Attention Consumption

(I found that I had this post saved, wohoo I didn’t have to rewrite this one!)

So I am a bit late to the debate, but here is my critical analysis of Twitter. In case anyone is interested this is my Twitter link: http://twitter.com/azollers

Twitter is a very interesting application, especially due to its architecture/design because it doubles as a status updater and a broadcast text messenger.

Twitter Pros:
For some situations, I think Twitter is an excellent application. For example, Twitter is a great tool during conferences because you can find out the location of your Twitter friends and meet them at interesting panels, for dinner, drinks, parties, ect. You can also get a glimpse into what your friends are thinking, which at conferences might spark great insights.

I also noticed that news sites have like Reuters have also started to
utilize Twitter for quick little headline updates. I also think this is
a great use of Twitter. You can sign up for whatever news services you
want and stay up do date even when you are traveling or away from your
computer.

Twitter is also an excellent tool for political campaigns, because you can know what candidates are doing on a daily basis. This adds an extra layer of information that was never available about candidates previously. You can see what it really means to “campaign”.

I think it would also be a great tool for activism or protests. Much like the use of text messaging during the Seattle protests, Twitter can help organize and direct people in a very quick and efficient way. It can also be used as a communication tool between action events to keep members up to date on activities being organized or conducted by the activist group. I am not sure if any activists groups are currently utilizing Twitter, if anyone knows of any cases please share them with me.

Twitter Cons:
The majority of the activity that does go occur on Twitter is daily status updates. “I just uploaded this song”, “Getting on a plane”, “Going to class”, ect. If we look at Twitter from a critical perspective, it is easy to see that the service is perpetuating the constant consumption of attention. People post to Twitter in a cycle of attention production and consumption. In a way, it just another way to get your “fix” of attention from you “friends”. This fix is important to us because we want to feel connected to other people. These connections become part of our identity, as well as our sense of status within our networks. Certainly, Twitter would not function if you could not “follow” other updates and also have others follow you. Thus, Twitter is just another medium – separate from social network sites like Facebook and IM – that reinforces the constant always-on connectedness that is so prevalent in our culture today. I must admit to feeling unhappy about new technologies ever increasing demand on our time and attention, as well as our  dependence on mediated technology for a constant sense of connectedness.

I think it is important to understand that our connections to other people have become commoditized by the social network sites, and in order to extract value from the users (aka us), the sites goal it to perpetuate the consumption of connections. So in a way, Twitter is reinforcing our consumption culture to the point that we are now consuming banalities. In fact, I think that social sites have created a fetishing of everyday banalities in order to keep the production-consumption machine going.

Filed under: Thoughts

WWW07 Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization

Unfortunately, I will not be able to recreate my liveblog of the WWW07 Tagging Workshop. So I will just provide the links to all the great papers presented there. Another big thank you goes out to Scott Golder and Frank Smadja for organizing a wonderful workshop.

9am: Network Properties of Folksonomies

9:30am: Tag-Cloud Drawing: Algorithms for Cloud Visualization

10am: Semkey: A Semantic Collaborative Tagging System

10:30am:  Emerging Motivations for Tagging: Expression, Performance and Activism (my paper, the presentation was very well received!)

11am: Applying Collaborative Tagging to E-Learning

11:30am: Learning User Profiles from Tagging Data and Leveraging them for Personal(ized) Information Access

12pm: Towards federated Web2.0 sites: the FolkDesk approach

After the formal presentations, we had a very informal break-out session where we mostly talked about my suggestion, which was “Beyond-text, utilizing multimedia for tagging”, we also extended our talk into tagging real-space and possible motivations for doing so. There was some great input from Mor Naaman, who works at Yahoo! Research Berkley, and is responsible for the great TagMaps application.

My main take-away from the workshop was the discovery that there have actually been no user studies conducted on tagging, and so I have decided that part of my dissertation will definitely include user studies, specifically looking at the motivations for tagging across different systems (ie not only ones that are specifically designed for organization such as Flickr).

I also took some great pictures of Banff, which was an amazingly beautiful location. I honestly did not want to leave. You can view some of my pictures here:

Banff 2007

Filed under: Academic Research, Conferences, Social Media, Tagging

Virginia Tech as a Media Spectacle

Here is a great analysis by one of my professors about Virginia Tech shooting:

Media Spectacle and the “Massacre at Virginia Tech” by Douglas Kellner

In class we also talked about how many members of Facebook changed their profiles pictures to this ribbon shown below. In fact, many VT student and alum profiles still contain this picture.

Once time passed, people were not sure of the appropriate etiquette as it regards online inteaction. How much time needs to pass before “it’s ok” to revert back to a normal profile picture, or is acceptable to post silly wall messages, and be happy in general. Additionally, some of the slain student’s profiles became “virtual memorials”, see the USA today piece for further details. One of the most interesting aspects of the memorialized profiles was that many people still posted messages directly to the slain person. Is this the virtual way of dealing with grief? Finally, here is an interesting blog post by an individual who lost a brother in an accident, and still visits his MySpace page.

Filed under: Academic Research, Social Media, Thoughts

WWW07 Tagging Workshop

The paper that I submitted to the WWW07 Tagging workshop is titled Emerging Motivations for Tagging: Expression, Performance, and Activism and can be found here: http://www2007.org/workshops/paper_55.pdf

You can also find my PPT presentation here: http://www.ayre.org/research/zollers-www07.ppt

Abstract:
Social tagging systems have generally been designed and used for personal information organization and retrieval. People use a variety of sites to tag photos, websites, blogs, and videos. Recently, commercial websites such as Amazon.com, have also implemented tagging on their websites. This type of tagging is not only social, where users can view other’s tags and resources, but collective or collaborative, where any user can tag any resource. By analyzing the tags of two sites that implement free-for-all tagging – Amazon.com and Last.fm – this paper describes emergent social motivations for tagging. The motivations that were found in the systems include expression, performance, and activism.

General Summary:
Social tagging originated with sites such as delicious and Flickr, which were specifically designed for the storage, organization, and later retrieval of personal resources. As more sites, such as Amazon, Last.fm, and Slashdot, implement free-for-all tagging, where any user can tag any resource on the system, increasingly social motivations for tagging tend to emerge. These systems implement free-for-all tagging, where any user can tag any resource. Free-for-all tagging is a social act the impacts the entire community of users as everyone can see everyone else’s tags. Therefore, user may be aware of or perceive an audience for their tags. My hypothesis, which I test with quantitative data from Amazon and Last.fm, states that in systems which were not originally designed for organization of personal resources and which implement free-for-all tagging, the nature of the tags and the act of tagging itself becomes a social or even collaborative activity.

Filed under: Academic Research, Tagging

Server Accident

There was an accident, and the last 6 months of data got unintentionally deleted from the server. Since I run my own web servers, and did not properly back things up (have learned my lesson), I have lost the last 6 months of posts to this blog. I am going to attempt to reconstruct some of them, so apologizes ahead of time for the large amount of activity that might be going on here.

Filed under: Thoughts