Bernie Hogan

The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media: Distinguishing Performances and Exhibitions Online

Presentation of self (via Goffman) is becoming increasingly popular as a means for explaining differences in meaning and activity of online participation. This article argues that self-presentation can be split into performances, which take place in synchronous “situations,” and artifacts, which take place in asynchronous “exhibitions.” Goffman’s dramaturgical approach (including the notions of front and back stage) focuses on situations. Social media, on the other hand, frequently employs exhibitions, such as lists of status updates and sets of photos, alongside situational activities, such as chatting. A key difference in exhibitions is the virtual “curator” that manages and redistributes this digital content. This article introduces the exhibitional approach and the curator and suggests ways in which this approach can extend present work concerning online presentation of self. It introduces a theory of “lowest common denominator” culture employing the exhibitional approach.

Visualizing Personal Networks: Working with Participant-aided Sociograms

We describe an interview-based data-collection procedure for social network analysis designed to aid gathering information about the people known by a respondent and reduce problems with data integrity and respondent burden. This procedure, a participant-aided network diagram (sociogram), is an extension of traditional name generators. Although such a diagram can be produced through computer-assisted programs for interviewing (CAPIs) and low technology (i.e., paper), we demonstrate both practical and methodological reasons for keeping high technology in the lab and low technology in the field. We provide some general heuristics that can reduce the time needed to complete a name generator. We present findings from our Connected Lives field study to illustrate this procedure and compare to an alternative method for gathering network data.

Connected Lives: The Project1

Barring the odd beast and monk, just about everyone is connected these days - at most by 6 degrees of interpersonal connection and often by less (Milgram, 1967; Kochen, 1989; Watts, 2003). Yet only a tiny fraction of those who are connected ever interact in any meaningful way as friends, relatives, neighbours, workmates, and acquaintances. These ties comprise our individual personal communities, each a solar system of 10-2000 persons orbiting around us (Wellman, 1979).

Persistence and Change in Social Media

In “Star Trek,” Scotty suggests that Transwarp beaming is “like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet, whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse” (Abrams, 2009). The study of social media faces similar challenges because new tools are developed at a rapid pace and existing tools are constantly being updated with new features, policies, and applications. Users tend to migrate, in often unpredictable ways, to new tools as well as to adopt multiple tools simultaneously, without showing consistent media preferences and habits (Quan-Haase, 2008). As a result, for scholars it sometimes feels as if the social media landscape changes too quickly to fully grasp and leaves scholars permanently lagging behind. We argue in this article that beyond the ebb and flow of everyday events and seemingly idiosyncratic usage, trends exist underlying long-term trajectories, persistent social practices, and discernable cultural patterns. Overarching findings have emerged within and across disciplines because the study of social media has from its early beginnings necessitated a multidisciplinary approach. From power laws to impression management, from privacy concerns to online social capital, there is a great onrush of scholarship on social media, its properties, and its consequences. Regardless of discipline, all scholars face the challenge of constant change occurring in this arena. This challenge exists on a number of different levels. On a practical level, research and publication timelines continue to be slow relative to the rapid transformation occurring in social media. This rapid change is particularly prominent with the study of social network sites, where both the popularity of certain sites and their privacy policies continue to be in continual flux (boyd, 2006, 2007; Gross & Acquisti, 2005; Tufekci, 2008; Young & Quan-Haase, 2009). On an applied level, challenges exist in teaching social media theory and methods because best practices and understandings quickly become obsolete. On a theoretical level, generalizable claims need to be constantly updated to reflect the new realities in policy, features, and usage. This and papers in the following issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society on “Persistence and Change in Social Media” compiles a series of papers to identify elements of social media practice that are persistent across platforms, users, and cultures. The goal of the papers is not only to present articles addressing current topics and the current state of knowledge, but also to present research pointing toward the long-term trajectory of social media development and usage. In this article, we propose the term social media practice as a means to overcome the transient nature of the phenomena encountered on social media and identify practices that are stable and universal. We argue that through a focus on the practices involved in the domestication and mainstreaming of social media, it is possible to develop more robust theories and present widely applicable findings. Because social media are a moving target, it is impossible to provide concrete answers to many research questions and to resolve conclusively existing debates about the longterm trajectory of social media. For example, there will never be a single and ideal way to self-present on social network sites (Tufekci, 2008) or a perfect hyperlink to place on one’s website. Despite the intangibility of the subject, recurring insights emerge. We list four examples of findings that have shown some stability:

Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty

Geographies of codified knowledge have always been characterized by stark core–periphery patterns, with some parts of the world at the center of global voice and representation and many others invisible or unheard. Many have pointed to the potential for radical change, however, as digital divides are bridged and 2.5 billion people are now online. With a focus on Wikipedia, which is one of the worlds most visible, most used, and most powerful repositories of user-generated content, we investigate whether we are now seeing fundamentally different patterns of knowledge production. Even though Wikipedia consists of a massive cloud of geographic information about millions of events and places around the globe put together by millions of hours of human labor, the encyclopedia remains characterized by uneven and clustered geographies: There is simply not a lot of content about much of the world. The article then moves to describe the factors that explain these patterns, showing that although just a few conditions can explain much of the variance in geographies of information, some parts of the world remain well below their expected values. These findings indicate that better connectivity is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the presence of volunteered geographic information about a place. We conclude by discussing the remaining social, economic, political, regulatory, and infrastructural barriers that continue to disadvantage many of the worlds informational peripheries. The article ultimately shows that, despite many hopes that a democratization of connectivity will spur a concomitant democratization of information production, Internet connectivity is not a panacea and can only ever be one part of a broader strategy to deepen the informational layers of places.

Racial and Ethnic Biases in Rental Housing: An Audit Study of Online Apartment Listings

As rental markets move online, techniques to assess racial/ethnic rental housing discrimination should keep pace. We demonstrate an audit method for assessing discrimination in Torontos online rental market. As a multicultural city with less segregation and more diverse visible minorities than most US cities, Toronto lends itself to multiname audit studies. We sent 5,620 fictitious email inquiries to landlords offering apartments on Craigslist, a popular Internet classifieds service. Each landlord received one inquiry each from five racialized groups—Caucasian, Black, E/SE Asian, Muslim/Arabic, and Jewish. In our experiments, “opportunity denying” discrimination (exclusion through nonresponse) was 10 times as common as “opportunity diminishing” discrimination (e.g., additional rental conditions). We estimate Muslim/Arabic–racialized men face the greatest resistance, with discrimination occurring in 12 percent of experiments. The level of discrimination is modest but significant for Asian men (7 percent), Blacks (5 percent), and Muslim/Arabic women (5 percent). Discrimination was evenly spread throughout the city. Sesgos raciales y étnicos en el alquiler de viviendas: Una auditoría de los anuncios de apartamentos en línea (Bernie Hogan y Brent Berry) Resumen A medida que los mercados de alquiler tienen más presencia en Internet, es preciso actualizar las técnicas para identificar la discriminación racial y étnica en dichos mercados. En este artículo demostramos cómo utilizar un método de auditoría para evaluar el nivel de discriminación en el mercado de alquiler de Toronto en el Internet. En tanto ciudad multicultural con un menor nivel de segregación y minorías más visibles que la mayoría de las ciudades estadounidenses, Toronto constituye un buen ejemplo para llevar a cabo estudios tipo auditoría usando diferentes nombres. Enviamos 5,620 mensajes electrónicos ficticios solicitando información a caseros con anuncios en Craigslist, un popular servicio de clasificados por Internet. Cada casero recibió un email de uno de cinco grupos raciales–personas de raza blanca, negra, asiáticas, musulmanes/árabes y judías. En nuestros experimentos, la discriminación tipo “negación de oportunidades” (exclusión vía la ausencia de respuestas) resultó ser 10 veces más común que la discriminación tipo “reducción de oportunidades” (por ejemplo, agregando condiciones adicionales). Según nuestros estimados, los hombres de origen musulmán/árabe son los que encuentran mayor resistencia dado que se dieron instancias de discriminación en un 12% de los experimentos usando nombres árabes masculinos. Los niveles de discriminación son más modestos pero significativos con respecto a los hombres asiáticos (7 por ciento), las personas de raza negra (5 por ciento) y las mujeres musulmanas/árabes (5 por ciento). Los patrones de discriminación estuvieron distribuidos de manera equitativa en toda la ciudad.

Assessing Structural Correlates to Social Capital in Facebook Ego Networks

Research in computer-mediated communication has consistently asserted that Facebook use is positively correlated with social capital. This research has drawn primarily on Williams’ (2006) bridging and bonding scales as well as behavioral attributes such as civic engagement. Yet, as social capital is inherently a structural construct, it is surprising that so little work has been done relating social capital to social structure as captured by social network site (SNS) Friendship networks. Facebook is particularly well-suited to support the examination of structure at the ego level since the networks articulated on Facebook tend to be large, dense, and indicative of many offline foci (e.g., coworkers, friends from high school). Assuming that each one of these foci only partially overlap, we initially present two hypotheses related to Facebook social networks and social capital: more foci are associated with perceptions of greater bridging social capital and more closure is associated with greater bonding social capital. Using a study of 235 employees at a Midwestern American university, we test these hypotheses alongside self-reported measures of activity on the site. Our results only partially confirm these hypotheses. In particular, using a widely used measure of closure (transitivity) we observe a strong and persistent negative relationship to bonding social capital. Although this finding is initially counter-intuitive it is easily explained by considering the topology of Facebook personal networks: networks with primarily closed triads tend to be networks with tightly bound foci (such as everyone from high school knowing each other) and few connections between foci. Networks with primarily open triads signify many crosscutting friendships across foci. Therefore, bonding social capital appears to be less tied to local clustering than to global cohesion.

A Global Shift in the Social Relationships of Networked Individuals: Meeting and Dating Online Comes of Age

This paper reports on an analysis of original data from a cross-national survey in 17 countries of couples and their social relationships. The survey focused on cohabiting couples, who have the Internet at home. Each member of each couple was asked how they met their partners, what dating strategies they used before they met, how they maintain their current relationships and social networks, and how these individuals use the Internet in everyday life and work. The survey was conducted online, using a professional pool of respondents to draw our samples. There is wide variety across the world and within nations, such as in approaches to online relationships, to friendships, and to the Internet. However, several general patterns are clear. First, slightly over a third of the sample has some experience with online dating, while 15 percent are currently in a relationship that started online. Beginning in 1997, coinciding with the rise of Web 2.0 technologies, online dating starts to gain prominence. This rise in prominence continues until 2009, when over 30% of Internet-enabled couples appear to have met through online dating. A similar growing prominence of the Internet is also occurring around the maintenance of relationships, and the development of social relations more generally. In these and other ways, it is clear that the Internet has become a new place to look for relationships, and that the Internet is important for strong as well as weak ties within social networks.

Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia

There are now more than 3 billion Internet users on our planet. The connections afforded to all of those people, in theory, allow for an unprecedented amount of communication and public participation. The goal of this article is to examine how those potentials match up to actual patterns of participation. By focusing on Wikipedia, the worlds largest and most used repository of user-generated content, we are able to gain important insights into the geographies of voice and participation. This article shows that the relative democratization of the Internet has not brought about a concurrent democratization of voice and participation. Despite the fact that it is widely used around the world, Wikipedia is characterized by highly uneven geographies of participation. The goal of highlighting these inequalities is not to suggest that they are insurmountable. Our regression analysis shows that the availability of broadband is a clear factor in the propensity of people to participate on Wikipedia. The relationship is not a linear one, though. As a country approaches levels of connectivity above about 450,000 broadband Internet connections, the ability of broadband access to positively affect participation keeps increasing. Complicating this issue is the fact that participation from the worlds economic peripheries tends to focus on editing about the worlds cores rather than their own local regions. These results ultimately point to an informational magnetism that is cast by the worlds economic cores, virtuous and vicious cycles that make it difficult to reconfigure networks and hierarchies of knowledge production.

Evaluating the Paper-to-Screen Translation of Participant-Aided Sociograms with High-Risk Participants

While much social network data exists online, key network metrics for high-risk populations must still be captured through self-report. This practice has suffered from numerous limitations in workflow and response burden. However, advances in technology, network drawing libraries and databases are making interactive network drawing increasingly feasible. We describe the translation of an analog-based technique for capturing personal networks into a digital framework termed netCanvas that addresses many existing shortcomings such as: 1) complex data entry; 2) extensive interviewer intervention and field setup; 3) difficulties in data reuse; and 4) a lack of dynamic visualizations. We test this implementation within a health behavior study of a high-risk and difficult-to-reach population. We provide a within--subjects comparison between paper and touchscreens. We assert that touchscreen-based social network capture is now a viable alternative for highly sensitive data and social network data entry tasks.