What’s new about social media?

According to dweinberger:

I’m on a panel about “What’s Next in Social Media?” at the National Archives tonight , moderated by Alex Howard, the Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, and with fellow panelists Sarah Bernard, Deputy Director, White House Office of Digital Strategy; Pamela S. Wright, Chief Digital Access Strategist at the National Archives. It’s at 7pm, with a “social media fair” beginning at 5:30pm.

I don’t know if we’re going to be asked to give brief opening statements. I suspect not. But, if so I’m thinking of talking about the context, because I don’t know what social media will be:

1. The Internet began as an open “address space” that enabled networks to be created within it. So, we got the Web, which networked pages. We got social networks, which networked people. We are well on our way to networking data, through the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. We are getting an Internet of Things. The DPLA will, I hope, help create a network of cultural objects.

2. The Internet and the Web have always been social, but the rise of networks particularly tuned to social needs is of vast importance because the social determines all the rest. Indeed, the Internet is a medium only because we are in fact that through which messages pass. We pass them along because they matter to us, and we stake a bit of selves on them. We are the medium.

3. Of all of the major and transformative networks that have emerged, only the social networks are closed and owned. I don’t know how or if we will get open social networks, but it is a danger that as of now we do not have them.

Network analysis

Network analysis is the study of social relations among a set of actors. It is a field of study -- a set of phenomena or data which we seek to understand.

In the process of working in this field, network researchers have developed a set of distinctive theoretical perspectives as well. Some of the hallmarks of these perspectives are:

• focus on relationships between actors rather than attributes of actors
• sense of interdependence: a molecular rather atomistic view
• structure affects substantive outcomes
• emergent effects

Network theory is sympathetic with systems theory and complexity theory.

Social networks is also characterized by a distinctive methodology encompassing techniques for collecting data, statistical analysis, visual representation, etc.

Social Relations

Social relations can be thought of as dyadic attributes. Whereas mainstream social science is concerned with monadic attributes (e.g., income, age, sex, etc.), network analysis is concerned with attributes of pairs of individuals, of which binary relations are the main kind. Some examples of dyadic attributes:

• Kinship: brother of, father of
• Social Roles: boss of, teacher of, friend of
• Affective: likes, respects, hates
• Cognitive: knows, views as similar
• Actions: talks to, has lunch with, attacks
• Flows: number of cars moving between
• Distance: number of miles between
• Co-occurrence: is in the same club as, has the same color hair as
• Mathematical: is two links removed from

Topics

1. Substantive effects of social network variables

• Attributes of ego network --> access to resources, mental/physical health
• Network closeness --> influence, diffusion
• Similarity of position --> similarity of risks, opportunities, outcomes

2. Substantive determinants of social network variables

• Personality --> centrality?
• Similarity --> friendship ties? (Homophily)
• Reduction of cognitive dissonance --> transitivity?
• Strategic "networking"

3. Network determinants of network variables

• Relationship between density and centrality

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Technology and shape of new culture

When a new technology with radically different and improved capabilities of communication is first introduced into society, it will profoundly change the culture and, indeed, mark the beginning of a new civilization. Qualities inherent in the technology help to shape this new culture.

New civilizations produce new institutions of power as functions once handled informally become organized, detach as separate power centers, and assert political and cultural dominance.

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Hypertext as a social practice

Greco's 1996 "Hypertext With Consequences" argues for a critical approach to hypertext as a social practice.

I'd suggest that appropriating literature and cinema theory's analyses of the role of realism as a style which conceals its own manufacture, and in so doing concealing various other ideological assumptions (gender, colour, race, for instance) would provide one mechanism for this analysis. For instance, simply having the theoretical vocabularly to be able to identify syntagmatic hypertexts as 'realist' provides a context from which it is possible to argue that the hypostatisation of usability, link transparency, and structure embody instrumental conceptions of information that ought to be recognised as one style (or genre) of knowledge production, rather than an ideal.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links

A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Irrelevant practice of writing

Jameson relates the bourgeois attitude toward art as separate from social reality directly to the ideology of bourgeois individualism.

This ideology leads to the perception that private life is sharply distinguished from the public world of politics in a way that parallels the bourgeois tendency to treat art as a self-enclosed realm separate from the social and political world. But this perception of art does not elevate it as somehow superior to everyday reality; instead it merely renders art irrelevant, diminishing its function in life. Similarly Jameson insists that the ostensible privileging of the private over the public that is central to bourgeois individualism actually impoverishes private life by obscuring the domination of the individual by capitalism and creating a false illusion of individual autonomy.

Far from creating the strong, independent individuals mythologized by bourgeois ideology, capitalism "maims our existence as individual subjects and paralyzes our thinking".

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Political context

Literature and culture cannot be separated from their social and political context.

We must careful attention to both form and content in elaborating the political significance of cultural artifacts, and a strong commitment to the necessity for a utopian element in critical thought.

For instance, Jameson's work is marked by a sophisticated use of concepts from poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and other forms of critical thought, but it remains firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition. It also provides an important methodological model in its insistence on the importance of a metacritical approach—that is, on criticism that not only discusses its object but also performs self-conscious critical examinations of the grounds of its own inquiry.

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Paper-based book

Several essays (R. Chartier, E. Souchier, E. Eisenstein, J. Svenbro, L. Canfora...) provide information about the history and development of the book.

They remark that the paper-based book, like the alphabet, was once the latest technological rage and was met with resistance, like the computer, from the establishment because books are more than delivery systems for information. They are a way of life developed over centuries. Our concepts of authors, readers, the canon of texts, and texts as intellectual property were not inevitable but were the cumulative results of part social and political choices....

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Fragment and socio-economic fracturing

Fredric Jameson has argued for the necessary relation between expressions of psychic and textual fragmentation and a concomitant socio-economic fracturing characteristic of late capitalism.

"[I]t is not the unity of the world that demands to be posited on the basis of the unity of the transcendental subject; rather, the unity or incoherence and fragmentation of the subject that is, the inaccessability of a workable subject position or the absence of one ‹ is itself a correlative of the unity or lack of unity of the outside world". (FJ)

On a related note, some feminist anthropologists have found it more than a bit strange that postmodern theorists began to question the basis of certain truths at precisely the moment when they lost the absolute privilege to define them. [Hartsock, Marcia-Lees, Nicholson] Thus the postmodern turn may be an expression not of some absolutely true state of things, but of the decentering and fragmentation currently experienced by dominant groups and classes, experiences that are at least partly the result of women's struggle for equality in the home and the workplace in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/
See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Paper-based book

Several essays provide information about the history and development of the book. They remark that the paper-based book, like the alphabet, was once the latest technological rage and was met with resistance, like the computer, from the establishment because books are more than delivery systems for information. They are a way of life developed over centuries. Our concepts of authors, readers, the canon of texts, and texts as intellectual property were not inevitable but were the cumulative results of part social and political choices....

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts.