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

Sarah R's report.

October 20, 2010

Emerging Media Research Report

The author of this current research paper is making the assumption that the reader knows and understands what Facebook is and does as a social networking site.  If the reader does not have this basis of knowledge the author would like to direct you to Neil Selwyn’s introduction in the article below.  Selwyn gives background information on the use, history, and development of the Facebook social networking site.  In the article entitled, “ ‘Screw Blackboard… do it on Facebook!’: and investigation of students’ educational use of Facebook,” Selwyn discusses the academic use of Facebook at the University of London in the United Kingdom. 

Facebook offers perhaps the most appropriate contemporary online setting within which to explore how social software applications ‘fit’ with higher educational settings and communities of educational users and, therefore, investigate the current assumptions surrounding social software and education. (Selwyn)

Facebook is the opportunity that Selwyn had been looking for to see how social networking sites are used in the educational system, more specifically the educational system within universities.  The debate among educators seems to boil down to whether or not these social networking sites actually help the students in their studies or if they really just impede the student’s pursuit for an education.  Selwyn proceeds to do a study to try and make some conclusions in either direction on the matter at hand. 

The group studied was undergraduate students attending Coalsville University in the school of Social Science. With 909 students in the Social Science School only 694 had active Facebook accounts, over the course of a four month period of data collection, and 68,169 wall postings over a five month period of analysis this study appears to have been supported with evidence. 

The evidence directed toward educational-related postings on the 694 profiles within the study brought forth five main themes including:  recounting and reflecting on the university experience, exchange of practical information, exchange of academic information, displays of supplication and/or disengagement, and exchanges of humor and nonsense.  As a college student the author of this paper certainly can agree that these are the most common themes in her own experience with Facebook and the educational posts she herself has made.  If a Facebook user were to log on right now they would very likely find all of these types of postings among their networks. 

Selwyn comes to the conclusion that, “…in terms of education-related interaction, Facebook was used primarily for maintaining strong links between people already in relatively tight-knit, emotionally close offline relationships, rather than creating new points of contact with a ‘glocalised’ community of students from other courses or even other institutions.”

In Marshall McLuhan’s book, “The Medium is the Massage,” he makes the following statement:

At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective. … Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.  As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. …We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of the experience coexist in a state of active interplay.

Technology, specifically social networking, has given us the ability to be a part of individual’s lives without necessarily investing in their lives.  The Facebook postings that Selwyn observed kept a few strong bonds between close friends.  Visual means of apprehending the world are just too slow; so instead of meeting face to face students are becoming more dependent upon social networking sites.  This transfer to technology based communication could be seen as a good or a bad thing depending upon the circle of critics involved.      

And yet Selwyn states that the data shows that students are doing the exact same thing they have always done only now it is instantly spread to more than just the small group in the back of the lecture hall. Students are still investing in their close friendships only in a new medium. In a sense the data listed shows,

How Facebook has become an important site for the informal, cultural learning of ‘being’ a student, with online interactions and experiences allowing roles to be learnt, values understood and identities shaped. … Facebook should therefore be seen as an increasingly important element of students’ meaning-making activities, especially where they reconstruct past events and thereby confer meaning onto the overarching university experience.

As an avid Facebook user the author of this piece would have to agree with much of what Selwyn states in his article, but cannot say that Facebook has not wasted hours of her time.  As one of the opening remarks to Selwyn’s article states, “We're all going to fail university. It's not because we're stupid, or because we don't do any work. It's because of an uncontrollable addiction to Facebook and msn. When we're not drinking, or being hungover, or thinking about drinking while being hungover, we're talking about drinking and debauchery on msn or Facebook. This has got to stop. It won't, we all know that, but it should,”

Introductory statement from the ‘Facebook is Sucking Out My Soul and MSN is Feeding on the

Remains’.  Although there may be benefits to Facebook such as networking, keeping in contact with classmates, and all the other reasons it is helpful, it seems that the average student is not using Facebook as a medium to pursue those benefits.  Rather Facebook is used as a distraction from the work at hand.  The author of this piece has in the time it has taken her to write this 1,000 word paper has gone on Facebook at least thirty times. 

 But is method of distraction really any different than what students did in the past?  Is this generation ignoring the professor and causing distractions for themselves any different than the students in the ‘90s that didn’t have laptops in their classrooms.  Those students surely made diversions for themselves, procrastinated, doodled, or spaced out in a classroom or lecture hall. The conclusion to the Facebook dilemma is this:  there is no conclusion.  As McLuhan put it on his opening pages,

The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

Facebook is by no means an exception to this statement.  Academic conversations that happened in the back of the classroom before now happen online and to a much wider audience.  Society will continue to be wrecked by social networking and technology.  Technology will increase, and there will be a time when Facebook will be accepted just like the printing press was accepted. 

Facetime by Natalie Friday

As the economy has suffered within the past few years and school are slowely limiting the amount of time students can spend outside of the classroom on fieldtrips and out of class experiences, teachers are being forced to improvise and come up with more creative ways to keep students interacting with the outside world. Some teachers connect their students with pen pals in different schools, and even different states. But what if we could connect the students in a more physical way, or at least connect a face with a name, or a classroom with an idea. The article Face Time by John K. Waters opens the doors to the idea of Videoconferencing in the K-12 classroom.

            The use of videoconferencing and connecting simultaneously with another person or class is what is called face-to-face. This is a way of connecting a face or voice with an email, text, blog, etc. The article introduces the concept my examining a fun and creative activity that has connected over 86 kindergarten through either grade classrooms which is a connection of 1800+ students between two states. Each classroom designs a Halloween monster using classroom materials and creates a list of instructions to go with their particular design. Included in the design the students have to include formulas that relate to math to help align particular angles, shapes, etc.  These details are posted in a wiki or blog that connects the classroom with another class located in another area. The second classroom then designs a monster using the specifications given. To finalize the activity the students use a video conference to display and share their monsters to see if they match up.

            There are several helpful organizations and websites to help teachers who are currently active with the videoconferencing programs as well as teachers who are newly interested. The groups, Polycom Collaborations Around the Planet (PCATP) and Two Way Interactive Connections in Education (TWICE), provide a website that allows educators to connect and present information about curriculum and program ideas as well as unite to collaborate with other schools and classrooms. PCATP and TWICE  are connected alongside a program called Read Around the Planet which occurs every year in March. This connection is another way that the use of video conferencing is connected to education.

            The article also talks about the concept of mashups. The idea of mashing up is the use of combining two web applications to join and work as one. The most common example used in the article is combining Good Maps with another application such as Ebay real estate to create a new and exciting use of technology. This is relavent when the Read Around the Planet connected with videoconferencing  This new technology is beginning to connect K-12 classrooms with a large social network. The connection here is the creation of a social network using videoconferencing.

            The article addresses what may come in the future as far as face-to-face activity goes online. According to the FaceTime article, “Video interactions have grown significantly in the past three years, from a single project with 20 classrooms participating in the 2003-2004 school year to more than 500 connections among numerous projects serving 15,000 students during the 2006-2007 schools year.” It is discussed that teachers in technology ready and enhanced districts are having the highest amount of project collaboration overall. This then presents the idea that videoconferencing may come to be more popular outside of the classroom. It is presented the online videoconferencing is the next form of social networking and is a personal alternative to the faceless online chat. The company Paltalk is one of the first companies to use this videoconferencing technology which at the time of the article had over 4 million users worldwide.

            Lastly the article briefly mentions some perks and downfalls that might arise with the use of face-to-face technology in the school setting. The upside to students and classrooms connecting with blogs and wikis is that they can be accessed during any time of the day and do not need collaboration or synchronization with another time zone. Real-time, however,  is the one downfall to this idea of connecting with other schools through video conferencing. This keeps students and teachers from being able to “time-shift” as they do when using blogs, emails, etc.

Facebook: Sara Lester

Facebook: Reflecting our society?

     The article Facebook Privacy Settings: Who Cares? by Danah Boyd and Eszter Hargittai seem mainly to explore privacy debates over Facebook, when they actually delve much deeper into the societal significance of Facebook.  The main points in the article deal with the complaints by journalists over increasingly complicated privacy settings on Facebook.  The article then proceeds to discuss Facebook’s actions to appease those in the media.  As Facebook has added more and more users to this social network, it would seem as privacy controls were being changed quite often.  The main issue is that privacy setting would automatically be set to allowing everyone with a computer to access your personal information.  In addition one would have to manually go in and change the settings to private.  The real question is, does the growing number of Facebook users know how to change their settings?

    Another very important aspect of the article discusses a study conducted of Facebook users age 18-19 regarding privacy settings.  The results show that being a regular user of the site is associated with more frequent changes to one’s privacy settings, as well as most Facebook users reported having modified their privacy settings at least once in 2009. Privacy is apparently very important to young adults today.  However, Facebook has expressed that is a common assumption that today’s youth are unconcerned about privacy and will not take steps to protect themselves.  

    Facebook takes the social media aspect to an extreme.  In the Medium is the Massage; by McLuhan it highlights several aspects the Internet that will change our society.  Facebook has remained flexible, which is why it has remained a widely popular social media site and it also gaining more users everyday.  At 500 million users, Facebook is doing something correctly.  McLuhan notes much about surveillance in his novel.  Facebook is not all the private when users are unable to figure out how to change their settings and is no way private to their “friends.”  Also when using Facebook a post, picture, status update is immediately sent to all your followers, demonstrating his idea of immediate consequences.  Another point I would like to connect to McLuhan’s is the idea of communalism on the net.  This is especially true for Facebook because one is apart of a community and is constantly speaking, posting, poking, commenting, and “liking,” what their friends are doing.  In essence on Facebook you are involved in a mini virtual society.  The last topic I will discuss about McLuhan is the clash of old versus new.   Studies have shown that new users are unable to adequately protect themselves compared with older users.  This also is the case of older users compared with younger users.  This makes obvious the point that the younger generation is better equipped with technology because as Shirky eloquently states that technology is most powerful when we forget its capabilities.  The younger generation has a much easier chance of experiencing this phenomenon.
    Another theorist that we have studied is Carr in the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  His main concerns are that we all have become distracted because our attention spans are extremely short due to the Internet, we are lazy, and what instant feeds are doing to us.  I could hardly help but connect this with Facebook.  Users are fed with constant status updates, new pictures, and new friend requests. Users are accustomed to the fast paced commenting and scanning.  Not to mention that Facebook is absolutely a huge distraction for students and now adults these days.  It is no secret that students spend a lot of time on Facebook in class.  Luckily teachers are catching on quickly and prohibiting laptops. Since teachers are outlawing computers, man useful programs for education are simultaneously being shut down as well.  Facebook has become an addiction for the growing 500 million users are counting, while other activities are put in the backseat.
    The last topic I would like to discuss is rhetoric.  Facebook is a host to numerous participants, its audience.  It is quite a large audience.  The question is, is it purposeful?  Most of the information streaming through Facebook seems quite arbitrary.  The majority of posts consist of simple everyday tasks, poking people, clicking “like,” among other functions.  Facebook does not promote searching for truth. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in order to connect other students on one campus.  It was essentially created for social reasons, and it has consisted as a social site that merely connects people.  The importance of the site is to allow people to be attuned with their friends’ daily activities. However, for some people Facebook is a way of knowing the world because we now understand the world in digital terms.  Facebook is a tool for expressing value and perhaps truth, as Freedman discusses.  In referring to the article, it is absolutely purposeful information.  The article is aiming to find the truth behind whether or not the users of Facebook are concerned with privacy.  The article is successful using a study.  Facebook is another avenue of rhetoric.  Discussing Shirky’s point of view about technology changing everything that we do.  Facebook has allowed everyone to be a publisher; it has changed the way people gather together.  Facebook has the capacity to gather people efficiently, in order to accomplish one goal.  Mostly, Facebook is not used in this way. 
    The significance of the article is that is shows that we are as a society are willing to share personal information more readily than before. This is accelerated through the Internet, but more so through websites such as Facebook where sharing personal information is vital in being a member of the site.  This article does show a resistance to whom we will share information with.  The point is that this changing media, that essentially we have no control over, is evolving so quickly that most users are unable to keep up with the changes.  Concerning digital literacy, the simple fact that users are unable to locate information on a social media site, does not seem promising for digital literacy skills.  However, it was noted that younger users are changing and manipulating their privacy information.  This leads to the conclusion that the younger generation is more technologically savvy and they are digitally literate compared with older generations.  This is important to further study because social media is expanding at rapid rates, it is important to see the effects it will have on digital literacy.  My opinion is that Facebook is an important site to most students and they will continue to use it whether or not they fully understand it.  I do think digital literacy is improving overall because children are using and practicing on the Internet.  Younger kids are able to manipulate settings on social media, whereas others are unable to. Overall Facebook has changed the way we live, communicate, gather, and understand the Internet.  Facebook has the capability to positively impact our lives, while it could also negatively effect it, as Shirky would argue it is in the way we utilize it. 

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.

Emerging Media Report - Jake King

Jake King

Newbold

ENG 213 Section 004

10-20-10

Emerging Media Paper

How Will People Afford the New Media?

Article:  Emerging Media: The Cookie Monster

The proliferation of new media channels presents an interesting conundrum: How will consumers be able to afford all these new services?

By Damien Stolarz

            In class, we have been discussing how advancements in technology have made an impact in our world, whether it be how we communicate, learn, collaborate, or view the working world as a whole. We have seen positive and negative impacts, such as how schools are dealing with their teachers having limited knowledge to teach their students regarding technology or how luxuries like Google give everyone the same availability to knowledge. But something that is brought up in the article Emerging Media: The Cookie Monster by Damien Stolarz is the role of money in all these new advancements, whether it is how technology companies make more money from it and how none of it may matter if hardly anybody can afford it. The main topics he addresses are how consumers end up paying for media from several places and what businesses do to continue gaining new consumers.

            Stolarz states in his first sentence that TV companies are always looking for what they like to call the “triple play” customer. This means that the customer subscribes to a home phone, cable, and TV from the same carrier. At times nowadays, companies can even find the “quadruple play” customers, those who have the triple play services along with the mobile phone. “Although this seems like hitting the customer convenience jackpot, a rule of thumb for subscription services is to not let that bill get too big,” Stolarz states. But Stolarz then brings up a problem concerning that fourth piece of media. “Now that you can watch video content online, on your phone, on your portable media player, and even in your car, the real question is how many different subscription fees consumers can endure.” These are the same new types of media we have been looking at in how our world has changed due to them, but the convenience of them may not matter in the future if the availability of them in so many areas becomes too much for the average consumer to handle financially. Stolarz says, “The prospect of developing new businesses that expand demand for their content on new platforms is exciting, but the threat of cannibalization of their existing revenue streams is also real.” An example of this would be the DVD industry. Many content owners feared DVDs at first, yet the market of it grew enormously. So to think that mobile, internet, and in-car content won’t continue to fight would be ludicrous.

            But despite some of the disadvantages businesses have in selling their emerging media in this manner, there is still light at the end of the tunnel that keeps them alive. Stolarz uses the example of when TV came into our country. “Consumers don’t want to view ads. But there’s one thing they object to even more: spending money. This is how TV in the U.S. took hold. The availability of a world of free content compelled penetration into 99% of U.S. households. Building value-added cable and, later, satellite services on top of this unmatched installed base proved not only feasible but profitable,” he writes. The same type of advertising is taking place when it comes to internet and TV has come along for the ride. There are TV screens at gas pumps, in taxis, and don’t forget about the huge plasma TVs at the mall, which are strategically placed in purchase-decision locations creating a vicious cycle where continues to be made. Stolarz gives his opinion of how the same type of deal will take place with our new emerging media and the internet. “It starts with location. Your phone asks for your zip code. Gradually, with GPS, carriers learn where you are at any time. Then they can stream some (ad-supported) video newscast relevant to the place you’ve just driven to. Most importantly, the phone remembers, "OK, this phone owner goes between these two places a lot. I bet they’d prefer JetBlue." This will lead JetBlue to be advertised near this customer for it to be purchased.

            The point of this article is to explain how the industries in charge of the new emerging technologies in our world are comparable to the loveable cartoon addict we know as the Cookie Monster. The Cookie Monster knows one thing and one thing only, and that’s that cookies are absolutely delicious just like these industries know that the internet, mobile phones, etc. are all in great demand for convenience. And just as the Cookie Monster doesn’t know when to stop eating cookies, these industries don’t seem to even be looking for a way to have these medias at rest. The internet is becoming a necessity, and they know that people will continue to purchase several methods of access to it. As this activity grows, so will prices and internet bills leaving the power and convenience of the new emerging media almost worthless since it will be at a point where hardly anyone can afford them.

“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