that the site name is not visible (this then puts the responsibility on host sites such as www.bitly.com to sift out the spam), using more than one hashtag to cover a larger base, and sometimes they use “suggestive keywords” that never fail to get some hits such as “naked”, “girls”, or “webcam”.  With these tactics in mind, the researches followed a simple set of rules to detect spammers within the #robotpickuplines trend. They manually went through a random sampling of 300 tweets with the hashtag #robotpickuplines and marked each one as spam or not spam. They then used this set to compare the rest of the tweets to. The study reports that “our algorithm matched 91 percent of the time, with 27 missed spam tweets and 12 false positives.”

Using this information, they were able to discover a correlation between the lifecycle of the #robotpickuplines and spam spread through utilizing the hashtag. The rise in the amount of spam messages containing the tracked hashtag ran in conjunction with legitimate tweets containing #robotpickuplines with a slight lag. Despite the spammers taking about five hours to being latching onto this hashtag after grantimahara’s first posting, 14% of all tweets containing the tag #robotpickuplines were generated by spammers. Here are two bar graphs from the study illustrating their findings; the first shows the first 24 hours of #robotpickuplines. The study reports that the hashtag “started at 11am CST and spiked around 3pm when it became a trending topic. It dropped around 4am and picked up again, although less heavily, the next day.” The next graph is the spam tweets using #robotpickuplines.

The study also addresses a series of questions that may or may not affect the results. For instance, they research whether the age of the Twitter account is different between spam accounts and actual accounts. They also determine whether or not spammers tweet more often than regular users of Twitter and if spammers have more friends than followers linked to their account. Finally, they also examine whether or not spammers are grouped together. While their research is thorough and their findings to these questions are interesting, I think that what we can relate to our work in our Digital Literacies class comes from the information already presented. This study is relevant to our work in English 213 for a number of reasons, but I want to focus primarily on themes found in Clay Shirky’s Here Come Everybody, specifically chapters five and seven because they relate to this study in regards to why events within the study progressed the way that they did and perhaps why Twitter is such an easy target for spammers.

            In chapter 5 of Here Comes Everybody, Shirky includes a figure (found on page 129) that illustrates the principles of Twitter very well by showing the relationship between an audience and the pattern of conversation. The larger the audience, the looser the conversation will be. We see this in the study of the hashtag #robotpickuplines on Twitter in that not everyone who participated in that conversation heard everything else that was said within that conversation. Had the researchers tracked the life of a similar hashtag within a medium that has a much smaller audience than Twitter, the conversation would have been much more contained and not been a target for spammers. 

            So how has Twitter changed the way spam works? For e-mail, spammers had to look for who to target and how to do so. In Twitter, they now look for what to target and when to do so. For example, the “Trending Topics” table on the main page of Twitter lets users (and spammers) know what are the most popular items being discussed. As they begin “trending”, they build momentum. This can be a definite indicator for spammers as this takes care of the “who” and “how” that they used to have to figure out with email.

            Chapter seven in Here Comes Everybody also addresses issues related to Twitter and this study. Shirky stresses the importance of how the speed of various processes affects our everyday lives and he begins his chapter titled “Faster and Faster” by saying that “collective action is different from individual action”. This is seen in the study on the evolution of #robotpickuplines on Twitter because it took a massive amount of people to link up to this hashtag enough that spammers took an active interest in utilizing it for their benefit. Shirky directly discussed Twitter in chapter seven and describes it as being “simple” yet “compelling”. Shirky explains that websites like Twitter are primarily used for the benefit of small groups like people who read their friends’ tweets. However, he also describes instances where Twitter can be far more important in its uses as he describes a democracy activist in Egypt who has recorded his arrest through his Twitter account. It’s through this “simple” process that human beings can create something “compelling”.

            Much of Shirky’s book hones in on the idea that people now possess the tools necessary to organize efficiently and create a revolution by using these tools to our advantage. Twitter can be one such tool. While it might not seem like tweets involving #robotpickuplines isn’t that important, this study does demonstrate the power that Twitter can hold. A nerdy joke about robots was sent out into the digital realm in less than 140 characters. This single action that probably only took its creator a few seconds to do sparked a form of “organization” that resulted in connecting thousands of people to the same joke. This group of people commanded enough attention that spammers took interest. It was because of one simple message that thousands of people, who were otherwise not connected to each other in any way, were able to take part in a conversation instantly. The researchers created a visual representation of that conversation:



With each pink dot representing a Twitter account, this picture makes a statement about our abilities to organize and adopt new behaviors as people who are living in a digital world. This picture astonishingly shows just how far something like #robotpickuplines can extend within the span of a few hours.

Works Cited

Boyd, Danah, Daniel Romero, Grant Schoenebeck, & Sarita Yardi. “Detecting spam in a Twitter network.” First Monday Volume 15 Number 1-4 (January 2010): web. http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2793/2431

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2008. Print.

 “define: spam”, “define: spammer”. Google (October 16, 2010): web. http://www.google.com

People and Social Networks

            In her graduate thesis paper, Jennifer Ryan discusses the far-reaching ramifications that social networks have on human communities. She discusses the history of social networks, the way people use them, the feelings they evoke, and the effects they have on people’s lives. Her research has lead her to the conclusion that social network participants:

Use social network sites to extend their offline communities into online practice in a manner more closely in line with the concept of "networked individualism," which suggests we are expanding our social networks (weak ties in particular) according to our cultural tastes and communities of membership. (189)

            Jennifer’s thesis is interesting in that she makes a bold argument over who is creating a social identity and the reasons for doing it. Unlike McLuhan’s prediction that society would move from an oral culture to a massive online collective consciousness, Jennifer claims that our online presence is used only to enhance our offline lives. Instead of creating whole new communities, we seek out our likes. In this way our offline lives are still more prevalent than online. We’re not using the Internet as this worldwide tool to improve mankind or connect as a whole species; instead we’re simply using it to connect and strengthen existing bonds.

            Jennifer looks at three social networks for her research: Facebook, Myspace, and Tribe. Her study shows that a certain demographic of people connect and use each network. Musicians and high school students have mostly claimed Myspace, Facebook a mixture of college, high school and young adult, and Tribe by the rest of the people leftover. Out of the three, Facebook and Myspace claim spots in the top five of most visited websites. All of the users on these sites manipulate technology to connect with people that exist within their real life communities. Instead of broadening out, social networks help us to focus in to the point where words like “Facebook stalking” are accepted norms. While Jennifer points out the positive ways that we connect and maintain these relationships, she also highlights the loss of privacy that pervades this new social media.

            People using these websites are mainly concerned with social and personal vices. The sharing of information is centralized around likes, friends, and lifestyle niches. If you look back at how Shirky talked about existing institutions losing control over the flow of data, you can see where social networks have helped corrode that control. With people joining sites and sharing information based on their likes and desires, web based technologies have been forced to create applications and feeds centered around their audiences. The information on the Internet is so pervasive that if a certain website doesn’t have the information or capabilities we desire we simply move on to the next available resource. An online social network’s capital gain depends on a large number of people constantly being on their site.

            The idea of spreadable media becoming the new norm for community communication has been a topic that we’ve covered extensively throughout the semester. Jennifer identifies social networks as the mainframe through which media is now being shared. According to Jennifer:

            The Internet provides a platform for the spread of information and ideas that can bring like-minded individuals into contact with one another regardless of temporal or spatial distance. Such perceived potential provides support for utopian ideologies, such as “neotribalism” and “technoshamanism,” that purport to promote the sanctity of humankind- the “sacred” campfire ritual and shamanistic practices described at the beginning of this thesis- utilizing modern technologies to tap into the “collective un/consciousness.” (138)

This idea that the Internet will provide a way for people across the globe to connect and share ideas that will ultimately improve the nature of humankind is an idea shared by Shirky. This idea of neotribalism simply means that the new tribe, the new communities we’re forming are through digital media.

            Jennifer’s thesis is centered on social networks and the way people use them to communicate and form identities. I find myself agreeing with her observation that currently we’re using social networks to help cultivate and maintain offline lives. However, I believe she overlooks the rapidly growing online identities that are being formed along side the offline ones. With every passing year I’ve found that more and more offline faucets of life are being invaded by technology. Academic life is now embedded with the need to have online identities and communities that are a separate entity than our offline ones. There are some people and things that are wholly dependent upon the Internet for existence. Professors can now establish and maintain relationships with others in their field without having to first connect offline. The ease with which the Internet allows people to form social bonds, not just strengthen existing ones, is a vital part of social networks.

            After reading our texts for the semester and Jennifer Ryan’s thesis I feel that the Internet is still largely underused as an educational tool. Most of the points that Selfe made seem to still be largely ignored or unanswered. We still are no closer to figuring out what technological literacy is, or how we should use it. People seem to be focused on personal benefits that technology provides more than humanistic benefits. I don’t think the question is if the Internet is making us stupid, I think the biggest question is what should we be expecting the Internet to do for us? Technology has evolved so rapidly and become so accessible that I don’t think we’ve had time to carefully examine how or what we really want to use it for. It can do anything. Jennifer writes “the Internet is a complex new medium that allows for the intimacy, interactivity, and casualness of speech as well as the permanency and permeability of writing.” (168) People are still too amazed with it that I don’t think anyone’s ready to stop and consider the points that Selfe or Shirky make. We don’t have rules or regulations for using it for business, education, or world markets. What we really need is a way to examine what we have, what technology and the Internet are capable of, and figure out the best way to manipulate it to become a useful tool and not just a social tool.

Ryan, Jenny. (2008). The Virtual Campfire: An Ethnography of Online Social Networking.

“Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance” by Anders Albrechtslund - Emerging Media Research Project

Tyler Trosper

Eng 213 Section 4
Dr. Webster Newbold

Emerging Media Research Report     

            The article “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance”, written by Anders Albrechtslund, fits into the research our class has been doing in regards to social networking.  As one can tell from the title, the article goes in-depth over the issues of surveillance “as a form of participatory surveillance involving mutuality, empowerment and sharing” (Albrechtslund).  Albrechtslund connects this research to Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the “global village”, as everyone that connects to the internet is able to observe anyone they want, no matter the distance.  Also, this surveillance of others is generally created through social networking means, people placing their entire lives up for display in the regards to what information they post about themselves on social networking websites.  Albrechtslund’s article goes into territory we never touched as a class, that is surveillance has become generally much easier with the creation of social networking, but it can also be seen as a scary tool for people with ill intentions.

            With the advent of social networking, the available information for a certain individual has increased tremendously.  For example, Albrechtslund points out the increase of youths posting an excess amount of information about themselves on social networking websites, which at times places them in danger of being attacked by predators, identity theft, and so on.  However, he brings up that that this is ignorance of the user and those issues should not lead to the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) banning certain use of the internet at public libraries and schools, as that increases the digital divide, a term we encountered in Selfe’s Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention.  As only a few students would have access to a certain portion of the internet because of others’ lack of internet at home, the situation creates a problem of inequality (Albrechtslund).  In that case, students should instead be warned about the dangers of posting personal information by teachers and parents, not hindered by what content they can access on the internet.

            Along those lines, surveillance of individuals can stretch back many years through social networking.  The feelings in a blog or comments on a certain person’s “status” on a social networking website can be temporary, but when those feelings are shared on the internet they can be viewed by others for a long time (Albrechtslund).  In getting a new job, more and more employers are searching their potential employee’s social networking past, which can be seen negative depending on the type of information is found.  Even through another person’s role in social networking, as Albrechtslund mentions through Tribble, your chances of getting employed can be jeopardized.  However, this, judging others by their use of social networking can be seen as a type of discrimination, as the individual is only expressing their rights of freedom of speech, and, depending on how far back certain information was posted, could be completely taken out of context today (Albrechtslund).

            An important term pops up in Albrechtslund’s article briefly, the idea of the “global village”, which had been mentioned in McLuhan’s book The Medium is the Massage.  In terms of surveillance, social networking as a “global village” works very well.  In a village, everyone knows everyone else’s business and watch out for each other.  Through social networking, people can be watched all the time, and not just from present activities but also through previous use of the internet as all the information, even as mundane as comments on someone else’s internet profile, is stored indefinitely on a database (Albrechtslund).  In this way, surveillance is much easier to accomplish through social networking than it is through real life; vertical surveillance, the sense of one person looking over all, like the government, can instead be replaced with horizontal surveillance, the most common person being able to spy on an individual (Albrechtslund).

            Furthermore, the example in the beginning of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, the incident of the missing cell phone, indicates the power of surveillance through social networking means.  One incident involving a handful of individuals was observed by millions of people worldwide, a phenomenon unheard of before the creation of blogging.  The observation eventually led to actions, suggestions by lawyers, support from others, and the eventual action of the police in arresting Sasha.  Albrechtslund brings up the idea that as soon as surveillance is acted upon it becomes “as a mutual, empowering and subjectivity building practice – is fundamentally social”, a true “global village” that is capable of observing others and available to help out when the need arises, such as with the incident with the lost cell phone (Shirky, McLuhan).

            Surveillance of others through social networking can also be used, as demonstrated earlier with the missing cell phone from Here Comes Everybody, for sharing of information and action among others, but also used to learn about others and become friends.  In this sense of a “global village”, a person is able to find someone of similar interests by first observing them, finding this information, which is most likely easily viewable through social networking means.  And through this observation these two individuals, possibly towns, states, or even countries apart, friendship could be formed (Albrechstlund).  I can provide an example of this myself.  As a teenager, I was infatuated with a certain series of video games, but no one I knew in the physical world played or liked them as much as I did.  However, this changed when I joined a forum that was specifically catered toward fans of that particular series.  And through my observations and interactions, I was able to make friends with people all over the world who liked that video game series.

            Surveillance through social networking can have its benefits along with its share of problems.  Young individuals can be prone to attacks by various means because of how much information they are willing to put online about themselves.  And through the actions of youth, employers can judge their potential employees, as information created on social networking has the potential to last forever.  However, with action through surveillance, such as the missing cell phone incident, positive actions toward a resolution can be produced (Shirky).  And through surveillance, likeminded individuals are able to find each other through social networking.  All-in-all, surveillance through social networking means has its dangers (identity theft, predators, etc.), but there is still a lot of positive potential in the act of surveillance (Albrechtslund).

“Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance” by Anders Albrechtslund:  http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2142/1949