Social Network Blog - r10

Kronholz tells the story of Shannon, who tracked a chain letter she started as part of a science fair project and became overwhelmed with e-mail replies. Although the article doesn’t say what the chain letter was about, it says that from January 13th to February 5th, she got 160,478 replies. This makes me wonder two things. First, what was the response rate? In other words, how many people got her letter and replied to her? How many received her letter and did not reply to her?

Also, the article notes that people even found her phone number to complain that their e-mails to her were being returned. This, to me, seems preposterous. I can imagine a student who gets an “unable to send e-mail” response when trying to send a project to his or her professor to contact that professor. However, I find it hard to believe that strangers halfway around the world would contact some random girl sending a chain letter. To add to my disbelief, this event occurred in 2003. I believe that people were more tolerant of chain letters when the Internet was newer (early 1990s) but are fed up by now. We’ve heard too many times that by forwarding a random letter, a girl dying of cancer will receive pennies for treatment.

Perplexed and disbelieving, I did some research as to the validity of this article. Apparently, as far as I can see, Snopes thinks that it is true. In addition, a Google search revealed sites in different languages discussing the event.

I want to know: Assuming that this article is true, how can you address the discrepancies between the supposed response rate and the more conceivable notion that people delete almost any e-mails which are not particularly relevant to their everyday lives?

Wellman’s defense of online relationships undermines pundits’ attacks on the legitimacy of online friendships. Whereas critics argue that relationships on the Internet are narrow, unsupportive, weak, and uncommitted, Wellman praises their compatibility with “real-world” communities; opportunities for fostering unique, specialized, close relationships; and function for engendering heterogeneous and homophilous ties between individuals and amongst groups.

One issue I considered during my reading was Latane and Darley’s “bystander intervention” theory and its presence in both real and virtual worlds. This theory says that an individual is more likely to provide help to someone in need when that individual feels that he or she is responsible; such a felt responsibility is often the result of the individual being the only person in the vicinity of the victim. Wellman says that recipients of online requests for help are affected by the theory of “bystander intervention” in the sense that they feel that they are the only ones who may be able to provide help to the person asking the question. I can understand that rationale, for when an individual is sitting in a room alone at his or her computer, that individual really is the only person “in the room” able to help. However, I would have thought that applying the “bystander intervention” theory would result in people not responding to online requests for help. Clearly, a person alone at his or her computer realizes that when he or she communicates in an online forum (i.e. newsgroup), there are many other people who are recipients of those messages (including requests for help). Thus, I would think that the person would be less likely to volunteer assistance, presuming that the hundreds or thousands (or millions!) of other people on the Internet would aid the requester. Thus, I ask: Why does Wellman believe that people, when “interacting”/“operating” in the virtual world, act in ways that would lead one to determine that those people believe that they are the only recipients of “virtual world messages”?

Another question I had concerns people’s demonstration of the norm of reciprocity in the virtual world. The article explains that “[i]t is a general norm of community that whatever is given ought to be repaid, if only to ensure that more is available when needed” (p.342). It goes on to say that there may be less motivation for social support in a virtual community, since ties are impersonal, weak, and not bound by the indirect social pressures inherent in real-world community structures. I was wondering: Is there a type of transitivity in the norm of reciprocity online? In other words, do people offer support online, hoping that if they needed support in the future, they could find it online? Does that make virtual acts of reciprocity more of an act of respect for the institution of the Internet rather than an act to aid an individual?

Baym’s study of the place of online social interaction among the milieu of person’s typical daily communication (especially) multimedia activities determined that the college students in this study have integrated the Internet into their repertoire of communication techniques. However, it also determined that, contrary to Nie et al’s 2002 study, use of the Internet as a communication tool does not diminish the quality of such interactions.

Baym first examined the pervasiveness of the internet. One of the findings he discussed is Dimmick et al’s 2000 study that showed that “[n]early half of their respondents said that they used long-distance telephone calls less, now that they were online” (p.303). I wondered how that fact is impacted by the higher cost of long-distance telephone calls relative to Internet communication. In addition, I wondered how will much will the increased pervasiveness in such technologies as VOIP and Skype impact that this finding?

When analyzing the results from her own study, Baym said that “26.5 percent of online interaction was conducted in the presence of other people, and 73.5 percent of the reported online interactions were conducted without others there” (p.312). I wondered what the distribution would be if this study were conducted with middle school students or high school students. Specifically, I know that in those age demographics, the Internet is often used as a “toy,” with which to play when friends come over to visit. Two friends might pass their time IMing another friend. I ask: Do you think that the use of the Internet in the presence of others would be dramatically increased if this question were asked of a different population? Which other population do you think would provide results most different from these?

Mesch’s study of Israeli adolescents focuses on the creation – rather than just the maintenance – of online ties. His review of the literature indicates that there exist disparate views on the quality of online relationships. While social constructivists see online relationships as high quality as in the social constructivist, the reduced social cues perspective sees them as low quality. Although he looked as the strength of tie and quality of relationship on many levels (i.e. multiplexity, time, closeness), I found the following result particularly interesting: “Adolescents with an online friend reported that this friend was know[n] for a shorter time than face-to-face friends, they discussed fewer topics, and they participated in fewer shared activities” (p.147).

Since the study involved adolescents who were an average age of 15.52, I wonder if this finding has to do with the facts that (a) people that age could not have used the Internet to maintain social relationships for more than a decade and (b) people that age have probably been taught for most of their lives not to “talk to strangers.” Thus, there must be a type of age bias in the number of online relationships someone of this age could be both able and allowed to form. I wonder if this study was done with older people, who are likely not living in the same locale as their childhood friends, would the findings be different?

Hampton questions whether the Internet should be viewed as a means of facilitating relationships within communities or hindering those relationships. By looking at past studies, he determines that the potential for the Internet to provide support between users and to be used as a legitimate form of asynchronous communication should not be overlooked.

When looking at the 1998 Homenet study by Kraut et al, I considered its flaws. These researchers provided people with a free computer, telephone line, and dial-up Internet access and then noticed a decrease in the “amount of time family members spent communicating with each other, the size of participants’ social networks, and psychological well-being” (p.221). To me, it makes sense when you are given a very valuable, new “present,” you would spend more time learning how to use it. Although it was admitted that the decrease in psychological well-being may be attributed to frustration and difficulties learning this new technology, there is no mention of a decrease in time spent with others due to the amount of time necessary to learn how to use the computer. In fact, Kraut noticed that the “negative effects originally attributed to Internet use dissipated over time” (p.223). I ask: Do you think the reason for this effect was because as people learned how to use the computer better, they increased the time they spent communicating in-person?

Another study discussed in this paper is of Netville. One finding says that “[a]ccess to computer-mediated communication in Netville was primarily successful in affording frequent social contact with a high number of what were comparatively weak social ties” (p.227). I wonder: Do you think that the fostering of contact between neighborhoods was a result of (a) access to computer-mediated communication, (b) homophily, in that all community members had unique high-speed Internet access, (c) both, or (d) something else?