Online infomation & the dangers
Barrry Wellman’s article “Physical Place and Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalized Networking” looks at how networks of community exist in physical places but also how the development of computer-supported community networks affects access to resources. Wellman seems to think it is a natural and inevitable of the development of community and technology for it to move beyond place and space. Today “computer-supported communication will be everywhere, but because it is independent of place, it will be situated nowhere” (Wellman, 230).
Wellman also discusses the use of internet in the home. He uses the example of Netville residents (Hampton 2001) and how the use of computers has replaced time spent watching television with net surfing. He uses the example of one household gathering around the computer with the family and a bowl of popcorn and that “parents rarely complain that the time their children and spouses spend online takes away from family activities”. Yet he seems to contradict himself in the next section when he argues that the internet is “more personally immersive than watching television or talking on the telephone. To net surf, someone must peer intently into a nearby screen as if praying to a shrine and finger keys as if they were prayer beads” (239).He states that family members have to compete for attention, in face, that “the internet is so immersive that its siren calls people towards their screens and away from their husbands, wives and children”. Is this a contradiction in Wellman’s article? If so, can we say that while community interactions have moved inside the private home, that it has also pushed us away from those inside our homes?
Marks’ article “Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites” illustrates some of the consequences of personal information on the web. I know that personally I don’t like to put much of my information online- just because as many people have warned, employers, family, and new friends can so easily “google” you. The question I had is, does the quality of relationships online depend on the quantity of information you have online when it comes to developing new friendships? If profiles and such are our way of introducing ourselves to a community, how much is too much?
This leads me to think about the privacy settings that are now popping up online. Especially with facebook, we can limit our profiles and our information not only to people in our school, but also to our friends. Ellison et. al looks at the role of Facebook in social networks and looks at how Facebook can be used to create various forms of social capital. Are we cutting ourselves off from certain types of social capital or resources by not participating in facebook, or even limiting our profiles on facebook?
Kleinberg & Lawrence’s article “The Structure of the Web” looks at just that. They state that the web does not have an engineered architecture, but rather, is decentralized with billions of pages created by individual. Research has shown, however, that there is a great deal of self-organization and that the web contains a “large, strongly connected core in which every page can reach every other by a path of hyperlinks” (p.1849), much like the “small world” situation. Like the Google technology & hierarchy we discussed in class, the authors state that there is a mechanism of preferential attachment- that “the network grows by the sequential arrival of new nodes and the probability that an existing node gains a link is proportional to the number of links it currently has”, or as they have stated, a “rich-get-richer” process. One issue today, that Kleinberg et al touch upon is the process/technology of favoring highly linked sites. While we might say that this particular site is popular because lots of people search for it & click on it, at the same time, many of the newer, smaller, lesser known, niche sites get lost in this huge virtual network. When people search for a term, the same sites are coming up, and are we then just all getting the same information? I know that when I google something I rarely click past the 5th page. What are some of the implications of this self-organization & mechanism of preferential attachment?