Handbook of Research on Social Interaction Technologies and Collaboration Software: Concepts and Trends

Handbook of Research on Social Interaction Technologies and Collaboration Software: Concepts and Trends Tatyana Dumova Montclair State University, USA Richard Fiordo University of North Dakota, USA

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Handbook of research on social interaction technologies and collaboration software : concepts and trends / Tatyana Dumova and Richard Fiordo, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: "This book explores the origin, structure, purpose, and function of socially interactive technologies known as social software"--Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-60566-368-5 (hbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-60566-369-2 (ebook) 1. Information technology--Social aspects. 2. Online social networks. 3. Internet--Social aspects. 4. Groupware (Computer software)--Social aspects. I. Dumova, Tatyana, 1962- II. Fiordo, Richard, 1945HM851.H3486 2009 303.48'33--dc22 2008054205

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. All work contributed to this book is new, previously-unpublished material. The views expressed in this book are those of the authors, but not necessarily of the publisher.

Editorial Advisory Board Guo-Ming Chen, University of Rhode Island, USA Harald F. O. von Kortzfleisch, University Koblenz-Landau, Campus Koblenz, Germany Paul Licker, Strategy and Leadership Research Group, School of Business Administration, Oakland University, USA J. Michael Sproule, San Jose University, USA Yonghua Zhang, Shanghai University, China

List of Reviewers June Abbas, University of Oklahoma, USA Joshua Azriel, Kennesaw State University, USA Lemi Baruh, Kadir Has University, Turkey Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, University of Haifa, Israel Stefan Bitzer, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany Oliver Bohl, University of Kassel, Germany Christos J. Bouras, University of Patras, Greece Ruth E. Brown, University of Nebraska at Kearney, USA Joseph E. Burns, Southeastern Louisiana University, USA Stacy L. Carter, Texas Tech University, USA Thorsten Caus, Georg August University of, Germany Scott L. Crabill, Oakland University, USA Andrea Crampton, Charles Sturt University, Australia Kevin Curran, University of Ulster, UK Helen Donelan, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Edward Downes, Boston University, USA Judith Gelernter, Rutgers University, USA Rosanna E. Guadagno, University of Alabama, USA Sirkku Kristiina Hellsten, University of Helsinki, Finland Jiehua Huang, Guangzhou University, China Lee Humphreys, Cornell University, USA Yasmin Ibrahim, University of Brighton, UK Lorraine D. Jackson, California Polytechnic State University, USA Pankaj Kamthan, Concordia University, Canada Todd Kelshaw, Montclair State University, USA

Hak-Lae Kim, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland Hong-Gee Kim, Seoul National University, South Korea Elizabeth Koh, National University of Singapore, Singapore James M. Laffey, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA Christine A. Lemesianou, Montclair State University, USA Morgan Luck, Charles Sturt University, Australia Ronald Marsh, University of North Dakota, USA Catherine McLoughlin, Australian Catholic University, Australia Marcus Messner, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA Junghoon Moon, Information and Communications University, South Korea Dhrubodhi Mukherjee, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA Susan O’Donnell, University of New Brunswick, Canada Bradley M. Okdie, University of Alabama, USA Kenneth Owen, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada Joowon Park, Information and Communications University, South Korea Robyn Parker, Kent State University, USA Sarah Pedersen, The Robert Gordon University, UK Lina Pelliccione, Curtin University of Technology, Australia Beth Perry, Athabasca University, Canada Isabella Peters, Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany Heather D. Pfeiffer, New Mexico State University, USA Narissra Punyanunt-Carter, Texas Tech University, USA Angela T. Ragusa, Charles Sturt University, Australia Alan Rea, Western Michigan University, USA James Robinson, University of Dayton, USA Noemi Maria Sadowska, Regents Business School, Regent’s College, UK Francesco Sofo, University of Canberra, Australia Robert D. Sprague, University of Wyoming, USA Wolfgang G. Stock, Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany Tami K. Tomasello, East Carolina University, USA Ane Tröger, Aston University, UK Lorna Uden, Staffordshire University, UK Cheng-Yen Wang, National Kaohsiung Normal University, Taiwan Richard D. Waters, North Carolina State University, USA Katrin Weller, Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany Gunilla Widen-Wulff, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Robert Willis, Vancouver Island University, Canada Melda N. Yildiz, William Paterson University, USA Zuopeng (Justin) Zhang, Eastern New Mexico University, USA

List of Contributors

Aaltio, Iiris / University of Jyväskylä, Finland .................................................................................. 257 Abbas, June / University of Oklahoma, USA..................................................................................... 451 Agarwal, Nitin / Arizona State University, USA................................................................................ 661 Agne, Robert / Auburn University, USA ............................................................................................ 302 Amelung, Christopher J. / Yale University, USA.............................................................................. 170 Azriel, Joshua / Kennesaw State University, USA ............................................................................. 363 Baruh, Lemi / Kadir Has University, Turkey............................................................................... 33, 392 Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron / University of Haifa, Israel ................................................................................. 327 Berzins, Michelle / University of Canberra, Australia ...................................................................... 561 Bitzer, Stefan / Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany ....................................................... 147 Bohl, Oliver / Accenture, Munich, Germany........................................................................................ 91 Bouras, Christos J. / University of Patras, Greece ........................................................................... 417 Breslin, John G. / National University of Galway, Ireland ............................................................... 519 Brown, Ruth E. / University of Nebraska—Lincoln, USA .......................................................... 45, 462 Burns, Joseph E. / Southeastern Louisiana University, USA ...................................................... 56, 383 Caus, Thorsten / Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany.................................................... 11 Christmann, Stefan / Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany ............................................ 11 Crabill, Scott L. / Oakland University, USA ..................................................................................... 315 da Rimini, Francesca / University of Technology, Sydney, Australia ............................................... 601 Decker, Stefan / National University of Galway, Ireland .................................................................. 519 Donelan, Helen / The Open University, UK....................................................................................... 270 Eardley, Alan / Staffordshire University, UK .................................................................................... 574 Eno, Cassie A. / University of Alabama, USA.................................................................................... 292 Gelernter, Judith / Carnegie Mellon University, USA ...................................................................... 439 Gibson, Kerri / National Research Council, Canada........................................................................ 528 Grimes, Joe / California Polytechnic State University, USA ............................................................. 220 Guadagno, Rosanna E. / University of Alabama, USA..................................................................... 292 Hagenhoff, Svenja / Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany .............................................. 11 Hellsten, Sirkku Kristiina / University of Helsinki, Finland.............................................................. 80 Herman, Clem / The Open University, UK ....................................................................................... 270 Herrington, Anthony / University of Wollongong, Australia............................................................ 685 Huang, Jiehua / Guangzhou University, China and Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland ........................................................................................................................................... 257

Humphreys, Lee / Cornell University, USA ........................................................................................ 22 Isikdag, Umit / IT Consultant, Ankara, Turkey ................................................................................. 372 Jackson, Lorraine D. / California Polytechnic State University, USA ............................................. 220 Jo, Sooran / Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea ............................. 486 Kamthan, Pankaj / Concordia University, Canada .......................................................................... 542 Kear, Karen / The Open University, UK............................................................................................ 270 Kelshaw, Todd / Montclair State University, USA............................................................................. 404 Kervin, Lisa / University of Wollongong, Australia .......................................................................... 685 Kim, Hak-Lae / National University of Galway, Ireland .................................................................. 519 Kim, Hong-Gee / Seoul National University, South Korea ............................................................... 519 Kirkup, Gill / The Open University, UK............................................................................................ 270 Koh, Elizabeth / National University of Singapore, Singapore......................................................... 209 Laffey, James M. / University of Missouri-Columbia, USA.............................................................. 170 Lee, Mark J. W. / Charles Sturt University, Australia ...................................................................... 194 Lemesianou, Christine A. / Montclair State University, USA .......................................................... 404 Lim, John / National University of Singapore, Singapore ................................................................ 209 Liu, Huan / Arizona State University, USA........................................................................................ 661 Manouchehri, Shakib / University of Kassel, Germany ..................................................................... 91 Mantei, Jessica / University of Wollongong, Australia...................................................................... 685 Marsh, Ronald / John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Science, University of North Dakota, USA ................................................................................................................................................ 428 McLoughlin, Catherine / Australian Catholic University, Australia ............................................... 194 Molyneaux, Heather / National Research Council, Canada ........................................................... 528 Moon, Junghoon / Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea................... 486 Mukherjee, Dhrubodhi / Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA ........................................ 110 Mulvany, Julie / Swinburne University of Technology, Australia ..................................................... 233 Nandhakumar, Joe / University of Warwick, UK .............................................................................. 639 Nerur, S. / University of Texas at Arlington, USA .............................................................................. 586 Nicosia, Laura M. / Montclair State University, USA ....................................................................... 623 O’Donnell, Susan / National Research Council, Canada ................................................................. 528 Okdie, Bradley M. / University of Alabama, USA ............................................................................ 292 Owen, Kenneth / Lakehead University, Canada ............................................................................... 509 Park, Joowon / Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea ........................ 486 Pedersen, Sarah / The Aberdeen Business School, The Robert Gordon University, UK .................. 281 Pelliccione, Lina / Curtin University of Technology, Australia ......................................................... 233 Peters, Isabella / Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany ............................................. 132 Pfeiffer, Heather D. / New Mexico State University, USA................................................................. 158 Pocknee, Catherine / Swinburne University of Technology, Australia ............................................. 233 Poulopoulos, Vassilis / University of Patras, Greece ....................................................................... 417 Ragusa, Angela T. / Charles Sturt University, Australia ................................................................... 181 Rea, Alan / Western Michigan University, USA ................................................................................. 336 Robinson, James D. / University of Dayton, USA ............................................................................. 302 Sachdev, V. / Middle Tennessee State University, USA ...................................................................... 586 Sadowska, Noemi Maria / Regents Business School, Regent’s College, UK.................................... 245

Schumann, Matthias / Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany .......................................... 147 Sofo, Francesco / University of Canberra, Australia ........................................................................ 121 Soysal, Levent / Kadir Has University, Turkey.................................................................................. 392 Sprague, Robert D. / University of Wyoming, USA........................................................................... 351 Stock, Wolfgang G. / Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany ...................................... 132 Tai, Zixue / University of Kentucky, USA............................................................................................. 67 Teng, J. T. C. / University of Texas at Arlington, USA....................................................................... 586 Thoroe, Lars / Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany ....................................................... 147 Tomasello, Tami K. / East Carolina University, USA ........................................................................... 1 Tonkin, Emma L. / University of Bath, UK ...................................................................................... 158 Tötterman, Anna-Karin / Åbo Akademi University, Finland ........................................................... 101 Tsogkas, Vassilis / University of Patras, Greece ............................................................................... 417 Uden, Lorna / Staffordshire University, UK ...................................................................................... 574 Uluç, Güliz / Ege University, Turkey.................................................................................................. 372 Waters, Richard D. / North Carolina State University, USA ............................................................ 473 Weller, Katrin / Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany ............................................... 132 Widén-Wulff, Gunilla / Åbo Akademi University, Finland............................................................... 101 Willis, Robert / Vancouver Island University, Canada...................................................................... 509 Xu, Susanna Xin / National University of Ireland–Galway, Ireland ................................................ 639 Yilmaz, Mehmet / Ege University, Turkey......................................................................................... 372 Zhang, Jianping / MITRE Corporation, USA ................................................................................... 661 Zhang, Zuopeng (Justin) / State University of New York at Plattsburgh, USA ................................ 496

Table of Contents

Preface ..........................................................................................................................................xxxviii Preface ................................................................................................................................................... xl Acknowledgment .............................................................................................................................xlvii

Volume 1 Section 1 Background and Development Chapter 1 J.C.R. Licklider and the Rise of Interactive and Networked Computing ............................................... 1 Tami K. Tomasello, East Carolina University, USA Chapter 2 Mobile Social Web: Opportunities and Drawbacks .............................................................................. 11 Thorsten Caus, Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany Stefan Christmann, Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany Svenja Hagenhoff, Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany Chapter 3 Mobile Social Networks and Services .................................................................................................. 22 Lee Humphreys, Cornell University, USA Chapter 4 Social Media Marketing: Web X.0 of Opportunities ............................................................................ 33 Lemi Baruh, Kadir Has University, Turkey Chapter 5 Citizen Marketing ................................................................................................................................. 45 Ruth E. Brown, The University of Nebraska—Lincoln, USA Chapter 6 The Past, Present, and Future of Podcasting ......................................................................................... 56 Joseph E. Burns, Southeastern Louisiana University, USA

Chapter 7 The Rise of the Chinese Blogosphere ................................................................................................... 67 Zixue Tai, University of Kentucky, USA Chapter 8 E-Government: A Case Study of East African Community Initiative .................................................. 80 Sirkku Kristiina Hellsten, University of Helsinki, Finland Chapter 9 Corporate Added Value in the Context of Web 2.0 ............................................................................... 91 Oliver Bohl, Accenture, Munich, Germany Shakib Manouchehri, University of Kassel, Germany Chapter 10 A Social Capital Perspective on Collaboration and Web 2.0 .............................................................. 101 Gunilla Widén-Wulff, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Anna-Karin Tötterman, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Chapter 11 Social Capital, Social Networks, and the Social Web: The Case of Virtual Volunteering .................. 110 Dhrubodhi Mukherjee, Southern Illinois University, USA Chapter 12 From Software to Team Ware: Virtual Teams and Online Learning Culture ...................................... 121 Francesco Sofo, University of Canberra, Australia

Section 2 Concepts, Contexts, and Applications Chapter 13 Folksonomy: The Collaborative Knowledge Organization System ................................................... 132 Katrin Weller, Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany Isabella Peters, Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany Wolfgang G. Stock, Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany Chapter 14 Folksonomy: Creating Metadata through Collaborative Tagging....................................................... 147 Stefan Bitzer, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany Lars Thoroe, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany Matthias Schumann, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany

Chapter 15 E-Tagging in Context: Information Management across Community Networks ............................... 158 Heather D. Pfeiffer, New Mexico State University, USA Emma L. Tonkin, University of Bath, UK Chapter 16 Using Notification Systems to Create Social Places for Online Learning .......................................... 170 James M. Laffey, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA Christopher J. Amelung, Yale University, USA Chapter 17 Peer Learning and Social Interactions in an Asynchronous Learning Environment .......................... 181 Angela T. Ragusa, Charles Sturt University, Australia Chapter 18 Educational Podcasting: A Taxonomy of Pedagogical Applications .................................................. 194 Catherine McLoughlin, Australian Catholic University, Australia Mark J. W. Lee, Charles Sturt University, Australia Chapter 19 Wiki Use in Higher Education: Implications for Group Size and Task Complexity .......................... 209 Elizabeth Koh, National University of Singapore, Singapore John Lim, National University of Singapore, Singapore Chapter 20 The Hybrid Course: Facilitating Learning through Social Interaction Technologies ......................... 220 Lorraine D. Jackson, California Polytechnic State University, USA Joe Grimes, California Polytechnic State University, USA Chapter 21 The Use of Social Interaction Technologies in E-Portfolios............................................................... 233 Lina Pelliccione, Curtin University of Technology, Australia Catherine Pocknee, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Julie Mulvany, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Chapter 22 Commerce and Gender: Generating Interactive Spaces for Female Online Users ............................. 245 Noemi Maria Sadowska, Regents Business School, Regent’s College, UK Chapter 23 Social Interaction Technologies: A Case Study of Guanxi and Women Managers’ Careers in Information Technology in China ...................................................................................... 257 Jiehua Huang, Guangzhou University, China and Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland Iiris Aaltio, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Chapter 24 Online Participation: Shaping the Networks of Professional Women................................................. 270 Helen Donelan, The Open University, UK Clem Herman, The Open University, UK Karen Kear, The Open University, UK Gill Kirkup, The Open University, UK Chapter 25 Women Bloggers Seeking Validation and Financial Recompense in the Blogosphere....................... 281 Sarah Pedersen, The Aberdeen Business School, The Robert Gordon University, UK Chapter 26 Personal Blogging: Individual Differences and Motivations............................................................... 292 Rosanna E. Guadagno, University of Alabama, USA Cassie A. Eno, University of Alabama, USA Bradley M. Okdie, University of Alabama, USA Chapter 27 Audience Replies to Character Blogs as Parasocial Relationships...................................................... 302 James D. Robinson, University of Dayton, USA Robert Agne, Auburn University, USA Chapter 28 Situating Social Identity through Language Convergence in Online Groups...................................... 315 Scott L. Crabill, Oakland University, USA Chapter 29 Online Relationships and the Realm of Romantic Possibilities........................................................... 327 Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, University of Haifa, Israel Chapter 30 The Virtual Social Continuum Expressed: Interaction and Community Formation in MMORPGs.................................................................................................................... 336 Alan Rea, Western Michigan University, USA

Section 3 Issues, Viewpoints, and Perspectives Chapter 31 Legal Issues Associated with Emerging Social Interaction Technologies........................................... 351 Robert D. Sprague, University of Wyoming, USA

Chapter 32 Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: How ISPs and Users are Legally Exempted from Offensive Materials ................................................................................................... 363 Joshua Azriel, Kennesaw State University, USA Chapter 33 Blogs and Forums in a Presidential Election Process in Turkey ........................................................ 372 Güliz Uluç, Ege University, Turkey Mehmet Yilmaz, Ege University, Turkey Umit Isikdag, IT Consultant, Ankara, Turkey Chapter 34 Wiki Journalism .................................................................................................................................. 383 Joseph E. Burns, Southeastern Louisiana University, USA Chapter 35 Public Intimacy and the New Face (Book) of Surveillance: The Role of Social Media in Shaping Contemporary Dataveillance ................................................................................. 392 Lemi Baruh, Kadir Has University, Turkey Levent Soysal, Kadir Has University, Turkey

Volume 2 Chapter 36 Emerging Online Democracy: The Dynamics of Formal and Informal Control in Digitally Mediated Social Structures................................................................................. 404 Todd Kelshaw, Montclair State University, USA Christine A. Lemesianou, Montclair State University, USA Chapter 37 Squeak Etoys: Interactive and Collaborative Learning Environments ............................................... 417 Christos J. Bouras, University of Patras, Greece Vassilis Poulopoulos, University of Patras, Greece Vassilis Tsogkas, University of Patras, Greece Chapter 38 The Sun Earth Moon System: Connecting Science and Informal Learning ....................................... 428 Ronald Marsh, John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Science, University of North Dakota, USA Chapter 39 Neogeography ..................................................................................................................................... 439 Judith Gelernter, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Chapter 40 Social Software Use in Public Libraries ............................................................................................. 451 June Abbas, University of Oklahoma, USA Chapter 41 Marketing for Children Using Social Interaction Technologies ......................................................... 462 Ruth E. Brown, University of Nebraska—Lincoln, USA Chapter 42 The Use of Social Media by Nonprofit Organizations: An Examination from the Diffusion of Innovations Perspective .................................................................................................................. 473 Richard D. Waters, North Carolina State University, USA Chapter 43 Towards Understanding the Successful Adoption of Blog-Based Knowledge Management Systems: A Socio-Psychological Approach .................................................................. 486 Joowon Park, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea Sooran Jo, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea Junghoon Moon, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea Chapter 44 Social Software for Customer Knowledge Management.................................................................... 496 Zuopeng (Justin) Zhang, State University of New York at Plattsburgh, USA Chapter 45 Critical Success Factors in the Development of Folksonomy-Based Knowledge Management Tools .............................................................................................................................. 509 Kenneth Owen, Lakehead University, Canada Robert Willis, Vancouver Island University, Canada Chapter 46 Representing and Sharing Tagging Data Using the Social Semantic Cloud of Tags .......................... 519 Hak-Lae Kim, National University of Galway, Ireland John G. Breslin, National University of Galway, Ireland Stefan Decker, National University of Galway, Ireland Hong-Gee Kim, Seoul National University, South Korea Chapter 47 A Framework for Analyzing Social Interaction Using Broadband Visual Communication Technologies............................................................................................................. 528 Susan O’Donnell, National Research Council, Canada Heather Molyneaux, National Research Council, Canada Kerri Gibson, National Research Council, Canada

Chapter 48 Using the Social Web for Collaboration in Software Engineering Education .................................... 542 Pankaj Kamthan, Concordia University, Canada Chapter 49 Online Scams: Case Studies from Australia ....................................................................................... 561 Michelle Berzins, University of Canberra, Australia Chapter 50 The Usability of Social Software ........................................................................................................ 574 Lorna Uden, Staffordshire University, UK Alan Eardley, Staffordshire University, UK

Section 4 Selected Readings Chapter 51 Interactivity Redefined for the Social Web ......................................................................................... 586 V. Sachdev, Middle Tennessee State University, USA S. Nerur, University of Texas at Arlington, USA J. T. C. Teng, University of Texas at Arlington, USA Chapter 52 Social Technologies and the Digital Commons .................................................................................. 601 Francesca da Rimini, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Chapter 53 Virtual Constructivism: Avatars in Action .......................................................................................... 623 Laura M. Nicosia, Montclair State University, USA Chapter 54 Managing E-Relationships in a Supply Network................................................................................ 639 Susanna Xin Xu, National University of Ireland–Galway, Ireland Joe Nandhakumar, University of Warwick, UK Chapter 55 A Study of Friendship Networks and Blogosphere............................................................................. 661 Nitin Agarwal, Arizona State University, USA Huan Liu, Arizona State University, USA Jianping Zhang, MITRE Corporation, USA

Chapter 56 Blogs as a Social Networking Tool to Build Community ................................................................... 685 Lisa Kervin, University of Wollongong, Australia Jessica Mantei, University of Wollongong, Australia Anthony Herrington, University of Wollongong, Australia

Compilation of References ............................................................................................................... 701

Detailed Table of Contents

Preface ..........................................................................................................................................xxxviii Preface .................................................................................................................................................. xl Acknowledgment .............................................................................................................................xlvii

Volume 1 Section 1 Background and Development This section addresses general issues related to the origin and development of social interaction technologies (SIT) as a driving force behind the diverse (inter)faces of Web 2.0 and the technological frontier of the new millennium. As a tribute to the visionaries of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the section opens with a chapter on the legacy of J.C.R. Licklider. In 1960, Licklider authored a seminal paper, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” that forever changed the history of computing and earned him a place in the Internet Hall of Fame. The remaining contributions discuss the growth of advanced web-based interaction technologies and their economic, social, political, and cultural implications for a variety of areas and activities ranging from Web 2.0 business and advertising models, to e-government, citizen marketing, mobile social networks, blogging, podcasting, virtual volunteering, and virtual teams. Chapter 1 J.C.R. Licklider and the Rise of Interactive and Networked Computing ............................................... 1 Tami K. Tomasello, East Carolina University, USA This chapter examines J.C.R. Licklider’s legacy as a contributor to the development of modern networked computing. In 1960 Licklider published his seminal “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” the first of three articles that attempted to redefine the human-computer interaction. Licklider outlined a vision for interactive, networked computing and, ultimately, the Internet that we experience today. Providing an overview of Licklider’s role as a visionary of the computerized communication networks of today, this chapter pays particular attention to the main ideas conveyed in “Man-Computer Symbiosis” and the influence of these ideas on academic and professional researchers during the following decades.

Chapter 2 Mobile Social Web: Opportunities and Drawbacks .............................................................................. 11 Thorsten Caus, Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany Stefan Christmann, Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany Svenja Hagenhoff, Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany As mobile Internet usage continues to grow, the phenomenon of accessing online communities through mobile devices draws researchers’ attention. Statistics show that close to 60 percent of all mobile Internet traffic worldwide is related to the use of mobile social networks. In this chapter, the mobile social web is defined, categories of mobile communities explained, and success factors and drawbacks discussed from the technical, social, and economic perspectives. Challenges, including low transmission rates, changes in usage patterns, search for new revenue sources, as well as the need for development of original mobile web content and applications are addressed. The technical requirements for the mobile use of online communities are identified. The chapter closes with a summary of potential economic and social prospects of the emerging mobile social web. Chapter 3 Mobile Social Networks and Services .................................................................................................. 22 Lee Humphreys, Cornell University, USA Mobile social networks allow users to connect with each other, share information, and create technologically enabled mobile communities. With the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, the public dream of the likelihood of mobile computing was realized. This chapter reviews mobile social networks ranging from early examples to current services; and, it identifies and categorizes them according to a specific media type, mode, and code. The challenges of categorization in light of technology convergence are discussed. Issues of privacy, compatibility, and pricing are presented as they relate to mobile social networks. Potential strategies are suggested for dealing with these challenges. Finally, future trends of mobile social services are identified. Chapter 4 Social Media Marketing: Web X.0 of Opportunities ............................................................................ 33 Lemi Baruh, Kadir Has University, Turkey In recent years social media applications, which enable consumers to contribute to the world of online content, have grown in popularity. However, this growth is yet to be transformed into a sustainable commercial model. Starting with a brief overview of existing online advertising models, this chapter discusses the opportunities available for advertisers trying to reach consumers through social media. The chapter focuses on viral marketing as a viable option for marketers, reviews recent viral marketing campaigns, and offers recommendations for a successful implementation of social media marketing. In conclusion, the author examines future trends regarding the utilization of the emerging Semantic Web in marketing online.

Chapter 5 Citizen Marketing.................................................................................................................................. 45 Ruth E. Brown, The University of Nebraska—Lincoln, USA This chapter explores citizen marketing, which refers to consumers voluntarily posting product information based on their knowledge and experience. The product information may take the form of opinions, reviews, videos, ads, or entire websites; it is persuasive in that it meets a consumer need for credible peer review of products. Research into information spread by word-of-mouth provides the theoretical foundation for citizen marketing. Because it is found on the Internet where word spreads quickly, citizen marketing empowers individuals to bring change in the form of product design or price. The chapter examines how mainstream marketers are trying to channel citizen marketing through various means, including unfiltered peer-to-peer interaction on product websites. Chapter 6 The Past, Present, and Future of Podcasting.......................................................................................... 56 Joseph E. Burns, Southeastern Louisiana University, USA Thanks to the friendship of an XML programmer and an ex-MTV video jock, the first podcast took place in July of 2003 by automatically streaming a single audio file half way around the world. Four months later Apple Computer, Inc. proved that its personal listening device, the iPod, could synch with a new program called iTunes and download files using the same technology. Since then podcasting has grown at a remarkable rate. In 2007, over 65 million people had used an RSS feed to download a podcast. Literally, millions of podcasts are currently available covering every topic imaginable. The broadcast media have begun to use podcasting as a method of time shifting programming. Educators are using podcasting for reaching out to students. Businesses are using podcasting as a marketing tool. Music artists are using the format to promote themselves and sell their records. The commercial future of podcasting appears to be in the area of advertising and broadcasting. Chapter 7 The Rise of the Chinese Blogosphere.................................................................................................... 67 Zixue Tai, University of Kentucky, USA In comparison with the USA and Europe, the Chinese blogosphere was off to a later start; however, it has experienced phenomenal growth since its formal birth in 2002. Now China boasts by far the largest blogging community in the world, surpassing the blogger population in the United States and Europe combined. Chinese bloggers are among the first globally to both actively engage in blog writing and reading. Although the Chinese blogosphere has closely followed the global path of technological innovation and ingenuity, it has taken many of its own unique twists and turns in terms of its creative uses and impact on the social, political and cultural contexts of Chinese society. Focusing on the popularization of blogs, mainstreaming, and commercialization of the global cyber culture in China, this chapter paints a portrait of a Chinese blogger. Due to the omnipresent state control of cyberspace and heavy-handed state censoring of online information, most Chinese bloggers have shied away from politically sensitive and subversive issues and topics. The most popular blogging topics include the documentation of personal experiences and the expression of individual viewpoints on a wide range of topics; these topics are followed by hobbies, entertainment, and amusement.

Chapter 8 E-Government: A Case Study of East African Community Initiative .................................................. 80 Sirkku Kristiina Hellsten, University of Helsinki, Finland E-government and other applications of information technologies can provide powerful means for global, national and local justice, increased democracy, decentralized decision-making, and more efficient service delivery. In general, e-government initiatives are aimed at modernizing governmental agencies in their dealings with the public and extending services into online environments. In various African countries, e-government initiatives have begun; they have allowed citizens easy access to public services and lobbying opportunities at policy level decision-making. This chapter identifies prospects and challenges in e-government and e-governance in the East African region. The author sketches harmonizing strategies for the development of an ethical framework for their implementation and argues that the challenge of e-governance in developing countries resides in the challenge of “good governance” as well as issues of accessibility and user skills. Chapter 9 Corporate Added Value in the Context of Web 2.0 ............................................................................... 91 Oliver Bohl, Accenture, Munich, Germany Shakib Manouchehri, University of Kassel, Germany Firms have faced and explored the increased use of Web 2.0. Driven mainly by private users, Web 2.0 may also have significant implications for corporate actions and business models. By systematically scanning and verifying possible positive and negative effects on the value of their creation, firms might be able to formulate and establish well-grounded strategies for corporate Web 2.0 applications and services. To establish such a process in an effective and adequate manner, it is necessary to analyze the relationship between Web 2.0 and corporate added value. This chapter contributes to these efforts by demonstrating that the corporate use of Web 2.0 applications is reinforced by fundamental and long-term business trends. The discussion pertains to the possibilities emerging from the application of Web 2.0 paradigms to business models: the market model, the activity model, and the capital market model. The potentials, risks, mainsprings, and restrictions associated with the corporate use of Web 2.0 are evaluated. Chapter 10 A Social Capital Perspective on Collaboration and Web 2.0 .............................................................. 101 Gunilla Widén-Wulff, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Anna-Karin Tötterman, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Social interaction technologies can successfully employ the previously untapped power of the web to utilize the collaborative creation of information and user-driven content. In this chapter, the social capital framework is applied to illustrate how Web 2.0 tools and techniques can support effective information and knowledge management in organizations. Interactions within and between organizations generate important practices that underscore the role of social capital. Managing social capital for effective knowledge sharing is a complex process, and Web 2.0 lends some support for organizations by creating a new culture of voluntary, contributive, and collaborative participation. The argument is made that Web

2.0 technologies can be seen as important tools that can bridge the creation and sharing of knowledge in diverse organizational contexts. Chapter 11 Social Capital, Social Networks, and the Social Web: The Case of Virtual Volunteering .................. 110 Dhrubodhi Mukherjee, Southern Illinois University, USA Social interaction technologies create communicative possibilities that go beyond dyadic interactions and across physical boundaries, bringing a qualitative shift in the functioning of the Internet. The present chapter employs social capital and social networks perspectives to identify the social determinants of virtual volunteering in the age of Web 2.0, explores the social motivation of volunteers who perform tasks using the Social Web in the context of online volunteering, and addresses the dynamic interplay of social capital, social networks, and the Social Web with implications for virtual volunteering. The argument furthered is that active participation in social networks generates social capital and facilitates the development of the Social Web. Chapter 12 From Software to Team Ware: Virtual Teams and Online Learning Culture ...................................... 121 Francesco Sofo, University of Canberra, Australia Social interaction technologies have made it possible for teams to exist in a virtual reality. Such change to the workplace status quo requires a new appreciation of the ways in which team members can create, maintain, transmit and influence their competitiveness and effectiveness. This chapter explores the concepts of virtual teams and online culture; it analyses the key requirements for the successful functioning of virtual teams: for instance, building trust, consolidating authentic communication flows and thinking critically. Commencing with a review of the current research, the chapter concentrates on the rise of virtual teams, the key dimensions, and the importance of establishing online learning cultures to ensure high performance. Additionally, pitfalls of virtual teams and recommendations for enhancing their work are presented.

Section 2 Concepts, Contexts, and Applications The chapters in this section scrutinize the ways social interaction technologies enhance the powers of connectivity, interaction, and collaboration for individuals, groups, organizations, and society as a whole in local and global contexts. The contributions discuss the deployment of SIT applications in knowledge management, education, business, and commerce. A broad range of concepts are introduced and analyzed: using folksonomies for knowledge organization and sharing; creating metadata through collaborative tagging; social tagging as annotation; constructing technology enhanced social and personal learning spaces; the impact of SIT on self-expression and social identity formation; online social, romantic and parasocial interactions and relationships; generating online interactive spaces for women; social networking and online community formation.

Chapter 13 Folksonomy: The Collaborative Knowledge Organization System ................................................... 132 Katrin Weller, Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany Isabella Peters, Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany Wolfgang G. Stock, Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany This chapter discusses folksonomies as a novel way of indexing documents and locating information based on user generated keywords. Folksonomies are considered from the point of view of knowledge organization and representation in the context of user collaboration within the Web 2.0 environments. Folksonomies provide multiple benefits which make them a useful indexing method in various contexts; however, they also have a number of shortcomings that may hamper precise or exhaustive document retrieval. The position maintained is that folksonomies are a valuable addition to the traditional spectrum of knowledge organization methods since they facilitate user input, stimulate active language use and timeliness, create opportunities for processing large data sets, and allow new ways of social navigation within document collections. Applications of folksonomies as well as recommendations for effective information indexing and retrieval are discussed. Chapter 14 Folksonomy: Creating Metadata through Collaborative Tagging....................................................... 147 Stefan Bitzer, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany Lars Thoroe, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany Matthias Schumann, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany Modern Web 2.0 technologies facilitate the collaboration and sharing of information among users, thereby enabling cooperative processes of information search. One kind of user participation is collaborative tagging, where individuals assign keywords to resources and objects on the Internet. Through the allocation of keywords, objects are enhanced with user-created metadata which results in the so-called folksonomies. This chapter focuses on the classification of tags based on function and user motivation, examines advantages and disadvantages of folksonomies, and provides a review of current applications using collaborative tagging. Future trends and potential developments are identified as they relate to the implementation of collaborative tagging in corporate settings. Chapter 15 E-Tagging in Context: Information Management across Community Networks ............................... 158 Heather D. Pfeiffer, New Mexico State University, USA Emma L. Tonkin, University of Bath, UK This chapter examines social tagging as annotation: first from the perspective of classification research; and second from the perspective of knowledge representation and knowledge management. Using the context meta-model of the annotation, the authors demonstrate that the model is adequately represented in existing knowledge representation theory: specifically, from the perspective of socially constructed meaning in community networks. Furthermore, the set of tagging representations (that is, triadic networks of the individual, object, and annotation) are explored throughout the knowledge representation domain. In contrast to many commentators, the authors of this chapter conclude that social tagging may

effectively be explored via a multidisciplinary approach linking knowledge representation and classification research and creating an open domain network. Chapter 16 Using Notification Systems to Create Social Places for Online Learning .......................................... 170 James M. Laffey, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA Christopher J. Amelung, Yale University, USA Context-aware activity notification systems have potential to improve and support the social experience of online learning. The authors of this chapter have developed a Context-aware Activity Notification System (CANS) that monitors online learning activities and represents relevant contextual information by providing notification and making the learning activity salient to other participants. The chapter describes previous efforts to develop and support online learning context awareness systems; it also defines the critical components and features of such a system. It is argued that notification systems can provide methods for using the context of activity to support members’ understanding of the meaning of activity. When designed and implemented effectively, CANS can turn course management systems (CMS) into technologies of social interaction to support the social requirements of learning. Chapter 17 Peer Learning and Social Interactions in an Asynchronous Learning Environment .......................... 181 Angela T. Ragusa, Charles Sturt University, Australia This chapter explores how Internet-based asynchronous communication forums utilized in teaching undergraduate courses affect social interactions and student satisfaction. Drawing from an analysis of qualitative data, such as student and teachers’ perceptions, this case study reveals four key factors that affect learner satisfaction: (1) trust of people and technology, (2) awareness of how technically-mediated interactions differ from face-to-face interactions, (3) peer-based learning opportunities, and 4) integration of relevant learning materials and opportunities for social engagement. The findings suggest that when asynchronous forums are used as the principle vehicle for communication and learning, students feel less socially isolated, report a sense of belonging, and positively evaluate learning outcomes. The case study identifies asynchronous electronic forums as an effective tool for peer learning and social interactions among upper-level distance education students in Australia. Chapter 18 Educational Podcasting: A Taxonomy of Pedagogical Applications .................................................. 194 Catherine McLoughlin, Australian Catholic University, Australia Mark J. W. Lee, Charles Sturt University, Australia The proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies generates a new wave of online behavior, distributed collaboration, and social interaction. They are already having a transformative effect on education, triggering changes in how teachers and students communicate and learn. The chapter illustrates the new forms of learning, communication, and participation enabled by podcasting and the pedagogical innovations that are possible with this audio-based Web 2.0 technology. Beyond having access to a wider range of content, learners can engage in creative authorship by producing and manipulating digital audio content

and making it available for consumption and critique by classmates, teachers, and a wider audience on the web. A range of podcasting activities are described in contemporary learning environments. The emphasis is on tertiary education settings where students are engaged in content creation, self-directed learning, and metacognitive skill development. These examples are discussed in terms of how they are indicative of the pedagogical choices now available to teachers and learners. Chapter 19 Wiki Use in Higher Education: Implications for Group Size and Task Complexity .......................... 209 Elizabeth Koh, National University of Singapore, Singapore John Lim, National University of Singapore, Singapore In recent years, the field of education has discovered the educational value of social interaction technologies, including wikis. However, a lack of conceptual understanding and operationalization of wiki use has prevented a more extensive adoption of this collaborative technology by educational institutions. The present chapter provides insights into the functionality of wikis and their educational implications for higher education. The authors contend that a conceptualization of wiki use in the classroom context can be derived from a typology of online interactive pedagogies. The proposed conceptualization is based on the assumption that certain kinds of wiki-related activities correspond to certain levels of classroom interactions: namely, social interaction, general discussion, topic focused discussion, and collaborative activities. Additionally, group size and task complexity should be considered as criteria for wiki implementation. The main premise of the chapter is that the instructional use of wiki-based classroom technologies can enhance student learning. Chapter 20 The Hybrid Course: Facilitating Learning through Social Interaction Technologies ......................... 220 Lorraine D. Jackson, California Polytechnic State University, USA Joe Grimes, California Polytechnic State University, USA This chapter surveys the benefits and challenges of hybrid courses, which blend face-to-face instruction with online learning, and opportunities provided by the introduction of web-based social interaction technologies. It discusses the pedagogical implications of various Web 2.0 tools: that is, asynchronous discussion boards, blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, e-portfolios, folksonomies, educational gaming, data mashups, and simulations. The authors argue that as hybrid courses continue to evolve to meet the needs of students, instructors, and institutions of higher learning, the integration of Web 2.0 applications in a hybrid model requires thoughtful course design, clear educational objectives, and carefully planned activities. Chapter 21 The Use of Social Interaction Technologies in E-Portfolios............................................................... 233 Lina Pelliccione, Curtin University of Technology, Australia Catherine Pocknee, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Julie Mulvany, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

The chapter focuses on the potential of electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) to engage and motivate the learners and presents a framework for the informed inclusion and adoption of social interaction technologies as a means to increase the effective use of ePortfolios. Electronic portfolios are a web-based format for providing genuine evidence of student performance, self-reflection, competence, career planning and leadership. The ePortfolios meet the needs of the digital learner in the knowledge society. The collaboratively constructed artifacts enable the articulation of shared knowledge building and selfreflective practice, further confirming the status of ePortfolios as living documents. By their electronic nature, ePortfolios open promising opportunities for the assimilation of social interaction technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, video, and photo sharing. The authors trace the development and use of ePortfolios within the context of higher education. Various ePortfolio tools are discussed along with their educational potential and the associated challenges. Chapter 22 Commerce and Gender: Generating Interactive Spaces for Female Online Users ............................. 245 Noemi Maria Sadowska, Regents Business School, Regent’s College, UK Internet technology presented the women’s magazine industry with new prospects for publishing and user interaction. The case of BEME.com, the UK online commercial portal targeting female users, exemplifies the tendency for a commercial context to trade in and on gender stereotypes instead of pursuing opportunities for novel conceptions of interaction with users. Contemporary design practices together with a feminist framework are drawn on to explore these issues. It is argued that although design managers and producers might have been aware of the Internet potential to foster new forms of interactive spaces for female users, these advances did not fit within the existing business models of commercial portals. The notions of “becoming” and “user interaction” are suggested as alternative approaches to the development of female oriented Internet portals. Chapter 23 Social Interaction Technologies: A Case Study of Guanxi and Women Managers’ Careers in Information Technology in China ...................................................................................... 257 Jiehua Huang, Guangzhou University, China and Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland Iiris Aaltio, University of Jyväskylä, Finland This chapter explores a relationship between social interaction technologies (SIT) and guanxi, a major Chinese informal style of networking, in the context of the careers of women managers in the information technology (IT) field in China. Addressing women’s under-representation in non-traditional occupations (such as IT), prior research has established that networking, especially informal, is an important career management tool for women. Recent advances in social capital theory and social network analysis provide a framework for understanding the role of social processes in achieving career success. Today, the growing web-based social and professional networking in China weighs against the traditional forms of relationships, such as personal networks based on guanxi. The study indicates that SIT and guanxi should be viewed as complementary rather than mutually exclusive influences.

Chapter 24 Online Participation: Shaping the Networks of Professional Women ................................................ 270 Helen Donelan, The Open University, UK Clem Herman, The Open University, UK Karen Kear, The Open University, UK Gill Kirkup, The Open University, UK Social interaction technologies present women with powerful tools to extend their network of professional contacts. This chapter considers the use of online networks by professional women, specifically those working in science, engineering, and technology, who may face particular barriers in advancing their careers; it explores the potential offered by online participation and interaction for overcoming these difficulties. Recent discussions about women’s networks and networking strategies are extended, and the authors investigate how these strategies are being affected by the growth and evolution of online social networking. Different approaches to online networking for career development are discussed, together with an examination of associated Internet and Web 2.0 technologies and the potential these approaches and tools present to women working in science, engineering, and technology. Chapter 25 Women Bloggers Seeking Validation and Financial Recompense in the Blogosphere ...................... 281 Sarah Pedersen, The Aberdeen Business School, The Robert Gordon University, UK Previous researchers investigating motivations for blogging have suggested mainly intangible benefits: for instance, documenting the author’s life, providing commentary and opinions, expressing deeply felt emotions, working out ideas through writing, and forming and maintaining communities and forums. The research detailed in this chapter focuses on the materialistic motivations of women bloggers in the U.K. and U.S. The author suggests that a need for validation and a strong financial stimulus should be added to this list of incentives. Chapter 26 Personal Blogging: Individual Differences and Motivations.............................................................. 292 Rosanna E. Guadagno, University of Alabama, USA Cassie A. Eno, University of Alabama, USA Bradley M. Okdie, University of Alabama, USA The present chapter examines current research of blogging practices; it focuses on the personal blog, a blog created and maintained by an individual and not used for financial or occupational gain. The authors maintain that individual difference factors, such as personality and gender, may contribute to differences in likelihood to blog, motivation to blog, and blog content. The authors argue that the same factors that allow for differentiation of individuals in more classic self-expressive communication modalities (e.g., journaling) may also delineate individuals in new modes of online communication and self-expression. However, these factors may manifest themselves differently over more contemporary methods of self-expression and communication. The authors conclude that bloggers and blog readership appear to be steadily growing, making this area of online self-expression increasingly deserving of scientific inquiry.

Chapter 27 Audience Replies to Character Blogs as Parasocial Relationships...................................................... 302 James D. Robinson, University of Dayton, USA Robert Agne, Auburn University, USA News anchors, talk show hosts, and soap opera characters often become objects of parasocial affection because of the nature of these program genres. This chapter explores the concept of parasocial interaction by focusing on audience replies to blog posts made on behalf of a TV character, Jessica Buchanan of ABC Television Network’s One Life to Live show. The authors employ communication accommodation theory to illuminate the concept and to identify specific communicative behaviors that occur during parasocial interaction. The chapter presents evidence of parasocial interaction within the blog replies and audience accommodation to the blog posts. Analysis suggests that parasocial interaction is the mediated manifestation of the relationship dimension inherent in television messages and used by audience members in much the same way it is used during face-to-face interaction. Chapter 28 Situating Social Identity through Language Convergence in Online Groups...................................... 315 Scott L. Crabill, Oakland University, USA According to social identity theory, individuals create and maintain their social identity through group membership. During face-to-face interactions within a group, people assess various verbal and nonverbal cues to influence the perceptions of themselves by others. However, in the context of online communication these cues are not as readily available. A screen name can be viewed as part of an individual’s “social identity creation”: a message that members of online discussion boards interpret and react to while trying to situate themselves within the group. This chapter explores how language convergence can function as a cue that facilitates situating social identity within online in-groups. Results of a content analysis of 400 screen names suggest that the screen names of discussion board members serve as an organizing variable for participants to situate themselves socially within the context of online interaction. Chapter 29 Online Relationships and the Realm of Romantic Possibilities........................................................... 327 Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, University of Haifa, Israel Human life concerns not only—or even mainly—the present, but rather, and to a significant extent, the realm of imagined possibilities that include cyberspace. The fundamental human capacity to imagine the possible not only reveals reality, but often disregards it as well. Although the realm of potential romantic possibilities is promising, it is also risky. To guide our path through this unknown territory, humans have created boundaries that eliminate the options that seem immoral or dangerous. Internetbased social interaction technologies have considerably increased the boundaries of the realm of the romantically possible and its accessibility. Hence, the challenge of coping with this realm has become central to modern life and has far reaching implications for human relationships. This chapter theorizes the role of technology in creating potential possibilities for romantic relationships and focuses on the imagination, interactivity, reciprocity, and anonymity of cyberspace.

Chapter 30 The Virtual Social Continuum Expressed: Interaction and Community Formation in MMORPGs ................................................................................................................... 336 Alan Rea, Western Michigan University, USA From the interactive textual worlds of MUDs and MuSHes to the visually rich, textured three-dimensional realms of MMORPGs, participants move from loose to strong associations forming social networks via structured guidelines and interaction patterns. These virtual world inhabitants create communication conduits, collaborate to attain goals and solve problems, or entertain themselves. In this chapter, the author uses Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, one of the most successful MMORPGs to date, to chart the various associations ranging from casual conversations to groups and guilds in which role specialization is critical to close-knit community success. The author argues that using rewards for accepted behavior creates a socialization continuum that stimulates players to interact with one another.

Section 3 Issues, Viewpoints, and Perspectives The concluding section details the practical advantages of social interaction technologies and discusses some of the issues pertaining to the unintended consequences of the uncritical application of these technologies. The expressed concerns entail the paradox of rapid technological change and slow creation of formal and informal societal checks and balances, legal aspects of user-contributed content distribution, issues of privacy and surveillance, and online fraud and marketing to children. Recognizing that SIT are having far-reaching and lasting effects on society, the contributors offer specific solutions and viewpoints that address such key issues as: the emerging role of SIT as enablers of political dialog and facilitators of civic interaction and online democracy; social media and participatory journalism; the use of social software by the nonprofit and public sectors; and, the role of new technologies in educational outreach. The chapters suggest diverse theoretical perspectives, approaches, and conceptual frameworks to ascertain the opportunities and benefits emerging from the SIT phenomenon. Chapter 31 Legal Issues Associated with Emerging Social Interaction Technologies .......................................... 351 Robert D. Sprague, University of Wyoming, USA This chapter focuses on legal issues that may arise from the increasing use of social interaction technologies: prospective employers searching the Internet to discover information from candidates’ blogs, personal web pages, or social networking profiles; employees being fired because of blog comments; a still-evolving federal law granting online service providers sweeping immunity from liability for userpublished content; and attempts to apply the federal computer crime law to conduct on social networking sites. The U.S. legal system has been slow to adapt to the rapid proliferation of social interaction technologies. This paradox of rapid technological change and slow legal development can sometimes cause unfairness and uncertainty. Until the U.S. legal system begins to adapt to the growing use of these technologies, there will be no change.

Chapter 32 Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: How ISPs and Users are Legally Exempted from Offensive Materials ................................................................................................... 363 Joshua Azriel, Kennesaw State University, USA As a federal law, the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) criminalizes any offensive content posted on a computer server that is operated by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The law exempts ISPs and other “users” from any liability for the illegal content that is posted by third parties as long as they make a “good faith” effort to restrict the information. Plaintiffs, who claim to be victims of offensive messages and sued ISPs, consistently lost their court cases. District and appellate courts have upheld Section 230’s provisions and Congress’s authority to regulate in this area of online communication. The CDA applies to many forms of Internet communication: for example, websites, chat rooms, discussion forums, wikis, and blogs. This chapter reviews the law, examines how federal and state courts have interpreted the CDA regarding ISPs, describes under what conditions an ISP can be held responsible for illegal content, analyzes the “user” portion of the law, and presents the legal dangers of providing immunity for “users” who post illegal content online. Chapter 33 Blogs and Forums in a Presidential Election Process in Turkey ........................................................ 372 Güliz Uluç, Ege University, Turkey Mehmet Yilmaz, Ege University, Turkey Umit Isikdag, IT Consultant, Ankara, Turkey Internet forums and weblogs have been institutionalized as an integral part of the political communication system. Political candidates, interest groups, and other political actors increasingly employ the Internet as a communication tool. Weblogs and online discussion forums are recognized as new democratic meeting places. This chapter investigates the role of political blogs and forums in the 2007 presidential election in Turkey and focuses on the interaction between political actors and the citizens. The content of 270 top-rated blogs and 15 discussion forums posted between April and September of 2007 was analyzed. The findings indicate that blogs and forums function as enablers of political dialogue and facilitate political participation and civic interaction. The conclusion is drawn that blogs and forums have emerged as innovative modes of political communication in Turkey resulting in a broad interchange of diverse political opinions in the political arena. Chapter 34 Wiki Journalism .................................................................................................................................. 383 Joseph E. Burns, Southeastern Louisiana University, USA Wiki journalism is a format of participatory journalism in which citizens are encouraged to add to, or modify, a wiki-based news story. Although the process is relatively new and the mainstream media still seem wary to accept the concept, the public has begun to recognize the potential of wiki journalism as a form of reporting. Wiki journalism has claimed success in the primary coverage of large news stories (for example, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007) and in being the first source to provide images, sound, and first-hand accounts. The technology is already in place for citizen-

based journalism to become a true new branch of media. However, critics of wiki journalism point out that this type of journalism is often based more on opinion than fact. Another concern is that when it comes to journalistic ethics and the law, participatory media do not function under the same set of rules as the traditional media. The author maintains that the future of wiki journalism depends on whether or not this novel news format can stand on its own. Chapter 35 Public Intimacy and the New Face (Book) of Surveillance: The Role of Social Media in Shaping Contemporary Dataveillance ................................................................................. 392 Lemi Baruh, Kadir Has University, Turkey Levent Soysal, Kadir Has University, Turkey In recent years, social media have become an important avenue for self-expression. At the same time, the ease with which individuals disclose their private information has added to an already heated debate about the privacy implications of interactive media. This chapter investigates the relationship between disclosure of personal information in social media and two related trends: the increasing value of subjective or private experience as a social currency and the evolving nature of automated dataveillance. The author argues that the results of the extended ability of individuals to negotiate their identity through social media are contradictory. The information revealed to communicate the complexity of one’s identity becomes an extensive source of data about individuals, thereby contributing to the functioning of a new regime of surveillance.

Volume 2 Chapter 36 Emerging Online Democracy: The Dynamics of Formal and Informal Control in Digitally Mediated Social Structures................................................................................. 404 Todd Kelshaw, Montclair State University, USA Christine A. Lemesianou, Montclair State University, USA The emergence and development of Web 2.0 has enabled new modes of social interaction that are potentially democratic, both within and across digitally mediated venues. Web-based interaction offers unlimited opportunities for organizing across geographic, demographic, and contextual boundaries, with ramifications in professional networking, political action, friendships, romances, learning, recreation, and entertainment. The wrangling between formal and informal modes of discursive control ensures perpetual dynamism and innovation; the wrangling also offers the promise that diverse voices are not only welcome but also potentially responsive and responsible. The conclusion advocated is the importance of paying attention to these tendencies since they demonstrate that the web’s proclivities for decentralization and pluralism do not necessarily lead to relativistic and nihilistic hypertextuality but to potentially novel forms of shared social control.

Chapter 37 Squeak Etoys: Interactive and Collaborative Learning Environments ............................................... 417 Christos J. Bouras, University of Patras, Greece Vassilis Poulopoulos, University of Patras, Greece Vassilis Tsogkas, University of Patras, Greece Squeak Etoys is a free software program and media-rich authoring system with a user-friendly visual interface. The software is designed to help six to twelve year-old children learn through interaction and collaboration; it comes preinstalled on XO laptop computers distributed by the One Laptop Per Child Foundation. The goal of the One Laptop Per Child initiative is to create novel educational opportunities for the world’s children by providing each child with a book-size, light and portable computer for personal use at school and at home. This chapter elaborates on the educational dimensions of the XO laptop and the Etoys environment developed to empower teachers and students with the capacity for creative learning, exploration, interaction, and collaboration. The authors focus on how the hardware and software capabilities of XO laptops can be utilized to allow children to interact, work together on projects, and engage in computer simulations and games while learning mathematics, physics, chemistry, and geometry. Chapter 38 The Sun Earth Moon System: Connecting Science and Informal Learning ....................................... 428 Ronald Marsh, John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Science, University of North Dakota, USA This chapter focuses on the issues pertaining to informal science learning through public outreach and the utilization of established and evolving web technologies. The Sun Earth Moon System (SEMs) is a website that integrates webcasting with Web 2.0 features to increase public awareness and interest in natural sciences as well as to dispel the stereotype that science is boring. The SEMs website provides live video webcasts of solar and lunar eclipses and planet transits streamed from various locations around the world as part of a web-based public outreach program. The SEMs project aims to offer the general public a realistic experience and evoke the spirit of excitement felt by being a part of a global community witnessing rare astronomical events. The purpose of the chapter is to explore webcasting and design strategies, such as the incorporation of social media elements, that can assist in the development of a science-oriented educational website. Chapter 39 Neogeography ..................................................................................................................................... 439 Judith Gelernter, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Neogeography refers to geography in the Web 2.0 style. The practice of neogeography shares the characteristics of other social interactive technologies as it represents a collaborative effort by the general public rather than professionals. Volunteer-supplied geographic tags may assume informational value beyond entertainment. Their potential is tempered by problems stemming from its novelty. For instance, neogeography-related websites provide different ways for people to contribute tags, photographs, locations, and commentary. More serious concerns are whether data and commentary are accurate and whether photographs can be an invasion of privacy. Assuming we come to terms with these concerns and there is a future for neogeography, the next generation of applications might change in appearance, mode of

Chapter 40 Social Software Use in Public Libraries ............................................................................................. 451 June Abbas, University of Oklahoma, USA With the emergence of Web 2.0, libraries have started employing social software applications (such as blogs, tagging, social networking, and wikis) to engage readers, encourage user-contributed content, and connect with user populations in novel ways. However, little research has been conducted on the applications of Web 2.0 technologies within public libraries. This chapter focuses on the applicability of social software in a library setting and examines the use of such innovative techniques as live tagging, social cataloging, and social bookmarking. The chapter evaluates the potential of social software tools for facilitating collaboration between librarians and library patrons; it addresses the concerns expressed by the library and information science community related to the issues of trust, authority, accuracy, responsibility, and ethics in the context of the Library 2.0. Chapter 41 Marketing for Children Using Social Interaction Technologies ......................................................... 462 Ruth E. Brown, University of Nebraska—Lincoln, USA Children are spending more time online and, in most cases, this means they are using social interaction technologies. Beyond the concern for safety, another issue is gathering strength: namely, interactive marketing to children. This chapter looks at the immersive nature of interactive marketing, which can be found in blogs, chat rooms, virtual worlds, advergaming, and other forms of advertainment. The chapter also examines: the ages of targetable audiences (some of whom cannot yet read the “advertisement” label), websites for children that use interactive marketing, where and how ads are displayed, the effects of interactive marketing, the potential for data collection through interactive marketing, the lack of regulation in interactive marketing, and the future trends of interactive marketing to children. Chapter 42 The Use of Social Media by Nonprofit Organizations: An Examination from the Diffusion of Innovations Perspective .................................................................................................................. 473 Richard D. Waters, North Carolina State University, USA Nonprofit organizations are an essential part of the social, political, and economic landscape of contemporary society. Social media provide ample opportunities for these organizations to increase their community presence, impact, effectiveness, and efficiency. A qualitative study of 39 nonprofit leaders explored how nonprofits are utilizing the potential of the social media technologies to carry out their programs and services. Thematic analysis revealed that nonprofits are slowly embracing the possibilities offered by the new social interaction technologies. Most nonprofit organizations lag behind and wait to see how other nonprofits incorporate these new communication outlets into their budgets and daily operations. Paralleling Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory, innovators and early adopters are using social media to revitalize their fundraising and volunteering efforts while the majority lags behind.

Chapter 43 Towards Understanding the Successful Adoption of Blog-Based Knowledge Management Systems: A Socio-Psychological Approach................................................................... 486 Joowon Park, Information and Communications University, South Korea Sooran Jo, Information and Communications University, South Korea Junghoon Moon, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea Knowledge has been recognized as a valuable resource for organizational activities. As businesses are entering the world of Web 2.0, knowledge sharing is widely regarded as a critical issue in the area of organizational knowledge management (KM). Recently, organizations have started adopting blog-based knowledge management systems (KMS) with encouraging results. Used as a tool for sharing organizational knowledge, blogging can aggregate the intellectual power of individual members, serve as innovative KMS, and lead to the creation of a trust-based corporate culture. However, despite the increasing adoption of blogs by organizations, a theoretical framework for understanding a blog-based KMS has not been developed. This chapter attempts to present a framework for understanding a blog-based KMS in an organizational setting, grounded in a socio-psychological approach and the application of social identity and symbolic interaction theories. Chapter 44 Social Software for Customer Knowledge Management..................................................................... 496 Zuopeng (Justin) Zhang, State University of New York at Plattsburgh, USA Social software is assuming a significant role in electronic business, increasingly referred to as e-business, and has been utilized recently on a growing scale by companies in customer relationship management. However, it is largely unclear at what levels firms should implement social software. This chapter addresses the gap by identifying the optimal level of social software deployment for a firm that plans to maximize its transactional benefits through the management of a customer knowledge base. The conclusion reached is that the optimal level of social software depends on a range of factors: for example, the initial volume of knowledge base, transaction benefits, and the estimates of the positive and negative effects of social software use. The chapter offers insights and guidance for business managers and practitioners. Chapter 45 Critical Success Factors in the Development of Folksonomy-Based Knowledge Management Tools............................................................................................................................... 509 Kenneth Owen, Lakehead University, Canada Robert Willis, Vancouver Island University, Canada This chapter examines three important aspects of folksonomies: common design factors found in folksonomies, developmental patterns of mature folksonomies, and the identification of knowledge consumer behaviors that can act as metrics for the evaluation of a small-scale folksonomy. In identifying desirable design elements, a comparative examination of tags and objects was made using a study conducted at Lakehead University. From this project, an exemplar of an effective folksonomical data structure was derived. User behavior was examined and categorized to identify behaviors that can be monitored and measured as indicators of user satisfaction. The authors analyze the structures of a folksonomy and synthesize a practical model of an effective folksonomy in the context of knowledge management.

Chapter 46 Representing and Sharing Tagging Data Using the Social Semantic Cloud of Tags .......................... 519 Hak-Lae Kim, National University of Galway, Ireland John G. Breslin, National University of Galway, Ireland Stefan Decker, National University of Galway, Ireland Hong-Gee Kim, Seoul National University, South Korea Social tagging has become an essential element for Web 2.0 and the emerging Semantic Web applications. With the rise of Web 2.0, websites that provide content creation and sharing features have become extremely popular. These sites allow users to categorize and browse content using tags (i.e., free-text keyword topics). However, the tagging structures or folksonomies created by users and communities are often interlocked with a particular site and cannot be reused in a different system or by a different client. This chapter presents a model for expressing the structure, features, and relations among tags in different Web 2.0 sites. The model, termed the Social Semantic Cloud of Tags (SCOT), allows for the exchange of semantic tag metadata and reuse of tags in various social software applications. Chapter 47 A Framework for Analyzing Social Interaction Using Broadband Visual Communication Technologies............................................................................................................. 528 Susan O’Donnell, National Research Council, Canada Heather Molyneaux, National Research Council, Canada Kerri Gibson, National Research Council, Canada Broadband visual communication (BVC) technologies—such as videoconferencing and video sharing— allow for the exchange of rich simultaneous or pre-recorded visual and audio data over broadband networks. This chapter introduces an analytical framework that can be utilized by multi-disciplinary teams working with BVC technologies to analyze the variables that hinder people’s adoption and use of BVC. The framework identifies four main categories, each with a number of sub-categories, covering variables that are social and technical in nature: namely, the production and reception of audio-visual content, technical infrastructure, interaction of users and groups with the technical infrastructure, and social and organizational relations. The authors apply the proposed framework to a study of BVC technology usability and effectiveness as well as technology needs assessment in remote and rural First Nation (Indigenous) communities of Canada. Chapter 48 Using the Social Web for Collaboration in Software Engineering Education .................................... 542 Pankaj Kamthan, Concordia University, Canada Recent innovations in the computer and software industry have placed new demands on academic programs in software engineering. Over the past decade, the technological environment in which software engineering education (SEE) resides has been rapidly changing. To be able to design, develop, and evaluate software applications and systems, future software engineers have to learn to adopt new technologies and acquire new skills. This chapter examines the educational impact of Social Web applications in classroom activities pertaining to SEE. The feasibility issues of the selection and adoption of collaborative

technologies and applications are emphasized, and the pedagogical patterns are discussed. The potential prospects of such an integration and related concerns are illustrated through examples. Chapter 49 Online Scams: Case Studies from Australia ....................................................................................... 561 Michelle Berzins, University of Canberra, Australia The adoption of new technologies presents a risk that inexperienced users may become immersed in a virtual world of cyber-crime featuring fraud, scams, and deceit. In addition to the societal benefits of social interaction technologies (SIT), the adoption of social software tools brings a range of security issues. The chapter highlights the “darker” side of SIT in which online safety and interpersonal trust become tangible commodities and where fraudsters prey on unsuspecting netizens; it demonstrates that an assortment of technological tools and psychological practices may be used to gain the confidence and trust of unsuspecting consumers. The author argues that consumer education can be successfully utilized to enhance the ability of Internet users to detect and avoid fraudulent interactions and safely enjoy the many benefits afforded by the emerging social interaction technologies. Chapter 50 The Usability of Social Software ........................................................................................................ 574 Lorna Uden, Staffordshire University, UK Alan Eardley, Staffordshire University, UK Emergent Web 2.0 technologies and applications (such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, mashups, and folksonomies) present a range of opportunities and benefits and are increasingly used by people to interact with each other. Despite the growing popularity of social software, there is a lack of research on the usability of these tools. This chapter focuses on how users interact with Web 2.0 technology, discusses a conceptual framework for a usability evaluation of social software, describes the different types of social software applications, and offers guidelines for their usability evaluation. The argument advanced is that social software usability should be viewed as a set of principles and practices aimed to deliver more service-orientated Web 2.0-based applications.

Section 4 Selected Readings Chapter 51 Interactivity Redefined for the Social Web ......................................................................................... 586 V. Sachdev, Middle Tennessee State University, USA S. Nerur, University of Texas at Arlington, USA J. T. C. Teng, University of Texas at Arlington, USA With the trend towards social interaction over the Internet and the mushrooming of Web sites such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube in the social computing space, practitioners and researchers are motivated to explain the sudden surge in user interest. The authors propose that interactivity is an important

and appropriate subject of investigation to shed light on this explosion in social media use. Based on a review of the extant literature, they justify the use of interactivity for addressing research questions motivated by this new phenomenon. In particular, they propose a redefinition of interactivity for the social computing domain and term it Social Computing Interactivity (SCI). The authors suggest possible operationalizations of the dimensions of SCI and explore theory bases which would inform a study of their relevance in predicting the continued growth of social computing. Chapter 52 Social Technologies and the Digital Commons .................................................................................. 601 Francesca da Rimini, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia This chapter investigates the premise that software is culture. It explores this proposition through the lens of peer production, of knowledge-based goods circulating in the electronic space of a digital commons, and the material space of free media labs. Computing history reveals that technological development has typically been influenced by external sociopolitical forces. However, with the advent of the Internet and the free software movement, such development is no longer solely shaped by an elite class. Dyne:bolic, Streamtime and the Container Project are three autonomously-managed projects that combine social technologies and cooperative labour with cultural activism. Innovative digital staging platforms enable creative expression by marginalised communities, and assist movements for social change. The author flags new social relations and shared social imaginaries generated in the nexus between open code and democratic media. In so doing the author aims to contribute tangible, inspiring examples to the emerging interdisciplinary field of software studies. Chapter 53 Virtual Constructivism: Avatars in Action .......................................................................................... 623 Laura M. Nicosia, Montclair State University, USA Contemporary educators have been reassessing pedagogical frameworks and reevaluating accepted epistemologies and ontologies of learning. The age-old debate whether knowledge is gained or constructed seems drawn to a consensus in the 21st Century: those who seek knowledge are active participants in the learning process and they have uniquely 21st Century attributes. Web 2.0+ technologies, various social media (Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, YouTube) and online virtual reality environments (Second Life, World of Warcraft, Sims) have influenced today’s students in ways that constructivists should explore, embrace and exploit. This essay explores how Second Life (SL) effectively employs and distills the principles of educational constructivism. SL offers endless opportunities for immersion within userconstructed environments and activities. Educational use of SL may facilitate learner-led activities and yield learning that is prompted by desire and curiosity rather than learning for learning’s sake. By exploiting these qualities with constructivist pedagogies, educators create environments that challenge and enable students to engage in the deepest kinds of learning. Chapter 54 Managing E-Relationships in a Supply Network................................................................................ 639 Susanna Xin Xu, National University of Ireland–Galway, Ireland Joe Nandhakumar, University of Warwick, UK

This chapter investigates the dynamics of the formation and transformation of electronic supply relationships (e-supply relationships) in the Chinese cultural, technological, and industrial network context. It focuses on a newly-formed large Chinese telecom company. The aim is to provide better insights into inter-organisational relationships (IORs) enabled by the application of newer types of Internet technology in different contexts, and to develop a new conceptual framework of e-supply relationships. In this research, the conceptualisation of the transformation process of e-supply relationships represents circuits of interactions between managerial actions and social structures, as well as the particular cultural and technological context within which the interactions take place. Chapter 55 A Study of Friendship Networks and Blogosphere............................................................................. 661 Nitin Agarwal, Arizona State University, USA Huan Liu, Arizona State University, USA Jianping Zhang, MITRE Corporation, USA In (Golbeck and Hendler, 2006), authors consider those social friendship networking sites where users explicitly provide trust ratings to other members. However, for large social friendship networks it is infeasible to assign trust ratings to each and every member so they propose an inferring mechanism which would assign binary trust ratings (trustworthy/non-trustworthy) to those who have not been assigned one. They demonstrate the use of these trust values in email filtering application domain and report encouraging results. Authors also assume three crucial properties of trust for their approach to work: transitivity, asymmetry, and personalization. These trust scores are often transitive, meaning, if Alice trusts Bob and Bob trusts Charles then Alice can trust Charles. Asymmetry says that for two people involved in a relationship, trust is not necessarily identical in both directions. This is contrary to what was proposed in (Yu and Singh, 2003). They assume symmetric trust values in the social friendship network Social networks allow us to share experiences, thoughts, opinions, and ideas. Members of these networks, in return experience a sense of community, a feeling of belonging, a bonding that members matter to one another and their needs will be met through being together. Individuals expand their social networks, convene groups of like-minded individuals and nurture discussions. In recent years, computers and the World Wide Web technologies have pushed social networks to a whole new level. It has made possible for individuals to connect with each other beyond geographical barriers in a “flat” world. The widespread awareness and pervasive usability of the social networks can be partially attributed to Web 2.0. Representative interaction Web services of social networks are social friendship networks, the blogosphere, social and collaborative annotation (aka “folksonomies”), and media sharing. In this work, we briefly introduce each of these with focus on social friendship networks and the blogosphere. We analyze and compare their varied characteristics, research issues, state-of-the-art approaches, and challenges these social networking services have posed in community formation, evolution and dynamics, emerging reputable experts and influential members of the community, information diffusion in social networks, community clustering into meaningful groups, collaboration recommendation, mining “collective wisdom” or “open source intelligence” from the exorbitantly available user-generated contents. We present a comparative study and put forth subtle yet essential differences of research in friendship networks and Blogosphere, and shed light on their potential research directions and on cross-pollination of the two fertile domains of ever expanding social networks on the Web.

Chapter 56 Blogs as a Social Networking Tool to Build Community ................................................................... 625 Lisa Kervin, University of Wollongong, Australia Jessica Mantei, University of Wollongong, Australia Anthony Herrington, University of Wollongong, Australia This chapter examines blogging as a social networking tool to engage final year preservice teachers in reflective processes. Using a developed Web site, the students post their own blogs and comment upon those of others. The authors argue that opportunity to engage with this networking experience provides avenue for the students to consider their emerging professional identity as teachers. The blogging mechanism brought together the physical university context and virtual online environment as students identified, examined and reflected upon the intricacies of what it means to be a teacher. The authors hope that examining the findings that emerged from our research will inform other educators as to the affordances of blogging as a social networking tool.

Compilation of References ............................................................................................................... 701

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Foreword

Web 2.0, the term no longer inspires curiosity. Indeed, Web 2.0 has become a commonplace, even an assumed feature of many digital venues. Although a measure of the term’s utility, it is more importantly a measure of the enormous and popular success of what it describes. In just a few years the World Wide Web has changed, offering new ways to publish and share content. Education has also been transformed, either by direct engagement with Web 2.0 technologies and practices, or by academia’s contact with the larger world. The term was coined by publisher Tim O’Reilly for a 2004 conference and unfolded in a 2005 article. It superceded a then-current software project label called social software. That term of art addressed a longstanding problem in digital culture: namely, the assumption that digital projects were asocial, if not actively inhuman. This draws on a generation of pop culture and cultural criticism, portraying machines as enemies of humanity, disconnectors of persons, agents of alienation, and enablers of bowling alone. “Social software” was raised as a banner for those with a diametrically opposed vision, those who saw technology connecting people. This view draws on the roots of networked computing, seen most significantly in epochal figures from J.C.R. Licklider to Tim Berners-Lee. It was seen in the rise of virtual communities during the 1980s, and the rapid growth of people sharing documents through the Web. By the first years of the 21st century Web services emerged that were explicitly designed to connect people. Friendster was initially the most notable, succeeded shortly by MySpace and Facebook, then by dozens of other platforms. As we can see from their name recognition and enormous user bases, such social software platforms clearly connected with a significant cultural need. People find something rewarding and meaningful in the process of posting personae and linking up with other people, from total strangers to friends from the past. The term “Web 2.0” then appeared, recasting social networks in a new light. O’Reilly’s 2005 article argues that these social software projects actually partake of a broader Web publication movement. This views Friendster alongside the blogosphere and MySpace as allied to the vast wiki world. It is now commonplace to see Web 2.0 as difficult to define, with blurry boundaries and far too many projects to monitor. But O’Reilly’s intervention did offer a generalizable model with certain readily understood characteristics. The total lack of a replacement term, four years later, suggests that the phrase is quite workable. First, we can note that there is no black-line division between Webs 1.0 and 2.0. Indeed, there is no special software to download, applications to run, or hardware to purchase. The numerical distinction describes a shift in style, a shift of information architecture. Second, Web 2.0 describes an emphasis on social connectivity. While Web 1.0 enabled people to share documents, opening up alternatives to broadcast media, it did not focus on connecting persons. Think about the ways a 1999 Web user had to connect with a Web page author: that is, through private email or a guest book. If such a connection were made between browser and creator, there would be no

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way for that link to appear in the larger world. Web 2.0 services, in contrast, emphasize such links. If Alice comments on Bob’s blog, Carol and Charlie can read the exchange. Since Carol can post her own comment, or Charlie post to his blog linking back to Bob and Alice, the link is productive. Other people can then see these links appear, adding their own. Third, what makes these social connections happen so quickly is an emphasis on microcontent. A decade of Web 1.0 practice established a publication apparatus: creating HTML locally, FTPing that local content to a Web server, and maintaining that Web host. The investment of time in following that multi-legged publication arc, while far easier than what broadcast media offered, was still significant. Web 2.0 drastically lowers the amount of that investment. Rather than designing a Web site from architectural scratch, one creates a blog in five minutes of clicks. Instead of building a new HTML page, one uses a wiki. We edit content on our Twitter feeds or Facebook walls in seconds, rather than going through the file-FTP-server cycle each time we want to alter our material. The result is a fast-growing, quickly modified, extensively social Web. It runs alongside the classic Web, not replacing it so much as constituting another layer. For example, educational practitioners have responded to this new Web stratum in several ways. First, many educators are invested in course management systems; those are following the Web 1.0-2.0 arc with microcontext-themed platforms emerging (e.g., Moodle) and the largest one, Blackboard, extending a series of social software tendrils. Second, a wide and connected body of educators has been teaching with Web 2.0 tools of all kinds, either using them to publish course materials, assigning students to use them, or both. Third, educators swim in the larger sea of cyberculture. Even if they don’t use wikis, a large number of students use Wikipedia. If they do not Twitter, many people in academia know the Facebook status box. Blog content crops up in our Google searches, even if we refuse to touch a single piece of the blogosphere. In short, since “social software” gave way to “Web 2.0”, educational practice has changed. And, educational practice will continue to do so - as Web 2.0 churns and grows, throwing off ever new services and concepts. By the time you read this book, dozens of new platforms will have appeared. Some of these will not have generic names, but we will try to understand them. The chapters in the Handbook of Research on Social Interaction Technologies and Collaboration Software: Concepts and Trends constitute a superb place to start.

Bryan Alexander Director for Research, National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, USA

Bryan Alexander is Director of Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE): a network of colleges, universities, and nonprofit educational organizations working together to advance higher education through the effective use of digital technologies. He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and has taught information technology at Centenary College in Louisiana. His primary research interests are in mobile and wireless computing, digital gaming, and social software. Committed to exploring computer-mediated pedagogy, he writes and publishes on the critical issues of computer use in teaching and learning.

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Preface

We live in a time unparalleled in human history: a time of fundamental cultural, political, social, and economic change marked by an exponential growth in human powers to electronically collect, process, store, retrieve and disseminate information and create new knowledge. This sizable increase occurred during the second half of the 20th century with such landmark events as the emergence of the Internet in the 1960-70s, the introduction of personal computers in the 1980s, and the birth of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. It is not accidental that computers and the Internet are listed by National Academy of Engineering among the 20th century’s greatest engineering achievements that transformed the world (Constable & Somerville, 2003). Computer-based information technologies (IT) have witnessed a remarkable expansion, penetrating all areas of people’s lives – from personal to public. The last decade saw a shift in Internet innovations from information transmission and retrieval to interaction, collaboration and sharing, from “read-only” Web 1.0 with information and communication technologies (ICT) behind it to “read-write” Web 2.0 with social interaction technologies (SIT) enhanced by a variety of so-called “social software.” A grand vision of the creator of the web Tim Berners-Lee who designed his invention “for a social effect – to help people work together – and not as a technical toy” (1999, p. 123) is coming to fruition. As ICT matured, a shift towards SIT became inevitable. Social interaction technologies refer to an assortment of Internet-based tools and techniques aimed at initiating, maintaining, sharing, and distributing interactive and collaborative activities and spaces online. Social software, also known as collaboration software, represents digital electronic systems designed to advance social contact and interaction through computer networks. Social interaction technologies can be viewed as a result of change brought about by ICT. SIT now pose as agents of future change in their own right. Relying on SIT, the World Wide Web is evolving from its current shape towards the Semantic Web and semantic web technology (BernersLee & Hendler, 2001; Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila, 2001; Berners-Lee, Hall, Hendler, Shadbolt, & Weitzner, 2006). SIT made possible the proliferation of social media powered by social software: thereby serving as a testimony that human society as a whole continues on the path of ingenious integration and adoption of information technologies by extending the existing system of checks and balances to secure free information exchange and promote new means of social connectedness. The Handbook of Research on Social Interaction Technologies and Collaboration Software: Concepts and Trends focuses on the latest explosion of Internet-based collaboration tools and platforms reaching end-users; it explores their origins, structures, purposes, and functions; and it muses over how SIT can expand human abilities and powers. This broad spectrum of applications and services includes: online social networking, blogs, wikis, podcasts, web feeds, folksonomies, social bookmaking, photo and video sharing, discussion forums, virtual worlds, and mashups intended to advance interaction, collaboration, and sharing online.

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Where the human community is found, diverse media of communication are also. Where computermediated communication is found, its benefits and drawbacks are also. Where social interaction technology is found, its contemporary and future challenges for the human community are also. Borrowing from V.L. Parsegian’s sage work, This Cybernetic World of Men, Machines, and Earth Systems (1972, p. 13), while “the computer has advantages over the human system,” its “picture is not altogether bright” because the computer brings “risks as well.” Since they “require highly skilled human judgment for their use or misuse,” computers “can compound human errors as well as reduce them.” In short, to avoid undesirable consequences, we must value the edification of human intelligence. In the broader sense of technology, Neil Postman, in Technopoly (1993, p. 18), asserted that a “new technology does not add or subtract something.” Rather, a new technology “changes everything.” He cautioned that inventions can have unintended results that are favorable and unfavorable, even when the intended effect is one of human benefit. To avoid a lopsided approach it is time to recognize that “understanding and fostering the growth of the World Wide Web, both in engineering and societal terms, will require the development of a new interdisciplinary field” (Berners-Lee, 2006, p. 769). The editors of this text and its authors have done their best to inform the reader on pursuing a path of wisdom and eschewing a path of folly with respect to social interaction technology and collaboration software. The joys and sorrows of social interaction technologies and collaboration software are noted with sanity and scholarship. Naïve optimism holds no sway in the learned writings of these authors. The promise of the Handbook is that it will generate dialogue among diverse scientists to enrich, in the words of Thomas S. Kuhn, “the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community” (1970, p. 175).

DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES The editors chose to select as many diverse perspectives on the subject of social interaction technologies and collaboration software as reasonably possible. Vehement efforts were extended to select suitable and learned authors from around the globe. The international celebrity of the authors is further enhanced by their varied academic fields. Overall, the Handbook presents state-of-the-art research on social interaction technologies and collaboration software as emerging fields of cross-disciplinary research and knowledge. It has been noted that “Web science, therefore, must be inherently interdisciplinary; its goal is to both understand the growth of the Web and to create approaches that allow new powerful and more beneficial patterns to occur” (Berners-Lee, 2006, p. 769). The Hanbook brings together experts from computer science, software engineering, management information systems, business and economics, knowledge management systems, marketing, public relations and advertising, law, journalism and media, communication, psychology, anthropology, social work, design, library and information science, and education. Additionally, the Handbook maintains a global approach. The contributors are scholars hailing from Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Greece, Finland, Ireland, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S. with approaches from empirical, interpretive, historical, philosophical, critical, and other research perspectives utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. One can say that a world of authors and an array of research methods contribute to the extraordinary quality of the chapters addressing this contemporary and burgeoning topic in the socially and technologically converging fields of Web 2.0 communication.

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TOPICS Numerous authors cover varied and timely topics. To grasp the breadth of topics, please glance at the following extensive list: interactive and networked computing, mobile social services and the Social Web, social software and social media, marketing and advertising, various aspects and uses of blogs and podcasting, corporate added value and web-based collaboration, e-government and online democracy, virtual volunteering, different aspects and uses of folksonomies, tagging and the social semantic cloud of tags, blog-based knowledge management systems, systems of online learning, social interaction technology in ePortfolios, wikis in education and journalism, IT and the blogosphere in China, women bloggers on the web, parasocial relationships and romance in cyberspace, legal issues and social interaction technology, dataveillance and online fraud, neogeography, social software usability, social software in libraries and nonprofit organizations, and broadband visual communication technology for enhancing social interaction.

STRUCTURE OF THE TEXT All sections contribute to the reader’s enlightenment on social interaction technologies and collaboration software. The expertise, wisdom, scholarship, and talent of the authors are shared with the reader in three sections. Section I reviews Background and Development over chapters 1-12. Section II covers Concepts, Context, and Applications over chapters 13-30. And, Section III examines Issues, Viewpoints, and Perspectives over chapters 31-50. Finally, Selected Readings in the concluding section offer additional perspectives on social interaction technologies by featuring scholarly work recently published by IGI Global.

CHAPTER FEATURES The organization of the chapter follows close to this format: abstract, introduction, background, body, future trends, conclusion, references, and key terms and definitions. The abstract presents a scholarly overview of the chapter. The introduction informs us of the direction of the chapter. The background contextualizes the information covered in the chapter. The chapter then develops its position and builds its case in the body. The future trends section projects the potential for the chapter’s content. The conclusion reports that which the authors deduce from the study and its findings. The references section includes the relevant research sources. And, the key terms and definitions section delivers a selection of words (or phrases) and their definitions from the chapter authors.

CONTENT CONTRIBUTIONS Section I: Background and Development This section addresses general issues related to the origin and development of social interaction technologies (SIT) as a driving force behind the diverse (inter)faces of Web 2.0 and the technological frontier of the new millennium. As a tribute to the visionaries of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the section

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opens with a chapter on the legacy of J.C.R. Licklider. In 1960, Licklider authored a seminal paper, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” that forever changed the history of computing and earned him a place in the Internet Hall of Fame. The remaining contributions discuss the growth of advanced web-based interaction technologies and their economic, social, political, and cultural implications for a variety of areas and activities ranging from Web 2.0 business and advertising models, to e-government, citizen marketing, mobile social networks, blogging, podcasting, virtual volunteering, and virtual teams. The chapters in Section I will now be highlighted. In Chapter 1, Tomasello examines J.C.R. Licklider’s legacy as a contributor to the development of modern networked computing. Caus, Christmann, and Hagenhoff, in Chapter 2, look into the opportunities and drawback of the mobile social web. In Chapter 3, Humphreys explains how mobile social networks allow users to connect with each other, share information, and create technologically enabled mobile communities. Baruh, in Chapter 4, examines the opportunities available for advertisers trying to reach consumers through social media. In Chapter 5, Brown explores “citizen marketing” or consumers voluntarily posting product information based on their knowledge and experience. Burns, in Chapter 6, affirms that the commercial future of podcasting appears to be in the area of advertising and broadcasting. In Chapter 7, Tai discusses the rise of the Chinese blogosphere. Hellsten, in Chapter 8, argues that the challenge of e-governance in developing countries resides in “good governance,” accessibility, and user skills. In Chapter 9, Bohl and Manouchehri evaluate potentials, risks, mainsprings, and restrictions associated with the corporate use of Web 2.0. Widén-Wulff and Tötterman, in Chapter 10, express their view that social interaction technologies can successfully employ the previously untapped power of the web to utilize the collaborative creation of information and user-driven content. In Chapter 11, Mukherjee maintains that social interaction technologies create communicative possibilities that go beyond dyadic interactions and across physical boundaries, bringing a qualitative shift in the functioning of the Internet. And, Sofo, in Chapter 12, holds that social interaction technologies have made it possible for teams to exist in a virtual reality.

Section II: Concepts, Contexts, and Applications The chapters in this section scrutinize the ways social interaction technologies enhance the powers of connectivity, interaction, and collaboration for individuals, groups, organizations, and society as a whole in local and global contexts. The contributions discuss the deployment of SIT applications in knowledge management, education, business, and commerce. A broad range of concepts are introduced and analyzed: using folksonomies for knowledge organization and sharing; creating metadata through collaborative tagging; social tagging as annotation; constructing technology enhanced social and personal learning spaces; the impact of SIT on self-expression and social identity formation; online social, romantic and parasocial interactions and relationships; generating online interactive spaces for women; social networking and online community formation. The chapters in Section II deliver the following valuable information. In Chapter 13, Weller, Peters, and Stock discuss folksonomies as a novel way of indexing documents and locating information based on user generated keywords. Bitzer, Thoroe, and Schumann, in Chapter 14, focus on the classification of tags based on function and user motivation, examine advantages and disadvantages of folksonomies, and provide a review of current applications using collaborative tagging. In chapter 15, Pfeiffer and Tonkin conclude that social tagging may effectively be explored via a multidisciplinary approach linking knowledge representation and classification research and creating an open domain network. Laffey and Amelung, in Chapter 16, build a case that context-aware activity notification systems have potential to improve and support the social experience of online learning. In Chapter 17, Ragusa reports that in Australia, there is a continuing trend among institutions of higher education to utilize and optimize distance

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learning as a method of delivery. McLoughlin and Lee, in Chapter 18, detail how a proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies generates a new wave of online behavior, distributed collaboration, and social interaction. In Chapter 19, Koh and Lim maintain that the instructional use of wiki-based classroom technologies can enhance student learning. Jackson and Grimes, in Chapter 20, survey the benefits and challenges of hybrid courses, which blend face-to-face instruction with online learning, and opportunities provided by the introduction of web-based social interaction technologies. In Chapter 21, Pelliccione, Pocknee, and Mulvany focus on the potential of electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) to engage and motivate the learners and presents a framework for the informed inclusion and adoption of social interaction technologies as a means to increase the effective use of ePortfolios. Sadowska, in Chapter 22, holds that Internet technology presented the women’s magazine industry with new prospects for publishing and user interaction. In Chapter 23, Huang and Aaltio explore a relationship between social interaction technologies (SIT) and guanxi, a major Chinese informal style of networking, in the context of the careers of women managers in the information technology (IT) field in China. Donelan, Herman, Kear, and Kirkup, in Chapter 24, elaborate on how social interaction technologies present women with powerful tools to extend their network of professional contacts. In Chapter 25, Pedersen suggests that a need for validation and a strong financial stimulus should be added to the list of incentives for women bloggers. Guadagno, Eno, and Okdie, in Chapter 26, conclude that bloggers and blog readership appear to be steadily growing, making this area of online self-expression increasingly deserving of scientific inquiry. In Chapter 27, Robinson and Agne explain how parasocial interaction is the mediated manifestation of the relationship dimension inherent in television messages and used by audience members in much the same way it is used during face-to-face interaction. Crabill, in Chapter 28, explores how language convergence can function as a cue that facilitates situating social identity within online in-groups. In Chapter 29, Ben-Ze’ev theorizes the role of technology in creating potential possibilities for romantic relationships and focuses on the imagination, interactivity, reciprocity, and anonymity of cyberspace. And, Rea, in Chapter 30, argues that using rewards for accepted behavior creates a socialization continuum that stimulates players of MMORPGs to interact with one another.

Section III: Issues, Viewpoints, and Perspectives This section details the practical advantages of social interaction technologies and discusses some of the issues pertaining to the unintended consequences of the uncritical application of these technologies. The expressed concerns entail the paradox of rapid technological change and slow creation of formal and informal societal checks and balances, legal aspects of user-contributed content distribution, issues of privacy and surveillance, and online fraud and marketing to children. Recognizing that SIT are having far-reaching and lasting effects on society, the contributors offer specific solutions and viewpoints that address such key issues as: the emerging role of SIT as enablers of political dialog and facilitators of civic interaction and online democracy; social media and participatory journalism; the use of social software by the nonprofit and public sectors; and, the role of new technologies in educational outreach. The chapters suggest diverse theoretical perspectives, approaches, and conceptual frameworks to ascertain the opportunities and benefits emerging from the SIT phenomenon. The chapters in Section III offer a wealth of content as well. In Chapter 31, Sprague elaborates on legal issues that may arise from the increasing use of social interaction technologies. Azriel, in Chapter 32, details how ISPs and users are legally exempted from offensive materials through Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act. In Chapter 33, Uluç, Yilmaz, and Isikdag explain in detail how blogs and forums have emerged as innovative modes of political communication in Turkey resulting in a broad interchange of diverse political opinions in the political arena. Burns, in Chapter 34, maintains that

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the future of wiki journalism depends on whether or not this novel news format can stand on its own. In Chapter 35, Baruh and Soysal investigate the relationship between disclosure of personal information in social media and two related trends: the increasing value of subjective or private experience as a social currency and the evolving nature of automated dataveillance. Kelshaw and Lemesianou, in Chapter 36, develop how web-based interaction offers unlimited opportunities for organizing across geographic, demographic, and contextual boundaries, with ramifications in professional networking, political action, friendships, romances, learning, recreation, and entertainment. In Chapter 37, Bouras, Poulopoulos, and Tsogkas elaborate on the educational dimensions of the XO laptop and the Etoys environment developed to empower teachers and students with the capacity for creative learning, exploration, interaction, and collaboration. Marsh, in Chapter 38, focuses on the issues pertaining to informal science learning through public outreach and the utilization of established and evolving web technologies. In Chapter 39, Gelernter narrates how neogeography shares the characteristics of other social interactive technologies as it represents a collaborative effort by the general public rather than professionals. Abbas, in Chapter 40, dwells on the applicability of social software in a library setting and examines the use of such innovative techniques as live tagging, social cataloging, and social bookmarking. In Chapter 41, Brown examines the immersive nature of interactive marketing, which can be found in blogs, chat rooms, virtual worlds, advergaming, and other forms of advertainment. Waters, in Chapter 42, discusses how nonprofit organizations are an essential part of the social, political, and economic landscape of contemporary society. In Chapter 43, Park, Jo, and Moon present a framework for understanding a blog-based KM system in an organizational setting, grounded in a socio-psychological approach and the application of social identity and symbolic interaction theories. In Chapter 44, Zhang suggests that social software is assuming a significant role in electronic business and has been utilized recently on a growing scale by companies in customer relationship management. Owen and Willis, in Chapter 45, investigate three important aspects of folksonomies: common design factors found in folksonomies, developmental patterns of mature folksonomies, and the identification of knowledge consumer behaviors that can act as metrics for the evaluation of a small-scale folksonomy. In Chapter 46, Kim, Breslin, Decker, and Kim analyze the structures of a folksonomy and synthesize a practical model of an effective folksonomy in the context of knowledge management. O’Donnell, Molyneaux, and Gibson, in Chapter 47, introduce an analytical framework that can be utilized by multi-disciplinary teams working with broadband visual communication (BVC) technologies to analyze the variables that hinder people’s adoption and use of BVC. In Chapter 48, Kamthan describes the educational impact of Social Web applications in classroom activities pertaining to software engineering education. Berzins, in Chapter 49, argues that consumer education can be successfully utilized to enhance the ability of Internet users to detect and avoid fraudulent interactions and safely enjoy the many benefits afforded by the emerging social interaction technologies. And, in Chapter 50, Uden and Eardley justify how emergent Web 2.0 technologies present a range of opportunities and argue that social software usability should be viewed as a set of principles aimed to deliver more service-orientated applications.

REFERENCES Berners-Lee, T. (with Fischetti, M.). (1999). Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web by its inventor. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco. Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J., Shadbolt, N., & Weitzner, D. J. (2006). Creating a science of the Web. Science, 313, 769-770.

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Berners-Lee, T., & Hendler, J. (2001). Publishing on the semantic web. Nature, 410, 10023-10024. Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., & Lassila, O. (2001). The semantic web. Scientific American, 284 (5), 34. Constable, G., & Somerville, B. (2003). A century of innovation: Twenty engineering achievements that transformed our lives. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Parsegian, V. L. (1972). This cybernetic world of men, machines, and earth systems. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. People of progress. (2000). Invention & Technology Magazine, 15 (3). Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/2000/3/2000_3_17.shtml Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. New York: Vintage Books.

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Acknowledgment

First and foremost, the editors wish to thank all the authors for their insightful and perceptive contributions to this book. Without their hard-working efforts the Handbook would not have happened. The editors would also like to acknowledge the help of the many people from the academic community involved in the review process, without them the project could not have been completed on time. Our profound gratitude goes to the publishing team of IGI Global and its Director Dr. KhosrowPour. In particular the editors wish to acknowledge the following IGI Global representatives for their professional dedication: Jan Travers, Director of Editorial Content Kristin M. Klinger, Managing Acquisitions Editor Kristin M. Roth, Managing Development Editor Julia Mosemann, Development Editor Rebecca Beistline, Assistant Development Editor Beth Ardner, Editorial Assistant Jamie Snavely, Production Senior Managing Editor Gregory Guenther, Sales and Marketing Assistant To all those who have helped this book to come to fruition: thank you for your generous support, patience, and encouragement.

Tatyana Dumova Montclair State University, USA Richard Fiordo University of North Dakota, USA

Section 1

Background and Development

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Chapter 1

J.C.R. Licklider and the Rise of Interactive and Networked Computing Tami K. Tomasello East Carolina University, USA

ABSTRACT This chapter examines J.C.R. Licklider’s legacy as a contributor to the development of modern networked computing. In 1960 Licklider published his seminal “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” the first of three articles that attempted to redefine the human-computer interaction. Licklider outlined a vision for interactive, networked computing and, ultimately, the Internet that we experience today. Providing an overview of Licklider’s role as a visionary of the computerized communication networks of today, this chapter pays particular attention to the main ideas conveyed in “Man-Computer Symbiosis” and the influence of these ideas on academic and professional researchers during the following decades.

INTRODUCTION The history of humankind’s attempts to create communication networks is complex and longstanding (Mattelart, 2000), ranging from early forms of optical telegraphy to contemporary electronic networks. The long history makes pinpointing the exact origin of the Internet difficult. However, many technology historians and researchers agree that Joseph Carl Robnett (J.C.R.) Licklider was instrumental in envisaging, writing about, and assembling the team of engineers that helped to foster the rise of networked DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch001

computing and computer-mediated communication (Brate, 2002; Hafner & Lyon, 1998; Packer & Jordan, 2001; Randall, 1997; Segaller, 1999; Waldrop, 2001). A key event in Licklider’s contribution to the development of computer networks occurred in 1960 with the publication of “Man-Computer Symbiosis” in the inaugural issue of Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics published by the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE). The first of three articles by Licklider that explored and redefined the human-computer relationship, this prescient piece outlined a vision for interactive, networked computing and, ultimately, the Internet that we experience today. Licklider’s vision and

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J.C.R. Licklider and the Rise of Interactive and Networked Computing

his penning of “Man-Computer Symbiosis” are considered to be watershed events that ushered in the Digital Age. As reporter Charles Cooper (2007) observed of Licklider, “He may be the most important computer theorist you’ve never heard about.” This chapter provides an overview of Licklider’s role as a visionary in the development of computerized communication networks during the 1950s and 60s, paying particular attention to his academic writings on the subject. In particular, focusing on the main ideas that Licklider conveyed in “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” this chapter presents findings from a study that examined the spread and influence of the article among academic and professional researchers over a 40-year period from 1960-2001. The chapter concludes with recommendations concerning directions for future research that investigate the roles and contributions of technology visionaries; it also discusses future trends in the development of social interaction and collaboration technologies in light of current technological developments and in the context of technology challenges in computing that Licklider identified in the 1960s, challenges that persist in varying degrees today.

BACKGROUND Contrary to what one might expect of a computer visionary, Licklider’s career did not originate in computing; in fact, computer science as a formally recognized field would not develop until many years after Licklider had articulated his vision of networked computing (Hafner & Lyon, 1998). Instead, his studies began in “physiological psychology,” the field known today as neuroscience. In particular, Licklider investigated the brain’s ability to understand speech in the presence of signal distortion (Waldrop, 2001). These early studies helped Licklider to understand the workings of the human brain and prepared him to foresee the potential for improved human-computer

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interactions, which, in turn, enabled him to hold prestigious academic and governmental positions later in life. Born March 11, 1915 in St. Louis, Missouri, Licklider was the only child of Margaret and Joseph Licklider. In his youth and throughout life, Licklider possessed “a lively sense of fun, an insatiable curiosity, and an abiding love of all things technological” (Waldrop, 2001, p.8). Highly intelligent and inquisitive, Licklider was also known for his sense of humor and self-effacing nature. In 1937, Licklider earned a triple degree in physics, mathematics, and psychology from Washington University. A year later, he earned a master’s in psychology from the same university and then began doctoral studies at the University of Rochester in 1938, where his dissertation “made what may well have been the first maps of neural activity on the auditory cortex” (p. 13), which helped to identify those areas of the brain that are responsible for interpreting sound frequencies. Notably, Licklider came of age alongside the emergence of electronic computing. Built in the 1940s, the Electronic Numerical Integrator Analyzer and Computer (ENIAC) was among the first operational electrical computers, a primary function of which was to calculate missile trajectories (Hafner & Lyon, 1998). Prior to this technological advancement, computers were mechanically-based, consisting of gears and levers rather than electrical switches and vacuum tubes. Among the more famous mechanical computers were: (1) Charles Babbages’ Analytic Engine, which was only partially built in 1830 and performed basic mathematical operations; (2) Herman Hollerith’s 1888 tabulating machine, which used an early version of punch cards and tallied the U. S. census in 1924; and (3) Vannevar Bush’s 1933 Differential Analyzer, which solved partial differential equations (Waldrop, 2001). In each case, the mechanical computers took considerable time—days or weeks—to program and were greatly limited in their calculating abilities. Electronic computing, using electrical switches

J.C.R. Licklider and the Rise of Interactive and Networked Computing

and binary code, promised to render faster and more complex calculations by comparison. During the 1940s, Licklider worked in Leo Beranek’s Psycho-Acoustics Lab at Harvard University. Beranek later formed the company Bolt, Beranek, & Newman (BBN) that would eventually play an important role in the development of networked computing. In the early 1950s, Licklider moved from Harvard to the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, where as a lifelong learner, he became fascinated with computers based, in part, on his work with the national-level early warning defense project: Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), also known as Project Charles. Working with the SAGE system in the early 1950s, Licklider observed first-hand the promise of real-time human-computer interactions whereby human operators retrieved aircraft coordinates from a computer screen using a light gun. A serendipitous encounter a few years later with researcher Wesley Clark at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory also contributed to his increasing interest in the world of computing. Clark introduced Licklider to technological advances of the time: a room-sized TX-2 with the computing power of a contemporary hand-held calculator. For Licklider the bond was immediate. Within a few years, Licklider’s interest shifted from psychology to computing as he increasingly realized the potential for human-computer interactions to become highly sophisticated and mutually beneficial (Hafner & Lyon, 1998). When Licklider wrote “Man-Computer Symbiosis” in 1960, he had left MIT and was employed at Bolt, Baranek & Newman, the company that later built the Advanced Research Projects Agency network (ARPAnet). Licklider, who “hated to write” (Waldrop, 2001, p. 176), penned the article as a favor to Jerry Elkind, the editor for the IRE Transactions, whom he had formerly mentored. In Licklider’s words, “Man-computer symbiosis was largely about ideas for how to get a computer and a person thinking together, sharing, dividing the load….” (Licklider, 1988, p. 22). Licklider

further articulated his ideas for interactive and networked computing in two subsequent articles: “Man-computer Partnership” (1965) and “The Computer as a Communication Device” (1968). He co-authored the latter with Robert W. Taylor. Licklider referred tongue-in-cheek to his vision of closely linked human-computer interactions and the individuals who would make that vision a reality as his “intergalactic network” (Waldrop, 2001, p. 38). His science-fiction inspired name would closely mirror the current term we use to describe the global linking of computers -- the internet. As Brate (2002) noted, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, “Licklider would quietly lay the groundwork for an open network that allowed everyone to communicate and share computing power” (p. 87).

REDEFINING THE HUMANCOMPUTER RELATIONSHIP In “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” Licklider proposed a new role for the computer that went beyond that of a simple calculating and data storage device, a commonly held view in the 1950s and 60s, to one in which the computer and the human user entered into a mutually dependent and beneficial partnership. The article began with a description of the symbiotic relationship between the fig tree and the insect Blastophaga grossorum, in which both the tree and the wasp were mutually dependent on each other for survival; that is, the tree depends on the wasp for pollination, and the wasp depends on the tree for food. Licklider summarized the relationship stating, “This cooperative ‘living together in intimate association, or even in close union, of two dissimilar organisms’ is called symbiosis” (1960, p. 4). Using a biological analogy to describe the interconnected relationship between the fig tree and the wasp as a springboard, Licklider predicted that a similar relationship would emerge in the near future between humans and computers. In

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J.C.R. Licklider and the Rise of Interactive and Networked Computing

the human-computer relationship of the future, the computer would function less as a calculating machine and more as a partner in handling complex phenomena via flexible programming and participation in higher-order thinking. According to Licklider, the computer of the future would perform a variety of complex functions including: transforming hypotheses into models that could be tested against data sets, answering complex research questions, simulating models and displaying results in tabular and graphical formats, taking once static formulas and transforming these into dynamic models, and functioning as a “statistical-inference, decision-theory, or game-theory machine….” (p. 7). The computer would also continue to carry out the routinizable and clerical functions characteristic of its original design. Licklider’s vision stemmed from a personal observation that a majority (85%) of his time was spent preparing to work rather than actually engaging in productive activity, and he felt certain that computers could lighten that load for the researcher and layperson alike. Before a symbiotic relationship could develop, however, Licklider specified that advances in software programs and computer languages, storage devices and capacity, data processing speeds and time-sharing, input/output devices, and the development of data transfer connections (or networks) between computers had to occur first. He devoted considerable space in the article detailing the challenges and possible solutions to each of these technology hurdles. In brief, at the time that the article was written, computers were severely limited in terms of their calculating abilities and their accessibility to users. Computers were room-sized, multi-ton units. Data storage capacities were typically in the byte and kilobyte (thousands of bytes) range, whereas today’s devices routinely store data in the gigabyte (billions of bytes) range with supercomputer storage in the terabyte (trillions of bytes) range and possibly higher. Processing speeds were similarly limited, resulting in response lag times that would

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not be tolerated today. Time-sharing, the ability of a computer to process multiple program requests and user access to computers, was in its infancy. Most computers were only accessible to government, research, and select private sector organizations, which did not include the general public. Input/ output devices - such as display screens, teletypes, and light guns- were also limited in sophistication leading Licklider to claim that, “the pencil and the doodle pad or the chalk and blackboard” remained superior methods for communicating information (p. 9). Lastly, Licklider noted that the differences in the ways that humans and computers process information were perhaps the most daunting challenge to overcome; he concluded that computers would have to “think,” at least on the surface, more like humans if a symbiotic relationship were to form. Once these computing technology hurdles were surpassed, Licklider predicted the advent of “thinking centers,” electronic libraries of information (similar to today’s World Wide Web) and elaborated, “The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services” (p. 8). Licklider’s 1960 vision closely resembles the basic structure of today’s Internet, which is composed of geographically separated computers connected into networks. What Licklider did not foresee in his initial vision was the invention of the personal computer; his network of the future would connect mainframes. Five years later, in “Man-Computer Partnership” (1965), Licklider reiterated his belief that computers could be successfully networked and further emphasized the need to overcome the technological limitations that he had identified previously in the 1960 article. Then, in 1968, Licklider and Robert Taylor published the article, “The Computer as a Communication Device,” which began, “In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face” (p. 21). The machine to which they referred was

J.C.R. Licklider and the Rise of Interactive and Networked Computing

“the programmed digital computer” (p. 22). A possible interactive scenario of the future was described in this way: Available within the network will be functions and services to which you subscribe on a regular basis and others that you call for when you need them. In the former group will be investment guidance, tax counseling, selective dissemination of information in your field of specialization, announcement of cultural, sport, and entertainment events that fit your interests, etc. In the latter group will be dictionaries, encyclopedias, indexes, catalogues, editing programs, teaching programs, testing programs, programming systems, data bases, and—most important—communication, display, and modeling programs (p. 39). The network they foresaw would interconnect, via a “network of networks” (p. 38), geographically separated online communities to form a “supercommunity” of users (p. 32). The authors reasoned that computer-mediated communication of this nature would result in happier people because interactions could be actively selected according to what people had in common with one another (the currently popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace, are examples of this type of predicted interaction and supercommunity) rather than relying primarily on the fickleness of chance encounters. The end result of these envisaged interactive technologies, it was believed, would produce more efficient and effective communication between people. Licklider’s contributions to contemporary computing and its applications are particularly notable because he was among the first: (1) to clearly articulate a vision for networked computing in a public forum, (2) to recast the human-computer relationship as symbiotic, and (3) refashion the computer itself as a communication device rather than a large-scale calculator and data storage device. He also accurately described the functioning and appearance of today’s Internet in terms of its

structure and applications. Yet he did so before most of the actual technology existed, during a time “when computers were excruciatingly slow and clumsy, with mainframe systems using punch card input and teletype output the norm” (Packer & Jordan, 2001, p. 56). Equally important as his written works, Licklider held professional, academic, and governmental positions that eventually gave him access to the network of technology resources and authority necessary to carry out his vision. Most notably, he became Head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) in 1962, a high-ranking position in the U.S. government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (APRA). As head of IPTO, Licklider was able to lay the groundwork necessary to bring together the individuals who would eventually build the ARPAnet, an experimental computer network developed in 1969 that helped pave the way for later Internet’s development and widespread diffusion. A true visionary, Licklider was not particularly interested in building a computer network himself; he was interested in identifying, assembling, and inspiring those who could. To this end he was successful. One of the key individuals who belonged to Licklider’s circle of scientists and engineers was Robert Taylor. Taylor, who co-authored the 1968 article “The Computer as a Communication Device” with Licklider, headed IPTO a few years after Licklider returned to MIT. Reflecting back on that time, Taylor (1989) credited “ManComputer Symbiosis” with motivating him to seek out Licklider: “the reason I moved from the NASA position [to ARPA] is fundamentally because over time, I became heartily subscribed to the Licklider vision of interactive computing. The 1960 man-computer symbiosis paper had had a large impact on me” (p. 5). Taylor took his place in computing history when he coordinated the design and implementation of the ARPAnet project, an early step toward achieving Licklider’s man-computer symbiosis and the building of the “intergalactic network.”

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J.C.R. Licklider and the Rise of Interactive and Networked Computing

Tracing the Influence of “ManComputer Symbiosis” A 2004 study by Tomasello examined the spread and influence of the main concepts in “ManComputer Symbiosis” among academic and professional researchers from 1960-2001 based, in part, on Taylor’s comment regarding the effect that Licklider’s article had on him and the computing community at large. Jerry Elkind, the IRE Transactions editor who published “ManComputer Symbiosis,” felt similarly to Taylor and claimed that Licklider’s article set a research agenda for computing that continues to be felt today (Waldrop, 2001). Intrigued by these comments, Tomasello content analyzed in-text citations to “Man-Computer Symbiosis” in 110 published research articles contained in the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) citation indexes. The ISI indexes offer comprehensive coverage of research publications in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences; importantly, these indexes allow patrons to identify the set of articles that refer to a particular publication. The main findings of the content analysis revealed that “Man-Computer Symbiosis” was consistently cited by academic and professional researchers an average of 3-4 times each year during the examined 40-year timeframe, which is an impressive accomplishment given that the article competes each year for recognition among an ever-increasing pool of thousands of newly published research articles. Citations peaked in 1961, the year following the publication of “ManComputer Symbiosis,” which is consistent with the general lag time that elapses between an article’s publication and the onset of other authors making reference to the work; in 1968, the year coinciding with the publication of “The Computer as a Communication Device” (Licklider & Taylor, 1968); and in 1993, the year corresponding with increased news coverage in the U.S. concerning the Clinton Administration’s focus on the rise of the then-fledgling Information Superhighway: that is, the Internet (Pavlik, 1998).

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Research articles citing “Man-Computer Symbiosis” most often (86%) referenced Licklider’s overarching notion concerning the importance of creating a symbiotic relationship between humans and computers, with the other related concepts cited in descending order of frequency: data processing speeds and timesharing, input/output devices, programming languages, and data storage and capacity. The location of citations to Licklider occurred primarily (74%) in sections presenting theory, literature reviews, and historical overviews; thus, Licklider’s work provided substantive context for subsequent studies that investigated a range of topics related to computing. Noteworthy, cited authors were affiliated with a variety of wellknown academic institutions (e.g., Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, and Stanford University) and private corporations (e.g., General Electric, Intel, Microsoft, Rand, Sylvania, and Union Carbide), several of which have made direct and indirect contributions to the development of current social networking and collaborative software initiatives and products. Lastly, articles containing citations to “ManComputer Symbiosis” were primarily (83%) published in journals classified into the broad subject category of science and technology, which is not surprising given that articles tend to be read and referred to by others within the same broad field of study (e.g., sciences, social sciences, humanities). However, the results also revealed that the article has been cited across a variety of disciplinary boundaries, including communication, economics, English, engineering, history, library science, medicine, philosophy, and psychology, with citations among the humanities and social sciences disciplines increasing overall since the 1990s. The increased spread of Licklider’s ideas into the humanities and social sciences may be attributed in part to the rise in popularity and relevance of the personal computer and the Internet in recent decades, which has made the use and study of computers a more relevant and accessible

J.C.R. Licklider and the Rise of Interactive and Networked Computing

topic to researchers in these fields. The author concluded that Licklider’s article helped to serve as “a common thread sewing together separate areas of computer research” to foster increased dialog between researchers in different areas of computing, as well as in different disciplines and market sectors (p. 143).

FUTURE TRENDS Today, the list of computer visionaries and practitioners frequently includes such well-known personalities as Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. However, other lesserknown and time-obscured, yet equally important, individuals have contributed to the success of the Internet and the social interaction technologies that rely on it. Cooper (2007) is not the only person to recognize the tendency to overlook earlier computer theorists and designers. Segaller (1999) also noted that innovators associated with the development of interactive and networked computing are “mostly still unknown and unrecognized” (p. 38). Future research, therefore, may look to the past to further identify and explore the works of those people whose visions have also shaped the computing technologies that we benefit from today. One possible method for identifying lesser-known visionaries is the use of citation analysis. An overlooked but potentially rich source of pioneering writings may be found in government documents, which contain a variety of technology proposals and reports, specifications, and requests for comments (RFCs) that may further illuminate the existence of past and current computer visionaries. Additionally, research examining the characteristics (e.g., personality traits, communication styles) that visionaries, past and present, hold in common with respect to how they communicate their ideas, along with detailed and systematic analyses of their writings, may help us to identify earlier and more completely those persons

whose contributions hold the most promise for illuminating the future of computing in general and social interaction technologies in particular. An intriguing aspect of Licklider’s initial writing was his use of a biological analogy -- symbiosis. In biology, symbiosis applies to the relationship between two living organisms; however, in an interesting twist, Licklider used the term to define a relationship between a living organism, the human, and a non-living entity, the computer. Future research may investigate the presence of similar analogies in past and present written works as a means to effectively convey new ideas and to inspire innovation. Regarding future trends in improving the human-computer relationship through the development of social interaction and collaborative technologies, we will continue to experience advancements in wireless connectivity with the goal of unencumbered mobility at the core of innovations in this area (McDowell, Steinberg, & Tomasello, 2008). Continued improvement to web standards will also progress as web content increasingly migrates to existing and as yet imagined smaller portable devices; current examples include cell phones and portable digital assistants (PDAs). A challenge that software designers continue to face is one that Licklider identified in “Man-Computer Symbiosis” when he claimed, “The basic dissimilarity between human languages and computer languages may be the most serious obstacle to true symbiosis” (1960, p. 8). The “language problem,” as Licklider dubbed this challenge, refers to the very different communication styles that humans and computers use. In brief, human language is goal-oriented and based on incentives and motivations, whereas computer language is based on step-by-step instructions that specify courses of action. The difference in these languages has created countless frustrations for human users of computers, including challenges in creating effective speech recognition programs and in users learning new software. Research will continue to strive to lessen this

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J.C.R. Licklider and the Rise of Interactive and Networked Computing

communication gap, with most efforts dedicated to making computers “think” and communicate more like humans.

CONCLUSION Licklider’s vision for networked computing and his publication of “Man-Computer Symbiosis” were watershed events that helped to usher in the Digital (or Information) Age, where computers now play an essential role in the human communication process. Using the biological term symbiosis to describe a new type of relationship between human and machine, Licklider’s vision provided a catalyst that contributed to the launch of a new direction in computing. Licklider proposed that computers function as linked communication devices at a time when most people thought of computers as large calculators, and he foresaw the day when humans and computers would form a close, sophisticated interactive partnership. Despite his uncanny ability to see into the future of computing, it is doubtful at the time of its writing that Licklider fully understood the foresight contained in “Man-Computer Symbiosis” nor its potential widespread influence. Decades later, in typical unassuming fashion, Licklider downplayed the insights his article provided stating in an interview that the piece “didn’t come out of any particular research. It was just a statement about the general notion of analyzing work …that you could see exactly how to get a computer to do” (Licklider, 1988, p. 22). Reading the article from today’s perspective, one is impressed by the clarity and detail of Licklider’s vision for technological improvements that would lead to the network of computers we now know as the Internet. Though many may argue, and rightly so, that we still have much to accomplish in the quest for ultimate human-computer symbiosis, we also recognize the enormous strides taken since the publication of “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” Graphical user interfaces, the wireless keyboard and mouse,

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streaming audio and video, gigahertz processors and hard drives in personal computers, virtual reality, telecommuting, programming languages, the World Wide Web, wireless networks, and online communities are examples of the steps that have been taken to advance the human-computer relationship during the last five decades in the areas specified by Licklider. The aforementioned examples do not, however, imply that improvements in computer technology are solely beneficial. Nor, importantly, does the term symbiosis mean that all relationships between organisms are mutually beneficial. Licklider himself expressed doubts during his career about the downside of increased integration of computers into our lives, and we see today some of the damaging effects of computing realized—the digital divide, toxic environmental pollutants from components manufacturing, computer viruses and hacking, phishing schemes, loss of privacy, and increased surveillance, to name a few. On the horizon lurk scenarios that are potentially more dangerous as revealed by computing pioneer Bill Joy (2000), a cofounder and former Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, in his dim forecast concerning developments in nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Joy’s article parallels Licklider’s 1960 admission that, in time, computers via artificial intelligence (and, in the future, via artificial life) may one day supersede humankind. The full effects of these alternative visions remain to be seen. Licklider died in 1990 (Waldrop, 2001), a few short years before the World Wide Web made its public debut in the U.S. and its subsequent global diffusion; however, his vision lives on. During the more than 40 years since its publication, “ManComputer Symbiosis” has been consistently cited in the works of academic and professional researchers from prestigious universities and international corporations, as well as across multiple disciplines (Tomasello, 2004). A recent article published by researchers at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories indicates that scientists

J.C.R. Licklider and the Rise of Interactive and Networked Computing

continue to work toward achieving the symbiotic relationship that Licklider mapped out during the 1960s (Lesh, Marks, Rich, & Sidner, 2002. Ongoing references to “Man-Computer Symbiosis” by contemporary scientists, researchers, and historians are testaments to Licklider’s longstanding value as a contributor to the development of modern computing and ultimately Internet-based communication and social interaction technologies.

REFERENCES Brate, A. (2002). Technomanifestos: Visions from the information revolutionaries. New York: Texere. Cooper, C. (2007). Licklider’s vision of the digital age. CNET News. Retrieved March 15, 2008, from http://www.news.com/Lickliders-vision-of-theDigital-Age/2010-1012_3-6167919.html Hafner, K., & Lyon, M. (1998). Where wizards stay up late: The origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster. Joy, B. (2000). Why the future doesn’t need us. Wired (San Francisco, Calif.), 8(4), 238–262. Lesh, N., Marks, J., Rich, C., & Sidner, C. L. (2002). ‘Man-computer symbiosis’ revisited: Achieving natural communication and collaboration with computers. IECE Transactions . E (Norwalk, Conn.), 85-A, 1–9. Licklider, J. C. R. (1960). Man-computer symbiosis. IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, 1, 4–11. doi:10.1109/ THFE2.1960.4503259 Licklider, J. C. R. (1965). Man-computer partnership. International Science and Technology, 41, 18–26.

Licklider, J. C. R. (1988). Oral history interview by William Aspray and Arthur L. Norberg, 28 October 1988, Cambridge, Massachusetts ( [). Minneapolis, MN: Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.]. OH. Osteopathic Hospitals, 150. Licklider, J. C. R., & Taylor, R. (1968). The computer as a communication device. Science and Technology, 76, 21–31. Mattelart, A. (2000). Networking the world, 1794-2000 (L. Carey-Libbrecht & J. A. Cohen, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McDowell, S. D., Steinberg, P. E., & Tomasello, T. K. (2008). Managing the infosphere: Governance, technology, and cultural practice in motion. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Packer, R., & Jordan, K. (Eds.). (2001). Multimedia: From Wagner to virtual reality. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Pavlik, J. V. (1998). New media technology: Cultural and commercial perspectives (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Randall, N. (1997). The soul of the Internet: Net gods, netizens, and the wiring of the world. New York: International Thomson Computer Press. Segaller, S. (1999). Nerds 2.0.1: A brief history of the Internet. New York: TV Books. Taylor, R. W. (1989). Oral history interview by William Aspray, 28 February 1989, San Francisco, California ( [). Minneapolis, MN: Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.]. OH. Osteopathic Hospitals, 154. Tomasello, T. K. (2004). A content analysis of citations to J.C.R. Licklider’s ‘Man-computer symbiosis,’ 1960-2001: Diffusing the intergalactic network. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Florida State University.

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Waldrop, M. M. (2001). The dream machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the revolution that made computing personal. New York: Viking.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS ARPAnet: The U.S. experimental computer network that in 1969 successfully interconnected four geographically separated computers located at the Stanford Research Institute, University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. Computer Network: A cluster of computers and related devices that are connected via permanent or temporary, wired or wireless technologies. Electronic Numerical Integrator and Analyzer (ENIAC): An early electronic computer developed in the 1940s by the U.S. Army to calculate missile trajectories. Input/Output Device: A peripheral or internal computer component that enables data to be entered and/or extracted. Examples of input/output

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devices include: internal and external disk drives, microphones, scanners, printers, keyboards, screens/monitors, and speakers. Interactive Computing: The immediate exchange of input and output between a computer and the user. Internet: The global network of computers used to exchange information and communication. Man-Computer Symbiosis: The humancomputer relationship in which human and machine are closely coupled in performing both lower (e.g., computational) and higher order (e.g., analytical) processes. Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE): A 1950s “network” of defense radars which involved real-time computing with human operators using keyboards, screen displays, and modems. Time-Sharing: The ability of a computer to process multiple commands and/or accommodate multiple users simultaneously without compromising performance.

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Chapter 2

Mobile Social Web

Opportunities and Drawbacks Thorsten Caus Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany Stefan Christmann Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany Svenja Hagenhoff Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany

ABSTRACT As mobile Internet usage continues to grow, the phenomenon of accessing online communities through mobile devices draws researchers’ attention. Statistics show that close to 60 percent of all mobile Internet traffic worldwide is related to the use of mobile social networks. In this chapter, the mobile social Web is defined, categories of mobile communities explained, and success factors and drawbacks discussed from the technical, social, and economic perspectives. Challenges, including low transmission rates, changes in usage patterns, search for new revenue sources, as well as the need for development of original mobile Web content and applications are addressed. The technical requirements for the mobile use of online communities are identified. The chapter closes with a summary of potential economic and social prospects of the emerging mobile social Web.

INTRODUCTION Until recently, the Internet was a domain restricted to stationary computers, but nowadays it can also be accessed through mobile devices equipped with web browsing capabilities. Now it is not only possible to surf the web using wireless access and mobile devices, but there is also a growing number of mobile Internet applications and services. Increasingly, mobile social networking applications have DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch002

been made available to a large number of mobile phone users. Internet users have accepted online communities and internalized the concept of the Social Web also referred to as Web 2.0 (Koesch, Magdanz, & Stadler, 2007). Private as well as business users have become familiar with various online communities (Patrzek, 2007; von Tetzchner, 2008). On the one hand, mobile social networks are becoming more widespread because of the increasing dissemination of new wireless communication technologies (Heng, 2006, p. 5). On the other hand, a large number of

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Mobile Social Web

devices are designed to implement new communications technologies, for example, the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) in Europe (Heng, 2006, p. 1). Studies conducted by Opera Software, an Internet software and services company, demonstrate that 40 percent of all mobile Internet traffic worldwide is related to the use of online communities. In some countries the share is as high as 60 percent: for example, in the United States, South Africa, and Indonesia (von Tetzchner, 2008). Research into the various ways of using the Social Web in a mobile context is now of paramount importance. In this chapter, mobile social web is defined, categories of mobile online communities and their success factors explained, and selected opportunities and drawbacks of the mobile online communities discussed from a technical, social, and economic perspectives.

BACKGROUND The Social Web can be viewed as a concept and a platform that utilizes social software (e.g., forums, wikis, blogs, etc.) to fulfill or support some of the important human needs, such as: self-realization, acceptance, social connectedness, and safety (Maslow, 1943, p. 372-383). The purpose of the Social Web is to support human communication and facilitate social contact. The Social Web encompasses numerous Internet applications, such as social networking sites, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, photo and video sharing, online stores and auction houses, virtual worlds, and wiki collaborations. The most popular and widespread actualizations are online communities (e.g., MySpace, Facebook, StudiVZ or XING). The term “Social Web” is often used in everyday language as well as in scholarly literature as a synonym for “virtual” and “online communities” (Hummel, 2005, p. 5), although these terms do not differ greatly (Fremuth & Tasch, 2002, pp. 5-6).

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In the past years many academic disciplines have dealt with the Social Web. Various attempts to provide a definition have resulted in three different approaches: technical, social, and economic. The technical approach focuses on the Internet as a medium or platform for a community. The sociological point of view stresses the forming and functioning of communities, whereas the economic perspective examines potential gains and intended profits (Hummel, 2005, p. 8-11). These three perspectives have led to a variety of definitions of online communities with differing points of emphasis. A detailed overview of common definitions is given by Fremuth and Tasch (2002), Hummel (2005) and Markus (2002). In identifying an online community one perspective emphasizes that it is formed by a group of people, while another stresses its web platform. The definition used in this chapter combines both approaches, for an online community is seen as a social group that interacts through a web platform over an extended period of time. An online community can be characterized by four elements (Gebert & von Rosenstiel, 1992, p. 122-123; Hamman, 2000, p. 225): • • • •

group of people with shared objectives (e.g., interests, goals) interaction over an extended period of time closeness due to bonds and relationships shared space for interactions governed by certain rules (for example, role definitions).

Without shared objectives there would be no interaction and relationship and, subsequently, no community at all (Markus, 2002, p. 36). Interactions within the community are seen as topicoriented communication as well as the execution of actions (Kim, 2000, p. 5). Both can take place independently of time and location (Winkler & Mandl, 2004, p. 14). The process of founding and maintaining such online communities usually

Mobile Social Web

Table 1. Success factors on online communities (adopted from Koch, Groh, & Hillebrand, 2002; Leitner, 2003) Users’ point of view • Advantages of usage, for example in the form of problem solving or entertainment • Simple compilation of contributions • Easy technical access, usage and adequate stability • Equality, credibility and trust • Non-commercial orientation

Corporations’ point of view • Personal network and personal characteristics of entrepreneurial team • Product or service idea in business model • Available resources and capabilities • Marketing strategy with viral emphasis • Potential for speedy marketing

takes place on the Internet (Eigner & Nausner, 2003, p. 58). The second defining characteristic is the web platform, which can be seen as an Internet communication system which acts as an intermediary. It enables and facilitates meetings, the maintenance of the community, and its interaction with other people (Reichwald, Fremuth, & Ney, 2002, p. 8). There are different ways of categorizing online communities (Brunold, Merz, & Wagner, 2000, p. 30-37; Fremuth & Tasch, 2002, p. 21; Hummel, 2005, p. 46). A reasonable approach is to categorize them according to similarities, for they play a major role in online communities. Therefore, an online community can be geographic (bound to an area), demographic (classification according to nationality, age, gender), or based on shared interests or activities (Kim, 2000, p. 5). Online communities can be viewed as social systems. Relationships and interactions can only develop once a web platform has been established, which makes it difficult to start a community (Leitner, 2003, p. 36). The network-effect character of online communities shows this very clearly. There will only be accelerated growth once a critical amount of relationships and interactions between users has been achieved. This is due to the fact that users do not benefit before this point is reached (Reichwald, Fremuth, & Ney, 2002, p. 8). Even though this development is difficult to predict, an operator is able to influence the

development of an online community by making it more attractive (Reichwald, Fremuth, & Ney, 2002, p. 9-10). The success factors that have been identified are listed in Table 1.

THE MOBILE SOCIAL WEB The mobile use of online communities can be referred to as the mobile social web. In this context, mobility is understood as the unrestricted transfer of text, voice or data independent of user’s physical location (Kurose & Ross, 2005, pp. 536-538). Therefore, mobile online communities are free of interruption caused by the movement of the user from one location to another. The devices employed can be either wireless or wired (Kurose & Ross, 2005, p. 504). Suitable types of devices are mobile phones, smart phones (Michelsen & Schaale, 2002, p. 51) and personal digital assistants, as these can always stay switched on and do not need to be booted. Although mobility does not necessarily require wireless connections to these devices, wireless mobile networks are used most commonly (Gerum, Sjurts, & Stieglitz, 2003, p. 145). European standards, for instance, include the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) extensions, Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) standard (Herzig, 2001, p. 399), General Radio Packet Service (GPRS) protocol (Stader, 2001, p. 37), and the 3rd generation Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) technology (Kurose & Ross, 2005, pp. 534-535). The mobile social web involves opportunities as well as drawbacks, as will be discussed below.

Opportunities of the Mobile Social Web The features of mobile communities generally correspond to those of traditional online communities. They are enhanced by a new way of accessing the community-web-platform through

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Mobile Social Web

Figure 1. Overview of the mobile social web potentials

the user in an online community. The user’s mobile device then serves as a membership card or an individual entrance ticket (Reichwald, Fremuth, & Ney, 2002, p. 7). Identifying the user can be automated, making it more reliable. It is also more authentic and results in more confidence within the community (Hummel, 2005, p. 72).

Social Aspects

mobile, wireless devices. On closer examination, these communities do not only seem to benefit from mobile access, but also from additional potentials resulting from mobility and localization possibilities. Furthermore the question arises, whether this newly opened potential encompasses not only technical and social aspects but economic aspects as well (see Figure 1).

Technical Aspects Mobile wireless devices facilitate ubiquitous access to online communities (Koch, Groh, & Hillebrand, 2002, p. 2). The user is able to gain access anywhere and any time, while being liberated from the world of stationary Internet and permanently installed devices (Reichwald, Fremuth & Ney, 2002, p. 6). Furthermore, users benefit from being reachable at all times by being armed with mobile wireless devices (Wiedmann, Buckler, & Buxel, 2000, p. 86). Therefore, the users can stay online and be accessible continuously and without interruption. No time is lost: for example, by turning the devices on or logging in. Thus, interaction becomes more spontaneous and expressive. Mobile wireless devices make it possible to identify the user via his PIN and SIM card, both of which are requirements of mobile communications (Tasch & Brakel, 2004, p. 4). This explicit possibility of identification can be used to identify

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A local context can be defined by identifying a user’s current whereabouts (Koch, Groh, & Hillebrand, 2002, p. 3). A user’s whereabouts could be presented to other users through geomapping or textually. Furthermore, an awareness service could be employed in addition to existing information services, such as “buddy lists” (Tasch & Brakel, 2004, p. 7). Contacts and friends in the vicinity of the user can be shown on the mobile device. Mobile online communities could thus improve interactions between community members and extend social ties. For example, people with similar interests can get together spontaneously. Contexts can be used to find out about the accessibility of mobile community users (Groh, 2003, p. 9). Depending on the user’s current whereabouts a service can provide information about if and how a person may be contacted and the user can decide how to do this. The contact information can simply rely on such area aspects as availability of UMTS. Personal preferences can also be used for this purpose. Another potential feature is to filter content according to current contexts (Groh, 2003, p. 9). A personal information service can select information about places of interest in the vicinity of the user’s current location and report it to the user (context specific presentation of information). Moreover, context specific capturing of content is conceivable (Groh, 2003, p. 8). Metadata (e.g., location data or location names) and information and news services form the basis for this idea. For example, an entry reviewing the quality of food and drinks in a local café could be generated

Mobile Social Web

automatically by entering the name of the café or its location. Personal meetings can be organized more easily as the awareness of a person’s location increases, matching the users’ interests is extended, and the management of accessibility becomes more efficient. Stronger relationships between persons will typically result when they are geographically close and have personal encounters (Larsen, Urry, & Axhausen, 2006, pp. 12-13). These aspects are not available in stationary online communities because they depend on time and location. Faceto-face communication can lead to an improved quality of relationships because interactions become closer and more intense. All of the above will result in the strengthening of a community (Schneider, 2003, p. 99).

•

Economic Aspects Mobile communities allow an opportunity for spontaneous, affective, and meaningful community activities, which may result in closer relationships between community members than in the case of traditional online communities. Data input and output can be accomplished more easily through context specific services (Diekmann et al., 2006). Therefore, community mobile operators assume that users will be more willing to pay for participation in mobile communities than in stationary online communities (Reichwald, Fremuth, & Ney, 2002, p. 12). The following list provides details of primary and secondary revenue sources for mobile operators (Reichwald, Fremuth, & Ney, 2002). Primary revenue sources arise from operating a mobile online community (Reichwald, Fremuth, & Ney, 2002, p. 11). Three possibilities can be identified: •

To levy usage fees: Users pay for the usage of mobile information and interactivity services and for community content. The fees depend on the usage of the services

•

or they are usage-independent (Reichwald et al., 2002, pp. 24-25). Users pay either for the usage of each single service or for using services during a certain period of time. Both approaches have proved unsuccessful in the case of non-mobile online communities (Reichwald et al., 2002, pp. 23-24). It may be expected that the advantages of mobile communities and their improved attractiveness are great enough to generate an increased willingness to pay (Reichwald, Fremuth, & Ney, 2002, p. 12). Moreover, users are generally accustomed to paying for mobile services. Advertising and sponsoring: Even now, non-mobile online communities allow the generation of advertisements tailored for special target groups by analyzing user profiles. In comparison to mass advertisements, this approach involves less wastefulness (Schubert & Ginsburg, 2000, pp. 51-52). For example, depending on the user’s current location, advertisements can be provided. Companies willing to sponsor certain activities are another potential source of revenue (Reichwald et al., 2002, p. 20). Data transmission fees: Fees for using telecommunication (TC) services have to be paid to the TC companies. The operator of a mobile online community could negotiate a share of the revenues. For this revenue sharing purpose, cooperation between the TC company and the community operator is needed, and accounting models have to be developed.

The users themselves can become the potential generators of possibilities to earn money for the community. Their content contributions can be used for market research as well as ideas about new services and products. Documented behavior, usage patterns, and preferences can be used to filter properties of target groups. The main potential for

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Mobile Social Web

Figure 2. Overview of the drawbacks of the mobile social web

community operators has to be made up by selling the gathered knowledge as consulting services or by using it for themselves (Reichwald, Fremuth, & Ney 2002, p. 12). Mobile communities can facilitate activities at a higher level of utility and quality, as data are potentially more differentiated and reliable compared to stationary activities.

Drawbacks of the Mobile Social Web Mobile online communities have drawbacks, as summarized in Figure 2.

Technical Aspects The utility of a service is a success factor as well as a challenge. It has to be decided which services should be accessible in a mobile community to make it attractive (Yom, 2002, p. 177). Not only information and interaction services have to be selected, content needs to be chosen, too. Restricted possibilities of data presentation and device handling as well as limited capacities of mobile devices affect the utility. Other factors influencing usability are data transmission costs, low data transmission rates, device handling problems, and inconvenient data input and output possibilities (Bliemel & Fassott, 2002, p. 14). The fees of mobile network operators are mostly based on data volume. Therefore, a community user will have to pay fees depending on the intensity of his or her usage.

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Low data transmission rates are often a problem for mobile device users. Established GSM services, such as Short Message Service (SMS), provide an adequate transmission rate; however, there are only limited possibilities for data presentation. Consequently, it makes more sense to opt for 3rd generation technologies like GPRS and UMTS, especially as the increasing dissemination of these technologies renders this alternative increasingly feasible. An appropriate localization technology must be integrated in order to realize enhanced mobile services and provide new functionalities of mobile online communities, such as contextual community content, context-oriented information collection, or efficient connectivity management. The localization of end devices connected to cellular networks via their radio cell is currently still expensive. However, free and precise localization using Global Positioning System (GPS) is not yet feasible, as the vast majority of users do not have GPS-compatible end devices. The possibility of unambiguous identification poses another problem. In case a mobile device gets lost, unauthorized persons may pretend to be the original user, as mobile devices usually have only a very low degree of security (Reisinger, 2007). This is especially a problem when users believe in the trustworthiness of the identification using mobile end devices.

Social Aspects The electronic capturing and processing of the user context as well as the opening of communities for mobile usage can lead to negative consequences. Publishing the actual location of a user means an intrusion into his or her privacy and a limitation to intimacy. Being spied upon undiscovered could be the result of using contextual services. Parents could use these services to locate their children. Partners in a relationship could use it to track each other. The risks involved may lead to a fear of misuse or limited intimacy, resulting in the

Mobile Social Web

merely conditional use of contextual services. In stationary online communities, we observe that little emphasis is put on intimacy - users publish a multitude of personal data (Gross & Acquisti, 2005, p. 4-8). Hence, it remains open whether the added value of contextual services or the fear of misuse and limited intimacy will prevail. At present mobile radio services, including SMS or telephony, are preferably used for contacting persons one already knows (Tasch & Brakel, 2004, p. 4). Stationary online communities are commonly used to create new relationships: i.e. contacting persons hitherto unknown to the user (Fremuth & Tasch, 2002, p. 24). The projection of mobile radio usage patterns onto stationary online communities could lead to the change from a preferably theme-oriented usage towards a person-oriented or communication-oriented usage of mobile online communities (Reichwald et al., 2002, p. 13). Mobile community activities would then be realized preferentially with already known persons. Such trends could jeopardize the establishment of theme-orientated mobile online communities.

•

•

Economic Aspects A commercial design of mobile online communities has to identify primary and secondary revenue sources for their operators. Commercial intentions should be declared and openly communicated to the community (Leitner, 2003, pp. 43-44). This is the only way to grant trust and authenticity from the very beginning. Using primary revenue sources involves the following challenges: •

Collection of usage fees: So far, the stationary Internet largely provides free content and services (Reichwald, Fremuth, & Ney, 2002, p. 11). Internet users are accustomed to free services. There is a possibility that this factor will have a negative impact on the willingness to pay for mobile services. Users already pay for mobile data

services such as SMS or mobile Internet access (Reichwald et al., 2002, p. 27). Fees for the use of services or content would increase these costs. Advertising and sponsoring: Advertising in online communities was often frowned upon in the past (Leitner, 2003, pp. 41-42). Even now, although an increased number of advertising banners are placed, the acceptance of advertising does not seem to be self-evident. Moreover, advertising messages on mobile devices are still fairly uncommon. It is unclear whether a satisfactory advertising effect can be achieved by mobile advertising in online communities. It is assumed that the perception duration of advertisement tends to drop with mobile usage compared to the stationary Internet (Heinonen & Stransdvik, 2007, p. 610; Reichwald et al., 2002, p. 22). Even when advertisements are noticed, little space for advertising messages is available due to the small displays of mobile devices (Michelsen & Schaale, 2002, p. 20). Mobile data transmission fees: As yet volume-billing models for the use of the mobile Internet are widespread; this could be a restriction to the time-consuming use of a mobile online community (Reichwald et al., 2002, p. 28). This can lead to lower data volumes, resulting in fewer payments to mobile radio operators. As a consequence, these operators would be less willing to forward payments to a community operator. It remains to be seen how this revenue potential develops through billing models for mobile Internet usage and cooperation.

There are also new challenges for the secondary revenue sources: Using a mobile online community as an instrument for market research can be profitable for an operator, but it seems reasonable that the users need to know that this

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Mobile Social Web

is drafted on the basis of content and the analysis of their usage habits (Leitner, 2003, p. 43-44). This could especially affect success factors of an online community like equality, credibility and trust. Sharing part of the revenues with users could be a solution.

FUTURE TRENDS A growing number of Internet services make their applications available to mobile users. This can be attributed to the increasing proliferation of mobile broadband Internet access (especially UMTS in Europe). Three variants of mobile implementation are available. Users can browse profile pages and photo albums via WAP and add new images and texts by means of SMS and Multimedia Message Service (MMS). The ShoZu service,1 in contrast, performs as an integration platform and allows mobile users to upload and download content at multiple online communities with a single message. One ConnectTM provided by Yahoo is another illustration which integrates social communities (e.g., MySpace, Dopplr, Facebook or Last.fm), instant messaging services (e.g., Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger), and the ordinary communication channels of mobile phones. Finally, as the example of the COSMOS project2 shows, a comprehensive use of mobile technical and social opportunities appears to be no so distant future—the COSMOS project integrates contextual services into the existing mobile social web. Users are informed about the geographical distance between them and may send messages to contacts within their own vicinity. The abovementioned trends are expected to advance in the future; yet, the possible dominance of one of them cannot be predicted.

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CONCLUSION The analysis of the potentials of mobile online communities leads to the conclusion that the social significance of the mobile Internet goes further than providing communities with an additional access channel. Besides mobile access and instant connectivity, unambiguous identification and contextual services can also be realized. The mobile web platform gains efficiency and facilitates not only flexible, spontaneous, and emotional interactions, but also credible and intensive ones. Reckoning with these possibilities, a community mobile operator can take an economic perspective and identify revenue sources that make the commercialization of mobile communities feasible. However, the specific technical and social characteristics of mobile communities can cast doubt upon their prospective potentials. Commercialization appears less promising as the willingness of users to pay fees is rather low. Mobile advertising poses additional problems despite its context-relatedness. Moreover, the realization of secondary revenue sources can lead to problems of trust. The assumption that the social significance of the mobile Internet will go beyond providing an additional access channel to online communities has so far only partially been confirmed. Many challenges to mobile communities remain to be resolved in the future for the economic perspective to gain relevance and the commercial interpretation to become a success.

REFERENCES Bliemel, F., & Fassott, G. (2002). Kundenfokus im mobile commerce: Anforderungen der kunden und anforderungen an die kunden. In G. Silberer, J. Wohlfahrt, & T. Wilhelm (Eds.), Mobile commerce - grundlagen, geschäftsmodelle, erfolgsfaktoren (pp. 3-23). Wiesbaden, Germany: Gabler.

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Brunold, J., Merz, H., & Wagner, J. (2000). www. cybercommunities.de: Virtual communities: Strategie, umsetzung, erfolgsfaktoren. Landsberg, Germany: Verlag Moderne Industrie.

Hamman, R. B. (2000). Computernetze als verbindendes element von gemeinschaftsnetzen. In U. Thiedeke (Ed.), Virtuelle gruppen. Charakteristika und problemdimensionen (pp. 221-243). Wiesbaden, Germany: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

Diekmann, T., Kaspar, C., Seidenfaden, L., & Hagenhoff, S. (2006). Kontextbewusste informationsdienste auf grundlage von information beacons. Retrieved June 23, 2008, from http:// www.gi-mms.de/mms2006/kurzbeitraege/diekmann.pdf

Heinonen, K., & Strandvik, T. (2007). Consumer responsiveness to mobile marketing. International Journal of Mobile Communications, 5(6), 603–617. doi:10.1504/IJMC.2007.014177

Eigner, C., & Nausner, P. (2003). Willkommen, ‘social learning’! In C. Eigner, H. Leitner, P. Nausner, & U. Schneider (Eds.), Online-communities, weblogs und die soziale rückeroberung des netzes (pp. 52-94). Graz, Austria: Nausner & Nausner.

Heng, S. (2006). Entgegen vielen erwartungen! Breitbandige mobilfunktechnologie UMTS ist realität. Retrieved June 5, 2008, from http:// www.dbresearch.com/PROD/DBR_INTERNET_DEPROD/PROD0000000000198071.pdf

Fremuth, N., & Tasch, A. (2002). Virtuelle und mobile communities - begriffsklärungen und implikationen für geschäftsmodelle (Arbeitsberichte des Lehrstuhls für Allgemeine und Industrielle Betriebswirtschaftslehre, No. 35). München: Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Industrielle Betriebswirtschaftslehre.

Herzig, M. (2001). Basistechnologien und standards des mobile business. Wirtschaftsinformatik, 43(4), 397–404.

Gebert, D., & Von Rosenstiel, L. (1992). Organisationspsychologie: Person und organisation. Köln, Germany: Kohlhammer. Gerum, E., Sjurts, I., & Stieglitz, N. (2003). Der mobilfunkmarkt im umbruch - eine innovationsökonomische und unternehmensstrategische analyse. Wiesbaden, Germany: Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag. Groh, G. (2003). Ortsbezug in kontext-sensitiven diensten für mobile communities. Retrieved June 20, 2008, from http://www11.informatik. tu-muenchen.de/lehrstuhl/personen/groh/pub/ gis.pdf Gross, R., & Acquisti, A. (2005). Information revelation and privacy in online social networks (the Facebook case). Retrieved June 22, 2008, from http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/papers/ privacy-facebook-gross-acquisti.pdf

Hummel, J. (2005). Online-gemeinschaften als geschäftsmodell - eine analyse aus sozioökonomischer perspektive. Wiesbaden, Germany: Deutscher Universitätsverlag. Kim, A. J. (2000). Community building on the Web: Secret strategies for successful online communities. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press. Koch, M., Groh, G., & Hillebrand, C. (2002). Mobile communities - extending online communities into the real world. Retrieved May 27, 2008, from http://www11.informatik.tumuenchen.de/ publications/pdf/Koch2002c.pdf Koesch, S., Magdanz, F., & Stadler, R. (2007). Soziale netzwerke - mobile kontaktbörsen. Retrieved June 15, 2008, from http://www.spiegel. de/netzwelt/mobil/0,1518,470250,00.html Kurose, J. F., & Ross, K. W. (2005). Computer networking - a top-down approach featuring the Internet. Boston: Pearson Education.

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Larsen, J., Urry, J., & Axhausen, K. W. (2006). Mobilities, networks, geographies. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Leitner, H. (2003). Online-community, ‘hands on!’. In C. Eigner, H. Leitner, P. Nausner, & U. Schneider (Eds.), Online-communities, weblogs und die soziale rückeroberung des netzes (pp. 11-51). Graz, Austria: Nausner & Nausner. Markus, U. (2002). Integration der virtuellen community in das CRM: Konzeption, rahmenmodell, realisierung. Electronic Commerce, 15. Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370–396. doi:10.1037/h0054346 Michelsen, D., & Schaale, A. (2002). Handy-business: M-commerce als massenmarkt. München, Germany: Financial Times Prentice Hall. Petrzek, D. (2007). Süchtig nach Myspace & Co. Internet World Business, 26, 1. Reichwald, R., Erben, R., Fremuth, N., & Tasch, A. (2002). Mobile communities: Phänomen und erlösungspotenziale. In R. Reichwald (Ed.), Arbeitsberichte des Lehrstuhls für Allgemeine und Industrielle Betriebswirtschaftslehre (no. 36). München, Germany: Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Industrielle Betriebswirtschaftslehre. Reichwald, R., Fremuth, N., & Ney, M. (2002). Mobile communities - erweiterung von virtuellen communities mit mobilen diensten. In R. Reichwald (Ed.), Mobile kommunikation (pp. 521-537). Wiesbaden, Germany: Gabler. Reisinger, D. (2007). ‘Bluejacking,’ ‘bluesnarfing’ and other mobile woes. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_39764450-7.html

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Schneider, U. (2003). Online-community - neues medium und/oder neue sozialform? In C. Eigner, H. Leitner, P. Nausner, & U. Schneider (Eds.), Online-communities, weblogs und die soziale rückeroberung des netzes (pp. 95-114). Graz, Austria: Nausner & Nausner. Schubert, P., & Ginsburg, M. (2000). Virtual communities of transaction: The role of personalization in electronic commerce. EM Electronic Markets, 10(1), 45–56. doi:10.1080/10196780050033971 Stader, R. (2001). Client- und endgerätetechnologien für mobile community-support-systeme. In U. Baumgarten, H. Krcmar, R. Reichwald, & J. Schlichter (Eds.), Community online services and mobile solutions - projektstartbericht des verbundvorhabens COSMOS (pp. 31-44). München, Germany: Institut für Informatik, Technische Universität München. Tasch, A., & Brakel, O. (2004). Location based community services – new services for a new type of Web communities. Retrieved May 25, 2008, from http://www.cosmoscommunity.org/ downloadFiles/Lisbon-format-final.pdf von Tetzchner, J. S. (2008). Mobile browsing report, state of the mobile Web: First quarter, 2008. Retrieved June 23, 2008, from http://www.opera. com/mobile_report/ Wiedmann, K.-P., Buckler, F., & Buxel, H. (2000). Chancenpotentiale und gestaltungsperspektiven des m-commerce. Der Markt, 39(153), 84–96. doi:10.1007/BF03036349 Winkler, K., & Mandl, H. (2004). Virtuelle communities - kennzeichen, gestaltungsprinzipien und wissensmanagement-prozesse. Retrieved June 12, 2008, from http://epub.ub.unimuenchen.de/ archive/00000323/01/ FB_166.pdf

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Yom, M. (2002). Utility und usabilty im mobile commerce. In G. Silberer, J. Wohlfahrt, & T. Wilhelm (Eds), Mobile commerce - grundlagen, geschäftsmodelle, erfolgsfaktoren (pp. 173-184). Wiesbaden, Germany: Gabler.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS COSMOS: The Community-Driven Systems Management in Open Source (COSMOS) project is a collaboration of software developers aimed to create standards-based tools for system management. Mobile Internet: Use of TCP/IP based services and protocols with mobile devices via wireless communications technologies. Mobile Social Web: Refers to mobile social networks and other Web 2.0-based applications in which people access and form online communities by using mobile devices. Mobile Wireless Devices: Handheld elec-

tronic devices with wireless capability to connect to the Internet. Examples include mobile phones, smart phones, and personal digital assistants. Mobility: Unrestricted transfer of text, voice or data independent of user’s physical location. Online Community: A social group that interacts through a web platform over an extended period of time. Social Web: Refers to Web 2.0-based technologies and applications that are used to support communication and facilitate social contact, such as, social networking sites, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, photo and video sharing, online stores and auction houses, virtual worlds, and collaborative wikis.

ENDNOTES 1 2

http://www.shozu.com See http://www.eclipse.org/cosmos

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Chapter 3

Mobile Social Networks and Services Lee Humphreys Cornell University, USA

ABSTRACT Mobile social networks allow users to connect with each other, share information, and create technologically enabled mobile communities. With the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, the public dream of the likelihood of mobile computing was realized. This chapter reviews mobile social networks ranging from early examples to current services; and, it identifies and categorizes them according to a specific media type, mode, and code. The challenges of categorization in light of technology convergence are discussed. Issues of privacy, compatibility, and pricing are presented as they relate to mobile social networks. Potential strategies are suggested for dealing with these challenges. Finally, future trends of mobile social services are identified.

BACKGROUND Mobile communication is becoming ubiquitous in many parts of the world today with over 3 billion mobile phone users worldwide (Tsai, 2008; Wolverton, 2008). Over 255 million mobile subscribers live in the U.S. (CTIA, 2008), which means more Americans own a mobile phone than have an Internet connection (On the Move: The Role of Cellular Communications in American Life, 2006). Considerable research has explored the social efDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch003

fects of mobile phone use (e.g., Goggin, 2006; Ito, Okabe, & Matsuda, 2005; Katz, 2003; Katz, 2006; Katz & Aakhus, 2002; Ling, 2004, 2008). Some have argued that mobile phones may lead to the atomization and privatization among users by discouraging face-to-face communication in urban environments (Banjo, Hu, & Sundar, 2006; Bull, 2004; Puro, 2002). As mobile technology advances, however, new services for mobile phones have been developed which allow people to create, develop, and strengthen social ties. Similar to social networking sites on the Internet (Benkler, 2006; Boyd, 2004; Boyd &

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Mobile Social Networks and Services

Ellison, 2007; Castells, 2000; Rheingold, 2002; Rosenbush, 2005; Saveri, Rheingold, & Vian, 2005), these mobile services may help users to build valuable networks to share information and resources (Ziv, 2009). One of the first mobile social devices to appear was the Lovegety in Japan (Iwatani, 1998; Reuters, 1998). The Lovegety was a stand-alone device that would fit in the palm of the hand and beep when it was within 5 meters of another device. There were “pink girl” devices and “blue boy” devices each with three settings: “let’s chat”, “let’s karaoke”, or “get2”. The devices beeped and flashed green when two co-located devices were on the same setting (e.g., both devices were set to “let’s chat”). The devices would beep and flash red when they were on different settings. According to one account, users would turn down the volumes, hide the devices, and pretend they did not have a device if they did not want to contact another Lovegety user (Iwatani, 1998). There were two kinds of information exchanged using the Lovegety. First, information regarding the identification of people who were interested in using a mobile device to meet other people; second, information regarding what kind of social interaction each person was looking for. The information exchanged was rather simplistic, but it allowed people to have interactions with strangers in public spaces mediated by mobile devices without divulging personal identifying information, such as mobile phone numbers or even names. MIT’s Media Lab and Intel Corporation each developed two other early mobile social networks. Social Serendipity was MIT’s Bluetooth-based social service meant to harness the power of mobile technology and social information (Eagle & Pentland, 2005). Social Serendipity facilitated social interaction among geographically proximate users by matching user profiles and then exchanging profile information with similar matches. Intel’s Jabberwocky sought to monitor and broadcast a user’s movement to identify “familiar strangers”

and encourage a sense of urban community (Paulos & Goodman, 2004). Both of these technologies relied on the mobility of the devices to ascertain locational information to facilitate social connections among users. Early versions of mobile social services, such as the Lovegety, Seredipity, and Jabberwocky, were often made as stand-alone mobile devices. As mobile phones have advanced, however, there has been a movement away from separate mobiles devices that facilitate social connectivity and towards mobile social services that work on mobile phones. The mobile phone has joined the ranks of keys and wallets as items most people do not leave home without (Lohr, 2005). Therefore, most publicly available mobile social services have been developed to be used with mobile phones. The present chapter reviews a range of mobile social services, from the early examples to most current, and identifies and categorizes various mobile social networks and services.

Mobile Social Services Mobile social services refer to software, applications, or systems for mobile phones that allow users to connect with other people, share information, and create technologically enabled mobile communities. Many different terms are used to describe these kinds of services including: mobile social network, mobile social software, mobile social network service, and mobile blog (or mo-blog). The term mobile social network has evolved in reference to the rise of such social networking services (SNS) as Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster. Boyd and Ellison (2007) define social network sites as “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.” The most obvious difference between a

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Mobile Social Networks and Services

mobile social network and a SNS is that the latter is web-based and the former is primarily mobile phone-based. Boyd and Ellison’s (2007) definition also is helpful to differentiate between mobile social networks and mobile social software (MoSoSo). Mobile social networks give users the ability both to identify those users with whom they are connected and to traverse the list of connections within the system. Sometimes this navigation occurs via an application on the mobile phone and sometimes it occurs on an affiliated website accessed through a computer. (As mobile technology is advancing, however, the ability to access more information through mobile devices is increasing; thus more and more of these services will be entirely mobile phone-based.) MoSoSo differ from mobile social networks in that MoSoSo are typically downloaded to one’s mobile device (or pre-installed on the phone prior to purchase) whereas a mobile social network does not require a special application or program running on the phone in order to work. Sometimes mobile social networks rely on text messaging, multimedia messaging services, or voice transmissions. MoSoSo also do not necessarily meet the three criteria of a SNS that Boyd and Ellison (2007) identify. Mobile social software may not have articulated lists of social connections among users. The purpose of mobile social software is to support social interactions among interconnected mobile phone users. For example, both Jabberwocky and Social Serendipity would be classified as mobile social software, not mobile social networks. Both facilitate the exchange of social information between groups of mobile users, but do not articulate users’ various social connections. Howard Rheingold’s book, Smart Mobs, (2002) was one of the first attempts to identify and describe the power of mobile connectivity among groups of users. He details the integral role of mobile phones in organizing the overthrow of President Joseph Estrada in the Philippines and the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle.

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Mobile technology allows for rapid exchange of information through the devices that people carry with them everyday which in turn allows them to socialize in ways previously unavailable. Mobile social services or MoSoSo can help people to connect with new people as well as to connect with old friends. Ellison, Steinfield and Lampe (2007) found that most of the connections on Facebook were among people who had offline ties (i.e., they had not “met” online). Similarly, mobile social networks can connect people who are already friends or acquaintances. In fact, most mobile social networks brand themselves as helping friends to connect with friends and not necessarily to make new relationships.

Media, Modes, and Codes There are a myriad of new mobile social services, but there are differences between these systems. Using traditional media typology, three broad factors can be identified to categorize these mobile systems: media, modes, and codes (Gross, 1973). The first factor of mobile social network categorization considers the media through which these systems operate. The term media is defined here as a means of communication, such as a mobile phone, computer, or wireless device. Despite an overall trend towards technological convergence, some mobile social networks solely rely on mobile phones to provide the technological means of connection between users. Some wireless devices use Bluetooth to connect users. Most mobile social networks, however, also allow for Internet-based connections. Often there is a web component of the mobile social network and it is not solely mobile phone-based. By identifying the particular media used in a variety of mobile social networks, one can begin to differentiate between the systems. It is also important to note that the media of mobile social networks facilitate the exchange of messages from one-to-one (interpersonal) to one-to-many (broad-

Mobile Social Networks and Services

casting). The mobile phone is often perceived as an interpersonal means of communication through which one person communicates via text message or voice to another person. The ability of mobile social networks to broadcast information to many people represents an important shift in mobile communicative practices. The mobile broadcast ability of messages is an important factor in mobile social networks because it allows groups of users to communicate quickly and easily. The second factor with which to categorize mobile social networks is the mode of communication. The mode of communication refers to the various forms of communication by which members are able to interact with one another, including text, image, voice (or audio), and video. Some mobile social networks facilitate communication via limited modes whereas others offer a variety of modes through which to interact. The mode of communication shapes the kinds of interactions that members have on mobile social networks. For example, sometimes there are limits on the number of characters that users can send over mobile social networks. Each of these modal differences shapes the kind of communication that occurs over the mobile social network. The third factor that differentiates mobile social networks is its code. The codes of communication are the symbolic systems of communicating social connections. Mobile social networks have various means through which members communicate their social network connections. Some systems display the particular relations of the users, while other mobile social networks display member profiles but not in relation to others. If no connection is displayed, the system would be classified as a mobile social service or software rather than a mobile social network. Another differentiating code is whether these systems require mutual connections or one-way connections. For example, some mobile social networks allow users to send messages to certain people but receive them from other people. Some services call this watching or following. A user might watch the

messages of a small number of users, but might be watched by a larger number of users or visa versa. For example, Malcolm Gladwell, an author and writer for The New Yorker Magazine, is followed on Twitter by 421 users but follows one user (Gladwell, 2008). A mutual network system does not allow this one-way messaging. For these mutual systems, users send and receive messages to and from the same people. The code of a mobile social network differentiates a variety of different services, all of which help users to connect with other members based upon common interests or geographic proximity. Table 1 categorizes the following mobile social services according to the type of media, mode, and code: Pownce.com, Twitxr, Twitter, Jaiku, MySay, Utterz, Cromple, Facebook Mobile, MySpace Mobile, Dodgeball, Socialight, Loopt, Kyte, and Radar. As such, Gross’s (1973) typology becomes a helpful tool with which to describe these services. For example, there are important differences in the mode of communication. Early mobile social networks, such as Dodgeball, were primarily text-based (Humphreys, 2007). Increasingly, these services are multi-modal, offering users the ability to broadcast text, images, audio, and video. For example, MySay and Utterz try to differentiate themselves from the other mobile social networks by allowing users to record their voices on their mobile phones and then broadcast them to the web. This categorization of networks also highlights the convergence of media. Increasingly, designers of mobile social networks are developing specific application-versions of their services, which can be integrated into other websites such as blogs or social network sites. For example, no longer do people have to go to the Twitter website to join, but they can download the application from the Facebook website itself. Thus not only are these services increasingly multi-modal, but they are also multi-media. This points to the convergent nature of communication technology (Jenkins, 2006). The lines between various modes and

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Mobile Social Networks and Services

Table 1. Categorization of mobile social services Name

Description

Media

Mode

Code

Kyte

“Share pictures & video online or from your mobile”

Web, mobile phone

Text, video, images, audio

No public display of social connections

MySay

“Talk to the web”

Mobile phone, web

Audio (voice), text, images, video

No public display of social connections

Cromple

“Keep friends updated with this simple blog system”

Web, mobile phone

Text

One-way friend networks

Jaiku

“Your conversation”

Web, mobile phone, Internet (IM)

Text, images

One-way friend networks

Pownce

“Send stuff to your friends”

Mobile, web, IM

Text, images, video, audio

One-way friend networks

Twitter

“What are you doing?”

Mobile, web, IM

Text, images

One-way friend networks

Twitxr

“A picture is worth a thousand word”

Mobile, web

Images, text

One-way friend networks

Utterz

“Share your news”

Mobile, web

Image, video, audio, text

One-way friend networks

Dodgeball

“Connect with your friends”

Mobile phone, web

Text

Mutual friend networks

Facebook Mobile

“Use Facebook on the go”

Mobile phone primarily (supplement to Facebook.com)

Text, images

Mutual friend network

Loopt

“Turn your mobile phone into a social compass”

Mobile phone (GPS), web, IM

Text, image

Mutual friend networks

MySpace Mobile

“A place for friends”

Mobile phone primarily (supplement to MySpace.com)

Text

Mutual friend networks

Radar

“Instant picture conversations with your favorite people and no one else”

Mobile, web, IM

Images, video, text, audio

Mutual friend networks

Socialight

“Discover right here right now information about places all around you”

Mobile phone (GPS), web

Images, text

Mutual friend networks

various media are blurring. Social network sites, for example, Facebook and MySpace, have added distinct mobile components to their services. In fact, MySpace is the largest mobile social network in the U.S. with a mobile audience of 3.7 million users (Minney, 2007). Facebook is the second most popular mobile social network in the U.S. with a mobile audience of 2 million users (Minney). The numerical success of these mobile platforms on MySpace and Facebook may have less to do with the need for mobility of the social network service than it does with the sheer success of these sites on the web. MySpace Mobile and Facebook Mobile are popular because their web services are popular. They each have developed

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a massive base of users, which is necessary for the success of all social media whether they are web or mobile based. The question then arises as to whether the term mobile social network is an appropriate way to describe multi-media social network services that are accessible on a variety of technological platforms? Despite the convergence of media, mobile social network is still a helpful term because it highlights the mobility, individuality, and accessibility of mobile device-based systems. Mobile phones are defined by their mobility. They are not confined to the kitchen, office, or even the phone booth, but can be found in all kinds of spaces. Unlike landlines, mobile phones are also primarily assigned

Mobile Social Networks and Services

to a particular body. Individuals often have their own mobile phones as opposed to private landlines which are typically assigned to a particular place (Wellman et al., 2003). Mobile phones are also often nearby and accessible. In fact, users have described being away from their mobile phones as anxiety inducing events (Cohen & Lemish, 2004; Humphreys, 2003; Rainie & Keeter, 2006). The accessibility, individuality, and mobility of mobile phones make them particularly powerful communication technologies which differ from more traditional PC technologies.

ISSUES AND CHALLENGES While much hype surrounds mobile social networks (e.g., Goodale, 2007; B. Johnson, 2007; Klaassen, 2006), several challenges regarding the development and use of mobile social networks persist. One of the largest challenges for mobile social networks is privacy. Some mobile social services allow and even encourage users to share copious amounts of information about themselves with those in their networks. Sometimes these services involve sharing locational information about where people are at certain points in time. Inevitably, concerns arise regarding who has access to this information and what is it being used for. For example, stalking may become a concern. Generally speaking, however, most of the services require users to actively identify who is in their network and will receive their messages, thus allowing users of mobile social networks to control their flows of information. Users can easily block other users from seeing their personal messages. Privacy issues, however, concern not only which users have access to information through these systems, but corporate surveillance of users as well. For example, when members use Dodgeball, they do not just tell everyone in their Dodgeball networks their location; they tell Dodgeball who tells everyone in their network. Dodgeball is owned

by Google, which means members are also telling Google where they are whenever they check in with their friends using Dodgeball. Another challenge for mobile social networks in the U.S. concerns media and model capability. Some mobile social services in the U.S. are only available on certain kinds of phones. For example, Loopt, a mobile geosocial networking services compatible with most Nextel and Sprint cellular phones in the U.S.; however, it is only compatible with AT&T’s Blackberries and iPhones. The reason that Loopt is not compatible with most AT&T phones is that Loopt relies on Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, which is not standard on most AT&T mobile devices as it is on Nextel and Sprint mobile phones. Therefore, the majority of AT&T mobile customers cannot use Loopt. This is certainly a challenge to Loopt’s growth and development. Until nearly all mobile phones in the U.S. have GPS, mobile social networks which rely on this satellite technology will be hampered. Similarly, while cameras on mobile phones in the U.S. have become increasingly standardized, mobile video is less common. Thus mobile social services (e.g., Kyte, Pownce and Radar), which encourage the sharing of mobile video, may have less of a market for their services until mobile video becomes more available. A final challenge for mobile social networks in the U.S. is the pricing for mobile services. Most mobile phone users in the U.S. have on-going subscriptions or contracts with the mobile service providers rather than pre-paid mobile phone service, which is more common in the rest of the world (CTIA, 2008; Kokko, 2004). Therefore most people in the U.S. pay for their mobile phone use about 30 days after they have incurred the charges. (This is sometimes referred to as a post-paid system.) All of the mobile social services discussed here are “free” to use. “Free” here refers to the fact that users do not pay the mobile social service to join or to send messages through their system. This, however, does not mean that the mobile social services are entirely free to use.

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Mobile Social Networks and Services

Mobile phone users incur charges for each minute they speak, each text message they send, and each data bit they download. What sometimes can happen is that new mobile social network users will not realize how much they will use these services and how much it might cost them, especially if they go over their voice, text or data limits. Sometimes users do not realize they have gone over their limits until they receive their bills the following month at which point it is too late. They receive a mobile phone bill much larger than they expect and are required to pay for their use. This can sometimes lead new mobile social network users to change their plan to unlimited or at least increased voice, text or data services. In some circumstances, an exorbitant mobile phone bill can lead new users to stop using the mobile social network altogether (Humphreys, 2008). Despite warnings from the mobile social networks, this kind of opaque billing system may discourage mobile social network adoption and use.

SOLUTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Mobile social network adoption and usage are increasing despite challenges (Minney, 2007). There are several steps that users, developers and regulators can take to further encourage the growth of mobile social networks. In the past, privacy campaigns by privacy advocates and government regulators have helped to encourage a shift in privacy policies of Google (C.Y. Johnson, 2007). Similar public advocacy could encourage more transparency in privacy policies of mobile social networks. There has also been a recent move among colleges and universities in the U.S. to create recommendations for information management on social network sites. For example, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recommends that students be “conscientious” when posting messages on Facebook and MySpace and encourages students to reset the privacy settings

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to “avoid having your contact information given out to other companies” (University of WisconsinMadison, 2008). Similar privacy awareness campaigns may help mobile social network users to be conscientious about their privacy and mobile communication practices. With any emerging technology, technical features take time to develop and standardize. Companies that provide GPS-based mobile social services are betting that a GPS (Global Positioning System) will become an increasingly standardized feature on mobile phones. Pew’s Internet and American Life Project found that mobile mapping was one feature that most mobile phone users wanted but did not yet have (Rainie & Keeter, 2006). Given the demand for mapping features, GPS is likely to become a more common feature on mobile phones. For example, when Apple introduced its second generation of iPhones, it had added GPS to the phone’s capabilities. Another change to the iPhone 3G signifies a second potential trend in mobile communication which may help with standardization and compatibility. iPhone 2.0 software update added an App Store – an application which allows users to quickly and easily download files (German & Bell, 2008). The iPhone App Store which offers applications designed for iPhone may encourage further innovation, development, and adoption of mobile social services. As mobile social services gain in popularity, pricing will become increasingly important. From 1998 until 2007, the average monthly mobile phone bill in the U.S. ranged between $40 and $50 (CTIA, 2008). In February 2008 both AT&T and Verizon began to offer unlimited voice for $99 (AT&T, 2008; Verizon, 2008). Unlimited data are an additional charge. Therefore the unlimited plans are a significant increase in price from what mobile phone users have been typically paying for service. That said, these unlimited mobile services have decreased in price. While it is still greater than the average monthly mobile bill, the lowering of costs to $99 per month for unlimited voice suggests that unlimited services may become

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a more popular plan among U.S. mobile phone users. Unlimited mobile services for a set price is likely to encourage the adoption and use of mobile social services because people could use the services as much as possible and would know exactly how much it will cost them.

FUTURE TRENDS There are several important areas for both the development and research of mobile social networks. With GPS technology and the triangulation of cell phone towers, the location of mobile phone users is identifiable. This opens up possibilities for the collection and use of location-aware services, which could be quite helpful for mobile social network users to communicate and access new kinds of information. Location-based services are a growing area of mobile technology development. Mapping services and geotagging allow users to interact with the physical space around them in new mediated ways. Socialight is one early example of a mobile social network with location aware messaging. Another potential area for the future development of mobile social networks is among specific populations. Already the use of mobile social networks at high-tech conferences has begun to rise (McCarthy, 2007). Mobile social networks can improve information flow efficiency among groups of people trying to connect with one another. One could also imagine that mobile social networks could be helpful to the elderly and youth populations as a means of maintaining family communications. An at-risk population constitutes another potential group that might benefit from the use of mobile social networks. For example, experimental research suggests that Alcoholics Anonymous members are less likely to fail when they use mobile phones to contact their support networks in time of need (Campbell & Kelley, 2006).

CONCLUSION With the introduction of the iPhone in June 2007, the public imagination of the possibility of mobile computing blossomed in the U.S. People suddenly had a tangible example of a mobile phone through which one could easily access the web. As mobile hardware and software become more advanced and user-friendly, mobile social networks will continue to grow. These services will increasingly become useful communication tools through which people manage their social relations.

REFERENCES AT&T. (2008, February 19). AT&T to launch unlimited U.S. calling plan (AT&T press release). Retrieved July 16, 2008, from http://www.att. com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=news&n ewsarticleid=25197 Banjo, O., Hu, Y., & Sundar, S. S. (2006). Cell phone usage and social interaction with proximate others: Ringing in a theoretical model. Paper presented at the International Communication Association, Dresden, Germany. Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Boyd, D. (2004). Friendster and publicly articulated social networking. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1279-1282). Vienna, Austria: ACM. Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd. ellison.html Retrieved July 16, 2008.

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Bull, M. (2004). ‘To each their own bubble’: Mobile spaces of sound in the city. In N. Couldry & A. McCarthy (Eds.), MediaSpace: Place, scale and culture in a media age (pp. 275-293). London: Routledge. Campbell, S. W., & Kelley, M. (2006). Mobile phone use in AA networks: An exploratory study. Journal of Applied Communication, 34(2), 191–208. doi:10.1080/00909880600574104 Castells, M. (2000). The rise of the network society (2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Gladwell, M. (2008). Twitter profile page. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from https://twitter.com/ MalcolmGladwell Goggin, G. (2006). Cell phone culture: Mobile technology in everyday life. New York: Routledge. Goodale, G. (2007, January 19). Students’ new best friend: ‘MoSoSo’. Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved July 16, 2008, from http://www. csmonitor.com/2007/0119/p11s02-stct.htm

Cohen, A. A., & Lemish, D. (2004, May). From flat tires to suicide bombings: Mobile phones and emergencies. Paper presented at the International Communication Association, New Orleans, LA.

Gross, L. P. (1973). Modes of communication and the acquisition of symbolic competence. In G. Gerbner, L. P. Gross, & W. H. Melody (Eds.), Communication technology and social policy (pp. 189-207). New York: Wiley.

CTIA. (2008). Semi-annual wireless industry survey: Annualized wireless industry survey results - December 1985 to December 2007. Washington, DC: CTIA-The Wireless Association.

Humphreys, L. (2003). Can you hear me now? A field study of cellphone usage in public space. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

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Humphreys, L. (2007). Mobile social networks and social practice: A case study of dodgeball. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/humphreys. html Retrieved July 16, 2008.

Ellison, N., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook ‘friends’: Exploring the relationship between college students’ use of online social networks and social capital. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ Retrieved July 16, 2008. doi:10.1111/j.10836101.2007.00367.x

Humphreys, L. (2008). Mobile devices and social networking. In M. Hartmann, P. Rössler & J. Höflich (Eds.), After the mobile? Social changes and the development of mobile communication. Berlin, Germany: Frank & Timme.

German, K., & Bell, D. (2008). CNet editors’ review: Apple iPhone 3G - 16GB, white. Retrieved July 16, 2008, from http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/apple-iphone-3g16gb/4505-6452_7-33064512.html?tag=promo

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Ito, M., Okabe, D., & Matsuda, M. (Eds.). (2005). Personal, portable, pedestrian: Mobile phones in Japanese life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Iwatani, Y. (1998, June 11). Love: Japanese style. Wired News. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.

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Johnson, C. Y. (2007, September 17). Social networking sites breaking free from the PC: Services offering cellphone links. The Boston Globe. Retrieved July 16, 2008, from http://www.boston. com/business/technology/articles/2007/09/17/ social_networking_sites_breaking_free_from_ the_pc/ Katz, J. E. (2003). Machines that become us: The social context of personal communication technology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Katz, J. E. (2006). Magic in the air: Mobile communication and the transformation of social life. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Katz, J. E., & Aakhus, M. (Eds.). (2002). Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. New York: Cambridge University Press. Klaassen, A. (2006, October 19). Forward thinking R/GA looks even further into the future. Advertising Age. Retrieved October 26, 2006, from http:// adage.com/digital/article?article_id=112571

McCarthy, J. F. (2007). The challenges of recommending digital selves in physical spaces. In Proceedings of the 2007 ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Minneapolis, MN (pp. 85-86). Minney, J. (2007). Mobile social networking has 12.3 million friends in the US and estern Europe (M:Metrics press release). Retrieved July 16, 2008, from http://www.mmetrics.com/press/pressrelease.aspx?article=20070815-socialnetworking Paulos, E., & Goodman, E. (2004, May). The familiar stranger: Anxiety, comfort, and play in public spaces. In Proceedings of CHI (pp. 223230). Vienna, Austria: ACM. Puro, J. P. (2002). Finland: A mobile culture. In J. E. Katz & M. Aakhus (Eds.), Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance (pp. 19-29). New York: Cambridge University Press. Rainie, L., & Keeter, S. (2006). Americans and their cell phones. Washington, DC: Pew Internet and American Life.

Kokko, J. (2004). Mobile Internet charging: Prepaid vs. postpaid. Helsinki, Finland: Networking Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology.

Reuters. (1998, May 15). Bleep at first sight. Wired. Retrieved April 8, 2008, from http://www.wired. com/culture/lifestyle/news/1998/05/12342

Ling, R. (2004). The mobile connection: The cell phone’s impact on society. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

Rheingold, H. (2002). Smart mobs: The next social revolution. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.

Ling, R. (2008). New tech, new ties: How mobile communication is reshaping social cohesion Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lohr, S. (2005, May 4). How much is too much. The New York Times, Section G, 1. On the move: The role of cellular communications in American life. (2006). Ann Arbor, MI: Department of Communication Studies, University of Michigan.

Rosenbush, S. (2005, July 19). News Corp.’s place in MySpace. Business Week Online. Retrieved April 17, 2008, from http://www. businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2005/ tc20050719_5427_tc119.htm Saveri, A., Rheingold, H., & Vian, K. (2005). Technologies of cooperation. Palo Alto, CA: Institute for the Future. Tsai, E. (2008). Worldwide mobile phone subscriber forecast, 2008-2012. Taipei, Taiwan: Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute.

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University of Wisconsin-Madison. (2008). Using Facebook and MySpace. Division of University Housing. Retrieved July 16, 2008, from http:// www.housing.wisc.edu/parents/facebook.php Verizon. (2008, February 19). Verizon Wireless introduces new unlimited plans that are as worry free as the guarantee (Verizon press release). Retrieved July 16, 2008, from http://news.vzw. com/news/2008/02/pr2008-02-19.html Wellman, B., Quan-Haase, A., Boase, J., Chen, W., Hampton, K., Isla del Diaz, I., et al. (2003). The social affordances of the Internet for networked individualism. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 8(3). Retrieved July 16, 2008, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue3/wellman.html Wolverton, T. (2008, April 7). Calling the future: Cell phone pioneer sees ‘another revolution’. San Jose Mercury News. Retrieved April 10, 2008, from http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ ci_8837221 Ziv, N. D. (2009). Mobile social networks: A new locus of innovation. In C. Romm-Livermore & K. Setzekorn (Eds.), Social networking communities and e-dating services: Concepts and implications (pp. 44-59). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Bluetooth: A wireless protocol which allows short-range connections to be made between mobile phones, laptops, and other portable devices. Global Positioning System (GPS): A satel-

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lite-based navigation system used to triangulate particular points on Earth using longitudes and latitudes; increasingly, GPS is used to identify mobile phone users’ locations, so as to access and share location-based information. Micro-Blog: A personal chronological log of thoughts, activities, or reflections which are limited in size (for example, to 140 characters). Mobile Blog (or Mo-Blog): A personal chronological log of thoughts, activities, or reflections sent from one’s mobile phone to either a website, blog, or mobile device; depending on the system, mo-blogs may include text, audio, still images, and video; mo-blogs are often micro-blogs Mobile Social Network: A mobile phonebased service that allows individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of users with whom they share a connection and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. Mobile Social Service: Mobile Internet systems that allow users to connect with others and create virtual communities. Mobile Social Software (or MoSoSo): A mobile phone application which supports social interaction among interconnected mobile phone users. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS): Video or picture messages sent over mobile phone networks. Short Messaging Service (SMS): Text messages sent over mobile phone networks. Social Networking Services (SNS): Online services that facilitate social interaction and networking.

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Chapter 4

Social Media Marketing Web X.0 of Opportunities Lemi Baruh Kadir Has University, Turkey

ABSTRACT In recent years social media applications, which enable consumers to contribute to the world of online content, have grown in popularity. However, this growth is yet to be transformed into a sustainable commercial model. Starting with a brief overview of existing online advertising models, this chapter discusses the opportunities available for advertisers trying to reach consumers through social media. The chapter focuses on viral marketing as a viable option for marketers, reviews recent viral marketing campaigns, and offers recommendations for a successful implementation of social media marketing. In conclusion, the author examines future trends regarding the utilization of the emerging Semantic Web in marketing online.

INTRODUCTION The brief history of the World Wide Web is filled with stories of unprecedented commercial success as well as shattered dreams of hopeful online entrepreneurs. It should not be surprising that, just as their predecessors, Web 2.0 and social media also bring about important questions regarding their sustainability. On the one hand, since 2006, social media sites have been growing in number and popularity (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). For example, according to DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch004

comScore, a leading Internet information provider, as of December 2007 Facebook had close to 98 million unique visitors, and Fox Interactive Media, including MySpace, had more than 150 million. Similarly, recent years have seen a phenomenal growth in the popularity of weblogs (blogs): in 2007 every day, 175,000 new blogs were added to an estimated 67 million blogs that were already up and running (as cited in Rappaport, 2007). On the other hand, skeptics voice their belief that social media, despite their current popularity, may not have the staying power (“MySpace, Facebook and Other Social Networking Sites,” 2006).

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Social Media Marketing

An important component of skeptics’ concerns about the sustainability of social media pertains to the fact that there are no agreed upon ways of monetizing the rising popularity of social media (Allison, 2007; Hall, 2007). Perhaps, the most telling example of this problem is Facebook. Despite having a market value of around $15 billion, Facebook’s 2007 revenue was $150 million (McCarthy, 2008) – a considerably small share of the $21 billion online advertising industry. Then, the question of whether social media will be more than just a fad boils down to advertisers’ ability to utilize the unique opportunities presented by social media. Although advertisers and social media entrepreneurs are yet to agree on a marketing model for social media, recent discussions point to several important requirements that a successful model should accommodate. Given the decentralized architecture of the Internet in general and social media in particular, a central tenet of these recent debates concerns the relative merits of more conventional advertising methods and word of mouth (or word of “mouse”) based marketing approaches that cede control to the consumers. In the light of these debates, this chapter will start by summarizing online advertising methods. After this brief summary, the chapter will focus on the opportunities and challenges for online marketers that are brought about by the development of social media. Finally, the chapter will discuss viral marketing and integrated marketing communication principles to provide a roadmap for realizing the financial and marketing potential of Web 2.0.

BACKGROUND Online Advertising In its most traditional sense, advertising is defined as a paid form of communication appearing in media, usually with the purpose of reaching a large number of potential customers. Since 1993, when

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CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be available to anyone free of charge, advertisers experimented with different methods of reaching consumers online. Unsurprisingly, the first reaction of advertisers was to treat the World Wide Web as a natural extension of traditional media, such as newspapers and television. And, just as in conventional mass media, early online advertising methods, such as banners, pop-ups and interstitials, were characterized by intrusiveness and adoption of a one-way stimulus-response model within which information flows from the advertiser to the customer (McCoy, Everard, Polak, & Galletta, 2007; Rappaport, 2007). However, even in the early years of online advertising, signs of what was to come in interactive marketing were revealed. Shortly after banners became a popular online advertising method in 1994, keyword-activated “smart banners” were introduced. What set smart banners apart from their predecessors was that the contents of the banners were personalized in response to the search words entered by the users. As such, smart banners were one of the first examples of how content variability in new media (Manovich, 2001) can be utilized to customize information to consumers’ needs (Faber, Lee & Nana 2007).

Customization and Message Congruence in Interactive Media As noted by several researchers, content variability and the consequent ability to customize content according to the needs of the consumer are made possible by the interactive capabilities of new media (Baruh, 2007; Faber et al., 2007). Two important characteristics of interactive media are the ability to facilitate a two-way flow of communication and the related ability to track and store every bit of information about how consumers use a system (McCallister & Turow, 2002). Real-time information about how consumers use a medium, especially when combined with other data through data mining, enables marketers to

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extract profiles about individuals that can then be used to tailor messages and products. The ultimate aim of this process is to target different consumer groups with specific messages that can tie a product to their informational needs, lifestyles or predispositions. Extant literature on online targeting suggests that consumers will be more receptive to messages that are tailored as such (McCoy et al. 2007; Robinson, Wyscocka, & Hand, 2007). To a large extent, this higher receptivity is the result of being able to promote the “right” product, at the “right” time and place and the “right” tone. A case in point that supports these research findings is the success of Google’s AdWords, which accounts for 40% of online advertising spending. The premise of AdWords is that the marketers can reach motivated consumers by providing them with contextual advertising messages congruent with their online keyword searches (and presumably, their interests). Similarly, a widely known feature of online vendors such as Amazon.com is their customized product recommendation systems. The recommendation system these online vendors utilize is based on a data mining system called market-basket analysis (also called association discovery). The premise of this system is that the marketer can create cross-selling opportunities by identifying the product types that a customer would be interested in (e.g., microwave popcorn) on the basis of other products that he or she has already purchased or is purchasing (e.g., a DVD movie). As such, what the market-basket analysis algorithm does is to identify product clusters that are purchased together or sequentially using the product purchasing history of customers whose tastes are similar to a specific customer.

ONE STEP FURTHER: WEB 2.0 OF OPPORTUNITIES Customization and Data from Social Media As can be inferred from the discussion above, collecting information about consumers is an important prerequisite of customizing advertising messages in accordance with the informational needs and lifestyles of consumers. Certainly, data about individuals’ online media consumption and purchasing behavior, especially when combined with other sources of data such as credit history, provide marketers with an unprecedented capability to not only determine which customers to target (and avoid) but also when and how to target them. Within this context, social network sites, such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn, have a potential to extend what is already a large pool of data about consumers. Such social network sites are designed to allow users to create personal profiles and connect with other users, friends or strangers. And through the creation and perennial updating of their profiles, users of social network sites actively participate in the dissemination of information about themselves (Andrejevic, 2007; Solove, 2007). The types of information users of social network sites disclose include: information about their hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes, whom they associate with, a dinner they had a couple of days ago and, sometimes, disturbingly private details about their social and sexual lives. Blogs, another highly popular form of social media, are no different from social network websites. As Solove (2007) points out, any topic, any issue and any personal experience are fair game for more than 60 million bloggers around the world. The massive quantities of data that social media users reveal online are not left untapped by media companies and marketers. For example, MySpace has recently begun an effort to mine data from its more than 100 million users in order to better

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target advertising messages. Named as MySpace HyperTargetting, the system initially began mining data about general interest categories, such as sports and gaming, and is now further dividing interests into thousands of subcategories (Morrisey, 2007).

The Community Touch An important point to note with respect to the types of data available in social media is that the digital goldmine of information is not simply a more detailed version of data collected about consumers’ interests and behaviors in other forms of interactive media. Rather, in social media, the available data contain unprecedented details about the network affinities of users. The data about the network affinities of users can be utilized at two levels. First, through the “tell me about your friends and I’ll tell you about yourself” principle, marketers can make further refinements to consumers’ profiles based on the interests shared by members of the communities they belong to. Secondly, information about the communities that an individual belongs to can be used to identify the paths through which they can be reached. Recent marketing techniques devised by online vendors and social media outlets illustrate how information about social affinities can be used to reach consumers. For example, Amazon.com’s iLike application, a music service that markets new music and concerts to interested listeners, works by scanning the music libraries of its subscribers. The service connects like-minded listeners and promotes new music to users through add-ons such as Facebook’s iLike widget. Similarly, Facebook’s own Beacon platform tracks purchases Facebook users make on partnering online vendors and then informs users’ networks about the recent purchase (Klaassen & Creamer, 2007; Thompson, 2007; Tsai, 2008). In addition to leveraging existing social networks to disseminate marketing messages, some software applications, for example, Stealth Friend Finder automatically generate

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massive and targeted Facebook Friend Requests to directly connect with the consumers.

Web 2.0 of Opportunities: Viral Marketing in Social Media These examples of social targeting pinpoint the direction that marketing in social media can take. Rather than being an advertising distribution system, Beacon is a viral marketing tool that lets community members know what their co-members have purchased. In other words, with the Beacon system, the consumer, through the publication of his/her purchasing decision, assumes the role of an influencer. Subramani and Rajagopalan (2003) suggest that consumers may assume such a role either passively or actively. In the passive form, the consumer spreads the word simply by using or purchasing a product (as is the case when an e-mail from a Blackberry user contains a message saying the e-mail was sent using a Blackberry account). On the other hand, active viral marketing requires that consumers participate in the message dissemination process by contacting other potential customers (Clow & Baack, 2007). An important criticism of passive viral marketing systems in social media is that they fail to utilize an important characteristic of Web 2.0 in general and social media in particular. Instead of being a passive consumer of readily available content, Web 2.0 users are participants in both the creation and dissemination of content. Accordingly, despite utilizing social graphs to target messages more effectively, the “your friend just bought this book from Amazon.com” message is nevertheless an advertising method that affords the consumer very little power as a potential source of influence (Anderson, 2006; Windley, 2007). Considered from this perspective, a more appropriate way of utilizing the viral potential of social media users is to invite them to actively participate in promoting the product. First, existing research shows that close to a quarter of users of online social networks, such as Facebook, use

Social Media Marketing

these sites to influence other users (Webb, 2007). Second, as evidenced by Facebook users’ negative reaction to Beacon, social network sites are relatively intimate environments and advertising intrusion (especially given an overall mistrust for advertising messages) is not welcome (Clemons, Barnett, & Appadurai, 2007; Gillin, 2007; Hall, 2007). In contrast, 94% of online social network users find product recommendations from friends to be at least very worthwhile to listen to (MacKeltworth, 2007). This finding is not surprising since recommendations coming from friends, family members, or colleagues are more likely to be trustworthy and relevant to one’s needs (Clemons et al., 2007). In fact, according to a recent survey, along with the reputation of the manufacturer, recommendations from friends and family members are the biggest factor that influences purchasing decisions made by individuals (Klaassen & Creamer, 2007). Third, thanks to synchronous connections between multiple users, a computer-mediated word of mouth can reach a larger number of people than word of mouth in the brick and mortar world. As briefly mentioned before, in addition to these three important advantages of inviting social media users to actively disseminate marketing messages, product information, or recommendations, social media also provide marketers with an unprecedented capability to identify the individuals who would be the best candidates in a social network to act as viral marketers. Domingos (2005) suggests that in addition to actually liking a product, a suitable viral marketing candidate should have high connectivity and should be powerful as a source of influence. Using social network analyses (Hanneman & Riddle, 2005; Scott, 2000; Wasserman & Faust, 1995), data regarding personal affiliations and social network memberships can be utilized to identify opinion leaders (“hubs”) who are central to and powerful in a given network. Recently, there have been several attempts to apply social network analysis to social media to

identify social network influencers. For example, Spertus, Sahami, and Büyükkökten (2005) used network data from Orkut.com to identify members who could be used to recommend new communities to users. Similarly, in a study of Flickr and Yahoo360 networks, Kumar, Novak and Tomkins (2006) were able to distinguish between passive users and active inviters that contributed to the extension of the network. And recently, MySpace announced that it is constructing an “influencer” option for advertisers who could be interested in reaching users with active and large networks. To identify potential influencers, MySpace will use data regarding users’ group memberships and interests, their friends’ interests, level of network activity in a given network and other factors (Morrissey, 2007).

The Integrated Marketing Communications Perspective In 1976, Wayne DeLozier suggested that marketing communication was a process of creating an integrated group of stimuli with the purpose of evoking a set of desired responses. According to this integrated marketing communications perspective, which has been adopted by many companies since the 1980’s, rather than being considered in isolation from one another, each component of the marketing mix should be coordinated to present a unified image to consumers. Considered from this perspective, fulfilling the viral marketing promise of Web 2.0 and social media requires that the viral marketing effort be part of a greater scheme of corporate communications. In other words, rather than merely focusing on spreading the word, the viral marketing effort should fit the brand personality (Webb, 2007). A particular case illustrating this point is the “Top This TV Challenge” campaign of Heinz®. In this campaign, Heinz® invited consumers to produce 30-second TV commercials for Heinz® Ketchup and submit the commercials on YouTube. The winner of the contest, determined first by a panel

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of judges and then by the votes of consumers, was awarded $57,000 and a chance to get the commercial aired on national television. The premise of the campaign was not only that it fit the “fun” brand image of Heinz® Ketchup but also that the consumers would play a crucial role in disseminating Heinz Ketchup’s name. Just as intended, many of the 4,000 qualified contestants who posted their videos on YouTube (as required) also created MySpace and Facebook pages promoting their own videos and consequently Heinz Ketchup. Another example illustrating the connection between viral marketing and an integrated marketing communications approach that provides a fit between the marketing campaign and the organizational image is the “Download Day” organized by Mozilla Firefox in June 2008. Mozilla is a not for profit organization that is mostly known for its Firefox Web Browser (a challenger of the market leader, Internet Explorer). The organization is a self-proclaimed open source project that publicly shares the source codes of their own software for the development of new Internet applications. Unlike its major competitors, such as Internet Explorer and Safari, the Firefox Web Browser is positioned as an “organic browser” that has been developed through a collaborative process whereby thousands of software developers – the majority of which are not employed by Mozilla – contribute to the software. Likewise, the dissemination of Firefox largely relies on volunteers “spreading” the software. In June 2008, Mozilla created a Download Day event to promote the third version of its Firefox Web Browser. The purpose of the Download Day was to set a world record in the number of downloads in 24 hours. To inform would-be users about the event, Mozilla heavily utilized social media and viral marketing. Following the initial announcement, the word of mouth about the Download Day first quickly spread through social news aggregators such as DiggTM and Reddit.com. Then, the links in the social news aggregators forwarded interested users to the

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Download Day homepage. In addition to asking individuals to pledge to download Firefox on Download Day and providing an update on the number of individuals who pledged to download, the homepage also invited them to engage in viral marketing by inviting their social networks to the event via Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, promoting the event on microblogging Twitterlike websites or organizing “Download Fests” on university campuses. These two examples provide important insights regarding the criteria for a successful viral marketing campaign online (and in social media): 1.

2.

Campaign-Organizational Image Congruence: In the Download Day example, the event, the promoted goal (setting a world record) and the method of dissemination of the information of the event (through social media) were in line with Mozilla’s overall image as a non-corporate, decentralized and innovative organization that relies on volunteers and users for its promotion as well as software development. Similarly, the “Top This TV Challenge” campaign of Heinz® fits the “fun” brand image of Heinz® Ketchup. Inciting Virality and Buzz: This is the key for creating a pull rather than inducing a push in an organization’s marketing campaign. An attractive event (in this case a world record setting event) or a message is a crucial component in developing an organic viral marketing process. The ability to create buzz through the event will also increase the chances that the viral marketing campaign will supplement other marketing communication goals: such as, providing material for other promotional efforts or getting coverage in traditional media— the latter being especially important for Firefox given that Mozilla does not have a centrally controlled advertising budget to spend on conventional media. For example,

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3.

4.

the overwhelming interest in the Top This TV Challenge (with 5.2 million views) also helped create publicity for the company in the mainstream media and prompted Heinz® to repeat the challenge in 2008. Getting Consumers to be Personally Invested: Mozilla’s Download Day emphasized not only the possibility of a world record but that the consumers would be an integral part of this unique success. In this case, the prospects of being a part of a possible Guinness World Record-setting activity may have increased the chances that consumers identify with (and are invested in) not only the product or the brand but also the success of the campaign. Perhaps, for the contestants in the Heinz® Top This TV Challenge, the personal investment was even higher because their own success (in terms of getting enough votes to win the contest) partly depended on the popular votes they would get from other consumers. Creating Levels of Viral Involvement: In terms of options available for viral marketing, social media not only expand the available options but also create the possibility of multiple levels of viral involvement. For example, in the Heinz® Top This TV Challenge, the level of viral activity of a contestant that promotes his/her video will naturally be higher than a regular YouTube user who happens to come across a challenger’s video that is worth sharing with friends. The Mozilla’s Download Day event, on the other hand, systematically utilized the social media (and other venues) to create tiers of consumer involvement. For example, an enthusiastic Firefox user could go as far as organizing a download festival whereas a regular user of Facebook or MySpace could invite friends to pledge for the download on the Mozilla’s Download Day homepage.

FUTURE TRENDS As discussed in the preceding sections, a central tenet of the debates regarding the marketing potential of social media pertains to the balance that needs to be struck between the efficiency of automatic recommendation systems and the organic involvement created by the real community touch of viral marketing campaigns that invite consumers to actively participate in the dissemination of the marketing messages. On the one hand, systems such as Facebook’s Beacon platform and MySpace’s “influencer” option promise to deliver large-scale, automated word of mouth that can expand the reach of viral marketing campaigns. However, the perceived intrusiveness of such systems, as well as their tendency to use consumers as passive hubs to automatically relay marketing messages, may call into question the true virality of such advertising efforts, consequently reducing their appeal for consumers. Recent discussions regarding “Web 3.0” and the future of the Internet may point to the direction that this uneasy relationship between virality and automatic customization may take. Despite frequent disagreements regarding the definition of Web 3.0, an increasing number of commentators have started to use the concept interchangeably with the Semantic Web – a set of technologies that enable software agents to understand, interpret and extract knowledge from information, making it possible for them to complete “sophisticated tasks for users” (Berners-Lee, Hendler & Lassila, 2001). Michael Bloch provides a simple example explaining how the Semantic Web would work: You want to go out to dinner…and your car is in the shop… You issue a command for the agent to search for a restaurant serving Indian food within a 10-mile radius…You want a restaurant that has a 4 star rating issued by a well-known restaurant critic. Furthermore, you want the table booked and a cab to pick you up from your place. Additionally you want a call to be made

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to your phone once that’s all done; but you don’t want to be disturbed by the call as you’ll be in a meeting - just for the reservation details added to your phone organizer. (Bloch, 2007)

that potential customers arrive at as a result of the viral marketing effort.

CONCLUSION As this example suggests, the Semantic Web is more than a compilation of web pages. Rather, it is a network of systems and databases that can communicate with each other to perform tasks on an individual’s behalf. Moreover, as recent developments suggest, the Semantic Web will have the potential for subtler customization of information in accordance with the cognitive (and perhaps emotional) styles/needs of consumers. For example, an article by Hauser, Urban, Liberali and Braun (forthcoming) from MIT’s Sloan School of Management announces an algorithm that uses clickstream data to morph the website content and format to the cognitive style of its users. As evidenced by recently developed semantic web advertising applications (such as SemanticMatchTM – a semantic advertising platform that utilizes a natural language processing algorithm to understand content and sentiments and target advertising accordingly), when applied to online advertising, semantic capabilities can enhance customization, decrease errors that are associated with keyword targeted advertising and provide a more conversational interaction between the advertiser and the consumer. With respect to viral marketing, such advancements in language processing and customization can address an important shortcoming of passive virality by making it more personal. Whereas social network analyses aid the identification of hubs that can act as active viral marketers, improvements in natural language processing can prove beneficial in terms of understanding the communicative processes and dynamics within a social network. This information can help the marketing organization create different strategies to reach various potential hubs, create levels of viral involvement depending on the depth and the context of the communicative processes between network members, and customize the webpage

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In recent years, Web 2.0 applications that enable web users to contribute to the world of online content have grown in popularity. In 2008, the Top 10 most frequently visited web site list of Alexa Internet – a web traffic information service – consistently included several social media sites: namely, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Wikipedia and Orkut.com (2008). Despite their popular appeal, however, many of the Web 2.0 initiatives are still struggling to turn their popularity into financial success. What is important to note is that when it comes to monetizing social media, there are no magic formulas. However, as explained above, the interactive nature of social media, combined with consumers’ participation in the creation and dissemination of information, make viral marketing a viable candidate to fulfill the promise of a Web 2.0 of opportunities. In contrast to impersonal advertising methods that consumers do not trust and find intrusive, viral marketing through social media has the potential to be a personal, personable, participatory and trustworthy. source of information. Nonetheless, this should not be taken for granted that any and all viral marketing efforts in social media would be successful. Extant literature suggests that there are certain prerequisites to a successful implementation of a viral marketing campaign in social media. First, as Webb (2007) suggests, because the company is going to have to rely on consumers to push the message, the message (and the product) should be worth pushing. Second, as consumers grow more suspicious of traditional advertising methods, marketers engaging in viral marketing in social media should pay the utmost attention to keeping viral marketing free from centralized interference that can damage its credibility. For

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example, Coplan (2007) notes that to remain credible, consumer marketers should be “honest about their opinions good and bad, open about their affiliation – and unpaid” (p. 26). This second prerequisite of success in social media marketing is closely related to the third one: In the world of consumer marketers, companies should learn to “cede control to customers” (cited in Poynter, 2008, p. 12). Partially, this means that viral marketing may be mixed with negative word of mouth and backlash (Gillin, 2007; Giuliana, 2005). At the same time, both positive and negative word of mouth should be considered as an opportunity to engage in a conversation with customers. For example, recently Cadbury PLC decided to relaunch Wispa (a chocolate bar discontinued in 2003) as a response to demands from 14,000 Facebook members (Poynter, 2008). Finally, as evidenced by the recent negative public reaction to the inadequate privacy protection on Facebook, marketers should be aware of the relatively intimate nature of social network sites.

REFERENCES Alexa.com. (2008). Global top 500. Retrieved July 6, 2008, from http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/ top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none Allison, K. (2007). Facebook set for a delicate balancing act. Financial Times (North American Edition), 8.

Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., & Lassila, O. (2001). The Semantic Web. American Scientist. Retrieved June 3, 2008, from http://www.sciam.com/article. cfm?id=the-semantic-web. Bloch, M. (2007, July 28). The Semantic Web–Web 3.0. Retrieved June 3, 2008, from http://www. tamingthebeast.net/blog/online-world/semanticweb-30-0707.htm Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230. doi:10.1111/j.10836101.2007.00393.x Clemons, E. K., Barnett, S., & Appadurai, A. (2007). The future of advertising and the value of social networks: Some preliminary examinations. Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Electronic Commerce, Minneapolis, MN. Clow, K. E., & Baack, D. (2007). Integrated advertising, promotion, and marketing communications. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. ComScore, Inc. (2008). Top global Web properties. Retrieved February 19, 2008, from http://www. comscore.com/press/data.asp Coplan, J. H. (2007). Should friends pitch friends? Adweek, 48, 26–26. DeLozier, M. W. (1976). The marketing communications process. London: McGraw Hill.

Anderson, C. (2006). The log tail: How endless choice is creating unlimited demand. London: Random House Business Books.

Domingos, P. (2005). Mining social networks for viral marketing. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 20(1).

Andrejevic, M. (2007). iSpy: Surveillance and power in the interactive era. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Faber, R. J., Lee, M., & Nan, X. (2004). Advertising and the consumer information environment online. The American Behavioral Scientist, 48(4), 447–466. doi:10.1177/0002764204270281

Baruh, L. (2007). Read at your own risk: Shrinkage of privacy and interactive media. New Media & Society, 9(2), 187–211. doi:10.1177/1461444807072220

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Gillin, P. (2007). The new influencers: A marketer’s guide to the new social media. Sanger, CA: Quill Driver Books. Giuliana, D. (2005). Alternative marketing techniques for entrepreneurs. Retrieved January 3, 2008, from http://www.scribd.com/doc/35013/ Alternative-Marketing-Techniques-for-Entrepreneurs Hall, E. (2007). Study: Popularity of social networks hampers ad growth. Advertising Age, 78(31), 18. Hanneman, R., & Riddle, M. (2005). Introduction to social network methods. Retrieved December 17, 2007, from http://www.faculty.ucr. edu/~hanneman/nettext/C10_Centrality.html Hauser, J. R., Urban, G. L., Liberali, G., & Braun, M. (forthcoming). Website morphing. Marketing Science. Retrieved July 4, 2008, from http://web. mit.edu/hauser/www/Papers/Hauser_Urban_Liberali_Braun_Website_Morphing_May_2008. pdf Klaassen, A., & Creamer, M. (2007). Facebook to add shopping service to its menu. Advertising Age, 78(44), 39–40. Kumar, R., Novak, J., & Tomkins, A. (2006). Structure and evolution of online social networks. Paper presented at the 12th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Data Mining, New York. MacKelworth, T. (2007). Social networks: Evolution of the marketing paradigm. Retrieved March 12, 2008, from http://www.amacltd.com/pdf/ SocialNetworksWhitePaper.pdf Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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McAllister, M. P., & Turow, J. (2002). New media and the commercial sphere: Two intersecting trends, five categories of concern. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 46(4), 505– 515. doi:10.1207/s15506878jobem4604_1 McCarthy, C. (2008, February 1). Report: Facebook raises ’08 revenue projection. Retrieved March 6, 2008, from http://www.news.com/830113577_3-9862792-36.html McCoy, S., Everard, A., Polak, P., & Galletta, D. F. (2007). The effects of online advertising. Communications of the ACM, 50(3), 84–88. doi:10.1145/1226736.1226740 Morrissey, B. (2007). Social network ads: Too close, too personal? Adweek, 48, 11–11. Poynter, R. (2008). Facebook: The future of networking with customers. International Journal of Market Research, 50(1), 11–12. Rappaport, S. D. (2007). Lessons from online practice: New advertising models. Journal of Advertising Research, 47(2), 135–141. doi:10.2501/ S0021849907070158 Robinson, H., Wyscocka, A., & Hand, C. (2007). Internet advertising effectiveness: The effect of design on click-through rates for banner ads. International Journal of Advertising, 26(4), 527–541. Scott, J. P. (2000). Social network analysis: A handbook. London: Sage Publications. Solove, D. J. (2007). The future of reputation: Gossip, rumor, and privacy on the Internet. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Spertus, E., Sahami, M., & Büyükkökten, O. (2005). Evaluating similarity measures: A largescale study in the Orkut social network. Paper presented at the 11th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Data Mining, Chicago, IL.

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Subramani, M. R., & Rajagopalan, B. (2003). Knowledge-sharing and influence in online social networks via viral marketing. Communications of the ACM, 46(12), 300–307. doi:10.1145/953460.953514 Thompson, R. J. (2007). Can’t skip this: Consumers acclimating to Internet ads. Brandweek, 48, 5. MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites: Hot today, gone tomorrow? (2006, May 3). Knowledge@Wharton. Retrieved April 24, 2007, from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article. cfm?articleid=1463 Tsai, J. (2008). Facebook’s about-face. Customer Relationship Management, 12(1), 17–18. Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. (1995). Social network analysis: Methods and applications. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Webb, G. (2007, October/November). A new future for brand marketing. The British Journal of Administrative Management, 13-15. Windley, P. (2007). The fine line between advertising and recommendations. Retrieved December 12, 2007, from http://blogs.zdnet.com/ BTL/?p=7134 Zarsky, T. Z. (2004). Desperately seeking solutions: Using implementation-based solutions for the troubles of information privacy in the age of data mining and the Internet Society. Maine Law Review, 56, 13–59.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Content Variability: Content variability refers to the notion that new media objects can exist in an infinite number of variations. This characteristic of new media is the result of the digital coding of content and consequently the modular nature of information. Data Mining: Data mining is a technologically

driven process of using algorithms to analyze data from multiple perspectives and extract meaningful patterns that can be used to predict future users behavior The market basket analysis system that Amazon.com uses to recommend new products to its customers on the basis of their past purchases is a widely known example of how data mining can be utilized in marketing. Interactive Media: Interactive media is a catch-all term that is used to describe the twoway flow of information between the content user and the content producer. In addition to enabling consumers to actively participate in the production of content, interactive media also allow for the collection of real time data, which can later be used for content customization. Semantic Web: The Semantic Web refers to a set of design principles, specifications, and web technologies that enable networked software agents to understand, interpret and communicate with each other to perform sophisticated tasks on behalf of users. Social Network Analysis: Social network analysis is a research methodology utilized in research to investigate the structure and patterns of the relationship between social agents. Examples of sources of relational data include: contacts, connections, and group ties which can be studied using quantitative methodologies. Social Network Sites: Social network sites are web-based systems that enable end-users to create online profiles, form associations with other users, and view other individuals’ profiles. Examples of social network sites include: Match. com, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, Bebo and LinkedIn. Viral Marketing: Viral marketing refers to a form of word of mouth marketing that relies on consumers relaying product information, a marketing message or a personal endorsement to other potential buyers. Web 2.0: Introduced in 2004, during a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly Media and MediaLive International, Web 2.0 refers

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to the second generation of web-based content. Rather than merely pointing to technological changes in the infrastructure of the Internet, the concept of Web 2.0 underlines the notion that end-users can do much more than consume readily available content: The user of Web 2.0 also plays

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a key role in the creation and the dissemination of content. Popular examples include: video-sharing and photo-sharing sites, such as YouTube and Flickr; social network sites, such as Orkut, MySpace and Facebook; and Weblogs (blogs).

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Chapter 5

Citizen Marketing Ruth E. Brown The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA

ABSTRACT This chapter explores citizen marketing, which refers to consumers voluntarily posting product information based on their knowledge and experience. The product information may take the form of opinions, reviews, videos, ads, or entire websites; it is persuasive in that it meets a consumer need for credible peer review of products. Research into information spread by word-of-mouth provides the theoretical foundation for citizen marketing. Because it is found on the Internet where word spreads quickly, citizen marketing empowers individuals to bring change in the form of product design or price. The chapter examines how mainstream marketers are trying to channel citizen marketing through various means, including unfiltered peer-to-peer interaction on product websites.

INTRODUCTION Marketing is historically considered an activity that business performs to direct the flow of goods and services from producers to consumers. An integral part of marketing is sending consumers messages that promote goods and services. However, the growth of the Internet and the development of social software have turned the tables in this top-down process by ushering in the age of citizen marketing. Today consumers can speak their minds in a DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch005

communication medium that provides worldwide access. Businesses can receive these messages and adjust their products, pricing, promotion, and distribution accordingly. Citizen marketing refers to consumers voluntarily posting online product information, based on their experiences with the product. The information may be positive or negative and may be in the form of posts, reviews, consumer-generated advertisements, videos, or entire websites. Product information posted by citizen marketers can be found on Internet forums, bulletin boards, blogs, ratings or opinion sites, social networking sites,

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Citizen Marketing

video sharing sites, or even on mainstream marketers’ websites as consumer reviews or discussion boards. When individuals voluntarily create content about a product they have used and then share that information on the Internet, they are citizen marketers. Product here refers to goods, services, brands, companies, organizations, or people, such as political candidates. Consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet to receive more product information. Often what they seek is provided by citizen marketers, who are eager to share their experiences and their knowledge of a product. What makes their words so believable and so persuasive is the fact that citizen marketers are not on the company payroll and are not trying to sell anything. They are consumers who volunteer their time as writers, animators, designers, and videographers to express their opinions about products. They use their own talents and their own equipment to write or videotape reviews; create music, ads, podcasts, and videos; establish blogs, websites, photo sharing sites, and web forums. Sometimes their work looks amateurish, but sometimes it matches work done by professionals. Regardless, it is authentic, it is often passionate, and it has the potential to influence others. This chapter explores the theoretical foundation of citizen marketing, notes the importance of citizen marketing as it relates to consumer behavior, provides examples, and explains how businesses are trying to leverage this new electronic word-of-mouth.

BACKGROUND Today’s citizen marketers were envisioned by futurist Alvin Toffler (1980) who coined the term “prosumers,” thus blending the words producer and consumer. The term was used to describe consumers who educated themselves and became involved in the design and manufacture of products. This is what some citizen marketers are doing

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today as they critique products, make suggestions for improvement, and publish their ideas through posts on the Internet. The term customer evangelist was also used prior to citizen marketing and is still used by some to describe passionate consumers who hold positive beliefs about a company and a product and who voluntarily promote those beliefs to others through a variety of channels, including the Internet. Additionally, McConnell, and Huba (2003) indicated that customer evangelists regularly purchase the product for themselves and others, provide unsolicited praise or suggestions for improvements, forgive occasional problems with the product or the company, feel part of something bigger, and cannot be bought. The term vigilante marketing is used occasionally to describe consumers acting as self-appointed promoters of a brand. Munoz and Schau (2007) defined vigilante marketing more specifically as “unpaid advertising and marketing efforts, including one-to-one, one-to-many, and manyto-many commercially oriented communications undertaken by brand loyalists on behalf of the brand” (p. 35). Although a variety of terms exist, citizen marketing was chosen because it can include both positive and negative commentary, and because it parallels citizen journalism, a term widely used to describe ordinary people posting stories, news, photos or video, as well as comments and ideas for news or feature stories online. The phenomenon of citizen marketing, as it is true of other user-created content (UCC), was made possible by new web technology, dubbed Web 2.0, and by the more widespread availability and use of broadband Internet access. Similar to other UCC, citizen marketing and citizen journalism seem to be done without expectation of remuneration but rather for self-expression, as a way of connecting with peers who have close interests, or possibly to achieve a certain degree of notoriety. McConnell and Huba (2007) noted that about 10 percent of those who visit a website will interact

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with it, but only a very small percent will actually create content for it. Based on numbers reported by Wikipedia and Yahoo Groups, McConnell, and Huba postulated that content creators comprise about 1 percent of the site’s visitors, thus their decision to nickname citizen marketers “the One Percenters.” The One Percenters contributed because it was a hobby, and it was fun. Research done by Sun, Youn, Wu, and Kuntaraporn (2006) found that online leadership, which is provided by the One Percenters, had a positive relationship with innovativeness. This suggested that an innovative person was more likely to be an opinion leader. Online opinion leaders also were often found to be online opinion seekers who wanted to continually update their own information or add to their knowledge. Thus, opinion leaders had high Internet usage in relation to the subject about which they provided their opinions. Interestingly, the researchers found that Internet social relationship had a positive relationship with online opinion seeking but not with online opinion leadership.

CITIZEN MARKETERS CREATE AND INFLUENCE Citizen marketers have made their voices heard throughout the Internet by providing their opinions and sharing their experiences regarding products and services as well as companies and organizations. The Internet facilitates this by enabling the mechanism for individuals from all over the world to share useful information on a topic of mutual interest. What began as simple textual messages in chat rooms and on discussion boards has blossomed into full scale websites and videos produced by consumers who have a message to share. Regardless of whether that message is for or against a product or a company, it has the potential to reach large numbers of people throughout the world. The lone citizen marketer can speak his or her mind, usually to a group of people drawn

Figure 1. Citizen marketers voluntarily post product reviews, opinions, videos, ads, or entire websites on the Internet. These posts are found on forums, discussion boards, blogs, ratings sites, social networking sites, video-sharing sites, or even mainstream marketers’ websites. They are usually read by like-minded individuals and have the potential to influence.

together by similar interests, and this draws others into the conversation. Sometimes the conversation involves posts and links on a website; sometimes it involves forwarding a link, photo, or video. What starts out with one person can quickly spread to many (see Figure 1). The term citizen marketer was first used in a blog called “Creating Customer Evangelists,” written by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (2005), who have researched the effects of word-of-mouth advertising on customer loyalty and used their blog to share ideas about citizen marketing. McConnell and Huba (2007 identified four types of citizen marketers: •

Filters collect information about a company or product from traditional and non-traditional media, package it with their own observations, links and summaries, and post it regularly. An example is iLounge.com. It started as iPodLounge.com in 2001, a few days after Apple Computer introduced the iPod. Ad revenue allowed the creator to quit his day job and to work fulltime on the

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•

•

•

site which now draws more than 4 million people a month of which 100,000 participate in forums. Fanatics praise and constructively critique to make their chosen brand as good as it can be. Some people might call them customer evangelists. They like to analyze progress of the product or brand and promote courses of action. McChronicles.blogspot. com is a good example because the creator critiques McDonald’s marketing and even conducts secret shopper reviews of McDonald’s stores on his travels. Facilitators are community builders who connect fans and build support groups. Cars are a favorite interest of facilitators who have created online forums for owners (and potential owners) of Chevrolet Corvettes, Ford Thunderbirds, Ford Explorers, Nissan Maximas, and BMW MiniCoopers, to name a few. Firecrackers pop up occasionally with a song, animation, ad, video, or other novelty that attracts a lot of attention at first but then dies out. McConnell and Huba call these citizen marketers “one-hit wonders” (p. 19). Go to YouTube.com for a plethora of examples. Some of the work there is obviously done by amateurs, but some is so professional that you cannot tell what is an advertisement produced by an agency and what is one created by a skilled amateur.

Some work by citizen marketers has found large audiences and some has not, but on the Internet it is not necessary for an audience to be large in order to be influential. Basically, citizen marketing is about consumers taking control and influencing people as a result of their own experiences and what they say online about those experiences. Often these postings lead to improvements in a product or its service. That is what happened in 2004 when Randy Cassingham wrote in his “This Is True” blog about a new Dell

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laptop computer he had just purchased and with which he was so dissatisfied that he added a page to his website specifically to talk about it and to allow readers to post their comments. Many readers participated in the ongoing discussion, which led to Dell executives calling to apologize. The company sent a service man with parts. All of these activities were documented on the blog, along with Cassingham’s own observations and conclusions (Cassingham, 2007). A more recent example is when Steve Jobs announced on Sept. 5, 2007, just ten weeks after the iPhone was introduced, that Apple was cutting the price of the iPhone by $200. Blogs and web forums erupted in mass consternation as customers who had purchased their iPhones prior to the price break aired their anger. These postings were enough to force Jobs to issue an apology on the Apple website and provide a $100 credit on Apple products for customers who had purchased the iPhone at the initial price (Musgrove, 2007). Each of the above is an example of citizen marketers exerting their cumulative power to influence change. They accomplished something that individuals alone could not have done. They are active consumers; sometimes the information on which they act originates with the consumer, as in the case of the Dell laptop, and sometimes it originates with the company, as in the case of the iPhone price cut. From there, the message is spread to other interested consumers who discuss the matter and act accordingly. Spreading the message through the Internet is often referred to as using electronic word-of-mouth or eWOM (Hung & Li, 2007).

WORD-OF-MOUTH THEORY PROVIDES FOUNDATION Theories that provide the foundation for citizen marketing involve research on word-of-mouth and how it affects consumer behavior. Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) found word-of-mouth to be a

Citizen Marketing

far greater influence on consumers than advertising or personal selling. The old adage that “your best salesman is a satisfied customer” was tested by Engel, Kegerreis, and Blackwell (1969), who studied innovators and found that nearly 60 percent believed word-of-mouth communication was the single most effective source in their decision to adopt an innovation. A primary reason for the impact that wordof-mouth has on consumers is its credibility. Consumer recommendations were deemed the most credible form of advertising by 78 percent of global respondents who participated in a 2007 Nielsen Survey. The recommendation of someone who has used the product is the most trusted source of information when consumers are deciding which products or services to buy, according to David McCallum, the global managing director for Nielsen’s Customized Research Services (Nielsen Online Global Consumer Study, 2007). Citizen marketers use electronic word-ofmouth to exchange a large quantity of diverse information that is not provided by traditional marketing communication as they discuss a branded product from multiple perspectives, such as price, design, reputation, effectiveness, and problem areas. They report their experiences and often compare them to less well-known competing brands. Although product information is often discussed in online forums, consumer reviews are particularly popular sources of this type of information. Schindler and Bickart (2005) found that consumers used and appreciated the convenience of an online channel for information input and decision making. In fact, the researchers reported that consumer-generated information that was gleaned online influenced every stage of the decisionmaking process from problem recognition through consideration, alternative evaluation, decision, and post-decision processes. They argued that a consumer’s mention of a product or its benefit could stimulate product recognition, a consumer’s ideas for alternatives could add to the consideration set, and a consumer’s experience with a product

could lead to an alternative being advanced or eliminated during the alternative evaluation. Also, mention of attributes important to the potential buyer could affect the purchase decision. After the purchase is made, online word-of-mouth could increase satisfaction with the purchase by providing reassuring positive information. Although their research focused on medium and high involvement decisions, Schindler and Bickart stressed that low involvement decisions involving entertainment, such as movie reviews, had similar results. It follows then, that positive consumer endorsements enhance the audience’s attitudes toward the endorsed product (Wang, 2005). Wang discovered that even though information provided by institutions was perceived by the audience as having more expertise than information provided by regular consumers, audiences were shifting their reliance toward regular consumers’ positive endorsements and credibility when it was time to make their decisions. Thus it appears that citizen marketers’ postings are important in helping consumers make decisions about products. Speed, convenience, and one-to-many reach are benefits of online word-of-mouth and citizen marketing, but so is ease in forwarding. Sun, Youn, Wu and Kuntaraporn (2006) found that online word-of-mouth led to online forwarding, which can be one-to-one or one-to-many. In addition, they found that online forwarding led to increased online chatting, which has the potential to reach a broader audience than forwarding. Online chatting is also called “buzz” (see Figure 2). When buzz was studied by Niederhoffer, Mooth, Wiesenfeld, and Gordon (2007), five key themes were found. These themes are as follows: a minority of new consumer packaged good brands generated a majority of the buzz, new product buzz usually preceded sales, strong new product buzz usually occurred in tandem with the strong use of traditional media, brand distinctiveness and strong category presence could predict buzz, and strong buzz appeared to drive sales.

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Citizen Marketing

Figure 2. One citizen marketer posts product information, which is discussed by a group of like-minded consumers, some of whom forward the information to others who discuss and forward it to additional individuals or groups. One post can quickly reach many individuals and create buzz.

BUSINESSES ATTEMPT TO LEVERAGE CONSUMER POWER Businesses saw the potential influence of these third-party endorsers and wanted to channel their power to increase positive buzz. This is where conversation marketing entered the picture. The term conversation marketing has been used frequently since publication of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” on Cluetrain.com. Now a book (Levine, Locke, Searls, & Weinberger, 2001), the manifesto declared that markets are actually conversations. These markets consist of human beings rather than geographic segments. The manifesto proclaimed that the Internet enables the exchange of knowledge through networked conversations, which results in smarter, more informed, and more organized markets. In studying promotional chat, Mayzlin (2006) found that anonymity on the Internet allows firms to directly manipulate conversations between and among consumers, but those messages can still be informative. Unlike traditional media, firms with lower quality merchandise engage in more promotional chat because they don’t get the free publicity that is often awarded superior products with competitive advantages. To help business capitalize on this new idea, Dave Balter founded BzzAgent in 2001 to create a network of unpaid citizen marketers who would utilize word-of-mouth to promote clients. Through

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its website, BzzAgents of all ages are recruited, trained, and kept up-to-date on activities in which they can participate. All participation is voluntary and involves conversing with friends online or offline about a specified product. BzzAgents are supposed to identify themselves upfront and be honest. They are encouraged to talk up the product but not to close the sale, and they are asked to report their activities after logging onto the BzzAgents website. Their only remuneration involves special offers and discounts for themselves and their friends (BzzAgent, 2007). They are a reincarnation of citizen marketers, but a breed that has been harnessed for specific marketing purposes. BzzAgent methods are in line with the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Code of Ethics, adopted in 2005, which states that consumer protection and respect are of utmost importance. The essence of the code is “the Honesty ROI” which includes honesty of relationship (say for whom you are speaking), honesty of opinion (say what you believe), and honesty of identity (WOMMA, 2005). However, “faux citizen marketers” can now be found on the Internet. Some of the faux citizen marketers are consumers who signed up at PayPerPost.com to earn $8 or more for each “opportunity.” The PayPerPost (PPP) website promises that a little hard work blogging can easily bring $500 per month, and it shows the amounts

Citizen Marketing

earned by the top three bloggers, usually $1,500 to $2,000 apiece. Some of these bloggers tip off their readers with a PPP before the product reference, and some of the blogs have a disclosure box, which states that the blog is supported by a company, organization, or group of organizations (Frazier, 2006). Although many of the PayPerPost mentions use a neutral tone, posts by enthusiastic first-time faux citizen marketers can overflow with enthusiasm. Research by Shimp, Wood, and Smarandescu (2007) warns that consumers who exaggerate the benefits or experience of a product risk mitigating the evaluation. The authors emphasized that sometimes the exaggeration occurs because of consumers’ expectations of what a testimonial should be. Other times the exaggeration occurs because consumers want to win a prize or other incentive offered by the company for participation. Authenticity and credibility are important components of citizen marketing and factor into believability. Advertisers who log onto a discussion board as “newbies” and quickly ask a question about a product or give a favorable recommendation on a product lack the authenticity of the long-time discussion board members and are often summarily dismissed by the members who see them for the intruders that they are. Public relations professionals, too, are sometimes discovered posing as citizen marketers. A two-minute video that poked fun of Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was uploaded on YouTube. com in 2006, supposedly by a 29-year-old from California. However, it was later found to be the work of a public relations firm whose client was ExxonMobil (Fernando, 2007). Consumer-generated advertisements are another piece of the citizen marketing phenomenon that businesses seek to channel. A few companies have embraced consumer-generated advertisements with excellent results. In 2005, Converse asked customers to submit short films that showed their love of the sneakers. At least 750 films were

submitted from 20 countries. Some of the films were chosen to air on cable channels, and many were uploaded to Conversegallery.com (Jeffers, 2005). However, when Chevy Tahoe tried something similar the next year, providing video clips of the product for individuals to add text, some citizen marketers seized the opportunity to send negative messages, such as charging General Motors with contributing to global warming; then they uploaded the videos to YouTube.com. The videos had thousands of views, thanks in part to the publicity they generated in traditional media (Sandoval, 2006). The Super Bowl provided a new venue for consumer-generated advertisements in 2007. That is when Frito-Lay aired the winner of its contest for Doritos ads. Learning from the Chevy Tahoe experience, the Frito-Lay contest had more guidelines and a filter with the winner being selected by an online vote after the company chose the five finalists (Doritos, 2006).

FUTURE TRENDS Mainstream marketers appear to be following the lead of conventional media, which were challenged by citizen journalists. In response, media organizations shifted from creating all of their own online content to providing the framework for citizens to publish and to offer feedback on the media websites. The media made their websites more interactive in order to receive citizen input and also to better enable citizens to forward media-provided stories, pictures, and video. New technology is now seen by the media as a way to reconnect with audiences through journalist blogs and citizen input, which they say is making journalism better (Loeschner, 2008). Marketers, too, are changing their strategies to encourage citizen interaction. Schindler and Bickart (2001) found that online forums were much more effective in generating product interest than corporate websites. They claimed that the forums were simply better posi-

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tioned to pique readers’ interest in the product category than were the corporate websites. However, corporate websites are now attempting to create their own forums and their own communities of passionate consumers. This involves taking a “hands-off” approach and allowing consumers to vent about the negative as well as extol the positive aspects of the product. The “hands-off” approach provides authenticity yet allows the marketer to easily monitor the site, seeking ways to improve the product. BMW has done this successfully with its bmwboard.com where owners discuss everything from mileage to turbo noise and rust on wheel hubs. Members of communities on Cisco and Dell websites help each other solve hardware and software problems before contacting customer service. By monitoring the communities, the companies can quickly and easily learn about problems that need to be addressed as customers with various skill levels continually test their products in a variety of environments. Amazon.com is another example of a company attempting to facilitate citizen marketing. Already a leader in textual product reviews, it added the capability to upload video reviews of products plus a photo and profile of each volunteer reviewer to make the reviewer seem more like a friend. In addition, it has created online communities for people of similar interests to gather and discuss those interests, generally as they relate to Amazon products or services. Research shows that consumers who post messages or product reviews visit those community websites nine times more often than they visit websites without communities (Foux, 2005). Customer communities are becoming a vital asset for companies that seek to gain more effective customer insights faster, respond more effectively to greater customer expectations driven by the Internet and reformulate communications in light of fragmenting traditional mass-media channels. Citizen marketing will continue to grow in

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quantity, quality, and importance. “The power is moving to the customer. And ultimately, the customers will become the marketplace,” according to Greg Toledo, manager of business development at Altrec.com, Inc. (Demery, 2005, p. 3). His outdoor gear company hoped to use this strategy to their advantage by building a quasi-social network site that included customer-submitted content and linked recommended products to buy pages. “The effect of like-minded consumers sharing product information and being able to act on that information and purchase their friend’s recommendations in one destination is explosive,” said Neel Grover, president of Buy.com, who sees social networking as a catalyst for the future of online retail commerce (Demery, 2005). Facebook tried a similar idea in November 2007 when it implemented a new technology, dubbed Beacon, which tracked products that Facebook users viewed and purchased on other websites. Purchases were then announced by Facebook to friends of the purchasers. Although this could have been a powerful tool, Facebook users were upset because they did not realize that their purchases would be made known. An online petition, signed by more than 50,000 Facebook users, caused the company to announce that it would no longer send such a message without explicit approval (Story and Stone, 2007). Certainly, as more new methods of marketing online are tried, some will fail while others succeed, but the power of the consumer – of citizen marketers making their opinions known – has already been felt and must now be dealt with by corporations.

CONCLUSION Citizen marketers have already influenced many consumers and businesses and will continue to do so faster and in greater numbers as more consumers go to the web for product information. Forums, blogs, and product websites administered

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by passionate consumers are being monitored by company personnel who want to know what consumers think of their products and who need to manage the company’s customer relations. The two-way communication enabled by the Internet and social interaction technologies also provides opportunities for businesses to engage in customer relationship building, which has the potential to reinvigorate brands. “Opportunities to reach out, even to those who don’t like your brand, can have positive consequences,” according to Hanlon and Hawkins (2008). “Reaching out conveys confidence, accessibility, respect and authenticity to people both inside and outside of the brand community” (p. 15). They advised to stop preaching to the audience, and start conversing with its members. Businesses and organizations should consider how to bring citizen marketers into the fold and make them customer evangelists. McConnell and Huba (2003) suggest this can be done by gathering customer feedback, sharing knowledge freely, building word-of-mouth networks, creating community, devising smaller specialized offerings to hook customers, and focusing on making the world or the industry better. It should be noted, though, that a cadre of citizen marketers will probably never be brought into the fold by corporations because they want to remain independent, operating as individual voices, and collecting and disseminating information from other individual voices to provide product information to consumers worldwide. This is their hobby, this is their passion, and this is their fun.

Burston-Marsteller. (2001). The power of online influencers, your company’s newest stakeholder group; the power of e-fluentials. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http://www.efluentials.com BzzAgent. (2007). Our company. About agents. Retrieved January 21, 2008, from http://www. bzzagent.com/ Cassingham, R. (2007). Dell hell. This is true. Retrieved March 17, 2008, from http://www. thisistrue.com/dellhell.html Demery, P. (2005). Where everyone becomes an advertiser. Retrieved March 1, 2008, from http:// www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=13712 Doritos. (2007). Create your own Super Bowl ad campaign. Retrieved January 22, 2008, from http://www.superbowlads.us/2006/12/doritos_2007_cr.html Engel, J. F., Kegerreis, R. J., & Blackwell, R. D. (1969). Word-of-mouth communication by the innovator. Journal of Marketing, 33(3), 15–19. doi:10.2307/1248475 Fernando, A. (2007, January/February). Social media change the rules. Communication World, 9-10. Retrieved March 17, 2008, from http:// findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4422/is_1_24/ ai_n27101707/pg_2?tag=artBody;col1 Foux, G. (2005). Customer communities herald new ground rules for successful marketing. Journal of Direct . Data and Digital Marketing Practice, 7(2), 112–121. doi:10.1057/palgrave. dddmp.4340515

REFERENCES

Frazier, M. (2006). Want to build up blog buzz? Start writing checks for $8. Advertising Age, 77(44), 3.

Bulik, B. S. (2007, October 15). Nintendo is Ad Age’s marketer of the year. Advertising Age, News, p. 1.

Hanlon, P., & Hawkins, J. (2008). Expand your brand community online. Advertising Age, 79(1), 14–15.

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Hung, K., & Li, S. (2007). The influence of eWOM on virtual consumer communities: Social capital, consumer learning, and behavioral outcomes. Journal of Advertising Research, 47(4), 485–495. doi:10.2501/S002184990707050X

Niederhoffer, K., Mooth, R., Wiesenfeld, D., & Gordon, J. (2007). The origin and impact of CPG new-product buzz: Emerging trends and implications. Journal of Advertising Research, 47(4), 420–426. doi:10.2501/S0021849907070432

Jeffers, M. (2005, May 16). Word on the street. Adweek, 46(19).

Nielsen Online Global Consumer Study. (2007). Word-of-mouth the most powerful selling tool: Nielsen global survey. Retrieved February 25, 2008, from http://www.nielsen.com/media/2007/ pr_071001.html

Katz, E., & Lazarsfeld, P. F. (1955). Personal influence: The part played by people in the flow of mass communication. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Locke, C., Levine, F., Searls, D., & Weinberger, D. (2001). The cluetrain manifesto: The end of business as usual. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing. Loeschner, J. (2008, March 28). Research brief: The troubled news media. Center for Media Research. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http:// blogs.mediapost.com/research_brief/?p=1670 Mayzlin, D. (2006). Promotional chat on the Internet. Marketing Science, 35(2), 155–163. doi:10.1287/mksc.1050.0137 McConnell, B., & Huba, J. (2003). Creating customer evangelists: How loyal customers become a volunteer sales force. Chicago, IL: Dearborn Trade Publishing. McConnell, B., & Huba, J. (2005). Creating customer evangelists (blog). Retrieved January 21, 2008, from http://www.creatingcustomerevangelists.com/about.asp McConnell, B., & Huba, J. (2007). Citizen marketers: When people are the message. Chicago, IL: Kaplan Publishing. Musgrove, M. (2007, September 7). Hi, it’s Steve. Sorry for the price cut. Take a credit. The Washington Post, p. D01.

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Sandoval, G. (2006, April 3). GM slow to react to nasty ads. Retrieved January 21, 2008, from http://www.news.cnet.com Muñiz, A. M. Jr, & Schau, H. J. (2007). Vigilante marketing and consumer-created communications. Journal of Advertising, 36(3), 35–50. doi:doi:10.2753/JOA0091-3367360303 Schindler, R. M., & Bickart, B. (2001). Internet forums as influential sources of consumer information. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 15(3), 31–40. doi:10.1002/dir.1014 Schindler, R. M., & Bickart, B. (2005). Published word of mouth: Referable, consumer-generated information on the Internet. In C. P. Haugtvedt, K. A. Machleit, & R. F. Yalch (Eds.), Online consumer psychology: Understanding and influencing consumer behavior in the virtual world (pp. 35-54). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Shimp, T., Wood, S., & Smarandescu, L. (2007). Self-generated advertisements: Testimonials and the perils of consumer exaggeration. Journal of Advertising Research, 47(4), 453–460. doi:10.2501/ S002184990707047X Story, L., & Stone, B. (2007, November 30). Facebook retreats on online tracking. The New York Times. Retrieved March 17, 2008, from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/ technology/30face.html

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Sun, T., Youn, S., Wu, G., & Kuntaraporn, M. (2006). Online word-of-mouth (or mouse): An exploration of its antecedents and consequences. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11, 1104–1127. doi:10.1111/j.10836101.2006.00310.x Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave. New York: Bantam Books. Wang, A. (2005). The effects of expert and consumer endorsements on audience response. Journal of Advertising Research, 45(4), 402–412. doi:10.1017/S0021849905050452 Word of Mouth Marketing Association. (WOMMA). (2005). Ethics code. Retrieved March 10, 2008, from http://www.womma.org/ethicscode/

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Buzz: Online conversations and discussions between like-minded consumers. Citizen Journalism: Individuals voluntarily writing stories or opinion pieces, taking photos or video, and posting them online.

Citizen Marketing: Individuals voluntarily posting information, reviews, advertisements, and videos online in order to share their experiences regarding a particular product.. Consumer-Generated Advertisements: Advertisements created by consumers with or without encouragement (such as contests). Conversation Marketing: Use of social media by corporate marketers to promote products or brands. Customer Evangelists: Consumers who are positively passionate about a particular product and who choose to voluntarily share their experience with others both online and offline. Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM): Person-to-person communication that occurs over the Internet or another electronic form of communication. Prosumer: A combination of the words producer and consumer used to describe consumers who become involved in the design and manufacture of customized products. Vigilante Marketing: Voluntary advertising and marketing efforts by brand loyalists on behalf of the brand.

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Chapter 6

The Past, Present, and Future of Podcasting Joseph E. Burns Southeastern Louisiana University, USA

ABSTRACT Thanks to the friendship of an XML programmer and an ex-MTV video jock, the first podcast took place in July of 2003 by automatically streaming a single audio file half way around the world. Four months later Apple Computer, Inc. proved that its personal listening device, the iPod, could synch with a new program called iTunes and download files using the same technology. Since then podcasting has grown at a remarkable rate. In 2007, over 65 million people had used an RSS feed to download a podcast. Literally, millions of podcasts are currently available covering every topic imaginable. The broadcast media have begun to use podcasting as a method of time shifting programming. Educators are using podcasting for reaching out to students. Businesses are using podcasting as a marketing tool. Music artists are using the format to promote themselves and sell their records. The commercial future of podcasting appears to be in the area of advertising and broadcasting.

INTRODUCTION Podcasting, a Lewis Carroll-style portmanteau word created out of the brand name iPod and the term broadcasting is a distinctive area within social interaction technology. Although podcasting often employs multi-user social software application such as iTunes to distribute content, that content is often listened to or viewed within the cocooning world of DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch006

a personal audio/video devise (Kay, 2005; Kuster, 2007; Sarrel, 2007). The upload or the download is the interaction, and often the download does not involve a user at all. Podcasts can be pushed to, or pulled by, a user incorporating Really Simple Syndication (RSS) subscription software scripts that gather and update audio and video files automatically (Go, 2007; Holtz, 2008). Once the content has been served, the interaction can end there. The user listens to or views the file, deletes it, and waits for the next episode. However,

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The Past, Present, and Future of Podcasting

because a podcast audio or video file is digital and in a format common to the Internet, normally MP3, that file can go viral being reposted, edited, linked to through social sites (such as YouTube, Facebook, or MySpace), or moved around the Internet through email or by some other social interaction means (Copeland, 2008). Podcasts are often free yet many times involve a fee. They are seen as a low-cost method for unsigned musicians to present themselves to a worldwide audience yet are used by the music licensing firms ASCAP and BMI and many national radio talk shows as a new subscription revenue stream. Local broadcast radio seems to be rushing to offer its programming through podcasting to allow its audience to listen to time shifted content claiming the audience consume “what they want, when they want” (Burns, 2007). Yet at the same time those same stations want the Arbitron Rating Service to find a method of accurately measuring when the audience is listening to that time shifted programming in order to track it for advertising purposes. Podcasts are global yet they are enjoyed individually. Podcasts are used by the largest broadcast entities in the world but are easy enough for a high school student to create. They are used for entertainment, education, instruction, profit and just to pass the time. Podcasting is a strange dichotomy and yet a viable and interesting section of social interaction technology.

BACKGROUND The concept of offering packets of audio and video, known generally as files or episodes, for download has been in use since the general public began using the Internet. Yet, simply offering a file for download through an Internet server or over email is not specifically part of the history of podcasting. What we know today as podcasting must include the use of syndication feed enclosures or the ability to deliver the files as part

of a subscription process. This is why the word broadcast is used to make up the term podcasting (Overton, 2006). The earliest demonstration of what we know today as podcasting can be traced back to late 2000 and the convergence of programmer Dave Winer’s RSS format and multiple audiobloggers, including ex-MTV Video Jock Adam Curry (Christopher, 2006).-Winer’s RSS format was, and is today, a small program written in Extensible Markup Language (XML) that allowed users to create a subscription link to a server in order to automatically download updating files (Joly, 2007; Lopresti, 2007; McCormick, 2007). Curry and others were running what were termed audioblogs, Internet web logs in audio packet formats available for download. Audiobloggers were interested in Winer’s RSS program because through it, a user would only need to install the XML program once. From that point on, the subscription would automatically update on a timely basis set up by the audioblog. The testing proved successful, yet the files were still being played on stationary computers. The technology that would free the user to move was about to be released. In October of 2001, less than a year after Winer had shown the viability of the RSS format, Apple Computer, Inc. began marketing the iPod (Kahney, 2006). According to Bob Doyle (2005), webmaster of skyBuilders.com, in July of 2003 his server hosted the first podcast that followed the format we know today. The podcasted file was an interview of Dave Winer by Boston-area reporter Christopher Lydon. The file was streamed automatically through RSS to Adam Curry’s iPod in Europe. The experiment’s success moved Winer to write the first widely available RSS file-sharing program, iPodder. Four months later at the first BloggerCon 2003 conference (October 4-5, 2003, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA).Kevin Marks, a programmer working for Apple Computer demonstrated how to download RSS-enclosed audio

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files into the iTunes audio player and synch the player with the new Apple iPod audio devise. The demonstration can be viewed in podcast format at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ml/output.pl/35512/ stream/temp.ram. Now the technology was in place but the concept needed a name. A February 2004 article by Ben Hammersley (2004) on the The Guardian. co.uk, titled “Audible Revolution,” asked what name should be given to the audio interviews by Christopher Lydon, noted above, that were being distributed through RSS and the new iPodder software. The article suggested: audioblogging, guerilla media, and the now accepted podcasting.

RSS: Really Simple Syndication RSS, the concept of using an Extensible Markup Language (XML) script to create a feed from a server to your computer, known in podcasting as subscribing, has larger uses than just helping you to get your favorite radio show or the latest news program. When a user clicks to start an RSS subscription, he or she enacts a small program that creates a feed, or channel, that makes a connection between the server and his or her computer. However, that feed does not always have to be just a single feed. The feed can be one of many. It can be what is known as aggregate. Feed aggregators, also known as RSS feed readers and news aggregators, are programs that allow a user to search through numerous podcasts in various genres choosing what he or she would like to read (What is RSS?, 2008). Using one is akin to creating your own morning newspaper. The program aggregates every RSS channel the user chooses and displays what it finds in a format chosen by the user. There are currently over 100 feed aggregators available (News on Feeds, 2008). The most popular include Amphetadesk, FeedReader, and NewsGator for Windows, My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader. Advancements in the feed aggregators appear

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to be in the area of search aggregators that will actually search out RSS feeds for the user under a set of parameters set by the user and RSS-Narrators that will take aggregated text podcasts and convert them into MP3 audio files to be loaded onto portable digital players.

PODCASTING IN CURRENT USE Since the first podcast in 2003, little has changed regarding how the hardware and software of podcasting communicates. What has changed is the amount of competition. RSS, in an updated form, RSS 2.0, is still the dominant method of creating podcasting subscriptions, although a new syndication format named “ATOM” has come into the market (Fichter, 2004; McMahon, 2006). While iTunes is still the dominant “podcatcher” as well, close to 100 competitors exist (including Juice, Doppler, AudioShell, Newzee). The Zune Marketplace, built to serve customers of the Microsoft Zune media player, is attempting to take market share (Bennington, 2007; Dahl, 2008). What has changed dramatically since 2003 are the almost staggering numbers of podcasts users have to choose from, the number of people subscribing, and how quickly that number has grown (Bullis, 2005). Less than one year after Kevin Marks demonstrated the viability of subscribing to podcasts through iTunes, Apple announced that the software had over one million podcast subscriptions (AppleInsider Staff, 2005). In January of 2006, Edison Media Research suggested the number of users subscribing to podcasts, not just those using iTunes, was 27 million (Edison Media Research, 2006). Then in November of that same year, Pew Research Center suggested that 12% of all Internet users had subscribed to a podcast putting the total number at a suggested 65 million users (Madden, 2006). With the actual number of podcasts available being in the multi-millions, podcasting search engines, outside of the iTunes search capabilities,

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began to show up on the Internet in 2005. Popular podcast search engines include: Odeo.com, Podcast.net, PodcastAlley.com, and Podzinger. com which changed its name to EveryZing.com since showcasing podcast video searches (Sullivan, 2007). A relatively new method of searching includes Podscope.com which searches the text within the podcast itself and numerous RSS search engines including Plazoo.com and Bloglines. com. Yahoo, Google, and AOL created searches as well, but by late 2007 each had pulled their service (Crowell, 2005).

Podcasting and Traditional Media The traditional broadcast media, particularly radio, began using podcasting as a method of serving their audience as early as 2005. Trinity Broadcasting, a division of Viacom, seemed the most interested in podcasting offering the first fully on-line and podcasted radio station, KYouRadio.com (Jardin, 2005). KYouRadio.com was created using San Francisco’s KYCY staff, changing the format from talk to music, and making a profit by including advertisements in the Internet stream and podcast downloads. The station was able to circumvent the concern over additional music royalty and distribution fees by using only unlicensed listenersubmitted music in their programming. Commercial radio talk shows including Premier’s Jim Rome and Rush Limbaugh began offering show content in podcast format but these shows offered their podcasts for a monthly or yearly subscription fee. This is a trend many broadcast shows are following today (Leung, 2005; Staff, 2005). Most syndicated radio shows can be found through an iTunes search and can be downloaded through the station’s website through an RSS feed or by a fee-based subscription service. Talk radio still has the most active podcasting audience (Klaassen, & Oser, 2005). NPR has followed suit as well allowing its audience to time shift much of its programming through podcasting (Dotinga, 2006).

However, broadcast stations offering their programming are wary of additional costs and what fees and royalties must be paid are not always clear (Garrity, Butler, & Bruno, 2005). Both the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) have stated that the fees paid for on-air music play do not apply to podcasting and the federal government has allowed both music licensing firms to charge an additional “webcasting royalty” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1995 (LaPolt, 2007). In January of 2005, ASCAP (2007) offered digital licenses allowing stations to offer specific services and streams. There are two licenses available. The first is an interactive license that allows pay-for-play jukebox formats online, snippets of music under 30 seconds, known as a sample, as well as user-created play lists. Podcasting music is not mentioned, but the wording of the first license seems to forbid music in any form other than a 30-seconds-or-less sample. The second is a non-interactive license that covers streaming, but specifically disallows podcasting (Podcasting News, 2005). BMI does offer a podcasting license. It requires additional royalties be paid. In fact, BMI seem to be behind podcasting to the point where the company itself offers podcasted music on the BMI.com website (BMI, 2005). So it seems the licensing firms and the federal government both feel radio stations should pay additional funds on top of the royalties currently paid to broadcast music for the ability to podcast music. However, most broadcast facilities that broadcast do not pay these additional fees. In fact, many go out of their way to not pay them. Radio stations and networks are getting around paying the fees by offering podcast programming that contain only 30-second music samples claiming their current fees cover those snippets of music. Many stations simply choose programming that contains no music or, as in the case of Rush Limbaugh, are stripping away existing

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music altogether (Limbaugh, 2005). This makes the statement of allowing the audience to listen to what they want when they want a rather difficult one to live up to, especially if the audience wants to hear music. Persons interested in creating podcasts for subscription would do well to stay abreast of the latest rulings of ASCAP, BMI, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), and Copyright Law as each entity has come into financial play in a previous podcast case (Burns, 2007; Lang, 2006).

Podcasting for All On a more positive note, persons who create their own content, and thus own the copyright, can use podcasting to create a world-wide venue that never existed before. Hardware and software packages and books are currently for sale dedicated to helping users create podcasts. Websites exists that explain how to post and promote your podcasts. The process is becoming as easy as creating a website. Companies such as Behringer, ION Audio, M-Audio, Alesis, Rode, and Sampson are all offering podcasting hardware packages that include mixing boards, headphones, USB microphones and MIDI inputs all specifically designed to create podcasts for less than $200. There are numerous tutorial sites that assist users in creating their own RSS feed scripts. Some sites, such as feedpublish.com and IBM. com’s developerWorks community allow users to create the RSS code by filling out forms. A search for “podcasting” on Amazon.com turned up hundreds of books on creating, bettering, and using podcasts to a user’s advantage. With podcasting, amateur musicians, producers, and DJs are now able to write, record, package, podcast, offer subscriptions, and sell their music over iTunes or on their own domain (Berry, 2006). The podcasting concept has allowed an

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unknown musician to distribute without the use of the music business (Battino, 2005). YouTube has made podcasting an even easier distribution method acting as a world-wide billboard for the music (Doyle, 2006). Although many students would rather use podcasts for entertainment, a lot of them are using iPods to listen to their professor’s lectures as many teachers have begun podcasting their lectures, and iTunes is building iTunesU around it (Lum, 2006; Young, 2007). People are learning foreign languages through podcasting. Just about any language is available for instruction. Newsweek (2006) writes that the most successful language instruction service is Chinesepod. com teaching the Chinese language in 1045 free lessons. The service is downloaded over 120,000 times per week. Interestingly enough, podcasting is so prevalent in today’s society, that it is not only professors and musicians who are using podcasting to capture an audience. Museums are podcasting tours. Architectural and cultural walking tours are now available. Podcasting godfather Adam Curry offers a podcasted walking tour of South Beach, Miami (Curry, 2005), and Sweatshopper.com Walking Tours offers tours of two Wal-Marts in Maine. Police departments are podcasting safety messages. iPlayMusic.com offers video-based podcasts that teach guitar. Podcastpickle.com offers video RSS feeds from Crash Test Kitchens and other channels offering podcasted recipes. Users not only receive the ingredient list and instruction but can watch the dish prepared on their iPod. Many people listen to their iPod while exercising in order to pass the time, but now there are podcasts that offer fitness tips as well as long-form podcasts that actually lead you through a complete workout (Long, 2006). Book lovers have known for a long time that books-on-tape have been available for purchase over iTunes and other podcatchers since their inception but not every book is under copyright protection and Librivox.org

The Past, Present, and Future of Podcasting

has taken advantage of that fact and made those books available for download in podcast format for free. Parents who find it difficult getting children to read may find it easier to have their children listen to books in podcast format through the site Storynory.com. Users that find reading computer manuals boring can find any number of podcasts explaining how to program their computer. The site Phppodcasts.com is just one example showcasing the PHP computer language. There seems to be no limit on the content that can be packaged into podcast format.

Branding the Podcast The above discussion illustrates a concern that a user attempting to bring a new podcast to the Internet will face—heavy competition. Just like the World Wide Web before, podcasting use has grown exponentially. Bringing a new podcast to the market poses a problem of how to be recognized in the sea of already existing content. Marketing books and websites state the answer lies in creating a good podcasting product and then following basic marketing: branding the podcast with a catchy name, domain, and artwork that will stand out among the crowd (PodcastFAQ, 2008). Websites have gone as far as holding contests to name their podcast hoping to create a name with a stronger appeal than the common use of the company name with the term cast affixed to the end. Help sites suggest the name of the podcast should be short, representative, appealing, and eye catching as most podcatchers display the names of podcasts in text. Housley (2008) states that demographic research, attention to audio quality, and a shorter run time have all proven supportive to the success of a podcast, but there is still no magic bullet. Companies that create a well-branded decent product and take the time to market that podcast, making sure it appears on iTunes and other RSS search engines, may have no success. It has to

do with the audience and the time people have available. The podcast audience is already accepting podcasts. To accept a new podcast, many people may feel they will need to drop an existing podcast from their routine. What the company is offering may be a good product, but it may not be strong enough to convince a large enough audience to change their routine.

The Terminology of Podcasting To this point, the terminology of podcasting has remained relatively tame. A podcast is an audio and/or video packet traditionally in MP3 format, known as an episode, that people subscribe to using an RSS feed channel and then play on their personal digital device, such as an iPod. However, podcasting is an overwhelming topic that spans much more technology and content than has been covered above and as such has a language all its own. A person who creates podcasts is generally known as a podcaster, a podder, or one of the pod people (Walker, 2005). Users that download podcasts make up the podosphere, a take off on the word blogosphere (Heister, 2008). The process of creating new content steams through podcasting, called narrowpodding, is so well known that many targeted content streams have podcast names all their own. Creating educational content is called learncasting (Stevens, 2006). Religious content is called godcasting or psalmcasting (The Economist, 2007). Blogger content is called blogcasting (Higgins, 2006). Video podcasts have three words vying for the title: vodcasting, vidcasting, and vlogging (Daily, 2007; Trier, 2007). Creating a podcast specifically for a mobile phone is called a mobilecasting while sending the mobilecast directly to the phone itself is called punchcasting. Launching a podcast directly from a cellular phone is termed phonecasting or voicecasting (Stevens, 2006).

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Remember also that since copyright laws do apply to content included within your podcasts, be sure to use music and voice tracks that are legally podsafe (Vogele & Garlick, 2006).

FUTURE TRENDS The future of podcasting will surely include updated versions of the software and hardware used to create and distribute podcasts as well as new competition that will no doubt enter into and fall out of the market. Portable devices will become smaller with larger hard drives, sharper displays, and newer compression formats will allow more content to be placed within a smaller amount of hard drive space. However, the most important future for podcasting will be in the tracking and commercial end. Just like the beginning of the Internet, podcasting is in a stage where much of it is still being done for the love of doing it, and content is plentiful; but as Green (2005) points out, there will come a time where a profit will need to be made, and it is projected that over 80% of those using podcasting commercially will lose money doing it. Advertising via podcasting, even through those podcasts that are being paid for by subscription fees, appears to be a viable topic in the broadcast and business community (Anderson, 2006). The concept of pre-roll ads, those that run before the podcast downloads, and embedded ads, those within the podcast itself, are both being tested (Klaassen & Taylor, 2006; Shields, 2006). The advertisements are seen as needed to offset production costs and make profit. Pre-roll ads are currently in use by major market radio stations in New York and Los Angeles. The pre-roll is done, generally, in one of two ways: before the download and at the beginning of the podcast itself. In the before-the-download format, a person downloading a podcast must listen to the advertisement from the server and then the download begins. This format allows for the number of

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advertisements played to be tracked and for the advertiser to be charged on a per-spot basis. The second format has the advertisement at the very beginning of the podcast. Although this may suggest the commercial is embedded, radio stations do not see these spots as embedded because of their placement at the beginning of the podcast, before the content. In fact, the placement allows the station to continue to claim that the podcast is offered commercial free (Burns, 2007). Since there is no method yet of exactly tracking whether the commercials are played after being downloaded, this commercial format is normally charged on a flat rate based on the number of times the podcast is downloaded per month. Embedded commercials are either done through podcasted shows leaving commercial breaks in the podcast, adding additional commercials in post-production, or having the announcer read commercials during the normal content of the show. This format, again, cannot be well tracked yet and is mostly charged on a monthly, per download, or flat fee basis. The future also holds the key to how the podcasts that cannot currently be tracked could somehow be tracked. If advertisers are going to buy time before or inside of a podcast, those advertisers will want to know if the spot is listened to or watched. Simply reporting downloads will not be enough. The Arbitron Rating Service was successful in tracking a podcast in New York City in 2006 as part of a test of their Portable People Meter (PPM) system. The system works by embedding signals into radio broadcasts that are then tracked within major markets (Arbitron, 2007a; Arbitron, 2007b). Using the system, a single podcast was tracked from download through the transfer to the personal device to the user actually listening to the podcast. The problem is that the successful test took place using an iPod. Recent surveys of podcast listeners conducted by Bridge Data suggest that almost 80% of all podcasts downloaded were never transferred to a portable devise or

The Past, Present, and Future of Podcasting

were deleted without being listened to (Dixon & Greeson, 2006). There is no proof yet that the Arbitron system is able to track a podcast without being placed on an iPod or equal player. That leaves out what the majority of podcasts users are listening to. However, that single tracked podcast was only the first successful test. Arbitron, and no doubt other companies, are working on ways to track listener’s podcasting habits. The ability to do so will mean a solid new revenue stream for the broadcast and business industries.

CONCLUSION In the world of podcasting, there is truly something for everyone, and if there is not, someone will create it, write an RSS script for it, and begin accepting subscriptions. The idea of taking little shows, or episodes, and packaging them into MP3 audio files or MPEG video files and distributing them around the Web seemed simple enough, but it happened at just the right time when the hardware and software that would make it possible became available. Podcasts are a popular delivery format appealing to both broad and niche markets. They work well for huge broadcast networks and basement musicians surrounded by cobbled digital instruments. Podcasts are both free and available for a fee. Only one idea about podcasting future is for certain: if there is content, it can be turned into a podcast.

Arbitron. (2007a). The portable people meter. Retrieved February 5, 2008, from http://www.arbitron.com/portable_people_meters/home.htm Arbitron. (2007b). Arbitron announces PPM ratings report schedule for Philadelphia. Retrieved February 5, 2008, from http://www.arbitron.com/ portable_people_meters/home.htm ASCAP. (2007). ASCAP’S new media and Internet licenses. Retrieved May, 2007, from http://www. ascap.com/weblicense Battino, D. (2005). The art of podcasting. Electronic Musician, 21(12), 42–56. Bennington, A. (2007). Stick it in your ear: Keeping current with podcasts. Online, 31(3), 30–33. Berry, R. (2006). Will the iPod kill the radio star? Profiling podcasting as radio. The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 12(2), 143–162. doi:10.1177/1354856506066522 BMI. (2005). BMI launches new songwriter/artist podcast; licenses podcasters in nationwide initiative. Retrieved May, 2007, from http://www.bmi. com/news/entry/234431 Bullis, K. (2005). Podcasting takes off. Technology Review, 108(10), 30. Burns, J. E. (October, 2007). Podcasting: Why do you podcast? Paper presented at the International Academy of Business and Public Administration Disciplines annual convention, New Orleans, LA.

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Christopher, C. L. (2006, April 6). Extra, extra, hear all about it. Seybold Report: Analyzing Publishing Technologies, 5/6(25/1), 10-15.

Anderson, D. (2006, March 6). Podcasting ads reel in $80M. Brandweek, 47(10), 16.

Copeland, M. V. (2008, January 21). Six leaps of innovation. Fortune, 157(1), 27–30.

AppleInsider Staff. (2005). iTunes podcast subscriptions top one million. Retrieved February 1, 2008, from http://www.appleinsider.com/ articles/05/06/30/

Crowell, S. (2005). Video and podcast search engines. Retrieved February 2, 2008, from http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage. html?page=3555196

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Curry, A. (2005). Daily source code for January 7 2005. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from Dahl, E. (2008). A potential alternative to the iPod. PC World, 26(2), 88. Daily, G. (2007). Light, camera, action. EContent, 30(5), 24–29. Dixon, C., & Greeson, M. (2006). Recasting the concept of podcasting: Part I. Retrieved February 2, 2008, from http://news.digitaltrends.com/ talkback109.html

Heister, M. (2008, June 18). I’m doing a lousy job of keeping up with old media. Retrieved June 19, 2008, from http://mheister.com/thepodosphere Higgins, T. (2006). How to podcast using just Blogger.com. Retrieved January 29, 2008, from http://blogcasting.blogspot.com Holtz, S. (2008). Bring your intranet into the 21st century. Communication World, 25(1), 14–18. http://radio.weblogs.com/0001014/categories/ dailySourceCode/2005/01/07.html#a6993

Dotinga, R. (2006, April 17). Podcasting shakes up local media. Christian Science Monitor (Boston, Mass.), 98(98), 2.

industry...2007. Retrieved February 3, 2008, from http://www.musicbizacademy.com/articles/ dl_newmedia.htm

Doyle, B. (2005). The first podcast. EContent, 28(9), 33.

itunes_podcast_subscriptions_top_one_million. html

Doyle, B. (2006). You Tube and iTV. EContent, 29(9), 22.

Jardin, X. (2005, April 27). Podcasting killed the radio star. Retrieved February 6, 2008, from http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/ news/2005/04/67344

Edison Media Research. (2006). Internet & multimedia 2006: On-demand media explodes. Retrieved February 1, 2008, from http://www. edisonresearch.com/home/archives/2006/06/ internet_multim_4.php Fichter, D. (2004). Using RSS to create new services. Online, 28(4), 52–55. Garrity, B., Butler, S., & Bruno, A. (2005, October 1). Podcast at the crossroads. Billboard, 117(40), 8.

Joly, K. (2007). 10 steps to better blogs. University Business, 10(1), 65–66. Kahney, L. (2006, October). Straight dope on the iPod’s birth. Retrieved January 29, 2008, from http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/10/71956 Kay, R. (2005, October 3). Podcasting. Computerworld, 39(40), 34.

Go, A. (2007, December 31). Make your favorite blogs come to you. U.S. News & World Report, 142(23), 50.

Klaassen, A., & Oser, K. (2005, October 24). From airwaves to MP3: Podcasting makes liftoff. Advertising Age, 76(43), 6.

Green, H. (2005). Indie podcasting: Not so independent anymore. Retrieved February 6, 2008, from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ content/nov2005/tc20051130_220713.htm

Klaassen, A., & Taylor, L. (2006, April 24). Few compete to settle podcasting’s wild west. Advertising Age, 77(17), 13.

Hammersley, B. (2004). Audible revolution. Retrieved February 6, 2008, from http://arts.guardian. co.uk/features/story/0,1145758,00.html

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Kuster, J. M. (2007, November 27). Professional and personal - podcasting. ASHA Leader, 12(16), 24–25.

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Lang, M. N. (2006). The regulation of shrinkwrapped radio: Implications of copyright on podcasting. CommLaw Conspectus, 14(2), 463–502. LaPolt, D. (2007). Taking a glance at other income streams in the music Leung, J. (2005). Clear channel radio expands podcast offerings. Retrieved February 6, 2008, from http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2005/06/clear_channel_r.html Limbaugh, R. (2005). Why no podcast music, Rush? Retrieved February 6, 2008, from http:// www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/podcastlandingpage/why_no_music.guest.html Long, K. (2006). Uncommon uses: Podcasting. Retrieved June 19, 2008, from http:// experiencecurve.com/archives/uncommon-usespodcasting Lopresti, M. (2007). Microsoft RSS patent applications. EContent, 30(2), 8. Lum, L. (2006, March 9). The power of podcasting. Diverse Issues in Higher Education, 23(2), 32–35. Madden, M. (2006). 12% of Internet users have downloaded a podcast. Retrieved February 1, 2008, from http://www.pewinternet.org/ pdfs/PIP_Podcasting.pdf McCormick, J. (2007, April, 23). Top 100 most influential people in it. eWeek, 24(14), 16-22. McMahon, F. (2006). Simplifying RSS feeds. Digital Content Producer, 32(8), 52–59. News on Feeds. (2008). Web-based aggregators. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://www.newsonfeeds.com/faq/aggregators Newsweek. (2006, September 25). My name is iPod. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://www. newsweek.com/id/45680

Overton, G. (2006). Are you Webcasting or podcasting? Laser Focus World, 42(6), 61–63. Podcast, FAQ (2008). Branding. Retrieved June 19, 2008, from http://www.podcastfaq.com/ podcast-promotion/branding/ Podcasting News. (2005). ASCAP posts podcasting licensing agreements for music. Retrieved May 15, 2007, from http://www.podcastingnews.com/ archives/2005/02/ Sarrel, M. D. (2007, February 6). Painless podcasting. PC Magazine, 26(3), 1. Shields, M. (2006, April 4). Planting podcasting seed. MediaWeek, 16(15), 7. Staff. (2005). Radio wades into podcast revenue stream. Retrieved February 6, 2007, from http:// www.marketingvox.com/archives/2005/11/28/ radio_wades_into_podcast_revenue_stream Stevens, P. S. (2006). Podcast, vidcast, voicecast? Podcast jargon for beginners. Retrieved June 19, 2008, from http://podcast-software-review. toptenreviews.com/podcast-vidcast-voicecastpodcast-jargon-for-beginners.html Sullivan, D. (2007, September 27). Yahoo podcasts to close; the sorry state of podcast search. Retrieved February 2, 2008, from http://searchengineland. com/070927-112229.php The Economist. (2007, December 22). The battle of the books. The Economist, 385(8560), 80–82. Trier, J. (2007). ‘Cool’ engagements with YouTube: Part 1. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 50, 408–412. doi:10.1598/JAAL.50.5.7 Vogele, C., & Garlick, M. (2006). Podcasting legal guide: Rules for the revolution. Retrieved June 19, 2008, from http://wiki.creativecommons. org/Podcasting_Legal_Guide

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Walker, L. (2005, March 10). Bloggers, meet the Pod people. Retrieved June 19, 2008, from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/ A20235-2005Mar9.html What is RSS? (2008). What is RSS? RSS explained. Retrieved June 18, 2008 from http:// www.whatisrss.com Young, J. R. (2007, November 30). Colleges try to make podcasting of courses easier. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 54(14), A23.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Audioblog/Audioblogger: An audioblogger is a person who blogs using audio files. The audioblog is the nickname for a blog that features an audioblogger’s content. Embedded Advertisements: These are commercials that are placed into stop breaks within the podcast itself. Feed Aggregator: A feed aggregator, also known as RSS feed readers and news aggregators, are programs that allows a user to search through numerous podcasts in various genres choosing what he or she would like to read. The aggregator compiles the feeds to the user’s parameters creating what would be akin to a morning newspaper set to the user’s specifications. iPod: The iPod is a personal audio/video devise, now in its sixth generation, sold by the Apple Computer, Inc. The name comes from a play on a line from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, “Open the pod bay door HAL.” The lowercase “i” comes from Apple’s habit of placing the lower-case letter in front of all of its trademarks. iTunes: The iTunes software is currently the

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most popular podcatcher software. iTunes allows users to easily subscribe to podcasts through RSS, search podcasts titles, and have access to Apple’s audio and video store. Podcatcher: A podcatcher is any piece of software that will run RSS software and gather podcasts automatically. The most popular podcatcher software is the Apple iTunes client. Podcasting: Podcasting is the serving of audio or video files, normally in MPEG format, through RSS subscription services or individually through websites. The podcast files themselves, normally known as episodes, are played on portable audio/video devices such as iPods or on personal computers. Pre-Roll Advertisements: In podcasting, a pre-roll advertisement can be on the server or at the very beginning of the podcast itself. The advertisement on the server plays after the user clicks to gather the podcast but before the podcast packet actually begins to download. The pre-roll on the podcast is a commercial at the very beginning of the Podcast rather than being embedded within the podcast content itself. Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary (RSS): Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, usually written as RSS, was created by Dave Winer. RSS is a script written, normally, in Extensible Markup Language (XML) that, once clicked on, creates a channel between a user’s podcatcher and a server. Once that channel is created, a subscription is underway allowing the server to deliver new and updated podcasts on a regular basis. Vodcasting/Vidcasting/Vlogging: These are all current nicknames for distributing podcasts that feature video.

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Chapter 7

The Rise of the Chinese Blogosphere Zixue Tai University of Kentucky, USA

ABSTRACT In comparison with the USA and Europe, the Chinese blogosphere was off to a later start; however, it has experienced phenomenal growth since its formal birth in 2002. Now China boasts by far the largest blogging community in the world, surpassing the blogger population in the United States and Europe combined. Chinese bloggers are among the first globally to both actively engage in blog writing and reading. Although the Chinese blogosphere has closely followed the global path of technological innovation and ingenuity, it has taken many of its own unique twists and turns in terms of its creative uses and impact on the social, political and cultural contexts of Chinese society. Focusing on the popularization of blogs, mainstreaming, and commercialization of the global cyber culture in China, this chapter paints a portrait of a Chinese blogger. Due to the omnipresent state control of cyberspace and heavy-handed state censoring of online information, most Chinese bloggers have shied away from politically sensitive and subversive issues and topics. The most popular blogging topics include the documentation of personal experiences and the expression of individual viewpoints on a wide range of topics; these topics are followed by hobbies, entertainment, and amusement.

INTRODUCTION In 1995 China’s Internet users made up less than 1% of the world’s Internet population; in 2007 they comprised about 16% of the global Internet total (Stanley, 2008). Against this backdrop of an DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch007

explosive growth of the Internet in China (Fanning, 2008; MacLeod, 2008) and amidst the global ballyhoo of blogs, the blogosphere has captured the imagination of millions of Chinese netizens with blogging as one of the top ten Internet applications (China Internet Network Information Center, 2008). The first blog-like type of online content appeared in the United States in 1994 (Barlow, 2007). The

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mainstreaming and popularization of blogs as a web phenomenon and as a social, political, and cultural force occurred at the turn of the new century: that is, years earlier than Jorn Barger first introduced a “weblog” and Peter Merholz coined the term “blog” (Barlow, 2007; Blood, 2002). The history of the blog in China’s cyberspace, however, began much later. While a handful of users already used a few blogging sites at the beginning of the new century, the Chinese blogosphere was not officially born until the publication of Blog China1 in August 2002. Blog China introduced the term “Boke” (Mandarin Chinese for both “blogs” and “bloggers”) to the Chinese blogosphere and became the first website in China dedicated to blogging (Fang & Wang, 2003). Since 2002, the Chinese blogosphere has experienced a remarkable growth. By November 2007, China registered about 47 million bloggers (about one fourth of China’s Internet population), with 16.9 million being active contributors (updating blog entries weekly or more often); there were 72.8 million blog “spaces” (sites) published in China, of which 28.8 million were active ones (being updated at least monthly) (China Internet Network Information Center, 2007). The rapid popularity of blogs in China brought a new dynamic to the multiple dimensions of the Chinese cyberspace. Although the blogosphere in China has closely followed the global path of technological innovation and ingenuity, it has taken many of its own unique twists and turns with respect to its creative uses and impact on the social, political and cultural scenes of Chinese society.

BACKGROUND User Generated Content holds a special place among Chinese netizens. Blogs, together with a variety of other social media technologies, fulfill a niche need for diverse users (Bruns, 2008). Universal McCann, a global media communications agency, has conducted three waves

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of world surveys of Internet users in over twenty countries from September 2006 through March 2008. Its latest survey estimates that, as of March 2008, China has over 42 million bloggers (cf. 47 million estimated by the China Internet Network Information Center as of November 2007, as mentioned earlier)2 out of a worldwide total of 184 million. China’s blogging community is by far the largest in the world, larger than that in the U.S. and Western Europe combined (Universal McCann, 2008). The prominence of blogs in the cyber culture of a particular nation can be demonstrated by the percentage of Internet users who regularly read and write blogs. Of the 29 nations surveyed by Universal McCann in its Third Wave study in interviewing active Internet users (i.e., using the Internet every day or every other day), China is ranked third (88.1% of Chinese netizens reported ever reading blogs), slightly trailing South Korea (92.1%) and the Philippines (90.3%). By comparison, only 60.3% Internet users in the United States reported ever reading blogs, putting the U.S. close to the bottom on the list (Universal McCann, 2008). However, using a different measure, which calculates the percentage of users who reported reading the blogs on a daily or weekly basis among all blog readers, China leads the rest of the nations with 89% of its users saying they do it, trailed closely by South Korea and Brazil (tied at 84%), Japan (82%), and India (81%). The United States again is found close to the bottom of the list, with only 65% of blog readers reporting doing this weekly or more often. This higher level of dependence on blogs, as a particular type of User Generated Content (UGC) in Chinese cyberspace used more than anywhere else, is quintessentially consistent with previous findings that Chinese netizens are more likely to access other types of similar content, such as BBS and chat rooms, than their counterparts elsewhere (Tai, 2006). Likewise, there is also a strong tendency among Chinese Internet users to contribute content to

The Rise of the Chinese Blogosphere

the blogosphere. Chinese netizens, like those elsewhere, don’t like to remain passive recipients of information online; they actively participate in the information production process. In that regard, blogging becomes the natural venue. China’s Internet users are setting the trend in running blogs with 70.3% of active Internet surfers reporting having their own blogs; this is second only to South Korea’s 70.6% (Universal McCann, 2008). In terms of the frequency in writing blog entries, China’s bloggers, 78% of whom say they write weekly or more often, are ahead of those in the other 28 nations surveyed. Blog writers in South Korea trail closely behind, with 75% of them reporting doing the same while only 45% of bloggers in the United States indicated doing so (Universal McCann, 2008). A point of particular relevance for the discussion of the Chinese blogosphere is China’s closely controlled media and information environment. While Chinese society has undergone unprecedented transformation in the wake of three decades of economic liberalization and reform, the Chinese communication system has been at the forefront of this period of wrenching change as a result of the government’s initiative to “marketize” the state-run media sector (Zhao, 2008). Although there is a fundamental shift from ideological indoctrination to mass appeal, mass media still have to walk the delicate line between serving audience needs and demands and following state directives and bureaucratic orders. As a result, the flow of information from the official media is not always free. Due to the structural constraints of the Chinese media environment, User Generated Content (UGC) distributed via various media platforms, including Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), text messaging (SMS), instant messaging (IM), and personal blogs, takes on a special meaning for Chinese netizens (Stanley, 2004; Tai, 2006). UGC often serves as a viable and sometimes sole source of information for individuals (e.g., Tai & Sun, 2007). Meanwhile, Chinese netizens display an unusually higher level of online efficacy (i.e.,

believing that they can effect social change through online participation) than their counterparts in most other countries (Tai, 2006). The nature of the Chinese blogosphere, therefore, needs to be understood within this broader context.

THE EVOLVING LANDSCAPE OF THE CHINESE BLOGOSPHERE The Portrait of a Chinese Blogger What are China’s bloggers like? Two comprehensive surveys that were conducted in China based on interviews of randomly sampled bloggers help to clarify the issue: one was a telephone survey completed in 2007 (China Internet Network Information Center, 2007); the other was a 2006 online survey done by CTR Market Research (CTR, 2006).3 To get a better understanding, the author will also make cross-national comparisons by using results from the Pew Research Center’s 2006 survey of U.S. bloggers (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2006). In both China and the United States, the blogosphere is overwhelmingly dominated by the young: “twentysomethings” are leading the charge, followed by people in their 30s, and then by those in their 40s. Only a small proportion of bloggers are 50 or older. While U.S. bloggers are slightly dominated by male writers (54% men versus 46% women), women outnumber men in the Chinese blogosphere; that is, the 57% versus 43% gender difference in bloggers is just the opposite of China’s Internet population overall with 45% women versus 55% men. Bloggers are more avid newsreaders than the average netizens both in China and the U.S., and they are also more enthusiastic blog readers – about 90% of US bloggers said they have read others’ blogs whereas 93% Chinese blog writers reported doing the same. The most popular blogging topics in both countries are, expectedly, documentation of their life and personal experiences as well as expression of personal viewpoints on a wide range of topics, followed by hobbies, entertainment and

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amusement. Therefore, the blogs, true to their original intent, are still maintained primarily as personal diaries. That the personal blogs are by far the most popular type of content is highly consistent with the global pattern of blog writing and reading as identified in the Universal McCann survey in 2008. To add more of a personal touch to the blogosphere, while about half of US bloggers tend to believe that their audience is mostly people they know, sixty-eight percent of Chinese bloggers reported reading blogs by people they know. Bloggers in both China and the U.S. are more likely to link to friends’ blogs and to visit blogs recommended to them by their friends. There are also notable areas of difference between bloggers in China and the U.S. Although only 11% of U.S. bloggers said they focus on government and politics, some politically oriented blogs tend to be popular hits in that they attract an unusually high volume of traffic and create buzz among blog audiences and even occasionally the mainstream media (Barlow, 2008). In China, most bloggers try to stay away from politics, especially domestic politics, mainly because many political topics are taboo and may get individual bloggers into trouble. Moreover, most blog hosting sites have enforced policies to ban the discussion of sensitive topics. So the dearth of political bloggers in China is a natural result of the lack of popular participation in its political life. With regard to revealing their identifying information, bloggers also fare differently in the two countries. In the United States, more than half (55%) of the bloggers use an alias, whereas about 80% of China’s bloggers leave pieces of their factual personal identifying information (i.e., gender, name, photos, occupation, mailbox, phone number, home address, resume) as ranked by the order of frequency).

Landmark Developments In the course of the explosive growth of the Chinese blogosphere in the new century from non-existence to the largest space of its kind in

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the word, there have been a number of key events that have shaped the course of its development. Understanding these events offers a glimpse of the unique twists and turns of the particular contours of China’s blogging culture. The first event that enlightened Chinese netizens to the blogs was “The Blogger Manifesto” drafted and distributed online by blog pioneers Fang Xingdong and Wang Junxiu in July 2002 and the publication of the first Chinese blog site (BlogChina.com) a month later (Fang & Wang, 2003). In the Blogger Manifesto, Fang and Wang argue that the birth of blogging marks the phase of the transition of the Internet into a culture technology from its early phases of first military and then commercial applications; they also maintain that blogging is pushing the Internet from an age of information sharing by portal sites to thought sharing on blog pages. BlogChina also introduced the idea and the practice of blogging to many Chinese Internet users for the first time. In November of the same year, BlogCN.com4 became the first site to offer free hosting for Chinese bloggers. Soon, the Blog Service Provider (BSP) list quickly expanded with the addition of BlogDriver.com, BlogBus.com, and BlogChina. com within the next two months. In this takeoff stage (2002-2003) of the Chinese blogosphere, however, it was just a few individuals and private businesses investing in blog hosting services with the aim of spreading the idea of blogging to Chinese netizens and thus getting them involved in writing blogs. There was hardly any coherent business strategy or long-term planning in place. This situation continued in 2003, with the noticeable change that the blog was making a bigger splash. Subsequently, more BSPs jumped on the bandwagon. Almost all of these investors were invariably small start-ups exclusively specializing in blog hosting services. Of the major Internet sites that offer information services in China, Qianlong Wang (21dnn.net.cn), a Beijing-based portal site jointly run by local media companies, was the only one offering blog-related services

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in 2003. Things took on a different turn in 2004, when all major Chinese portal sites, led by the big three (Netease, Sohu, Sina), followed suit as part of their strategy to compete for Internet traffic. By year end 2004, there were over 300 BSPs in China (Fang & Zhang, 2005). The list exploded to 1,460 by 2006 (Xinhua News Net, 2006). While blog use has thrived on its anti-commercial and anti-corporate nature of empowering individuals to take over the process of information production, the blog as a business venture can only survive in today’s global environment based on a viable marketing strategy. Since the nascent Chinese blog industry is still in a process of consolidation and transformation, investors, advertisers, and Internet giants have an extensive role to play here. Initially, as in many business operations, merging with successful start-ups was believed to be a short-cut strategy to catch up in the blog business. Therefore, two high-profile merger cases took place in 2004 and 2005: Blogbus.com (ranked No. 7 in 2005) purchased Yourblog.org (ranked No. 2 in 2005), and Blogchina.com (ranked No. 1 in 2005) bought Blogdriver.com (ranked No. 3 in 2005) (Asia-Pacific Economic Times, 2005). Although some had speculated that this was the start of more mergers in the years to come, the large-scale merger wave has not materialized as of 2008. Instead, Chinese blog entrepreneurs have shifted their focus to the capital market, improving customer service and stepping up technological innovation. Since cash flow is essential to the success of any business operations, many independent start-up Internet Business Service Provider (BSP) companies quickly found that they were reaching the end of the money-squeezing game. Of the everchanging thousand-plus Internet BSP companies in China, hundreds have already been wiped off the list as more are joining in. For the ones that stumble forward, surviving financially has been a constant challenge. The situation was exacerbated after existing Internet companies started to compete for a share of the blogosphere. Therefore, the

next step was natural that these start-ups would eye toward venture capitalists for urgently needed cash. In 2004, BlogChina became the first to win venture capital support (US$ 50K), followed by BlogBus (US$ 20K). There was a significant increase in venture capital inflow into China’s blog market the next year, led by a US$ 10 million deal for Blogcn from global investors IDG and Granite, one of the largest of such blog-focused global opportunistic transactions (Zhao, 2006). After a spotty downturn in early 2006 when major blog service providers had to lay off staff and tighten belts due to financial difficulties, the influx of international venture capital reached a new height in 2007 as information services featured by blogs, social networks, wikis, and other Web 2.0 companies landed a record US$ 209 million in 22 deals in the 2nd quarter, representing a 100% increase over the previous quarter of the same year (Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young, 2007). A few of the sites -- among them Bokee.com (blog service), 51.com (blog and social networking), and Qihoo.com (search engine for blog and BBS sites) -- are weighing the ambitious move of a possible NASDAQ IPO listing in the near future. Over a decade ago, Goldhaver (1997) pointed out that the Internet economy is an “attention economy” – what becomes scarce is not information but rather attention. The web platform, then, is in a sense a leveled playing ground. Attention is not guaranteed for anybody, and the ones with eye-catching information stand out. Large established corporate and institutional powers often have more resources to compete for public attention. In the early years, China’s blogosphere was solely dominated by active writers whose names were otherwise unknown in the offline world. History changed in October 2005 when Sina.com, the most popular portal in China, started its Mingren Boke (Celebrity Blogger) movement by inviting social elites in different walks of life (with the noticeable exception of politicians) to become bloggers on its blog section (blog.sina. com.cn) as an overall strategy to attract online

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visit and to promote its brand. The first celebrity to join was the popular writer Yu Hua, followed by hundreds of big names from sports to entertainment to business circles. The star of stars has been Xu Jinglei, who made her fame through movie acting and directing. Her blog recorded 10 million hits within 112 days, making history not only in China but across the world as well. As of June 2008, Xu’s blog has landed over 160 million visits, followed by over 159 million hits by that of Han Han (a popular writer and commentator). Each of the entries by these popular bloggers is typically followed by comments numbered often in the thousands on the particular blog page, and generates numerous additional discussions and debates throughout the blogosphere. A selection of Xu’s 2006 blogs resulted in a popular seller, a print republication of her online writings, titled Old Xu’s Blogs (Xu, 2006). In no time, Mingren Boke has become a unique cultural phenomenon of the Chinese blogosphere unrivaled in other parts of the world. In 2005, Chinese bloggers were called on to take part in three waves of blog contests to win cash awards. Sohu’s First Global Chinese Blog Contest started with big fanfare on September 24, followed quickly on September 26 by the First China Blog Contest hosted by its competitor Sina; On October 12, Bokee.com, not wanting to be left behind, co-sponsored its own Second Global Chinese Blog Contest with China Internet Communication Association. All three contests offered a cash award for up to RMB ¥10,000, and became one of the most-talked-about events among bloggers and the conventional media. Today, blog contests have become routine events, with sponsors ranging from industries to institutions to Websites featuring a variety of themes and topics with a diversified body of participants. Thanks to a combination of high-profile events (e.g., influx of foreign venture capital, rise of celebrity bloggers, and hosting of blog contests), the year 2005 was dubbed by Boke Yuannian (“primary year of the blog”) in China.

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The popularization of blogging in China has accidentally led to the rise of a special genre of bloggers, often nicknamed Boke Mingren (“blog celebrities”), who have established a fame among blog writers and readers solely through their blog sites. Those people, unlike Mingren Boke, would otherwise have no way of getting known by the public without the blogosphere. Their elite status is totally owed to the quality (coupled with the quantity, as those who write little stand a minimal chance of joining this league) of their blogs. Two good examples are Acosta and wu2198 – both nicknames, and their sites are hosted at blog. sina.com.cn/u/1456252804, and blog.sina.com. cn/u/1216826604; these blogs are ranked No. 3 and No. 4 respectively on Sina’s blogs with over 149.4 million and 148.7 million hits as of June 2008. In contrast with offline celebrities whose life and family background is known to the public in excruciating detail, these grassroots writers gain widespread recognition through the currency of their blogs while other aspects of their lives are scarcely available, despite their enormous appeal to some. In fact, “Who is Acosta/wu2198” has been searched so many times that it is featured as a popular phrase on China’s No. 1 search engine Baidu. Toppers of this league, as expected, change on a regular basis as more and more vie for the spotlight. The mainstreaming of the blog in Chinese cyberspace would inevitably spill over to the domain of coverage of important news events. This milestone development took place in February 2006, when, for the first time, the national media utilized blogging as an interactive tool in their news reporting of the annual sessions of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in Beijing. These annual sessions have become important barometers for Chinese politics; they incur a large presence of national and international press corps. A significant change in 2006 was the rise of the blog as a viable platform in covering and delivering news to the Chinese

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netizens by the domestic media. China Central Television (CCTV), the only national television network, took the lead in having its reporters blog news stories and solicit feedback and comments from the audience on CCTV’s own blog services (blog.cctv.com). This type of news coverage creates an additional personal touch to the stories and adds depth to the news compared with what is delivered over the air. For most readers, what was popular was the behind-the-news type of story from the reporters. Xinhua, the official news agency, was not to be left behind in getting its own reporters involved in news blogging on blog.xinhuanet.com, albeit not as extensively. The preeminent mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, People’s Daily, also created its own blog sections (blog.people.com. cn) and carried news blogs by its own reporters. Soon this practice spread to most of the rest of the nation’s media Web sites. A significant note of difference between China’s media blog sites and those in the West is that the Chinese media have also opened its blog space to users by functioning also as a blog hosting service, allowing users to blog alongside their reporters. Compared with other blog sites, although the media sites started relatively late, they have a unique advantage that most others cannot claim – a readily available troupe of professional reporters. Most media blog sites have been strategically employed to gain a competitive edge over the vast number of competing blog sites. Now it has become part of routine reporting for staff journalists to run their blogs as part of their regular assignment. While blog use initially prospered as a countertrend opposing the increasing commercialization of the global cyber culture, it is just a matter of time when commercial interests will penetrate the blogosphere. This did not take long in China (Chen, 2008; Zhao, 2007). First, thus far, there have been two rounds of fund-raising drives by BSPs (first in 2005-2006 and then in 20072008) targeting both domestic and international opportunistic investors. The need for financial

viability is illustrated well by the case of Mingsi Blog (under two URLs, meansys.com and blogms. com), which started BSP operation on October 23, 2003. After “burning” RMB¥ 1.5 million for 1000 days, it went out of business on August 1, 2006, despite its status of being continuously ranked in the top ten Chinese blog sites for two consecutive years (2004-2005) and a blogger base of over one million. On February 27, 2008, Mingsi staged a comeback (under a new DNS at blog.stnn.cc) with the technical and financial support of the HongKong-based Tsing Tao News Corp. Second, unlike their Western counterparts which run by charging bloggers a flat monthly fee for maintaining a blog site on their servers, all Chinese BSPs thrived on offering free hosting service to users. That has been a significant contributing factor to the popularization of blogging among Chinese netizens. The downside of this practice, however, is the inevitable pressure for BSPs to find alternative revenues to remain in business and sustain the growing demand of the blog market. As a business strategy, then, some BSPs have switched to a two-tiered service model: free hosting basic service supplanted by fee-based premium service to different groups of users. As early as May 2004, BlogBus became the first in China to offer VIP services to paying clients. A few more BSPs adopted similar practices in 2005 and later (e.g., Blogcn, BlogChina, QQ.com), with more considering joining in. Fee-paying bloggers can get value-added services such as a personalized domain name, more storage, customized page design, and the ability to add plug-in applications. Tencent is the current leader not only in instant messaging (QQ, TM2008, QQ Groups, RTX), but in tapping into new blogging services: such as video blog (QQVideo), audio blog (RTX), and mobile blog (Taotao) as part of its value-added services. Third, blog sites have resorted to advertising on their main pages as a major revenue source. This step is unsurprising in consideration of the fact that high page views are always the envy of

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advertisers. Ironically, the one who is leading the charge is none other than Fang Xingdong, the founder of BlogChina and Bokee who started his blog career by branding the blog as a way to counter the commercialization of cyber culture. Although advertisers had a presence on the sites of some popular BSPs in the early years, their impact was largely negligible for individual bloggers. A monumental step took place in 2006 when Hexun and Bokee released their respective plans to introduce advertising to pages of individual bloggers. Hexun first put forward its plan called “Blog Advertising Union,” through which individual bloggers hosted by Hexun can sign up for the types of advertising they would like to see on their blogs. Hexun then will specifically redistribute the ads to appropriate individual blog sites. Bokee developed a similar plan, nicknamed “Bokee Gold Bank,” in August in which bloggers can voluntarily place advertising on their pages. In both plans, individual bloggers get rewarded in a profit-sharing arrangement with the BSPs based on the number of click-throughs during a specific period of time. In November 2007, Sina was the first major portal to have followed with its own advertising profit-sharing plan by involving bloggers. At the same time, Sina was also leading all Internet sites with blog services in advertising revenue, with its third quarter blog advertising experiencing a 160% growth over the previous quarter and reaching a record US$ 1.6 million (Chen, 2008). Additionally, other advertising strategies that are being experimented with include blogger endorsement of particular products and sponsorship of particular blog events. The former solicits product use and discussion from prominent bloggers, and the latter involves commercial entities to sponsor blog activities through which their products/services can be advertised (e.g., the popular Lady Blogger Beauty Contest, which was held in three consecutive years from 2006 to 2008).

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FUTURE TRENDS According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT, formerly the Ministry of Information Industry), as of May 2008, China has over 592 million mobile phone users (MIIT, 2008), boasting by far the largest mobile network in the world. An area that promises to significantly reshape the Chinese blogosphere in the near future is moblog, or mobile blog, which allows users to post blog entries directly on the Web through mobile technology, such as a cell phone or PDA. In mid-2006, China Mobile, the largest wireless phone service operator in the country, started to offer moblog service to its Beijing-based subscribers on four platforms: the World Wide Web, WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), MMS (multimedia messaging service), and IVR (interactive voice response). Of the four platforms, only the first one enables mobloggers to access third-party Web sites while the latter three are all licensed to China Mobile. Since then, moblog service has been expanded to most major cities in China, and a few popular sites specializing in moblogs (e.g., monternet, 139, and 3City) have emerged. Since text-based moblog service has serious limitation due to its length constraints, moblog services have instead diverged in the direction of audio and video blogs. Major BSPs have also started to create value-added services to the growing body of mobloggers in China. From August 15 to December 31 of 2006, China Mobile sponsored the First China Mobile Moblog Contest” to advertise its services and attract users. Within the first month, as many as 200, 000 participants registered and over a million voted. This “blog-on-the-move” trend is in all likelihood going to accelerate in the near future, especially in consideration of China’s unfolding national 3G mobile network. After successfully releasing its TD-SCDMA (Time DivisionSynchronous Code Division Multiple Access) national standard for 3G mobile technology in

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early 2006 (after much wrangling and delay), China started commercial trials of 3G services in eight major cities on April 1, 2008; it plans to officially offer services across the nation soon thereafter. Mobile service providers in the major cities were in full gear to rush 3G services to users to take advantage of the precious opportunity of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As mobloggers reach a critical mass, this is undoubtedly going to substantially change the nature of the blog culture in Chinese cyberspace. A particularly important point of observation will be the role mobloggers play in the real-time covering major breaking news in the future and the challenge this poses for the authorities to control information flow under such circumstances. Whereas the blog has become a fad among Chinese netizens and Internet businesses, the landscape of China’s blogosphere is going to be significantly redrawn in the next five to ten years. Since 2002, the number of Blog Service Providers that have declared bankruptcy is already in the hundreds, and it continues to grow. Most of them are still in the process of struggling for profitability, while a few have stood out in the cut-throat competition for users. Although the blogosphere was officially introduced to Chinese netizens and monopolized in early days by independent BSPs specializing in the blog business, major portals quickly overtook the BSPs and now become the dominant players thanks largely to competitive leverages in other areas of online information production, consumption, and financial strength. This suggests that solely depending on the blog business may not be a viable corporate strategy. For independent BSPs, expanding into other areas of business may be a crucial step to survive in the long term. Additionally, instead of trying to cater to the needs of everyone, BSPs may very well fare better in pinpointing a particular niche market and serving the special needs of selective groups. For independent BSPs and portals alike, how to work out a sustainable advertising/business model will remain a challenge in the near future.

In this regard, because of the particularities of the Chinese blogosphere, no one can hope to find ready solutions from elsewhere. Those who meet the challenge will occupy the high-point in the battle of commercializing the blogosphere, and it is likely that major winners and losers will be determined in the next five to ten years. Moreover, overseas capital will play a pivotal role in the process. Finally, how the Chinese authority will respond to the future blogosphere will be a focus of global attention. It is not reasonable to expect the Chinese government to give the blog its free reign; however, it is not realistic to foresee the Chinese authorities gaining total control in the blogosphere either. Just as the Internet has brought about dynamic socio-political changes to China (Tai, 2006; Zheng, 2007), the blogosphere is positioned to achieve similar effects in enabling new interactions between the state and society. It is very likely that the state will become even more responsive to popular demands from the blog community. In many cases, it may be more accountable for actions due to pressure from the blogosphere. Meanwhile, the blog will turn into a significant platform of public participation in the political process. How exactly things of that nature will happen, nonetheless, will have to be seen in the future.

CONCLUSION The Chinese blogosphere was off to a later start compared with those in most countries in the West, but it has experienced phenomenal growth since its formal birth in 2002. Now China boasts by far the largest blog community in the world, surpassing the size of that in the United States and Europe combined. Along with the high numbers is the propensity of Chinese netizens to contribute to User Generated Content online – whether it is bulletin board messages, chat room postings, or blog entries. Chinese bloggers are among the first

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in the world to both actively engage in blog writing and blog reading. Because the overall information environment is one-sidedly dominated by a few official-sanctioned portals and alternative sources from the conventional online portals are reduced to a minimum, the blogs (along with other types of Internet communication venues) have become an important forum for netizens to create content of their own to compensate for the generally dull and unexciting daily flow of information from the official sources. Meanwhile, due to the omnipresent state power in cyberspace and heavy-handed state censoring of online information (Zheng, 2007), most Chinese bloggers have voluntarily shied away from politically sensitive and subversive issues and topics and have opted to focus predominantly on entertainment and amusement as a strategy of self-survival. Blog Service Providers have played an indispensable role in the popularization of China’s blogosphere, especially in the early stages of its development. However, independent BSPs were soon overtaken by conventional portal sites in attracting blog writers and readers, as these portals – driven by their unchallengeable competitive edges in financing and technological power – have become the dominating players in the Chinese blogosphere. The BSPs’ initial merger strategy to gain a foothold in the fierce competition for blog writers and readers was soon replaced by campaigns to attract overseas venture capitals. Independent BSPs still face an uncertain future as they are still in the process of searching for a feasible long-term business strategy. The key role of advertisers in this process is still at the experimental stage and will be a crucial shaper of future developments. As Drezner and Farrell (2004, p. 35) observe, “even as the blogosphere continues to expand, only a few blogs are likely to emerge as focal points.” The nature of cyberspace makes it possible for only a limited number of bloggers to make it to the “A-list” of established, well-known, and often controversial bloggers (Bruns & Jacobs, 2006, p.1).

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These bloggers who become household names come in two types in the Chinese blogosphere: Mingren Boke (celebrity bloggers) and Boke Mingren (blog celebrities). In functioning as “focal points,” these bloggers are able to successfully grab public attention by creating controversies that less prominent bloggers find convenient to debate and share their viewpoints on. In this sense, big-name bloggers and less renowned ones have developed this symbiotic relationship with one another in sustaining the network chain of information production in the blogosphere. Additionally, news Web sites and conventional news media play the role of an amplifier in spreading the news to a larger audience. For those bloggers who otherwise do not have name recognition, the best way to achieve fame is to publicly stage stunts that are difficult for others to ignore. So the Chinese blogosphere has to some extent become a mind-boggling bazaar of hype manufacturing by a variety of individuals for different kinds of purposes through feeding public curiosity for the sexy, weird, and bizarre. The end of an attention-grabber justifies any means imaginable – thus the rise of a new profession called “network hand-pusher” whose sole service is to calculate the most likely move in the particular situation for its shock value. In China, every type of media content is subject to official control and regulation. Blogs are no exception. For that reason, the vast majority of Chinese bloggers have not played a major role in covering important news, especially when it involves controversial issues. News only gains momentum when the conventional media and the officially-approved portals get involved. Major news bloggers are also reporters for the conventional media because of their privileged status as government-appointed messengers. The average bloggers, however, often pick up the news from these official sources and blog their viewpoints or comments. When it involves sensitive topics and grievances against public officials, anonymous forums, such as BBS and chat rooms, are

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preferred channels. Since blogs and other forums complement each other, the popularization of the blogs has not diminished the need for other online forums.

REFERENCES Asia-Pacific Economic Times. (2005, January 21). The blog business enters commercialization: It attracts venture capital, but one hopes it is not a new round of Internet bubble (In Chinese). p. 09. Barlow, A. (2007). The rise of the blogosphere. Westport, CT: Praeger. Barlow, A. (2008). Blogging America: The new public sphere. Westport, CT: Praeger. Blood, R. (2002). Weblogs: A history and perspective. In J. Rodzvilla (Ed.), We’ve got blog: How blogs are changing our culture (pp. 7-16). Cambridge, MA: Perseus. Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From production to produsage. New York: Peter Lang. Bruns, A., & Jacobs, J. (2006). Introduction. In A. Bruns & J. Jacobs (Eds.), Uses of blogs (pp. 1-8). New York: Peter Lang. Chen, D. (2008, January 9). Blogger daily share over RMB¥ 3,00, blog commercialization shows clear path (In Chinese). Telecomm Info Daily, p. B2. China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). (2006, December). 2006 survey report on China Weblog market. Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www.cnnic.org.cn/html/ Dir/2006/09/25/4176.htm

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). (2008, July). Statistical survey report on the Internet development in China (Abridged ed.). Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www. cnnic.cn/download/2008/CNNIC22threport-en. pdf Drezner, D. W., & Farrell, H. (2004). Web of influence. Foreign Policy, 145, 32–40. doi:10.2307/4152942 Fang, X., & Wang, J. (2003). Bloggers – firestealers in the e-age (In Chinese). Beijing, China: China Founder (Fangzheng) Publishing House. Fang, X., & Zhang, X. (2005). Analytical report of China blog development: 2004. In B. Cui (Ed.), China media industry development report: 20042005 (In Chinese). Beijing, China: Social Science Literature Press. Fanning, R. A. (2008). Silicon dragon: How China is winning the tech race. New York: McGraw Hill. Goldhaver, M. H. (1997). Attention and the Net. First Monday, 2(4). Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/ issue2_4/goldhaber/ Jones, D. VentureOne, & Ernst & Young. (2007, August 14). Fueled by record IT investment, venture investment in mainland China reaches $560 million in 2nd quarter (Press release). Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www. ey.com/Global/Assets.nsf/China_E/140807_ Press_Release(Eng)/$file/Venture%20capital_ EY_PressRelease_Final_Eng.pdf MacLeod, C. (2008, April 21). China vaults past USA in number of Internet users. USA Today, p. 1A.

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). (2007, December). 2007 survey report on China Weblog market. Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www.cnnic.cn/uploadfiles/ doc/2007/12/26/113707.doc

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Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). (of China). (2008). Monthly telecommunications statistical report: May 2008. Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www.miit.gov.cn/ art/2008/06/24/art_5136_49229.html Pew Internet & American Life Project. (2006, July 19). Bloggers: A portrait of the Internet’s new storytellers. Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%202006.pdf Stanley, M. (2004, April 14). The China Internet report. Retrieved from http://www.morganstanley. com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/China_Internet_Report0404.pdf Stanley, M. (2008, March 18). Internet trends. Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www. morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/ pdfs/InternetTrends031808.pdf Tai, Z. (2006). The Internet in China: Cyberspace and civil society. New York: Routledge. Tai, Z., & Sun, T. (2007). Media dependencies in a changing media environment: The case of the 2003 SARS epidemic in China. New Media & Society, 9(6), 987–1009. doi:10.1177/1461444807082691 Tremayne, M. (Ed.). (2007). Blogging, citizenship, and the future of media. New York: Routledge. Universal McCann. (2008, March). Power to the people: Social media tracker. Wave.3. Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www.universalmccann.com/Assets/wave_3_20080403093750. pdf Xinhua News Net. (2006, December 8). Chinese search engine Baidu launches blog search service. Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-12/08/ content_5452254.htm Xu, J. (2006). Old Xu’s blogs (In Chinese). Beijing, China: CITIC Publishing.

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Zhao, X. (2007, January 9). Blog commercialization goes from shriek to roar (In Chinese). Jiansu Commercial News, p. 2. Zhao, Y. (2008). Communication in China: Political economy, power, and conflict. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Zheng, Y. (2007). Technological empowerment: The Internet, state, and society in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS BlogCN: Known in China as Zhongguo Boke (China Blog), BlogCN is one of the most popular blog service providers in China. It offers both free and fee-based (VIP) blog hosting services to bloggers in the Chinese language. BlogCN started its operation in November 2002, and was the first to offer free blog hosting service in China. Headquartered in Hangzhou (the provincial capital of Zhenjiang), it has registered over 25 million bloggers and attracts an average of 30 million visits per day as of late 2008. BlogChina: An arch competitor of BlogCN (as suggested by its Chinese name Boke Zhongguo, or Blog China), it is headquartered in the Zhongguancun district of Beijing, nicknamed the “Silicon Valley of China.” It was founded in August 2002 by a blog pioneer Fang Xingdong as www.blogchina.com, and changed its name to Boke Wang (Blog Net) in July 2005 (hosted at www.bokee.com). As of late 2008, it claims over 20 registered users, and reports an average of 1.2 million logins per day. Blog Service Provider (BSP): A company that offers free or paid blog hosting service. BSPs have played an indispensable role in the popularization of China’s blogosphere, particularly in the early stages. Boke: (1) a noun to refer to a blog page or site; (2) a noun for a blogger; (3) a verb to mean “to

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author a blog page or site.” The term was coined by blog pioneers Fang Xingdong and Wang Junxiu in July 2002 in their effort to introduce blogs/ blogging to China. Boke Mingren: The popularization of blogging in China has led to the rise of a special genre of bloggers, often nicknamed Boke Mingren (“blog celebrities”), who have established a reputation among blog writers and readers through their blog entries. China Blog Contest: It has become a common strategy among major BSPs in China to host contests among bloggers for varying amounts of cash prizes in order to promote their brands and attract traffic to their sites. Each contest is typically thematically branded with a particular focus, and often involves commercial sponsor(s). China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC): A non-profit network information center of China founded in 1997. CNNIC is administered jointly by the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (MII) and by Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). QQ: The most popular instant messaging service in China offered by Tencent Inc. As of September 2008, QQ had 865 million registered accounts, of which 355 million were active. Besides instant messaging, Tencent also offers game, chat, and blog services. Mingren Boke: A term for celebrity bloggers in China. It was first coined by Sina when it staged a movement to sign up celebrities in China to open accounts and contribute to its blog section (at blog.

sina.com.cn). This was part of an effort to gain competitive edge over popular independent blog sites by diverting traffic to Sina’s blog sites. Netizen: Called Wang Min in Mandarin, the term is defined by the China Internet Network Information Center as any Chinese citizen older than six years who has used the Internet in the past six months. User Generated Content (UGC): The term refers to various types of content that is generated by end-users and is publicly available on the Internet. Examples include postings on electronic Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), messages in online chat rooms, and blog entries.

ENDNOTES 1 2

3

4

http://www.blogchina.com This discrepancy can be probably best explained by the particular procedures in which Universal McCanns and CNNIC defined bloggers in their surveys: the former only included users who were between the ages of 16-54, while the latter extended the definition to all age groups. CTR is a joint venture between China’s Central Television Network (CCTV) and Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS), an international market information group which specializes in market research and consulting. http://www.blogcn.com

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Chapter 8

E-Government

A Case Study of East African Community Initiative Sirkku Kristiina Hellsten University of Helsinki, Finland

ABSTRACT E-government and other applications of information technologies can provide powerful means for global, national and local justice, increased democracy, decentralized decision-making, and more efficient service delivery. In general, e-government initiatives are aimed at modernizing governmental agencies in their dealings with the public and extending services into online environments. In various African countries, e-government initiatives have begun; they have allowed citizens easy access to public services and lobbying opportunities at policy level decision-making. This chapter identifies prospects and challenges in e-government and e-governance in the East African region. The author sketches harmonizing strategies for the development of an ethical framework for their implementation and argues that the challenge of e-governance in developing countries resides in the challenge of “good governance” as well as issues of accessibility and user skills.

INTRODUCTION This chapter focuses on the role of the modern information and communication technologies (ICT) in the development of e-government and e-democracy in the East African region, particularly, in the countries of East African Community (EAC): Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda. Founded in 1999, EAC is a regional intergovernmental orDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch008

ganization with the goal to develop an economic and political union of the member states1. In this chapter the author explores an EAC e-government initiative in enhancing democracy and civil society. The main issue discussed is how the use of information and communication technologies can empower ordinary citizens and help them to participate in politics, public affairs and economics locally and nationally. The chapter identifies the prospects and challenges in e-government and e-governance in the

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East Africa, and sketches harmonizing strategies for the development of an ethical framework for their implementation. It examines the strategic priorities of the East African Community regional e-government initiative and its relation to the wider political, economic, and social issues in the region. The author argues that besides the problems of accessibility and user skills, the challenge of e-government in developing countries resides mainly in the field of “good governance”: developing the accountability, transparency, and responsiveness of involved governments (whether national or local). The author emphasises that e-government and the principles of “good governance” have to be implemented concurrently to promote sustainable development and democracy. By “good governance” the author means governance that is responsive to the citizens’ needs and concerns, is accountable and transparent, promotes democracy and political participation to realize the common good of the society—instead of supporting narrow and selfish benefits for the ruling elites. The author concludes that for e-governance to bring about democratic participation, more accountable leadership, social justice, and equitable human development, all e-government initiatives have to include elements of attitude and culture changes as well as the principles of “good governance.”

BACKGROUND Globalization has brought a special emphasis on knowledge creation and transfer as the primary driver of economic growth and competitiveness with information technologies playing an everincreasing role. The economic, social and political landscape in which development is taking place has changed altogether. All countries, developed and developing, are reconsidering their approaches and strategies of growth to incorporate new realities of a globalized knowledge-based economy. For developing countries the opportunities are now open to utilize information and communication

technologies to make rapid advances in their economic and political progress by acknowledging and promoting the free flow of information in global communication. In 1996 only five African countries had Internet connectivity. In 2001 all of the countries in the continent had access to the Internet. During the first decade of the 21st century, the Internet access in Africa has further increased. The mushrooming of cyber cafes in African cities and major towns, the spread of personal computers and mobile phones enabled access to a virtual global village in which information and knowledge from most parts of the globe is accessible at the click of the mouse. Africa currently has 260 million mobile phone users, and about 20 million landline subscribers, with wireless connections increasing faster than wired. According to ComScore, a global Internet information provider, there are over 41 million Internet users across Africa now.2 But still this number represents only about 5% of the population of the African continent. The continuing growth of interactive Internet-based local, national and global communication and the dissemination of information and knowledge provide a widening base for democratic participation and civil society in the regions that have been formerly marginalized. The increasing Internet connectivity and ereadiness is particularly important in many African countries that face serious economic and political challenges. These include, for instance: (1) the promotion of sustainable development and the eradication of poverty; (2) providing equal and fair access to the natural resources; (3) the prevention, management and resolution of ethnic conflicts and reinforcement of peace, security and stability; (4) the endorsement of inclusive popular participation in the development processes of democracy and “good governance”; and, (5) the promotion of human rights and civil society activities. E-government, for its part, is defined by the United Nations as a “government that applies ICT to transform its internal and external rela-

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tionships” (UNPAN, 2005). The definition of e-government adopted by EAC is: a “situation in which administrative, legislative and judicial agencies (including both central and local governments) digitize their internal and external operations and utilize networked systems efficiently to realize better quality in the provision of public services.”3 In the Kenyan government web page e-government is defined as the “use of a range of information technology... by government agencies to run government operations in order to improve effectiveness, efficiency, service delivery and to promote democracy...” (Directorate of e-Government, 2008). In general, e-governance has three main domains: (a) e-administration: improving government processes; (b) e-services: connecting individual citizens with their governments through ICT; and, (c) e-society: building interactions with and within civil society (Heeks, 2001). ICT is seen as allowing a government’s internal and external communication to gain speed, precision, simplicity, outreach, and networking capacity, which can be converted into cost reduction and increased services. ICT can also enable transparency and accountability and prepare people for participation in an inclusive political process that can produce well-informed public consent, which forms the basis for the legitimacy of governments (IICD, 2007). The definitions of e-government have clear normative connotations of development and positive change. It is no surprise then that many promoters of information technology are confident that ICT and newer social interaction technologies can play an important role in increasing civic involvement in developing African countries. There is no doubt that creating and supporting the systems of e-government and e-democracy could help create a more direct relationship between people and their representatives, and empower citizens with knowledge that can help them make informed decisions, find government information, contact elected officials or regional offices, and learn about government programs.

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Within sub-regional integration, the citizens of different East African countries could communicate with their legislators and representatives as well as with each other on the issues and policies that will directly influence them. Particularly, applications of e-government in the remote areas could help citizens to stay in touch with their local and national governments. The civil society organizations could also effectively take part in governance and democracy issues; the human rights situation can be promoted with relevant information; and channels for citizens to report and follow up human rights violations and cases of corruption can be established. E-government is also helpful in improving government accountability and cost saving, since e-government provides more services within a shorter time than the traditional government (Kaaya, 2004; Netchaeva, 2002). Since civic involvement and political participation is linked to economic development and participatory democracy, with e-government there would be more opportunities to build more trust between the citizens and their governments, and to help citizens understand the roles of the civil society organizations. Across the East African region, informational technology could offer new ways of providing access to essential information, as well as create the potential for widespread sharing of indigenous and global knowledge, promote human development, create conditions for alleviation of poverty through enhancement of economic activities and participation in political decision-making. In the short run, domestically and regionally, citizens could have new ways of online registration and voting that could reduce the possibilities of electoral fraud and could make the voting process easier and more accessible for those living in peripheries. Between elections citizens could communicate with their representatives and articulate their grievances. Overall, e-government could create significant opportunities for better governance, and political and economic advancement.

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E-GOVERNMENT IN EAST AFRICA: PROSPECTS AND CHALLENGES The members of the East African Community (EAC)—Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi—have their own national e-government initiatives at various stages of execution. These efforts form a basis for a regional East African Community e-governance program4 that has recognized the role of information technology in facilitating the process of political and economic integration in the region. The EAC regional e-governance initiative emphasizes the importance and benefits associated with e-government implementation in all the member states. All the initiatives have produced policy papers and implementation frameworks, while partner states have been able to set up web-based information and communication systems; they are currently working on various types of e-services to the citizens on local, regional, and national administrative levels. The EAC members adopted a consensus statement according to which the partner states support EAC secretariat in coordination and implementation of e-government process in the region with identified priority areas in customs control, e-parliament, e-health, e-banking, e-procurement, e-commerce, and meteorology (EAC Consensus Statement, 2004). High priority is given to migrating government services into online environments, as the newly introduced practices of e-government are found to have great efficiency and flexibility. The e-readiness in the countries in the East African region differs and the initiatives for egovernment are in different stages. The stages range from the website creations to two-way interactions and online transactions, aiming toward creating comprehensive e-government portals that can provide a wide range of information and services to end-users and support one-stop online transactions without the need for dealing directly with different government agencies5 (Kaaya 2004; Kagwe, 2007). In some of the EAC member states, for example, Kenya, the e-government develop-

ment is tied together with wider public service reforms. The Kenyan Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC), for instance, has an online reporting and information system, which citizens can use to anonymously report cases of corruption and other misuse of public offices. The State Law Office offers comprehensive information on the legislation and related issues as well as downloadable forms for different services. In fact, the Kenyan e-government project as a whole has received an international recognition for its achievements. United Republic of Tanzania has established the Tanzania National Website and introduced various other information management systems and public service networks: such as, an Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS), a customs transit network connecting all Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) offices, and a Development of Motor Vehicles Online Register, among others. The Ugandan government through the National Planning Authority (NPA) in collaboration with other core government agencies, private sector, civil society and academia embarked on the harmonization and coordination of e-government initiatives through the Inter-Agency e-Government National Planning team. This approach includes creating a legal framework, which enhances government service delivery and local government and information communication systems, such as data and information for parliament use and an integrated financial management system. For direct public services, Uganda is, for example, setting up a computerized driver’s licence issuance system. Rwanda has undergone a rapid turnaround from one of the most technologically deficient nations only a decade ago to a country where legislative business is conducted online while wireless Internet access is available almost anywhere in the country. This is a remarkable development in comparison to other countries in the East African region in which the improvement has been considerably slower (Mwangi, 2006, p. 199-208). Burundi at the moment has the least developed

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e-government system due to the fact that the country is still recovering from a long-lasting war. The rapid development of e-government in Rwanda can be partly explained by Rwanda’s recent history of the 1994 genocide and its aftermath: the destruction of public trust, infrastructure, institutional framework, and property. In general, the misuse of the official channels of communication have forced the country to work hard on rebuilding and reconciling the nation, and to emphasize impartial leadership and governance, open dialogue, and availability of equal services to all. However, despite the efforts to increase the use of information technologies in government services, and various e-government initiatives and policies, all of the above will not automatically increase democracy, end poverty, and create a civil society with a participatory democracy and have accountable and transparent governance. E-government efforts are the means towards improving effective government operations and communication, and many challenges still remain. The major obstacles for building democracy with the help of information technology are, on the one hand, the “hardware issues” related to the availability of the technology (the equipment as well as user skills). On the other hand, “software challenges” exist in finding a way to make the implementation of e-governance go hand in hand with the political commitment to and realization of the principles of “good governance.”

Domestic and Regional Problems in Accessibility The first challenge is directly related to economic issues, digital divide, and technological marginalization. According to the United Nations global e-Government Survey 2008: From e-Government to Connected Governance (UNPAN, 2008), the developing countries are still lagging behind in e-government implementation which appears to have a strong relation with per capita income. Many African countries still lack the telecom-

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munications infrastructure to be able to benefit from the opportunities provided by the information technologies. An individual in a developed country is over 22 times more likely to be an Internet user than someone in a developing country. Despite the recent advances of the information technologies and the fact that more and more people around the globe have direct access to technologies and the information they convey, there are still vast regions in Africa, which have either no, or very limited access to the means of communication and information exchange. For example, most Internet users in East Africa access the web at cyber cafés, because the prices of Internet services are prohibitive in the region in which approximately half of the population still lives below the poverty line on less than one dollar a day. And for those who can at least afford to use cyber cafés, the accessibility of cafes (and the quality of their services) varies widely in the region. While the e-government services are gradually being set and increasingly used by the citizenry, they are still accessible to a limited segment of the population (Hook & Werner, 2003). In fact, there are many places in East Africa with restricted access to global connections. Many regions lack even traditional communication channels: such as telephone, radio, and television. Even in the places where Internet access is available, the connections are frequently slow and costly. While various e-government projects have been set up with national and international funding pledged, attention should be focused on more comprehensive development that combines constructing an einfrastructure alongside the “traditional infrastructure” and e-institutions alongside the “traditional bureaucracies.” Other barriers involve unreliable power supply, poor communications infrastructure in general (including telephone connections in rural areas), low literacy rates, and language issues (most of the government services and web-pages are in English while the most widely spoken African language in the region is Swahili along with numerous other local languages6).

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Digital Divide Based on global surveys, the United Nations has developed the e-Government Index (UNPAN, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008) that serves as a composite indicator of the progress among 192 member states towards implementing e-government. In 2003, the EAC countries scored deficient e-government capacity though they had web presence in government services (Kaaya, 2004, p. 43). The 2008 UN e-Government Readiness Index placed the five EAC states between the 122nd and 174th ranking positions with Kenya and Uganda at the top and Burundi at the bottom of the EAC group (UNPAN, 2008). Thus, in relation to e-readiness, it should be noted that in East Africa out of a total population of about 91 million, only about 1 million people have direct access to the Internet. The Internet services are concentrated in urban areas. The digital divide remains mainly intact, and the implementation of e-government services should go hand in hand with strategies to improve the overall infrastructure and economic conditions as well. Here the issue of political will is of central importance because it reflects the government’s willingness to embrace e-government services and to commit financial, human and physical resources (Kaaya, 2004, p. 42). While e-governance and the wider use of Internet technology are promoted as a development goal, it is important to notice that the obstacles in the access to information and knowledge are the same as the access to global markets in general. The lack of Internet connectivity in Africa—and elsewhere in the developing world—is at least partly based on global economic inequalities. In the most parts of East Africa, the very same obstacles that prevent the use of information technology are the ones that prevent its widespread use in the poor parts of the world. Geographic isolation with no reliable means of transportation, coupled with a lack of education, is further aggravated by poverty. Few people can utilize even the traditional communication channels, let alone the

new information technologies. This implies that Internet service providers have to charge high fees to make up for their investment costs. Because most private companies have to play according to the rules of market, the service providers are locked in maintaining excessively high prices in regions where there are few customers and where the connections are difficult to establish. Therefore, the use of information technologies, such as the Internet or mobile phone, remains limited to a relatively small elite, which includes foreign business and donor partners who can afford the costs. This has kept the demand relatively low, which has meant limited competition and virtually no interest from private investors. Thus, the prices continue to remain unaffordable to the wider public and especially in the rural areas— where the services and connections are needed the most. Since anticipated returns remain insufficient to attract private capital to build comprehensive communication networks in low-income areas, government investments, and international donor commitment are central in guaranteeing the accessibility of e-services.

Political Will: Needed Locally and Globally If the people in the East African nations are to benefit from e-governance, the existing governments - as well as the international development organizations—have to make more comprehensive investments that would provide service network to all, not just a few and privileged—educated urban dwellers, middle class, and elites. The policy needs to focus on providing access to the information technology, education, and technical training (Heeks, 2001; UNCTAD, 2004, 2005; UNPAN, 2005). While a globalized economy tends to benefit those who are better off, regional, national and local East African governments have to set their developmental priorities, including democracy. To enhance e-democracy and e-inclusion, it is

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important to focus on the improvement of the public service culture as a whole. Legislation that prevents publication of official documents online, or in general, blocks the information access to the public, has to be adjusted. While the security and confidentiality issues are central in developing e-government service, there is a need to further enhance the freedom of information and public access to the documents related to the use of public resources and public funds. Open and free access to information increases government accountability and prevents corruption. The governments in the East African region still tend to maintain secrecy around official documents and government transactions. Even parliaments tend to be reluctant to post their debates and related documents on their official websites. However, many business companies and civil society organizations provide access to “public information” on their websites for citizens with or without charge.

FUTURE TRENDS: E-GOVERNANCE OR “GOOD GOVERNANCE”? In relation to the political will, one of the main challenges to e-government is related to the wider attitude change within the traditionally hierarchical and frequently authoritarian leadership culture that is prevalent in the region. The problem is that e-government can as easily be used to control, censor, and suffocate citizens’ participation as it can be used to enhance democracy. If e-governance is to bring about wider democratic space and empower people, the leadership needs to comply with a new ethical and democratic culture and to follow the principles of “good governance” while expanding the government and state services online. “Good governance” requires setting up new ethical and legal frameworks, enhancing more transparent political leadership and long-term political commitment, and increasing enlightened public engagement and inclusive partnership. Clearly, setting up systems of monitoring and evaluation are of central importance. This is

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naturally a “chicken and egg” question: Can the use of new technology in itself enhance cultural transparency and accountability, or do we need first a cultural change before we can expect real e-democracy to work anywhere? In Kenya, for example, while there are interactive online anticorruption reporting systems, the end result is the same, as it would be without new, sophisticated technology. In many parts of Africa, political power has for a long time been centralized in the executive branch: around a president and his inner circle. Since checks and balances are not integrated in the governance systems, as a result, corruption, nepotism, and cronyism have for decades remained the problem of many African countries. Additionally, persistent and consistent inequalities and historical injustices often lead to conflict. The greed of leaders and grievances of those outside and without power tend to instigate violence with ethnic undertones. The result is a vicious cycle of bad governance, poverty, and marginalization in Africa and East Africa is no exception. The 2007 general election political crisis in Kenya shows that even systems with advanced levels of e-governance fail when power games and greed take over the considerations of the common good in the leadership. This leads to a question whether the Rwandan genocide situation could have been avoided with more efficient governance systems. In both cases, communication technology was used to incite ethnic hatred and animosities. In Kenya, short message service (SMS) and e-mail campaigns for and against political candidates were often ethnically targeted. In Rwanda, the media were used as a means for instigating genocide. Democracy and “good governance” are not advanced merely by setting in place democratic processes and institutions, whether online or in traditional forms, if there is no public trust in the formal institutions of governance. Without serious political commitment to the democratic values of impartiality, equality, individual freedom, and rights, as well as political and social justice,

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information technology cannot change the culture of impunity, political authoritarianism, and communal (whether ethnic or regional) partiality and favoritism. Technological development needs to be accompanied by cultural and attitudinal changes. Adapting the political democratic culture does not mean leaving behind traditional cultural values, but rather helps to integrate these values in new environments of openness and interconnectedness. Information technology can be used to promote cultural tolerance, diversity and pluralism. It can give different cultures a channel to distribute information, start a dialogue, exchange views, and express their concerns across the country, the region, the continent, and the world. Global interaction between minority cultures and ethnic communities could further empower people and let them realize that the problems they share are similar. It could help the government find solutions to the issues that may have appeared local and unique—akin to indigenous rights issues, land ownership, and language matters. Instead of lamenting that globalization leads to the cultural neo-colonialism, we can instead all learn from each other and from each other’s experiences through the means of information and communication technology. The basic technological readiness for expansion of e-government services in Africa is available, and citizens with access to the Internet are content to use new communication channels to manage their personal and public lives. In Africa, the overall access to the Internet services is gradually improving, but it will take time before it will be available equally to all citizens. However, cultural and attitudinal change that is needed to turn e-government into “good governance” is still lacking. More emphasis on improving professional and leadership ethics is needed nationally and locally.

CONCLUSION Currently, it appears that e-government initiatives have not yet succeeded in empowering East African citizens to participate in regional, national, and local markets or policy-making. Neither have they been able to balance the traditional power hierarchies. Without political commitment to the principles of “good governance” and democratic values, e-government cannot deliver impartial social justice in the region. In many East African countries, citizens are concerned with their endemic dismal socio-economic and political conditions, disappointed with the working of traditional governments, frustrated with the quality and service of the public sector, and worried about the future of their region—as well as the African continent as a whole—in a rapidly globalizing world. Many are also disenchanted with their political leadership. Despite the setting up the e-government delivery systems, the regular issues and problems of inadequate governance continue to exist. Among them is the struggle within the political elites, the greed and selfishness of those in decision-making positions, and the stubborn tendency to stick with old hierarchical patterns of power and resist change. In such political environment, there is a need to set up working two-way communication channels and use Internet technology to enhance more open and transparent forms of governance. It is also important to pay more attention to the unwanted effect of e-development in an African social and cultural context in which personal relations have always played a central role. These side effects may actually result in strengthening the powers of the elites, the educated, and the corporate sectors at the expense of the ordinary people—particularly, the poor and marginalized. E-participation could further weaken what little influence the poor have over their rulers if human face-to-face communication and relations are eliminated and replaced by impersonal virtual interaction. The periphery areas could become

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“virtually marginalized” with leaders maintaining contact only through communication technology and feeling that personal visits to these areas are no longer needed and necessary to keep in touch with the “reality” of their “potential voters.” It therefore remains to be seen whether the concept of e-government will in the long term strengthen the African sense of community, cohesion, and solidarity or lead into disintegration by weakening the connections between urban and rural areas while leaving the underprivileged alone. While planning and setting up e-government systems, there is a need to look to the new generations of African leaders who welcome and promote the principles of “good governance” and “democracy”—once the technical capacity and accessibility of ICT has been reached. For e-governance to be successful, it needs to be able to empower ordinary people to effectively and meaningfully participate in decision-making that affects their lives, livelihood, and life-styles. Besides technological education, it is necessary to maintain a clear focus on training both the government officials and the citizenry about ethical considerations, codes of conduct, and principles of “good governance.” Only then can e-government enhance opportunities for the poor, the marginalized, and the illiterate, making their voices heard more clearly than before. While there have been consistent efforts to integrate democratic principles into the frameworks and policy papers of e-government initiatives in East Africa, there remains a need to increase ethical training and enforcement of professional ethics through codes of conduct, performance based management, and performance contracts within governments, and civil service. Only such a comprehensive approach to e-governance can make leaders and administrators more responsible, accountable, and transparent while making citizens more aware of their rights and responsibilities (Modiddin, 2002; also see AEC Secretariat, 2005; Kagoda-Batuwa, 2006).

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REFERENCES Annan, K. (2003). IT industry must help bridge global digital divide. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/ content/stories Clarke, M. (2003). E-development? Development and the new economy (UNU/WIDER Policy Brief No. 7). Helsinki, Finland: UNU Press. Coleman, S. (2005) African e-governance: Opportunities and challenges. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://www.commissionforafrica. org Directorate of e-Government. (2008). Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://www.e-government.go.ke East African Community (EAC). (2004). Consensus statement. In Proceedings of the East African Community e-government workshop. Arusha, Tanzania: EAC. East African Community (EAC) Secretariat. (2005). Regional e-government framework: Main report. Arusha, Tanzania: EAC. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://www.eac.int/ eac_egov_draft_framework.pdf Government of Kenya. (2006). Draft national information and communication policy. Nairobi, Kenya: Office of the President. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://www.e-government. go.ke Heeks, R. (2001) Building e-governance for development: A framework for national and donor action (E-Government Working Paper No. 12). Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://www. man.ac.uk/idpm Hook, F., & Werner, M. (2003). Kenya cyber cafe users survey. Nairobi, Kenya: Archway Technology Management Limited.

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Humphrey, J., Mansell, R., Paré, D., & Schmitz, H. (2004). E-commerce for developing countries: Expectations and reality. IDS Bulletin, 35(1), 31–39. doi:10.1111/j.1759-5436.2004.tb00106.x

Sarocco, C. (2002). Improving IP connectivity in the least developed countries. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://www.itu.int/osg/ spu/ni/ipdc

Kaaya, J. (2004). Implementing e-government services in East-Africa: Assessing status through content analysis of government websites. Electronic [from http://www.ejeg.com]. Journal of E-Government, 2(1), 39–54. Retrieved September 28, 2008.

United Nations. (2003). World public sector report 2003: E-government at the crossroads. New York: United Nations. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/ public/documents/UN/UNPAN012733.pdf

Kagoda-Batuwa, S. (2006). Statement by the co-coordinator, e-government initiative of East African Community. Paper presented at the East African Regional Cyber Law and E-Justice Stakeholders Consultative Workshop. Arusha, Tanzania: EAC. Kagwe, M. (2007). E-government and ICT in Kenya. Presentation at the World Bank Menda, A. (2005). Computering local government in Tanzania: The Kinondoni experience. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://www. iconnect-online.org Modiddin, A. (2002). The challenges of edemocracy: Opportunities and risks. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://unpan1.un.org/ intradoc/groups/public/documents/CAFRAD/ UNPAN007932.pdf Mwangi, W. (2006). The social relations of egovernment diffusion in developing countries: The case of Rwanda. In Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Digital Government Research (ACM International Conference Proceedings series, Vol. 151.). New York: ACM. Netchaeva, I. (2002). E-government and edemocracy: A comparison of opportunities in the North and South. International Communication Gazette, 64(5), 467–477. doi:10.1177/17480485 020640050601

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAC). (2004). UNCTAD e-commerce and development report 2004. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://r0.unctad.org/ ecommerce/ecommerce_en/edr04_en United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAC). (2006) The digital divide report: ICT diffusion index 2005 (UNCTAC/ITE/IPC/2006/5). New York: United Nations. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). (2008). eGovernance-Africa.net. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://ictd.undp. org/africaegov/en/about.php United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). (2005). Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://www/uneca.org/aisi/nici United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). (2002). Mediumterm strategy 2002-2007. Communication and information technology. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://portal.unesco.org/ci United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN). (2003). UN global e-government survey 2003. New York: United Nations. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://unpan1. un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/ unpan016066.pdf

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United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN). (2004). UN global e-government readiness report 2004: Towards access for opportunity. New York: United Nations. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/ groups/public/documents/un/unpan019207.pdf United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN). (2005). United Nations e-government readiness report 2005: From e-govenrment to e-inclusion. New York: United Nations. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://unpan1. un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/ unpan021888.pdf United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN). (2008). UN e-government survey 2008: From e-government to connected governance. New York: United Nations. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/ groups/public/documents/UN/UNPAN028607. pdf

in 1999, EAC is a regional intergovernmental organization that includes Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda and aims to develop an economic and political union. E-Democracy: Democratic governance, processes, and institutions that use the Internet technology in their operations. E-Development: Development processes and activities through the use of the information and communication technologies. E-Government: Internet-based government’s activity and services. E-Readiness: A country’s capacity and ability to provide services through the Internet. “Good Governance”: The principles of responsive, accountable, and transparent governance, public service, and leadership practices.

ENDNOTES 1

Weddi, D. (2005). Transforming local government: E-governance in Uganda. Retrieved September 28, 2008, from http://www.ftpiicd.org/iconnect/ ICT4D_Governance/EN_Governance_UG.pdf

2 3

4

5

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Digital Divide: Inequalities in global access to the Internet, online resources, and services. East African Community (EAC): Founded

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See http://www.eac.int/about-eac.html See http://www.comscore.com See http://www.eac.int/programes-activities/ eac-programmes/178-e-government.html See http://www.eac.int/programes-activities/ eac-programmes/178-e-government.html See http://www.kenya.go.ke for Kenya, http://www.tanzania.go.tz for Tanzania, and http://www.government.go.ug for Uganda. In Burundi and Rwanda historically more French is spoken.

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Chapter 9

Corporate Added Value in the Context of Web 2.0 Oliver Bohl Accenture, Munich, Germany Shakib Manouchehri University of Kassel, Germany

ABSTRACT Firms have faced and explored the increased use of Web 2.0. Driven mainly by private users, Web 2.0 may also have significant implications for corporate actions and business models. By systematically scanning and verifying possible positive and negative effects on the value of their creation, firms might be able to formulate and establish well-grounded strategies for corporate Web 2.0 applications and services. To establish such a process in an effective and adequate manner, it is necessary to analyze the relationship between Web 2.0 and corporate added value. This chapter contributes to these efforts by demonstrating that the corporate use of Web 2.0 applications is reinforced by fundamental and long-term business trends. The discussion pertains to the possibilities emerging from the application of Web 2.0 paradigms to business models: the market model, the activity model, and the capital market model. The potentials, risks, mainsprings, and restrictions associated with the corporate use of Web 2.0 are evaluated.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Firms have faced, and already explored, the increased use of Web 2.0. Due to the popularity of their offers, Web 2.0 applications enjoy the recognition of many private user groups. Companies, however, miss the added value of the applications. This chapter addresses this area of conflict. The companies, which expect an added value by using corresponding DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch009

offers, are of particular interest. The present chapter concentrates on the following: the internal effect amongst others through increasing networking, the simplification of communication through networkeffects, increasing user-participation, and external effects (“prosumers,” “mashups,” etc.) from the use of Web 2.0. One major aim is to analyze the potential to support or thwart these trends by comparing paradigms of Web 2.0 with general trends which have an influence on the added value of a company. Following the definition of basic terms,

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essential trends and their consequences on the Web 2.0 are discussed in terms of three sub-models of business. Building on this, the chapter details the chances and risks for corporate application of Web 2.0 paradigms. The term “Web 2.0” suggests a fundamental technological improvement by assigning a version number. This misleads insofar as it is preferably used for the characterization of a new use of Internet-technology. Common characterizations of Web 2.0 are mostly based on seven paradigms defined by O’Reilly (2005): “The Web as a Platform,” “Harnessing Collective Intelligence,” “Data is the Next Intel Inside,” “End of Software Release Cycle,” “Lightweight Programming Models,” “Software above the Level of a Single Device,” and “Rich User Experiences.” This paradigm-catalogue clarifies the current understanding of Web 2.0 as a phenomenon, occurring in an area of conflict, which contains technological, socio-cultural, and economic influences as poles. It is essential to consider these influences as bundled. However, from the aforesaid paradigms, O’Reilly derives seven core-competences which companies should possess in case they want to implement approaches of Web 2.0 in their business processes. To this, he adds use and service instead of software packages, which are characterized by a cost-efficient scalability. He next defines the control of unique data-sources, which are hard to copy and whose value increases proportional to their frequency of use. As a third factor, correspondent companies should believe in the users as co-developers. The willingness to capitalize on collective intelligence is then presented, and the achievement and use of “the long tail” of small websites by establishing communities is fifth. A sixth core-competence is defined by the creation of software beyond the borders of individual devices, which are influenced by a seventh attribute -- the use of “light weighted” user interfaces and adequate development, especially business models (O’Reilly, 2005). Paradigms and components of companies’

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use of Web 2.0 normally require an adjustment to established business models. This is clarified by the above-mentioned core competences which mostly don’t exist bundled in companies. O’Reilly specifically explains this relation by pointing out the requirement for adequateness to business models as a separate core competence. By that, he characterizes a close relation between efforts and possibilities in the corporate use of Web 2.0 and the design of business models. Concerning business models, it should be emphasized that the concept is a further development of the strategyconcept, which has been discussed for 40 years in the literature (Chesbrough & Rosenbloom, 2002; Knyphausen-Aufsess & Meinhardt, 2002). This discussion offers possibilities of a structured analysis of corporate added value activities (Magretta, 2002). According to such an analysis, business models help corporate organizations to systemize their actions so that they can support the analysis of corporate added value. The models are discussed as a basis for corporate service provision (Pigneur, 2000). Consequently, they are considered analytical units for corporate added value activities. As a result, they offer the ability to describe the aims and tasks of corporate acting (Grob et al., 2005; Hoppe & Breitner, 2003). These can be compared to approaches of Web 2.0 as well as common trends.

Web 2.0 Business Models Web 2.0 offers innovative possibilities for the adopting companies. Corporate action is normally determined by effective trends in the long run. Some essential trends in the context of Web 2.0 are discussed in the following. For an effective discussion of business models, it is necessary to consider the constituent elements separately. Business models are decomposed into sub-models to fulfill this task. Hoppe and Breitner (2003) propose a regulation framework for that. The authors focus on the middle-term and long-term profit maximization of the concerned

Corporate Added Value in the Context of Web 2.0

Figure 1. Web 2.0 business models

correlations of these with additional, in particular socio-cultural and technical, trends are meaningful for the design of future business models in Web 2.0. Subsequently, what influences the paradigms have sub-models that should be considered. This happens through a discussion of essential, but exemplary, effects of Web 2.0.

Market Model Oriented View

activity, which is influencing three sub-models: the market model, the activity model, and the capital market model. Simultaneously the models influence each other and have to be coordinated. The market model serves the characterization of market structures, the activity model describes the added value, and the capital market model portrays the costs and revenues to be realized by the targeted business. These sub-models are used in research to analyze general trends, which affect the corporate added value and therefore also the business models. Furthermore they serve to identify correspondents and contrary elements in the approaches of Web 2.0. Therefore it can be clarified within a market model of how the proceeding prosuming (or blurring of boundaries between producing and consuming) can be fostered by the use of Web 2.0. In an activity model, the issue of localization of value adding activities is relevant, while the capital model can be used to analyze the distribution of costs and revenues. Within such an analysis of (economic) trends and their correspondences in Web 2.0, it is important that the customer is moved toward the center of the business model triad. Figure 1 illustrates these relations. Trends are assigned to the separate sub-models within a cloud of terms. The analysis of the sub-models is closely related to O’Reilly’s implemented paradigms. The

Market model oriented considerations are used to characterize market structures. The effects of Web 2.0, which are assigned to paradigms and therefore balanced with general trends of the informationcommunity, are centered here. The transformation of customers into corporate processes can be considered a major alteration of market structure. Applications of Web 2.0 (which cause contents to be increasingly produced, published, recommended and rated by users) imply an increasing integration of formerly non-involved groups to the added value. The relevant processes and markets change correspondingly. Often the involved users act without commercial interest und the corporate partners concentrate on the organization of value adding activities. This characterization of the “Web as a Power” which forms markets and consumers was already declared in 1999 within the Cluetrain Manifesto’s 95 theses (Levine et al., 2000). Theses 9 to 12 reflect the increasing force of consumers and networked conversations (Schroll & Neef, 2006). Furthermore technical specifications of Web 2.0 affect the market models. Technologies associated with Web 2.0 offer new potentials. Websites now offer the use of interactive functions and elements in the browser, based on AJAX, which were formerly known as applications being installed on PCs. Thus, simplified software can be offered simplified, for it saves the user the trouble of installation and care. Programs are run on servers, and data is also saved independent of devices. These considerations correlate with such paradigms as: “Web as a Platform”, “Lightweight

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Programming Models,” and “Software above the Level of a Single Device.” Cumulative trends can be found for these characteristics. Lately, a trend towards the use of so- called thin-clients can be observed in scenarios of network computing. Peer-to-peer technologies also support the paradigm of the web as a universal platform—to be used through a browser (Taft, 2006). Trends towards migration of monolithic applications and application-systems strengthen the paradigms in the direction of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Combined, Web 2.0 applications offer a significant potential to realize broad software/services by the use of Internet-based technologies (Keller, 2006; Mulpuru, 2006).

Activity Model Oriented View The activity sub-model is used to describe corporate added value. Besides the involvement of users to the added value, the mashups -- realizable by the consequent use of Web 2.0 paradigms -- use of user generated content and new localized connections of value adding activities have significant importance. Concerning the provision of content, the term user generatedcontent is discussed in the context of Web 2.0. Content, characterized as user generated, occurs on platforms which involve customers. The most common samples include: weblogs, wikis, and file sharing portals for an exchange of, for instance, photos (Flickr.com) or videos (YouTube. com). The history of user generated content in online communities and Internet forums goes back to 1994 with the porting of such existing prototypes as the WELL. The prototypes were exclusively limited to text-information at that time. In the course of technical development, possibilities have arisen for the user to act as a producer and provider of additional media-forms and contents (e.g., images, audio, and videos). The importance of correspondent approaches becomes apparent by the fact that 70 million active blogs are registered at the moment. Flickr has 5,000 page views per

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minute; YouTube uploads 30,000 videos daily; and Wikipedia yields 3.8 million articles in 200 languages (Schroll & Neef, 2006). Against this background the present users have to consider how to structure their processes and activities when concretely designing their market models; they also have to take into account how many producers will produce and provide how much content: that is, what interests new providers will gain from the overall-use of media and what existing providers will give away that revolutionizes their business model (Schroll & Neef, 2006). The increased interest in the active exposure to the Internet contains further potential - through new forms and possibilities of participation as well as through the increased networking of users - to find solutions to problems faster and more efficiently, as it has been until now, to reach new activity models. This assumption can be illustrated especially through the paradigms of “Harnessing Collective Intelligence” and “End of the Software Release Cycle” in the context of Web 2.0, where the use of collective intelligence and the renunciation of traditional software-development-processes are forecast. If one combines both approaches, a connection to the trend of open source-projects will occur. The development of open-source-software shows that results with comprehensive features (e.g., Linux) can emerge. The question for the motivation and organization of correspondent approaches is interesting since, to some extent, high quality results are achieved, although classical basic conditions—budget, client, agreements of aim and time, and payment for work—are missing (Langen & Hansen, 2004). Instead, selfdetermination of aims, quality-awareness of their own work, and internationally allocated working systems with self-organization and formal planning can be observed. It is also interesting to analyze the “mashup principle” as a special paradigm of Web 2.0. The realized added value by a combination of free available resources and services to “ambitious” user-adequate and complex service-offers has to

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be distinguished in this context. This induces a massive rethinking by many users and will cause an erosion of present added-value-structures. The open interfaces of Google Maps and Amazon. com in particular are used for the design of applications that combine contents and services of different providers for new offers. Tutorlinker. com provides a market that finds tutors with the description of their focus on content and prices based on their geographical location -- through an integration of Google Maps. In this context, the “microwork principle” is significant. The attractiveness and the success of many Web 2.0 applications are based on that. Users contribute to the success of the application. According to a survey, 57% of the Web 2.0 users can be classified as actively participating users (Result Gmb, 2007). This delineates a broad participation of users in the creation of contents. At Wikipedia, for example, a whole can be determined from many small contributions. Consequently, a network effect results and the users benefit from it to a great extend because they create and use contents collectively, for example, bookmarks in Del.icio.us, news at digg.com, gastronomy reviews at Qype.com, or hotel ratings at Tripadvisor.com (Schroll & Neef, 2006). This approach reflects the two paradigms of “Harnessing Collective Intelligence” and “Data is the Next Intel Inside.” The use of collective intelligence is directly discussed as an important trend and therefore supports the use of Web 2.0. The approach by Surowiecki (2004), entitled “Wisdom of the Crowds,” is often mentioned in this context. Two questions are combined: (a) Why is such a big group “smarter” than a single member of the group? and (b) How can the business life, economy, society, and nation be formed by the wisdom of a mass? As one could reveal through Wikipedia, when many work on something, something new and grand can arise. As regards the topic of “swarm intelligence,” contrary approaches also exist; these approaches mainly question the potential for innovation in collective systems (Lanier, 2006).

Capital Market Model Oriented View In a capital market model oriented view, the costs and revenues which have to be realized are characterized by the targeted business. A major aspect of the Web 2.0 applications is the fact that these are offered to the users free. In private contexts, users pay with their own content and with the attention they pay for the platform. For the financing of the offers, different characteristics can be found. Some providers (e.g., YouTube.com) offer their content and service free of charge and make profit by placing advertisements. Supplies (e.g., marketplace of Amazon.com) are partly offered, yet provisions are incurred to the adjustor. Other suppliers (e.g., Thinkfree.com), offer some supplies as basic services, which can be complemented by further offers with costs. Also a financing by membership fees for enhanced services for premium users can be accomplished (Xing.com). License-based offers can also be found, where the user pays for single contents or the duration of use. Mixed forms of these approaches also occur (Skiba et al., 2006). Another approach involves the use of positive effects of communities. A community increases its purchasing power and can negotiate better conditions for its members: e.g., for mobile phone contracts, DSL access, and hotel contingents. It doesn’t seem to be absurd to pay the participating users for their efforts. There are current approaches where providers pay users for the upload of particular contents. When recalling contents, the up-loader gets credited a particular amount, for example, in such online talent competitions as Spymac.com. The following aspects are also important and worthy of discussion: the revenue sharing among the users and the corporate use of Web 2.0 applications, including the creation of a corporate-internal wiki, blogsystem, or social networks. Internal social software components can be utilized by companies to match expertsystems in which expert-knowledge results from

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the wisdom of employees. This promises positive results for costs.

CORPORATE USE OF WEB 2.0: POTENTIAL AND RISKS The connection of Web 2.0 and corporate added value, discussed in this chapter, has initial ambiguity because of the illustrated explicit involvement of users with the added value. The approach of Web 2.0 propagates a (sometimes active) exchange of contents between users, their network, and communication. As a general rule, this happens without explicit commercial interests and often, at first, outside corporate action. Through the establishment of web-based communities (or the provisions of interaction platforms and their sales to commercial investors, or via IPOs), massive revenues are generated and business models are constituted. As far as the application of Web 2.0 in daily life, almost no commercial use can be realized; yet, more corporate users discover Web 2.0 applications, such as blogs, folksonomies, and social bookmarking privately. New challenges and changes for their business models result for the utilizing companies. As demonstrated, the corporate use of Web 2.0 applications with increasing importance is supported by fundamental, long-term trends. At the same time, it is striking that currently unstructured approaches to implementing Web 2.0 with corporate actions lead to the absurd. A prominent example includes sub-optimal behaviors, which were shown by the corporate use of weblogs. The revolt of employees of the Siemens Corporation against corporate management on the intranet caused headlines, as the company attempted to use the innovative power of social software as a novel instrument of corporate communication. The employees misused a blog, established by the corporate management, concerning customer satisfaction, to communicate about their discontent with corporate

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management (Seith, 2006). Other examples of the inadequate use entail the corporate assisted financial support of active and assumed independent bloggers and the upload of supposedly privately produced video-clips at YouTube (“Lonely Girl 15”). If corresponding approaches are made too offensive, positive potential can quickly change to negative effects. A direct, blind adaptation of corporations acting out of “traditional” surroundings and the takeover of non-adapted business models appear critical. The corporate use of Web 2.0 offers a promise for the intensification of customer relationships through web communities, email, and so on. This can happen through various instruments, including weblogs and active forms of customer analysis (e.g., the corporate analysis of statistics of the use of wikis and social networks). These methods gain importance and offer enhanced possibilities for meeting users’ individualized needs. Only the bundled integration of Web 2.0 paradigms into the corporate culture and explicit integration into the business models will ensure its maximal utilization. A comparison of common trends affecting companies makes it clear. The change of markets, associated with Web 2.0 is reflected in a trend, which is determined as the emergence of “prosumers” and has been fostered by companies for a long-time (von Kortzfleisch & Winand, 1997). In this context, Schwartz (2005), using the term “age of participation,” describes the increasing disappearance of the border between provider and buyer as well as between producer and consumer. Users are called prosumers because they enter the markets actively and the added value is affected by their attendance and semiprofessional contributions. The hitherto existing users become new providers. It should be noted in this context that the approaches of Web 2.0 support, or even accelerate, the networking of different participants. This trend correlates with steadily increasing corporate networking and the virtualization of service-establishment, which, in turn, are driven by the economic premise of

Corporate Added Value in the Context of Web 2.0

concentration on corporate core competences. Companies observe that the use of Web 2.0 applications leads to an increased productivity within groups. In general, the pattern of using Web 2.0 is characterized as employee-driven customization of IT applications or as bottom-up integration (LaMonica, 2006). Employees are using the Web 2.0 tools privately in the form of applications such photo and video sharing (e.g., YouTube or Flickr); they chat with each other and comment, using weblogs; make use of collaborative tagging of their bookmarks on platforms similar to Del. icio.us; and enroll in networks (such as Xing or LinkedIn). This way familiarity with Web 2.0 originates and gains relevance, and a transfer to the corporate context is easier to realize. Such an approach allows for viewing Web 2.0 as parallel to corporate design options that tend to shift towards outsourcing and service orientation. Taken together, these aspects affect the market and activity models of corporate business models. Overall, capital market models, the analysis of costs, and the use of Web 2.0 applications are likely to have an impact on future business models. The examination of the paradigms of O’Reilly and the use of Web 2.0 by companies demonstrates significant cost-saving potential. Cost advantages rank first in the reduction of piloting-phases and introduction-phases of systems (Mayfield, 2005) as Web 2.0 applications contain a big part of functionalities regarding collaboration. Costs within the software development processes pertaining to the implementation, introduction, and maintenance of software can be reduced. With web access, only the costs for installation and maintenance remain for the client. There is no need for the establishment of different versions or separate platforms and the capability of workstations does not have to be changed. However, different browser types as well as plug-ins may have to be installed. It is also essential to consider the characteristics of mobile and ubiquitous access possibilities and their limited ability for illustration and transfer. Upgrades are available

directly during the construction of the network and independent of the platform. Since data are stored online instead of local hard drives, the costs of software, synchronization, and transaction disappear. Finally, if one considers the text-phase and introduction-phase of Web 2.0 applications, it can be assumed that they can be shortened. Reasons for this include that Web 2.0 applications are kept simple in the ideal case; they are designed to be conventional, user-friendly, and easy to implement. The knowledge of experienced users, which was generated by the use in private contests, can be utilized. Training and further education costs can be reduced for this reason.

FUTURE TRENDS As demonstrated, the use of Web 2.0 technologies nowadays is an integral part of most people’s everyday life; in the future, it may have a significant influence on professional work as well. Another area of increasing importance is mobility and technologies that enable mobile working. Consequently, a link between formerly separate fields of mobile technologies and Web 2.0 applications has a potential to foster the diffusion of the mobile Internet. The principle of “Harnessing Collective Intelligence” can be extended to restricted mobile devices—small, battery driven, multifunctional devices carried by the user. The distinguishing principle of Mobile Web 2.0 is the fact that people carrying devices become prosumers rather than consumers. Jaokar & Fish (2006) use three guidelines to define seven principles of (future) Mobile Web 2.0: “Harnessing Collective Intelligence,” “Capturing Information at the Point of Inspiration,” and “Extending the Web.” The authors explain that mobile devices are ideally poised to capture user-generated content at the point of inspiration. Instead of various numbers (such as home or mobile numbers), they propose tags as a much more natural way to identify people.

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Mobile Web 2.0 will be multilingual and impact more people whose first language is not English. A global network of mobile phones will emerge. The authors assume that the emerging Mobile Web 2.0 will drive digital convergence, potentially through mashups. They conclude that the Mobile Web 2.0 will foster the usage of location-based services and mobile search services. It is apparent that suppliers of existing Web 2.0 services are looking for new opportunities to migrate successfully into mobile scenarios and offer their users access and possibilities to interact with their social network regardless of space and time. For instance, providers are already offering mobile access to formerly stationary used webbased services: TinyTube.net, which is focused on the distribution of mobile video, and partyStrands, a service combining stationary and mobile technologies for an improved user experience. Such preliminary approaches lack the user’s perception and most often offer only marginally adapted services. A multiplicity of these services makes little or no use of the options, potential mobile devices, and infrastructures offered. To illustrate, currently only a minority utilizes location-based services; furthermore, they do not take into account the limitations of mobile devices (specifically, user interfaces). Applications of the Mobile Web 2.0, contextual mobile social software, and mobile social networking are seen as core elements of the future mobile data communication. According to market analysis carried out by Informa Telecoms & Media (2006), the market for mobile communities is expected to reach 13 billion dollars by 2011. Based on the examples cited above, one can agree with Ahonen (2006): Call it Mobile Social Networks.... Call it Digital Communities on 3G. Call it mobile blogging, moblogging. Call it user-generated content on mobile. But trust me, Communities Dominate. We now have found our first true killer application for the 3G space. And it is the digital community services.

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Due to the massive diffusion of mobile technologies and the increasing number of people using social software, the targeted combination of these areas is viewed as a key to successful future applications.

CONCLUSION The availability of Web 2.0 applications in mobile contexts has already been realized; however, the potential of mobile devices and infrastructures (e.g., the extended possibilities of localization) have not been sufficiently analyzed (Alby, 2007). The need for further research becomes especially evident against the background of a growing convergence of communication instruments and mobile devices playing an increasingly important role. This chapter clarifies the requirements that affect companies that want to use Web 2.0 effectively and efficiently. The authors argue that the corporate use of Web 2.0 applications is reinforced by fundamental and long-term corporate trends. By adapting and migrating to new business models, companies can seize the momentum and utilize the current trends. To take advantage of the market structures and value adding activities as well as facilitate the distribution of the realized costs and revenues, a targeted transfer of business models should be done, particularly as regards the specific sub-models. Such an approach may serve as an effective implementation strategy for investigating the relationship between Web 2.0 and corporate added value.

REFERENCES Ahonen, T. (2006). Like SMS before it. Retrieved July 11, 2007, from http://communities-dominate. blogs.com/ brands/2006/10/like_sms_before. html

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Alby, T. (2007). Web 2.0. Munich, Germany: Carl Hanser. Chesbrough, H. W., & Rosenbloom, R. S. (2002). The role of the business model in capturing value from innovation. Industrial and Corporate Change, 11, 529–555. doi:10.1093/icc/11.3.529 Grob, H. L., vom Brocke, J., & Bensberg, F. (2005). Finanzwirtschaftliche bewertung von geschäftsmodellen im e-learning. In M.-H. Breitner & G. Hoppe (Eds.), E-learning (pp. 101-116). Heidelberg, Germany: Physica. Hoppe, G., & Breitner, M.-H. (2003). Classification and sustainability analysis of e-learning applications. Hannover, Germany: IWI. Informa Telecoms & Media. (2006). Mobile communities and user-generated content. Retrieved January 10, 2007, from http://www.informatm. com Jaokar, A., & Fish, T. (2006). Mobile Web 2.0. London: Futuretext. Keller, E. (2006). A new dogfight: SOA versus Web 2.0. Manufacturing Business Technology. Retrieved April 12, 2007, from http://www.mbtmag.com/current_issues/2006/june/col2.asp LaMonica, M. (2006). Web 2.0 entering corporate world slowly. Cnet News. Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://news.com.com/Web+2.0+entering+c orporate+world+slowly/2100-7345_3-6117854. html Langen, M., & Hansen, T. (2004). Wissensaustausch in open source projekten. In M. Engelien & K. Meissner (Eds.), Virtuelle organisation und neue medien (pp. 373-382). Lohmar, Germany: Eul. Lanier, J. (2006). The hazards of the new online collectivism. Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http:// www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html

Levine, R., et al. (2000). The cluetrain manifesto: The end of business as usual. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. Magretta, J. (2002). Why business models matter. Harvard Business Review, 5, 3–8. Mayfield, R. (2005). Many-to-many: Fear, greed and social software. Retrieved April 12, 2007, from http://many.corante.com Mulpuru, S. (2006). 5 trends for Web 2.0. SiliconIndia. Retrieved April 12, 2007, from http:// www.siliconindia.com/ magazine/fullstory.php/ PNH725517105 O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0. Retrieved November 15, 2006, from http://www.oreillynet. com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-isweb-20.html Pigneur, Y. (2000). The e-business model handbook. Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://www. hec.unil.ch/ yp/Pub/00-ebmh.pdf Result Gmb, H. (2007). Web 2.0 - begriffsdefinition und eine analyse der auswirkungen auf das allgemeine mediennutzungsverhalten. Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://www.result.de/ research-studien-web-2-0 Schroll, W., & Neef, A. (2006). Web 2.0 was ist dran? Perspektive Blau. Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://www.perspektive-blau.de/ wissen/0609a/0609a.htm Schwartz, J. (2005). The participation age. Retrieved April 11, 2007, from http://blogs.sun.com/ jonathan/date/20050404 Seith, A. (2006). Siemens-Mitarbeiter revoltieren im intranet. Spiegel Online. Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://www.spiegel.de/ wirtschaft/0,1518,439346,00.html Skiba, B., Tamas, A., & Robinson, K. (2006). Web 2.0: Hype or reality - a strategic analysis. London: Armapartners.

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Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds. New York: Doubleday. Taft, D. K. (2006). Ajax, Soa to merge. eWEEK. Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://www.eweek. com/article2/ 0,1895,2022638,00.asp von Kortzfleisch, H., & Winand, U. (1997). Tele-insuring: Der Beitrag neuer kommunikations- und informationstechniken (KIT) zur verbesserung der kundenorientierung im versicherungsbereich. DBW, 57(3), 337-355. zu Knyphausen-Aufsess, D., & Meinhardt, Y. (2002). Revisiting strategy: Ein ansatz zur systematisierung von geschäftsmodellen. In T. Bieger, N. Bickhoff, R. Caspers, D. zu Knyphausen-Aufsess, & K. Reding (Eds.), Zukünftige geschäftsmodelle (pp. 63-90). Berlin, Germany: Springer.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Activity Model: The activity model is used to describe corporate added value. Besides the involvement of users to the added value of mashups - realizable by the consequent use of Web 2.0 paradigms, the use of user generated content, and the connected new localization of value adding activities.

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Business Models: Business models are reduced to sub-models (the market model, the activity model, and the capital market model) to fulfill the task and are centered on the middleterm and long-term profit maximization of the concerned activity. Capital Market Model: Within a capital market model oriented view, the costs and revenues which have to be realized are characterized by the targeted business. Market Model: Market model oriented considerations are used to characterize market structures. The effects of Web 2.0, attributed to paradigms and therefore balanced with general trends in the information-community, are centered here. Migration: In the discipline of information systems, migration refers to the replacement or upgrade of applications and/or software systems with potentially better ones. Mobile Social Software: Social software designed for use on mobile devices. Prosumer: The trend towards the so-called “age of participation” provides that in the future there will be no more separation between bidder and buyer, producer and consumer. Today users are no longer only consumers; they have increasingly become producers. This new type of participant is called a prosumer.

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Chapter 10

A Social Capital Perspective on Collaboration and Web 2.0 Gunilla Widén-Wulff Åbo Akademi University, Finland Anna-Karin Tötterman Åbo Akademi University, Finland

ABSTRACT Social interaction technologies can successfully employ the previously untapped power of the Web to utilize the collaborative creation of information and user-driven content. In this chapter, the social capital framework is applied to illustrate how Web 2.0 tools and techniques can support effective information and knowledge management in organizations. Interactions within and between organizations generate important practices that underscore the role of social capital. Managing social capital for effective knowledge sharing is a complex process, and Web 2.0 lends some support for organizations by creating a new culture of voluntary, contributive, and collaborative participation. The argument is made that Web 2.0 technologies can be seen as important tools that can bridge the creation and sharing of knowledge in diverse organizational contexts.

INTRODUCTION During the last decade the processes of globalization and development of virtual tools for knowledge management has profoundly influenced many organizations. Groups and individuals must manage different social and cultural environments, dissimilar modes of communication and information processing, and various Internet-based technologies. This gives rise to new challenges and possibilities for DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch010

managing information and knowledge in organizations. The introduction of a service-oriented web which becomes increasingly social and interactive, defined by Tim O’Reilly (2005) as Web 2.0, raises the issue of computer self-efficacy or information competence that yields a higher performance-related outcome and a greater use of computers in organizations. The social nature of Web 2.0 emphasizes the importance of user skills termed electronic literacy (Godwin-Jones, 2006). To draw a deeper picture of the benefits and challenges associated with Web 2.0, we will ap-

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ply the social capital framework to illuminate how Web 2.0 tools and techniques can support effective knowledge sharing in organizations. As argued (Audunson, Vårheim, Aabø & Holm, 2007; Johnson, 2004; Tötterman, in press; Tötterman & Widén-Wulff, 2007; Widén-Wulff, 2007; Widén-Wulff et al., 2008; Widén-Wulff & Ginman, 2004), social capital can provide a suitable theoretical framework for understanding knowledge management processes in organizations.

BACKGROUND Research on social capital has been carried out in different disciplines and at different levels depending on the chosen perspective (e.g., Fukuyama, 1995; Putnam, 2000). At the organizational level, social capital has been connected, for example, to interunit resource exchange (Tsai & Ghoshal, 1998) and to individual gains in terms of status and career opportunities (Burt, 1997; Lin, 1999). There exists no unified definition of social capital, however. In this chapter, we use a definition of social capital by Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998, p. 243) that includes the individual and the social aspects: “The sum of actual and potential resources embedded within, available through, and derived from the network of relationships possessed by an individual or social unit. Social capital thus comprises both the network and the assets that may be mobilized through that network.” Social capital is also often described in three dimensions: a structural dimension (network character), a relational dimension (trust and social identity), and a content dimension (communication to facilitate social capital). The structural dimension includes the network structure and the nature of the network ties between the actors. Networks are viewed as the cornerstone for resource exchange and the ties can be described as information channels (Adler & Kwon, 2002). The relational dimension embraces social identity and trust. The notion of trust is a crucial aspect of

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social capital (Fukuyama, 1995). An atmosphere of trust among the members of an organization has been suggested as an important factor facilitating information and knowledge sharing, cooperation, and other forms of collective actions within and outside the social unit (Huotari & Iivonen, 2004). Identification is also viewed as an important part of relational social capital (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). Cognitive identification can be described as the process by which individuals view themselves as part of a social unit and define themselves by the group (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998; Tyler & Blader, 2001). Communication is seen as a critical aspect of social capital. It is considered a foundation for social capital and a key mechanism in generating further organizational goals: namely, intellectual capital and reduced transaction costs (Hazleton & Kennan, 2000). By communication, a common knowledge base can be created which facilitates further communication and information sharing. The communication content within the network structure can also be seen as an essential motivation to information practices (Adler & Kwon, 2002; Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). Further, versatile communicative ability is crucial in creating the communicative mechanism that creates in organizations further advantages with fruitful social capital (Hazleton & Kennan, 2000). It has been shown that the social capital framework is a usable navigation tool in picturing the information and knowledge sharing processes. Although social capital is inherent to every organization and group, it has not always received attention it deserves. Social capital is a context of dynamic environments for information sharing and continuously changing while following patterns and rhythms. It opens up relational, structural, and content dimensions related to sharing. It gives an overall picture to organizational and collaborative action and improves the understanding of the role of information and knowledge sharing in diverse institutional contexts and results in better information control.

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The new social interactive technologies within the concept of Web 2.0 allow new collaborative possibilities and place new demands in terms of knowledge sharing in organizations. These technologies are seen as a network of collaborative applications where users consume, create, and recreate information from several sources resulting in new contents and structure. The entire informational value is constructed by user action and user interaction. It is a social dynamic that includes how the information is used, understood, and re-invented all the time (Miller, 2006; Tredinnick, 2006a). One benefit of the Web 2.0 techniques is that they are technically not challenging. Sharing, for example, experiences and information on work procedures in a blog is rewarding when the person knows colleagues and peers will read about how the procedure works and contributes knowledge on the topic. The exchange of views leads to a more productive knowledge sharing environment (Brady, 2005; Ojala, 2005). The Web 2.0 technology also gives collaboration and knowledge sharing a visible structure; it is motivating to collaborate when one’s inputs are seen immediately. The social and interactive features of Web 2.0 are important reasons for their popularity. Social aspects of knowledge sharing are, however, not easy and straightforward to manage. There is a wide range of specific social factors that influence people’s willingness to share knowledge. Among other aspects, it has been acknowledged that interpersonal trust and commitment to the group or organization is of importance (e.g., Byrne, 2001; Newell & Swan, 2000). There is evidently a need for an interactive discussion - combining social capital aspects, knowledge sharing theories, and Web 2.0 techniques - to develop concepts from a common basis.

DIMENSIONS OF SOCIAL CAPITAL AND WEB 2.0 It has been shown that the different aspects of social capital bring a deeper understanding to the knowledge sharing processes. It has also been stated that Web 2.0 technologies and tools are bringing forward new collaborative possibilities. The authors will examine these new possibilities and demands through the lenses of social capital and its dimensions.

The Structural Dimension The structural dimension of social capital is defined through network structures and the nature of the network ties between the actors. Social interactions in the structures are channels for information flows. Through these interactions, an actor may gain information and also access to other actors and their resources. There is a need to know the network, how to access it, and what kinds of benefits there are within the network. Structures, ties, and networks are seen as enablers of efficient knowledge sharing. Web 2. 0 technologies give the sharing visible structures: for example, wikis finding their way into the workplace where they are seen as a possibility for employees collectively and easily to store, edit, and access work-related material. Wikis help the employees to collaborate electronically by merging fragmented knowledge in the organization into more usable entities and easily accessible data (Hasan & Pfaff, 2006). The wikis give collective knowledge a visible structure in which everyone can contribute. Organizational blogs are also a good example of giving a structural dimension to collaborative work. There are mainly two types of blogs associated with the workplace: internal and external blogs. External blogs are difficult to evaluate as knowledge sharing tools in an organization since these are personal blogs of employees only connected to that person’s individual interests. However, external blogs also shape a network,

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connecting persons in an organization to a wider network that could be used for collaborative purposes. The internal blogs are more important from the workplace point of view. They are often part of an intranet and are encouraged by the employer. Internal blogs seem to work best if they are the personal diary type, as were the original blogs. To work as a knowledge sharing technology, the blogs need to be non-alienating and should be the voice of the employers, not a management tool (Ojala, 2005). From the structural dimension point of view, linking between blog posts enables visible and public feedback and the shaping of communities (Brady, 2005) - useful information when developing effective knowledge sharing.

The Relational Dimension The relational dimension is defined through trust, identity, and roles. In the relational dimension the underlying motives for sharing are stressed. It has been shown that the exchange of information in online environments is highly dependent on social relationships. Although a social infrastructure often starts in face-to-face environments, online techniques and web platforms support the development of relational ties (Hall & Widén-Wulff, 2008). It has been said that Web 2.0 tools bring structure to collaborative processes. They also support possibilities to develop social relations, resulting in different kinds of benefits. There are a number of studies looking at blogs, wikis, and social networks as important tools of support for learning in different environments, e.g., the context of higher education (Craig, 2007). Hall and Davison (2007) have studied blogs as a tool to encourage the interaction between students and found that blogs increased reflective engagement with teaching material; there was also a higher level of shared peer support between class members. There is a learning outcome as a positive effect of social software, but it must be remembered that simply importing informal Web 2.0 applications

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does not automatically lead to stronger relations, giving positive effects (Selwyn, 2007). Although Web 2.0 tools are easy to adopt, new applications always demand some motivation from the individual to be able to adapt to the interactive tools. Trust is an important enabler to both motivating and using social technologies and needs to be integrated into this understanding. Trust is usually built over time (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995) and is not always possible in this kind of environment.

The Content Dimension The content dimension is defined as shared goals, common experience, language, and knowledge where shared meaning and collective knowledge are key aspects. The Web 2.0 technologies especially promote a shared language and collective knowledge. In a workplace, a collective view on specific problems may be mediated. Attitudes in the workplace have changed rapidly from looking at blogs as individual diaries with the description of the person’s political interests into being a more collective tool where several persons can participate and generate a wider knowledge base on a specific matter. With these features the blogs reflect a personal viewpoint and allow readers to respond and comment (Ojala, 2005), creating a dynamic context (Klamma, Cao, & Spaniol, 2007) and a collective viewpoint. Blogs also generate a common language which is usually very casual. Blogs are easy to use, informal, and allow lapses in language, grammar and typographical errors (Ojala, 2005). At the same time, this may create a serious flaw by flattening the expertise and undermining the basis of quality assurance (Brabazon, 2006). The dynamic nature of blogs may also cause problems, making the knowledge content unstable (Klamma et al., 2007). There are also some important cautions against the use of wikis in organizations. There is a risk that the wiki will be edited in a destructive manner to include irrelevant or even mislead-

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ing information. Here one encounters the same problems with quality assurance and reliability as mentioned above (Hasan & Pfaff, 2006). Despite some problematic issues concerning the quality of information produced through social software, there is an obvious strength in the possibility of generating collective knowledge, viewpoints, and action. This is a clear benefit to effective knowledge sharing and management.

Web 2.0 as a Generator of Social Capital, Collaboration, and Knowledge Sharing Knowledge work may be defined as using one’s intellectual and social capital to create new knowledge (Cohen & Prusak, 2001). Within the objectivist perspective on knowledge management, knowledge is understood as an entity that people possess and which can be transferred to other people. From the practice-based perspective, knowledge is seen as socially constructed and embedded in people’s actions. From this point of view, the focus is often on social and socio-technological conditions interacting with collaborative knowledge sharing across different groups, communities, and regimes in both offline and online settings. One of the problems of knowledge work and knowledge management is the difficulty in getting people to share their tacit knowledge. This is where the social and interactive tools of Web 2.0 could bring some positive effects and support the sharing of expertise (Angeles, 2003; Stover, 2004). As mentioned earlier, there are many different kinds of social software applications. Specifically, the public nature of blogs and wikis are seen as motivating people to write and contribute; it enables them to create ideas, accumulate knowledge, create networks, share, and manage (Brady, 2005; Hasan & Pfaff, 2006). Web 2.0 in fact highlights one of the ideals: free and open generation of information and knowledge in social interactions -- an intersection of users, social contexts, and information

systems. Therefore, one can claim that Web 2.0 is constructed out of a real use and need, based on the user’s learning processes both offline and online. In contrast, earlier information system initiatives in organizations, such as the managed intranets, were characterized by the organization’s preferred and idealized view of itself, harming the free and democratic generation and capitalization of the organizational member’s knowledge (Tredinnick, 2006b). It has been shown that there are a number of possibilities using Web 2.0 techniques as knowledge sharing tools in organizations. At the same time, there is a need for a critical view and a need to avoid adopting them automatically to solve all knowledge management issues. Information and knowledge in any organization is individual and specific for each environment. Knowledge management is contextualized by the organization and includes information as an object and a user construct (Kirk, 2005). The fact that it is highly specific as to what constitutes information and knowledge in an organization means that the knowledge management initiatives must be brought to the local context where the human and social processes underpin the formal structures enabling information sharing. The ability to manage people and what they know - in other words, the human and social networks - is known to be a complex and challenging process. In this respect, the use of blogs and wikis for creating ideas, sharing knowledge, and shaping communities and networks is found to be suitable for various knowledge processes (Klamma et al., 2007). Important core competences of using Web 2.0 technologies in organizations encompass the fact that these tools are foremost; that they induce trust and make users co-developers of information and content. Harnessing collective intelligence can be reached through customer self-service and developing lightweight user interfaces (O’Reilly, 2005). Web 2.0 tools can be seen as generators of social capital and knowledge sharing, where

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social capital refers to both norms and networks as facilitating collective action and encouraging cooperation. Understanding how social capital works is vital for creating new intellectual capital in organizations where a new culture of voluntary, contributive, and collaborative participation is emerging (Brady, 2005). As such, the structural, relational, and content dimensions of social capital become visible in the analysis of social software and knowledge sharing in organizations

FUTURE TRENDS Knowledge at the organizational level is created in conversations, collaboration, and different social contexts (Avram, 2006). The ability to share information and knowledge among different communities, groups, and discourses is crucial for an organization’s innovative capability (Davenport & Hall, 2002; Kogut & Zander, 1992). To fully understand and utilize these knowledge processes, the focus should be on social and socio-technological conditions interacting with the knowledge processes (Orlikowski, 2002). This kind of knowledge work is seen as supportive of social capital (Cohen & Prusak, 2001). Among the positive effects of having a high level of social capital is the availability of intellectual resources through networks and through the relationships between individuals and social units. However, managing social capital and knowledge related processes are challenging areas. One of the problems knowledge work and management faces is the difficulty in encouraging people to share their tacit knowledge. Until now, writings on Web 2.0 in organizations have merely focused on describing the new technology tools and techniques and their potential benefits, as well as voiced certain skepticism towards their value (Avram, 2006; Dvorak, 2006; Ojala, 2005; Tredinnick, 2006b). In the future, it would be of great importance to conduct deeper studies based upon multi-sided empiri-

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cal research into the interaction and integration of social contexts, social software, and various knowledge processes within different workplace and organizational settings. It would be of interest to explore, examine, and theorize on such questions as: How are the Web 2.0 techniques used in organizations? How are they affecting knowledge processes in organizations? How are they interacting with different social contexts? As social software continues to expand, new tools will emerge that will bring new challenges to information and knowledge sharing in organizations. Regardless of how the future of the web would materialize, there will always be challenges in understanding individuals’ information behavior and effective knowledge management in online environments and organizational contexts.

CONCLUSION Managing social capital for effective knowledge sharing is a complex process, but Web 2.0 lends some concrete support in this organizational challenge. In this chapter, we have addressed the fact that social interaction technologies have a potential in terms of knowledge management in organizations. Contributing to a blog or wiki may help employees to collaborate electronically and share their expertise with others by merging fragmented knowledge into more usable entities and accessible data (Hasan & Pfaff, 2006). The informal character of blogs and wikis also supports the ease of adoption of these tools. However, this also challenges the issue of quality of the information produced. In addition, new technologies may demand a certain degree of motivation from individuals to be able to adapt to the interactivity of Web 2.0. Trust is considered an important motivator while the motives for using blogs as a knowledge sharing tool include the possibility of increasing one’s own knowledge base, exploring one’s thoughts, supporting and disproving one’s own ideas.

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Web 2.0 tools that allow knowledge processes to function in and between individuals, units, and social networks may well support developing the social capital of an organization. Furthermore, Web 2.0 technologies afford the possibility of increasing one’s knowledge base, exploring one’s thoughts, and supporting and disproving one’s ideas. Overall, Web 2.0 techniques and applications can be seen as important tools that can bridge different knowledge sharing processes and collaboration between individuals and groups in organizational contexts.

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Burt, R. S. (1997). The contingent value of social capital. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42(2), 339–365. doi:10.2307/2393923 Byrne, R. (2001). Employees: Capital or commodity? Career Development International, 6(6), 324–330. doi:10.1108/EUM0000000005988 Cohen, D., & Prusak, L. (2001). In good company: How social capital makes organizations work. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Compeau, D., Higgins, C. A., & Huff, S. (1999). Social cognitive theory and individual reactions to computing technology: A longitudinal study. MIS Quarterly, 23(2), 145–158. doi:10.2307/249749 Craig, E. M. (2007). Changing paradigms: Managed learning environments and Web 2.0. Campus-Wide Information Systems, 24(3), 152–161. doi:10.1108/10650740710762185 Davenport, E., & Hall, H. (2002). Organizational knowledge and communities of practice. Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, 36, 170–227. doi:10.1002/aris.1440360105 Dvorak, J. C. (2006). Web 2.0 baloney. Retrieved January 15, 2008, from www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1931858,00.asp Fukuyama, F. (1995). Social capital and the global economy. Foreign Affairs (Council on Foreign Relations), 74(5), 89–103. Godwin-Jones, R. (2006). Emerging technologies: Tag clouds in the blogosphere: Electronic literacy and social networking. Language Learning & Technology, 10(2), 8–15. Hall, H., & Davison, B. (2007). Social software as support in hybrid learning environments: The value of the blog as a tool for reflective learning and peer support. Library & Information Science Research, 29(2), 163–187. doi:10.1016/j. lisr.2007.04.007

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Selwyn, N. (2007) Web 2.0 applications as alternative environments for informal learning - a critical review. Paper presented at the OECD-KERIS expert meeting, Cheju Island, South Korea. Stover, M. (2004). Making tacit knowledge explicit: The ready reference database as codified knowledge. RSR. Reference Services Review, 32(2), 164–173. doi:10.1108/00907320410537685 Tötterman, A.-K. (in press). Kommunikationsdimensionen i socialt kapital. En studie av informationsdelning, förtroende och social identitet vid en universitetsfakultet. (The communication dimension in social capital: A study of information sharing, trust and social identity at a university faculty.) (Meddelanden från Ekonomisk-statsvetenskapliga fakulteten vid Åbo Akademi.) Tötterman, A.-K., & Widén-Wulff, G. (2007). What a social capital perspective can bring into the understanding of information sharing in a university context. Information Research, 12(4). Retrieved January 9, 2008, from http://InformationR.net/ir/12-4/colis/colis19.html Tredinnick, L. (2006a). Anarchy and the organisation: The intranet. In . Proceedings of Online Information, 27-29, 163–167. Tredinnick, L. (2006b). Web 2.0 and business: A pointer to the intranets of the future? Business Information Review, 23(4), 228–234. doi:10.1177/0266382106072239 Tsai, W., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital and value creation: The role of intrafirm networks. Academy of Management Journal, 41(4), 464–476. doi:10.2307/257085 Tyler, T. R., & Blader, S. L. (2001). Identity and co-operative behaviour in groups. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 4(3), 207–226. doi:10.1177/1368430201004003003

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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Knowledge Management: A broad concept which refers to the theoretical and practical base for the effective management of organizational knowledge. Knowledge Work: Creation, application, and utilization of knowledge. Includes the development and use of tacit knowledge. Social Capital: Refers to capital that is created and nurtured in social relations. Social Interaction Technologies: An assortment of interactive and collaborative applications, such as blogs and wikis, where users can consume, create, and recreate information resulting in new contents and structure. Web 2.0: An Internet phenomenon where new competencies emerge in the form of more social and interactive uses of the web. Wikis: Web-based applications that can be used for collaborative knowledge management.

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Chapter 11

Social Capital, Social Networks, and the Social Web The Case of Virtual Volunteering Dhrubodhi Mukherjee Southern Illinois University, USA

ABSTRACT Social interaction technologies create communicative possibilities that go beyond dyadic interactions and across physical boundaries, bringing a qualitative shift in the functioning of the Internet. The present chapter employs social capital and social networks perspectives to identify the social determinants of virtual volunteering in the age of Web 2.0, explores the social motivation of volunteers who perform tasks using the social Web in the context of online volunteering, and addresses the dynamic interplay of social capital, social networks, and the social Web with implications for virtual volunteering. The argument furthered is that active participation in social networks generates social capital and facilitates the development of the social Web.

INTRODUCTION The Social Web or Web 2.0 refers to an aggregation of social interaction and collaboration technologies, including blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networking sites, photo and video sharing services, and simulated 3-D virtual worlds – a phenomenon, which has brought about a qualitative shift in the functioning of the Internet (O’Reilly, 2005). The Social Web has displayed an immense potential to create online social environments (Mikroyannidis, 2007). From DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch011

a medium for information retrieval and electronic mail exchange, the World Wide Web has grown into a comprehensive platform for social interaction and collaboration with rich communicative possibilities. The Social Web has developed over the recent years through smaller decentralized initiatives worldwide. As such, the Social Web is becoming a platform for the creation of a World Volunteer Web1 where virtual volunteers can communicate and interact with volunteer organizations and volunteer managers to explore and pursue common goals and interests. This evolution has resulted in the formation of new web-based organizations in the U.S., such as the

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VolunteerMatch2 which aims to help prospective volunteers find suitable volunteer opportunities in their communities. Virtual or online volunteering is the process of volunteering performed from an offsite or remote location through the use of the Internet (Cravens, 2000, 2006; Ellis & Cravens, 2000; Fussell & Setlock, 2003). Today, many national and international organizations recruit virtual volunteers to perform various tasks (Capeling-Alakija, 2001). United Nations Volunteer Programme, Amnesty International, SeniorNet, and Elder Wisdom Circle are some of the early adopters of virtual volunteering. Created as a virtual volunteering segment under the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)3, a UN global development network, the United Nations Volunteers (UNV)4 program has been designed to connect prospective volunteers, primarily from developed countries, with non-profit organizations to assist the low development regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Cravens, 2006). UNV defines online volunteering as “a form of social behaviour, undertaken freely over the Internet, which benefits the community and society at large as well as the volunteer, and which is not driven by financial considerations.”5 The United Nations Volunteers program launched a website6 to facilitate virtual volunteering by supporting collaboration between development organizations and volunteers over the world. In 2000, in association with Cisco Systems the UNV program started a joint initiative called NetAid7 to utilize the power of information technology to combat poverty around the world by raising awareness among young generations (Cravens, 2006). Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam (2000) expressed concerns that Americans are becoming detached from civic activities and community life, resulting in a loss of so-called social capital. According to Putnam, social capital stands for the value—economic, emotional, spiritual, and social—that people generate by engaging in social relationships (1995a, 1995b). Putnam considered

social capital as the glue holding communities together with the power of cooperative actions. At the core of Putnam’s proposition is the notion that social capital is dictated by how networks of individuals in a community create conditions where people are inclined to do things for one another. In his seminal work, Bowling Alone, Putnam (2000) argued that social capital in America was declining and that Americans were becoming less engaged in collective and informal interactions, including volunteerism. After attributing several reasons for the decline in social capital, Putnam singled out television for its detrimental influence. Putnam (2000) asserted that TV has atomized local communities by providing people with a source of passive entertainment within the comforts of their homes. As a result, Putnam (2001) claimed, social activities and civic engagement in recent decades have been replaced with television viewing and cautioned that the Internet might take the same route. Some scholars, however, believe that unlike TV, the Internet has interactive potential and may connect rather than disconnect people (Benschoten, 2000; Galston, 2000). Overall, different technological innovations have helped people make time commitments to other than traditional volunteering and civic engagement activities (Robinson & Goeffrey, 1997). From the early 1950’s to the present day, television, videogames, the iPod, the iPhone, MP3 players, and electronic gadgets as well as the overall digitalization of entertainment have all had a profound displacement impact on the social engagement that takes place during leisure time. As the Internet penetration among American households has grown, so have concerns over the possible unfavorable effects on social capital. A Pew Internet & American Life (2007) survey suggested that nearly 75 percent of Americans reported to have used the Internet, a 10 percent increase from year 2005. Almost 92 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 are on the Internet. The report indicated that on a typical day, one third of Internet users go online for “no obvious reason”

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(Finn, 2006). However, one study, found that heavy Internet use was generally associated with high levels of participation in voluntary associations (Wellman, 2001 As of today, virtual volunteering is an emerging field involving thousands of individuals and organizations around the world; however, there is a paucity of empirical research and theoretical frameworks to understand the social implications of these activities. The present chapter addresses a relationship between social capital, social networks and the Social Web, and discusses the scholarly debate on the virtue of the Social Web in the context of online volunteering. The author employs the social capital and social networks perspectives to explore the social determinants behind virtual volunteering.

BACKGROUND The practice of virtual volunteering is a comparatively recent phenomenon. However, volunteering using telephone connections has a longer historical precedence (Benschoten, 2000; Blanchard & Horan, 1998). In the early 1970s, Project Gutenberg began recruiting virtual volunteers in a nationwide effort to digitalize books available in the public domain (Hart, 1992). The idea received further advance when a California based non-profit organization named Impact Online initiated the Virtual Volunteering Project to promote volunteering practices among non-profit organizations (Ellis & Cravens, 2000). The project identified organizations that already employed virtual volunteers in their existing programs and also introduced virtual volunteering to new organizations. The Virtual Volunteering Project later shifted its base to the University of Texas at Austin.8 A Pew Internet & American Life national survey found that 67 percent of teenagers and young adults are involved in civic activities and social networking using the social features of the Internet, the largest among all age groups (Len-

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hart, Madden, Macgill, & Smith, 2007). Online social networking sites provide an opportunity to maintain a web-profile with an array of other services (such as instant messaging, email, photo and video sharing) and the ability to connect with friends. MySpace and Facebook are popular social networking sites with more than 120 million members (Weber, 2007). MySpace and Facebook have recently added new forums for civic participation on their respective sites. The Facebook network runs several community action projects where unfamiliar volunteers from the same neighborhoods connect with one another through a Facebook group to raise funds or donations for such projects as Actions Against Hunger. ServiceLeader.org, a website maintained by the University of Texas at Austin, lists many tasks that virtual volunteers can perform: such as, conducting research for a cause, data collection and scrutiny, news tracking and media analysis, tutoring and mentoring, legal consultations, providing accounting and tax advice, developing business and technology plans, translation and proofreading, providing multimedia expertise in desktop publishing, graphic and web design, and assisting with computer technology.9 Many organizations, such as SeniorNet, encourage skilled senior citizens to get involved in volunteering by using the Internet. Various population segments -- including the elderly, people with disabilities, women, and minorities -- can now engage in social capital generating activities through the Social Web. The introduction of social interaction technologies has helped the Internet to reflect the real world with its rich social connections and interactions more closely. When Peter Hoschka coined the phrase “the Social Web” in 1998, he initiated the possibility of merging various social interactive features of the Internet in one single platform (Hoschka, 1998). The vagaries of human behavior have become more apparent in computer enabled interactions (Mukherjee, 2007). The concept and the practices of the Social Web

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have raised expectations of the possible positive impact of the Internet on civic engagement, citizen participation, and volunteering (Dunlop & Holosko, 2007).

Virtual Volunteering Virtual volunteering emanates from the convergence of computer and communication technologies (Monge & Contractor, 2003). This new form of online interaction causes a “spatial transformation” by dissociating spatial proximity from real life functions (Castells, 1996, p. 394). Wellman (2001) maintained that when computer networks connect real people, they become social networks. The rapid growth of information and communication technologies has expanded social networks beyond geographic limitations (Wellman, 2001). As a result, participants of volunteer activities become disembodied from their geographic locations and integrated into functional virtual networks (Castells, 1996). These networks open up multiple possibilities for virtual volunteers and the organizations/communities for which they serve by forming social ties beyond their immediate geographic boundaries and by sharing the skills and resources embedded across these social ties. Volunteering on the web operates on the same altruistic and philanthropic principles as that of on-site volunteering. The motivation for virtual volunteers stems from the desire to see their contribution make a meaningful difference for the communities they care about. Thus, this kind of volunteering also reaffirms accountability for the organizations they serve. The collaborative work environment on the Internet, sustained by both synchronous and asynchronous communications, positively reinforces prosocial behavior in volunteers (Sproull, Conley, & Moon, 2005). Moreover, virtual volunteers get access to a wide range of information on the Internet about the organization and their respective assignments before signing up for the task. The availability of information

online gives these netizens a further advantage, as they could voice their concerns and opinions in an interactive environment. These arrangements help relieve stress, doubts, and misunderstandings for virtual volunteers while sustaining their motivation. Sproull and colleagues argue that social networking on the Internet provides volunteers with a unique platform for social support and social learning, which is very important for maintaining and increasing their social motivation. Volunteering in cyberspace has several inherent advantages that have been attracting organizations from around the world (Gardyn, 2006). Because it is done through the Internet infrastructure, virtual volunteering produces an opportunity to access a wide range of services that could not have been easily located around particular geographic areas; for example, organizations in remote areas with an Internet connection would find it very useful to connect with a virtual volunteer from another place (Cravens, 2006). Secondly, virtual volunteering has been estimated to save considerable resources for both the volunteer and the agencies they serve, as organizations can save on office space and overhead expenses by employing virtual volunteers. Participating volunteers also enjoy enormous flexibility to perform their tasks. Time flexibility reduces volunteers’ stress and gives them the ability to work within the confines of their own schedules. To manage volunteering online is also less expensive than on-site since there is no transportation cost involved, the return on investments is much higher, and technology and staff operating cost are minimal. Moreover, managers acquire access to a wide pool of volunteers from geographically dispersed areas; this access renders ease and diversity to their recruitment efforts. Recent empirical research (Amichai-Hamburger, 2008) avers that volunteers who perform their tasks online are more educated, hail from higher socio-economic strata, and are more likely to hold professional positions. Generally, virtual volunteers perform tasks that are highly professional in nature: namely, data

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entry, accounting, translation, business plans and grant writing assistance, and computer technology support (Sproull, Conley, & Moon, 2005). Virtual volunteering involves the use of Internet-based tools (e.g., e-mail, listservs, chat rooms, MOOs, VOIP telephony, and webcams) to deliver assigned tasks over distance. Volunteers communicate their work progress via email to a project manager. They are primarily employed by the not-for-profit human service and political organizations to perform specific tasks that require specialized skill-sets, which organizations either cannot afford or cannot get access to outside of the virtual environment. Similar to face-to-face volunteering, virtual volunteers need to self-motivate themselves and commit to a time-line. Organizations, by contrast, must provide basic infrastructure and administrative support to help volunteers perform their tasks in virtual environments. As virtual volunteering expands, it creates opportunities for people who have hitherto remained on the receiving end of volunteering. The online nature of volunteering has paved the way for a population group, whose physical mobility is restricted either by disability or old age, to become actively engaged in volunteering (Strathdee, 2005). The Pew Internet & American Life Project (2006) research shows that Internet penetration is growing among the elderly. Older adults have the time, knowledge and skills to contribute to many social causes across the world, but may be restricted by age and mobility issues. Oraves (2000) observed that almost 53 percent of people with disabilities have recognized the Internet as their window to volunteering opportunities. Volunteering online adds more value to an organization. Though organizations pursue uniform rules for both online and onsite volunteers, demographic characteristics of virtual volunteers make the former more sustainable. Major corporations, e.g., Hewlett-Packard, are allocating time to their employees for online volunteering or to work with disadvantaged groups. Other organizations

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have created volunteering opportunities for their retirees. Thus, virtual volunteering technology has enabled the inclusion of highly skilled elderly and disabled people to use their vast knowledge and work experiences to help social causes. Elder Wisdom Circle10 is an organization that allows elderly people to “adopt” grandchildren through the Internet to mentor and advise them. Similarly, the “disability rights movement” has received a good amount of fund-raising online through a network of virtual volunteers who are disabled themselves (Galston, 2000). Thus, through cooperative action, conventionally disadvantaged groups receive an opportunity to empower themselves and become more fully engaged and integrated in inter-generational and cross-sectional social networks.

DISCUSSION Social capital theorists assume that human relationships have intrinsic values that, if nurtured according to the society’s norm, could produce positive outcomes for society as a whole and for individuals in particular. Putnam (2000) termed the summation of such relationships as social capital, and thought that, if harnessed, they could bring about coordinated action among groups of individuals. Pierre Bourdieu (1986), however, believed that social capital stemmed from structural hierarchies of society which allowed persons better positioned in social, economic, and cultural hierarchy to use their social networks to their advantage. Economists and structural social scientists have observed that human relationships are embedded with certain values depending on their interactions (Benkler, 2006). Through communication across social networks of connected individuals, groups, and communities, such values are accrued and shared by the individual and collective entities. These values are resources generated outside the market in the domain of social relationships by connected actors; they can function emotionally

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as support from a friend during stress and instrumentally as economic support from a local church (Antonnuci, 2001). Putnam’s view of the Internet vis-à-vis social capital had drawn criticism from researchers who wanted him to take a more definite stance on the potential of the Internet as it relates to social capital (Field, 2003; Fukuyama, 2001). In his book Better Together, Putnam showcased the online portal Craigslist, a network of community based message boards, as an example of successful “tapping” of the Internet’s potential to nurture social capital (Putnam & Feldstein, 2003). Putnam, however, has not carried out any empirical study of the connecting power of the Internet. Nevertheless, with advances in social interaction technologies, the Internet is emerging as a vehicle for the creation of a global multi-level social network. Social networks are constituted by a set of relational ties across several sets of actors (nodes), which together form a social structure (Scott, 2001). Network theorists argue that a proper understanding of social capital requires a more precise analysis of the specific qualities and configurations of network ties (Wasserman & Faust, 1998). Putnam distinguishes two types of networks that determine the characteristics of social capital: bridging and bonding ties (or exclusive and inclusive ties). Bridging ties refers to diverse networks that encompass more distant ties or weak ties outside of one’s close networks, such as operational relationships with co-workers and other people at professional online forums. Bonding ties refer to relationships that are characterized by homogenous (similar) networks between people who are alike and share high trust and reciprocity, such as immediate family members, close friends, and neighbors (Putnam, 2000). Coleman (1988) labeled these bonding ties dense and closed networks, dense because they are emotionally rich and closed because boundaries are such that outsiders or persons with different characteristics find it hard to assimilate. According to Haythornthwaite and Wellman

(1998), the effectiveness of social networks that can generate social capital would depend on the structure of the network where communication takes place. The structure of social networks consists of both strong and weak ties that determine the quality of communication and the exchange of embedded resources, which eventually lead to social capital formation. As strong ties, bonding is characterized by emotional involvement, while bridging ties are mostly weak ties enriched with opportunities to earn instrumental support or referrals that help to move up the social ladder. The notion of bridging networks is more explicitly explored by Burt (1992) who called attention to the gap between different network clusters. A bridging and linking network transcends this gap by providing opportunities for diverse transaction of resources across varied networks. The social network theory of media use (Haythornthwaite, 1999) maintains that technology mediated human interactions evolve with the intensification of the quality of communication. The theory predicts that interaction through social networks would be more frequent among participants who have strong ties in real life and would be weak among those with weak ties. When friendship networks expand in real life, the friendship would need further reinforcement through the Social Web technologies. This works on the assumption that one utilizes multiple communication techniques; in short, friendship networks expand the Social Web providing that platform. Thus Haythornthwaite proposes an attractive proposition that participation in social networks could supplement face-to-face communication and positively influence the accumulation of the social capital by adding more units to the already existing social network. Communication is an important ingredient in the formation of social capital, and the mode of communication, whether face-to-face or through a social network, impacts the scope of social capital. As the quality of the interaction between human beings and technology progresses, people

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create new social spaces where social capital is generated. The Social Web has exponentionally multiplied such tools of communication and made them available for everyone’s use. Wellman (2001) argued that modern social association has undergone significant changes along with the technological facilitation of social communications. He claimed that the definition of community has undergone a transformation from territorial communities into a set of social connections that exist across individual social networks, which he called “networked individualism.” Still, Wellman has been optimistic that online networks would gradually increase social capital in communities by strengthening social ties and facilitating civic engagement. The mechanisms for generating the two important ingredients of social capital, namely trust and reciprocity, in physical space and real time do not require traditional methods of regular onsite participation. The Social Web reduces the time it takes to build norms that are important for accumulating social capital in communities. The phenomena of online social networking sites, forums, blogs, and wikis have made the Internet much more socially entrenched and behaviorally fluid. Furthermore, social networks can accrue the benefits of social capital by facilitating community action and community cohesion, helping people easily engage in social networks, making them accessible through the Internet, and providing strong reference points of trust through the connectivity of their web platforms. The social capital generated through volunteering online helps participants associate with new networks of friends and support. Friendship networks, emotional support, and building trust have been identified as important factors in developing social capital (Schultz, 1961). As volunteering incorporates social interaction tools in its repertoire, with each new innovation the mode of interaction between the volunteer and the organization or community goes through transformations. Today, users incorporate multiple channels and

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add newer modes of online communication to their existing ones to accommodate the emotional and communicational demands resulting from a qualitative change in virtual relationships. For instance, someone who started primarily with basic e-mail communication may upgrade to using online chat, Internet telephony (e.g., Skype), or video conferencing software based on the requirements of a task level of interaction. As a rule, virtual volunteers who develop strong social ties with the organization/community use more than one Internet tool (e-mail, forum, listserv, blog, etc.) in their work. Thus, newer channels of communication are added to the existing ones leading to closer involvement with the network.

FUTURE TRENDS While the beginning of the Social Web era has started a process of re-conceptualization of volunteering on empirical and theoretical grounds, research of virtual volunteering is still in its exploratory stages. In the absence of a method for tracking every instance of online volunteering, there is no empirical data on the prevalence and distribution of virtual volunteering across organizations (Cravens, 2006). Overall, virtual volunteering is an important phenomenon that needs a rigorous examination to help the scholarly community, policy makers, and practitioners understand the nature of emerging civic engagement through the Internet. It has been suggested that social interactions through virtual networks can be supplementary to existing social relations. The Social Web, therefore, is a communicative tool that adds to or facilitates the social connectedness of humanity. Higher participation in a social network increases its size and contributes to bridging ties, as people who participate are more likely to communicate with diverse categories of individuals. The scholarly community works on developing conceptualizations of virtual volunteering, typologies, and theoretical frameworks (Acevedo,

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2005; Murray & Harrison, 2002). Future studies, however, may also focus on the negative side of online social networks and the unintended consequences of networked social interactions. Finally, it would be significant to trace whether and how the Social Web will change the essence or notion of social capital, as we know it from Bourdieu, Coleman, and Putnam. The prospects of the Social Web may be difficult to predict considering the pace with which social interaction technologies are evolving. Investments in broadband infrastructure, which had brought major computer networks of the world into one connected platform, have revolutionized patterns of communication for organizations and communities across geographic boundaries (Aneesh, 2006). Under these circumstances, virtual volunteering creates new opportunities for social cohesion and international social development worldwide. As mass usage brings down related costs and makes technology more accessible (Norris, 2001), virtual volunteering becomes instrumental in creating a coalition of partnerships for social and human development that span across individuals, communities, organizations, and governments.

CONCLUSION Virtual volunteering has emerged as an outlet for social engagement; it aspires to balance the lack of civic participation with the growing opportunities for social interaction provided by the Social Web. The virtual volunteering model is highly flexible and makes it possible for volunteers to participate in social causes from their homes and workplaces through an ensemble of communication tools brought to the Internet by the generation of Web 2.0 technologies (ILO, 2004). The growing interest in virtual volunteering (Cravens, 2000, 2006) suggests that awareness of the importance of civic participation exists across communities, but the method of such participation has undergone a significant change.

Virtual volunteering as a form of social interaction, centers on performing a given task; at the same time, it helps volunteers to reach out to one another and form lasting relations. These relations include volunteers, volunteers and agencies, and the communities they serve. Through communication across social networks of connected individuals, groups, and communities social values are accrued and shared by individual and collective entities. Through the process of social interaction during volunteering, virtual volunteers serve their communities and contribute to the accumulation of social capital assets in society. The Internet has created avenues where asynchronous communication is able to play a major role in the disbursement of volunteering services. Thus, it has created a win-win situation for volunteers and the organizations they serve by adding flexibility of time and place to the world of volunteering. Online social networks have altered the traditional theoretical assumptions about social capital formation, which have long suggested that only prolonged civil participation in a primarily face-to-face environment will lead to its creation. The rules of social engagement in a social network environment on the Internet follow a different path; they generate community trust and reciprocity through the creation of reputable web portals that benefit from community goodwill and the affirmation of millions of social networks dispersed all over the globe. To summarize, the Social Web reduces the amount of time and effort required to increase social capital assets and enhance the community’s positive outcomes by enabling rich social interactions. Thus, active participation in social networks generates social capital, and the Social Web facilitates such participation by providing the necessary interactive platforms.

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Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Coleman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94, S95–S12. doi:10.1086/228943 Cravens, J. (2000). Virtual volunteerism: Online volunteers providing assistance to human service agencies. In J. Finn & G. Holden (Eds.), Human services online: A new arena for service delivery (pp. 119-136). New York: Haworth Press.

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Ellis, S. J., & Cravens, J. (2000). The virtual volunteering guidebook. Palo Alto, CA: ImpactOnline. Retrieved December 15, from http://www. serviceleader.org/new/documents/vvguide.pdf Field, J. (2003). Social capital: Key ideas. New York: Routledge. Finn, J. (2006). An exploratory study of email use by direct service social workers. Journal of Technology in Human Services, 24(4), 1–20. doi:10.1300/J017v24n04_01 Fukuyama, F. (2001). Social capital, civil society and development. Third World Quarterly, 22(1), 7–20. doi:10.1080/713701144 Fussell, S. R., & Setlock, L. D. (2003). Informal communication in an online volunteer community: Implications for supporting virtual relationships. Unpublished manuscript, Carnegie Mellon University.

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Galston, W. A. (2000). Does the Internet strengthen community? National Civic Review, 89(3), 193–202. doi:10.1002/ncr.89302 Gardyn, R. (2006). Volunteering goes virtual. Chronicle of Philanthropy, 8. Retrieved November 1, 2008, from http://philanthropy.com/free/ articles/v18/i07/07t00501.htm Hart, M. (1992). Guttenberg: The history and philosophy of project Gutenberg. Retrieved March 26, 2007, from http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/ Gutenberg:The_History_and_Philosophy_of_ Project_Gutenberg_by_Michael_Hart Haythornthwaite, C. (1999). A social network theory of tie strength and media use: A framework for evaluating multi-level impacts of new media. Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois. Haythornthwaite, C., & Wellman, B. (1998). Work, friendship and media use for information exchange in a networked organization. Journal of the American Society for Information Science American Society for Information Science, 49(12), 1101–1114. doi:10.1002/(SICI)10974571(1998)49:12<1101::AID-ASI6>3.0.CO;2Z Hoschka, P. (1998). Computers as assistants: A new generation of support systems. New York: CRC. International Labor Organization (ILO). (2004). A fair globalization: Creating opportunities for all. Geneva, Switzerland. Lenhart, A., Madden, M., Macgill, A. R., & Smith, A. (2007). Teens and social media. Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Mukherjee, D. (2007). Reassembling the social environment: A network approach to human behavior. Administration in Social Work, 8(1), 208–218. Murray, V., & Harrison, Y. (2002). Virtual volunteering: Current status and future prospects. Toronto, Canada: Canadian Centre for Philanthropy. Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www. onlinevolunteering.org/resources/documents/ murray_sr2_english_web.pdf Norris, P. (2001). Digital divide. New York: Cambridge University Press. O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/ news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html Oraves, J. (2000). Online counseling and the Internet: Perspectives for mental health care supervision and education. Journal of Mental Health, 9(2), 1–12. Pew Internet & American Life Project. (2006). Reports: Demographics. Retrieved February 16, 2007, from http://www.pewinternet.org/ PPF/r/171/report_display.asp Pew Internet & American Life Project. (2007). Demographics of Internet users. Retrieved February 16, 2007, from http://www.pewinternet.org/ trends/User_Demo_2.15.08.htm Putnam, R. (1995a). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6, 67–78. doi:10.1353/jod.1995.0002

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Putnam, R. (2001). Civic disengagement in contemporary America. Government and Opposition, 36(2), 135–156. doi:10.1111/1477-7053.00059 Putnam, R., & Feldstein, L. M. (2003). Better together: Restoring the American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Robinson, J. P., & Goeffrey, G. (1997). Time for life: The surprising ways Americans use their time. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schultz, T. W. (1961). Investment in human capital. The American Economic Review, 51(2), 1–17. Scott, J. (2001). Social network analysis: A handbook (2nd ed.). London: Sage Publications. Sproull, L., Conley, C., & Moon, J. Y. (2005). Prosocial behavior on the net. In Y. AmichaiHamburger (Ed.), The social Net: Human behavior in cyberspace (pp. 139-162). New York: Oxford University Press. Strathdee, R. (2005). Social exclusion and the remaking of social networks. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. (1998). Social network analysis: Methods and applications. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Weber, L. (2007). Marketing to the social Web: How digital customer communities build your business. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Wellman, B. (2001). Computer networks as social networks. Science, 293, 2031–2034. doi:10.1126/ science.1065547

Social Network: A social structure made of nodes of individuals and organizations that are tied by specific types of interdependency. Social Networking Site: An online service that allows users to maintain a personal profile and communicate with others in an interactive media-rich environment. Social Web: Also known as Web 2.0, the Social Web is an aggregation of social interaction and collaboration technologies, including blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networking, photo and video sharing, and simulated 3-D virtual worlds. The United Nations Volunteer (UNV) program: Created under the auspices of the United Nations Development Programme, UNV encourages people around the world to engage in volunteering activities. VolunteerMatch: A U.S. national nonprofit organization which maintains a website (www. volunteermatch.org) dedicated to help people find volunteer opportunities in their local communities; the database of volunteer opportunities can be searched by location, interest area, or keyword. Virtual Volunteering: The process of volunteering performed from an offsite or remote location through the use of the Internet.

ENDNOTES 1 2 3 4 5

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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

7 8

Social Capital: The value (trust, reciprocity, social and emotional support) that is generated from participation in formal and informal social network relationships.

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9 10

http://www.worldvolunteerweb.org http://www.volunteermatch.org http://hdr.undp.org/en/ http://www.unv.org http://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en/org/ resources/further_reading.html http://www.onlinevolunteering.org http://www.netaid.org http://www.serviceleader.org http://www.serviceleader.org/new/virtual/ http://www.elderwisdomcircle.org

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Chapter 12

From Software to Team Ware

Virtual Teams and Online Learning Culture Francesco Sofo University of Canberra, Australia

ABSTRACT Social interaction technologies have made it possible for teams to exist in a virtual reality. Such change to the workplace status quo requires a new appreciation of the ways in which team members can create, maintain, transmit and influence their competitiveness and effectiveness. This chapter explores the concepts of virtual teams and online culture; it analyses the key requirements for the successful functioning of virtual teams: for instance, building trust, consolidating authentic communication flows and thinking critically. Commencing with a review of the current research, the chapter concentrates on the rise of virtual teams, the key dimensions, and the importance of establishing online learning cultures to ensure high performance. Additionally, pitfalls of virtual teams and recommendations for enhancing their work are presented.

INTRODUCTION The emergence of social interaction technologies (SIT) has drastically altered the way in which individuals relate to each other, particularly with regard to team work and group membership. A team used to be constrained by the geographical location of its members, and the quality of the face-to-face interaction and interdependence was largely reliant on the close proximity through which members worked. In DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch012

recent years, teams have evolved to become virtual entities consisting of teleworkers, telecommuters and individuals situated in countries around the world who are linked together through collaborative work. This shift has seen changes to the ways in which team work occurs, and the virtual world of work has emerged as a complex environment where success is dependent on a shared culture that facilitates knowledge creation and the best contributions of all its members (Starke-Meyerring & Andrews, 2006). Modern workplace is inherently ambiguous, uncertain and full of change. It puts exacting

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demands on the team to be effective in terms of communication processes and trust, and presents an increasing environmental complexity which is further exacerbated by the transfer of previously familiar concepts such as “team work” to a virtual, online world. Gone are the geographic borders and face-to-face interactions that previously embodied teaming; instead team members are faced with a trail of communications held on a server and transmitted via the Internet. The irony is that teleworkers are now working over greater distances and those who have not been in itinerant occupations have suddenly found themselves, similar to the nomads, working across vast distances (Sofo, 2000). New communication and social interaction technologies have made it possible for teams to function in a virtual reality. Such change to the workplace status quo requires a new appreciation of the ways in which team members can create, maintain, transmit and influence their competitiveness and effectiveness. This emerging shift in workplace culture defines the identity and uniqueness of an organization and thus gives purpose to its activities, responsibilities and behavior of its members (Lundberg, 1988). This chapter reviews the concepts of virtual teams and online culture that promote critical thinking, including the transferability of key skills to the working of virtual teams. By commencing with an exploration of the concepts of virtual teams and online culture, and outlining their connection and links to the current research, this chapter analyses the key requirements for the successful functioning of a virtual team, including building trust, and consolidating authentic communication flows. Some practice guidelines for developing online learning cultures for virtual teams, as well as recommendations for enhancing the ability of virtual team members to think critically, are provided.

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BACKGROUND Traditionally, a team is viewed as a group of people who bring balanced competencies and accountability to shared purposes, approaches and performance targets. Members of a team have a unified commitment and think of themselves as a whole or as being “more than individuals.” There is usually synergy which means that when the individual efforts and actions are harmonized, something different and unique is created that could not be produced by any single individual of the team. There are six vital elements that comprise the concept of a team: the first element is size which is linked to the scope of the task as well as the other elements of the team; the second element is the fact that members’ skills are balanced which is a strong basis for interdependence; the third element is mutual accountability where members essentially consider themselves as synergistic and trust each other. The fourth, fifth and sixth elements relate to the synergies of purpose, approach and performance targets (Dani, Burns, Backhouse, & Kochhar, 2006). These six elements of a team are all present in a virtual team where commitment, communication and trust are still vitally important to success. A traditional team is usually co-located whereas a virtual team is not, thus, distance is viewed as the seventh element of a virtual team. Virtual teams are teams whose members are geographically distributed, requiring them to work together through electronic means with minimal face-to-face interaction (Malhotra, Majchrzak, & Rosen, 2007); they are also a group of people who work interdependently with a shared purpose across space, time, and organization boundaries using technology (Lipnack & Stamps, 2000). Virtual teams can vary in size, competencies, duration and focus. Many have a proven capacity to create dialogue amongst diverse individuals and groups in order to develop a mutually supportive, collaborative network of people sharing meanings and achieving common objectives. Virtual teams

From Software to Team Ware

are characterized by reciprocal relationships among all the stakeholders, particularly when there is a shared culture among the members and their broader learning communities. Virtual teams need commitment to feedback, experimentation, reflecting critically, welcoming ambiguity and exploring multiple perspectives – all of which are key skills inherent to critical thinking. There is a place for adopting overt roles of thinking critically to nurture the work of individuals and their virtual teams. Successful teams – whether virtual or not – rely on the ability of seemingly disparate people to work together in order to achieve a common and desirable outcome. A virtual team is in fact a virtual learning community, a network of relationships based on common aims and shared meaning that creates and uses a distinctive learning culture. Factors that enhance the quality of team work include personal effectiveness, the sharing of mental models, team learning, a demonstrated commitment to effective implementation and mutual accountability for the phases and stages of delivery (Senge, 2006). Whether real or virtual, learning communities or teams require parallel and distributive leadership (Andrews et al., 2004). By extension, they must also contain reflective, active and critical thinkers who are capable of moving in unison even if individuals are separated geographically. Virtual teams, for example, learning communities are therefore based on a leadership culture of learning, trust and openness which communicates to all members that there are choices and that any individual can demonstrate leadership and thus influence direction and development (Walker & Shuangye, 2007). To perform effectively, care needs to be taken in dealing with a number of factors that can impact on the performance of either a face-to-face team, a virtual team or a mixed mode team including social loafing and the effect of transactive memory systems. Individuals who believe that they are taking part in a task with others have been found to reduce their performance, independent of any potential

loss attributable to distraction or a lack of coordination during the actual group performance – a situation known as social loafing. Steiner’s (1972) empirical study found that reduced contribution still exists when the number of team members increase, even after controlling for the coordination loss within the team. An individual’s psychological motivation may therefore be a key factor of social loafing. A possible explanation for the emergence of social loafing in team work may be that the greater the number of team members, the less chance there is of the individual contribution of each being identified or observed. This means that some members may be able to “hide” in the team, thus resulting in a reduced contribution or loafing. During an early twentieth century experiment, Maximilien Ringelmann (1861-1931), noticed that individual performance decreased as group size increased. This finding is in stark contrast to the assumption that the total output of a team should be at least equal to, or more than, the sum of each individual contribution. The finding of this experiment reported by Kravitz and Martin (1986) indicates that the real performance of a team is much lower than expected. This has become known as the “Ringelmann effect.” Ringelmann identified two possible causes to this effect: the first is a coordination loss where an increasing number of team members results in more complex linkages between each of them, causing difficulties in the attainment or maintenance of harmony among the members. Team members have even been found to counteract one another. The second possible cause is motivation loss due to differences in the thought, conception and background of team members which leads to a reduction in their commitment to dedicate their best to the team. Inaction is likely to be the outcome thus making members’ performance on the team less than it would be as individuals. Kerr and Bruun (1981) believed that effort was somewhat dispensable so when individuals realized that their performance was not easily

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recognized nor valued in the team setting, then a re-evaluation could take place where those individuals decide to decrease the level of their contribution. This in turn decreases the level of personal motivation and dedication that individuals might show to both their work and their team. Tension can arise within the team when other members start noticing the loafing, and thus resent the fact that they are working with free-riders who may share the results of their performance without any real participation or contribution. Even more relevant is Comer’s (1995) finding that when people realize that team members are being inactive, there is an increased possibility that they all end up displaying the same loafing behavior. This means that people reduce their contribution to the task at hand because they want to protect themselves from being hurt by the social loafer. Co-worker loafing can therefore have significant effect on morale, the general functioning of the team as well as the overall result achieved by the team. All of these causes and effects of social loafing would appear to be further exacerbated for the virtual team where the online environment is not conducive to the easy attainment or maintenance of coordination, motivation and trust. Some of these factors link in to the work of Wegner, Erber and Raymond (1991) who found that transactive memory systems (TMS) have a larger impact on team performance than other variables such as cohesion, motivation and social identity. The three key dimensions of TMS of teams include who knows what (expertise location), who does what (task coordination) and relying on tasks being done (trust). Because TMS dimensions are more difficult to achieve in a virtual team than in a face-to-face team, Kamawattanachai and Yoo (2007) recommended the need to emphasize early and frequent task-oriented communication during the formation stage of a virtual team as well as the further refinement of e-tools such as electronic diaries to build trust and greater coordination among members. Several authors have confirmed that TMS improves team performance (Kamawat-

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tanachai & Yoo, 2007; Moreland & Myaskovsky, 2000; Senge, 2006).

The Rise of Virtual Teams There has been substantial literature on the differences between teams and virtual teams especially in terms of coordination, communication and collaboration (Fiol & O’Connor, 2005; Lipnack & Stamps, 2000; Saunders, Van Slyke, & Vogel, 2004). Perhaps what has been less examined is the role of adaptability and how tolerance for ambiguity and the capacity for thinking critically are assumed base-line skills for any member of a virtual team. Adaptability and openness of mind refer to relying on, and trusting each other that more than one solution exists (Sofo, 2004). These competencies enable any team to identify and challenge assumptions, to see with fresh eyes, to have an open mind and to create new perspectives. The key additional ingredient to a virtual team includes human interaction across time and space which is mediated by technology. Virtual teams often comprise cross-functional members who work on interdependent tasks and share responsibility for team performance targets, yet do not meet face-toface. Instead, collaboration is facilitated through an assortment of social interaction technologies. Thomas, Bostrom and Gouge (2007) found that virtual teams used an average of thirteen different technologies in each project they examined. Communication and social interaction technologies have made crossing boundaries possible and have brought virtual teams into existence. Given this crossing of boundaries, the term virtual team has been coined to refer to any interdependent group activity that involves spatial or time-based dispersion across distributed or global environmental settings. Lipnack and Stamps (2000) introduced coordinates to better appreciate virtual teams within the new global order with elements including space, time and organizational distance. Penetration of each of these elements has implications for building relationships among

From Software to Team Ware

team members and between the team and headquarters. In their model, the top right hand corner represents the greatest degree of virtuality while the bottom left hand corner at the axis represents the least degree of virtuality, the traditional work team. Lipnack and Stamps suggest it is possible to compute an index of virtuality by locating the team characteristics along each axis and multiplying the two digits. The higher the score of the “x” axis (organizational distance) multiplied by the “y” axis (space/time distance), the more virtual the team. It is assumed that the higher the score, the greater the challenges faced by the team due to the virtual nature of the communication processes. This, in turn, has implications for the way in which team goals can be met. Examples of virtual teams which might generate a low score using the model include a co-located team where all members work in the same area (building/floor) and can have face-toface meetings easily instead of relying on SIT. Cross-functional teams would generate a higher score than the co-located teams due to the need for cooperation across organizational boundaries or between people in different organizations. The highest scoring situations might included a fully distributed team where team members are located in different countries and are heavily reliant on SIT to facilitate their interactions, decision-making processes and outputs. Of course, it is also possible that co-located teams decide to work virtually to different degrees while distributed teams decide that frequent face-to-face meetings are important. Given their increasing popularity, virtual teams must be successful teams, and this means that any online culture must be a learning culture. Without learning there would be ineffective virtual teams and similarly, ineffective online cultures. Many organizations have transformed their culture by utilizing the Internet and adapting their work patterns and strategies to meet the requirements of the digital age. There needs to be deep integration between e-learning and web-based systems

to achieve the criteria of a learning culture, and whilst SIT may be used by any team, it becomes the lifeblood for a virtual team and is thus indispensable to its success. The inclusion of information technology can make the work of a virtual team more complex than that of traditional teams, yet without them, it would be practically impossible to have virtual teams as we know them today. For example, the introduction of virtual worlds such as Second Life has resulted in new language being created for a virtual living environment with multi-lateral control. In an environment where there is unilateral control, the maintenance of rationality at all costs and limited learning, lead to the persistence of the status quo. Argyris and Schon (1978) call this single loop learning: it describes a learning culture that fuels error processes and misunderstandings, is limited, uncreative, unchanging and reinforces existing routines. It is a type of culture that insists on doing things right, persisting with the status quo, maintaining the same rules and doing little differently. This type of learning can incorporate quite sophisticated defensive routines and is inadequate for learning that leads to improvement and change. So it would seem that a culture of an organization that does not allow the organization to reduce its defensive organizational routines, be adaptable, flexible, organize situations where its staff can be original and learn new things and ways to protect each other overtly, is not a learning culture. To counteract the deleterious effects of this type of culture many authors on virtual teams emphasize the importance of building trust in virtual team relationships (Lipnack & Stamps, 2000; StarkeMeyerring & Andrews, 2006; Stinson, Pearson, & Lucas, 2006; Thomas, Bostrom, & Gouge, 2007). Further, Dani, Burns, Backhouse and Kochhar (2005) demonstrated that there does appear to be a relationship between trust and cultural orientation of firms for the working of virtual teams. Since SIT provide the major communication mechanisms in virtual teams, team members need to be able to adapt technology use when problems

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or improvement opportunities arise. Adaptability then, is the linchpin of virtual teams. Where adaptable and flexible routines are encouraged, double loop learning occurs. This is the hallmark of a learning culture suited to virtual teams. In both single loop and double loop learning, errors are detected and corrected. The difference is that in single loop learning the culture within a team or an organization promotes skilled unconscious incompetence and vicious cycles and thus does not encourage or permit challenge. In double loop learning, the culture encourages skilled conscious incompetence, virtuous cycles and a reconsideration of the underlying values and structures to promote adaptability and flexibility. A learning culture is therefore where trusting relationships are nurtured that encourage learning at all levels. Stinson, Pearson and Lucas (2006) emphasized several major factors: learning environment, identifying and fulfilling learning and development needs, and applying the learning outcomes to the workplace. Their twelve characteristics of a learning culture include: 1.

Valuing and recognizing the need for lifelong learning 2. Encouraging active learning amongst staff 3. Developing individual self-awareness 4. Being open to new ideas, making time for learning, teams 5. Departments and organizations making time for learning 6. Developing shared visions within teams 7. Learning at department or organizational levels 8. Taking the time for team-building 9. Developing leadership skills 10. Learning from mistakes 11. Thinking about the wider environment 12. Taking the time to recognize achievements Virtual teams are a twenty-first century structural work innovation and appeal to managers wanting to save funds, reduce travel burdens and

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increase efficiency. The practice of virtual teams seems unproblematic because of SIT such as email, chat capabilities, videoconferencing and group support systems. Limitations of distance such as travel and accommodation costs and time have been reduced as individuals can interact via SIT. Virtual team work (such as specialized task forces and committees) offers attractive costsaving devices for decision-making. Apart from this economic rationalist approach to virtual teams, another attractive aspect is creativity. A salient feature of virtual teams in organizations is teambased innovation as SIT has the power to extend capabilities and invite the best global talents to join membership of a virtual team. Virtual teams therefore are slowly becoming synonymous with diversity and creativity because they are required to leverage and integrate diverse expertise and to generate innovative products, processes and business strategies.

PITFALLS OF VIRTUAL TEAMS In spite of modern facilities, communication and performance challenges of teams remain and the lack of face-to-face contact makes some of these challenges more difficult to accomplish especially where there is a loss of trust. Issues of negotiation, persuasion and outcomes achievement may be easier for some individuals on a face-to-face basis than at a distance. Body language which has more impact on the effectiveness of communication than do voice and meta-verbal aspects, is a factor contributing to the success of teams but generally is reduced or eliminated in the interactions of virtual teams. Sharing information, brainstorming, negotiating alternatives, decision-making, persuasiveness and successful outputs take on new forms that exclude the use of body language. The replacement of face-to-face work with virtual work has been inevitable and is increasing. Not only does the maintenance of trust, often gained through body language, seem

From Software to Team Ware

more difficult to achieve (Watson-Manheim & Belanger, 2002) but also the loss of trust is fatal to the effectiveness of virtual teams (de Pillis & Furumo, 2007). As well as difficulties in gaining trust and maintaining it, there are other drawbacks to virtual teams that are not immediately visible. A challenge to the effectiveness of any group is that created by social loafing or free riding where individuals do not contribute equally to the operation of a group or in fact where they do not complete their fair share of the work mutually agreed to. Compared to face-to-face groups, social loafing is not only less visible in virtual teams but can also result in individuals contributing even less (Chidambaram & Tung, 2005). Results of a study conducted by de Pillis and Furumo (2007) show that virtual teams yield significantly lower performance, lower satisfaction and a lower result-to-effort ratio than face-to-face teams. Virtual teams appeared to excel only at lowering commitment, morale and performance. Issues of communication and emotional intelligence form a complex base of possible difficulties to the success of virtual teams that endeavor to bridge space over time. The three dimensions of TMS reviewed earlier are a formidable basis of delayed impact on virtual team performance and each dimension acts differently on performance not only temporally but also dynamically and interactively (Kamawattanachai & Yoo, 2007). For example, knowledge coordination appears to be emergent and evolving while the other two factors may not be emergent or may follow different paths. It appears to take longer to build emotional intelligence and effective TMS in virtual teams compared to face-to-face teams and social communication in virtual teams particularly in the early stages may in fact be harmful to team task performance. The traditional importance of achieving a balance between the strength of task orientation versus emotional well being of the team members has been persistently referred to in the literature as difficult to achieve in face-to-face

teams. This challenge is exacerbated in virtual teams since it is easier to keep emotional intelligence of the team hidden within virtual teams compared to face-to-face teams. Further, trust takes time to develop in any face-to-face group but in virtual teams it takes longer to build but once established, beliefs and levels of trust seem more embedded and difficult to change. The focus on developing online learning cultures is on technical and technological literacy where e-learning provides tools for problem solving, just-in-time learning and day to day knowledge sharing. Jones, Oyung and Pace (2005) focused attention on four key challenges of working in a mostly virtual team environment. The first of these challenges involves building a sense of community and common purpose which can be achieved through use of instant messaging, frequent all-hands meetings, use of video, pictures and occasional face-to-face meetings where possible. The second challenge includes time-zone issues which can be overcome by regularly sharing the inconvenience by recording meetings for off-line listening, all-hands meetings and offering multiple sessions of training to accommodate the different times. The third challenge relates to language and cultural differences that need to be made explicit and resolved equitably. The final issue is attention span which can be overcome by limiting the length of virtual meetings and using multimedia (video/images) instead of always relying on spoken or written language.

FUTURE TRENDS Developing effective online learning cultures for virtual teams and communities is critical. Watkins and Marsick (1993) defined six action imperatives as the framework to creating and supporting a learning culture: creating continuous learning opportunities; promoting inquiry and dialogue; encouraging collaboration and team learning; establishing systems to capture and share learning;

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empowering people toward a collective vision and connecting the organization to its environment. Herrington (2004) reiterated these imperatives and added other specific criteria important to maintaining a technological environment for learning in virtual teams. These principles consist of: equality in power and access, both linguistically and technologically; synchronous communication; stable, fast connections; robust visual and audible information for interaction; equal access to information; and, additional actual international exchange. Starke-Meyerring and Andrews (2006) suggested that a learning environment for intercultural virtual team work should accomplish the following ten aspects. These strategies can also be regarded as good practice guidelines for developing online learning cultures, which in turn will raise the performance of virtual teams: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

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Facilitate team integration across institutions, fostering the development of a shared culture (e.g., through calendars, blogs, and other technologies that foster inclusive communication, updating, and keeping track of contextual information) Ensure availability of an integrated set of technologies with alerting features that let all know what has been added where Provide various communication channels (e.g., voice, visual, synchronous, and asynchronous) Provide sufficient opportunities to learn how to critically assess the impact of various digital technologies on communication and collaboration Allow for teams to control their own Web space Facilitate the exchange and tracking of collaboratively produced and professionally designed draft documents Allow equal access by all Reflect the shared partnership identity

9.

Integrate the shared learning environment with the communication practices and the technological infrastructure available to all in each location 10. Protect privacy

CONCLUSION At the heart of virtual teams is the concept of work. The practice of working virtually continues to be reshaped especially as greater diversity of virtual interaction is possible. The lack of physical presence is challenging but social interaction technologies enable learning as the key process of virtual work to be achieved more deeply. Online teams and communities continue to be vital learning sources. Visionary leaders are finding ways to integrate virtual teams as part of the new form of work by promoting virtual structures and rewarding new forms and sources of productivity. Building social capital virtually, stimulating well focused business and social relationships through virtual teams and creating virtual networks as key approaches to work are being figured into performance management systems by progressive leaders (Hoefling, 2001). Virtual teams are a key aspect of networked organizations where shared meanings are communicated pervasively to provide a common ground and integrate the organizational vision and efforts of all. We would expect more sophisticated social networking technologies in the future to facilitate team scheduling and build fully networked organizations. We would expect leaders and workers to commit to virtual systemic structures and supportive collaboration. The linchpin of working in virtual teams is productive learning facilitated through social interaction technologies and achieved cooperatively within the environments of trust. Virtuality is becoming the norm, the habitual way of working and learning. Work is ever more seen as collaboration which in turn is increasingly treated as a relational activity.

From Software to Team Ware

Performance is becoming more deeply team based and team incentives are not uncommon within organizations where virtual teams flourish. Working virtually signals a paradigm shift based on the use of new communication and social interaction technologies. This change relinquishes the physical handshake but enriches past human experience of face-to-face collaboration and community building.

REFERENCES Andrews, D., Conway, J., Dawson, M., Lewis, M., McMaster, J., Morgan, A., & Starr, H. (2004). School revitalization: The IDEAS way (ACEA Monograph Series No. 34). Winmalee, Australia: Australian Council for Educational Leaders. Argyris, C., & Schon, D. (1978). Organizational learning: A theory of action perspective. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Chidambaram, I., & Tung, I. (2005). Is out of sight out of mind? An empirical study of social loafing in technology supported groups. Information Systems Research, 16(2), 27–39. doi:10.1287/ isre.1050.0051 Comer, D. (1995). A model of social loafing in real work groups. Human Relations, 48(6), 647–667. doi:10.1177/001872679504800603 Dani, S., Burns, N., Backhouse, C., & Kochhar, A. (2006). The implications of organizational culture and trust in the working of virtual teams. Journal of Engineering Manufacture, 220(6), 951–960. de Pillis, E., & Furumo, K. (2007). Counting the cost of virtual teams. Communications of the ACM, 50(12), 93–95. doi:10.1145/1323688.1323714 Fiol, C., & O’Connor, E. (2005). Identification in face-to-face, hybrid and pure virtual teams: Untangling the contradictions. Organization Science, 16(1), 19–32. doi:10.1287/orsc.1040.0101

Herrington, T. (2004). Where in the world is the Global Classroom Project? In J. Di Leo & W. Jacobs (Eds.), If classrooms matter: Progressive visions of educational environments (pp. 197-210). New York: Routledge. Hoefling, T. (2001). Working virtually: Managing people for successful virtual teams and organizations. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Jones, R., Oyung, R., & Pace, L. (2005). Working virtually: Challenges of virtual teams. Hershey, PA: Cybertech Publishing. Kamawattanachai, P., & Yoo, Y. (2007). The impact of knowledge coordination on virtual team performance over time. MIS Quarterly, 31(4), 783–808. Kerr, N., & Bruun, S. (1981). Ringelmann revisited: Alternative explanations for the social loafing effect. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 7(2), 224–231. doi:10.1177/014616728172007 Kravitz, D., & Martin, B. (1986). Ringelmann rediscovered: The original article. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 936–941. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.50.5.936 Lipnack, J., & Stamps, J. (2000). Virtual teams: People working across boundaries with technology. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Lundberg, C. (1988). Working with culture. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 1, 38–47. doi:10.1108/eb025598 Malhotra, A., Majchrzak, A., & Rosen, B. (2007). Leading virtual teams. Academy of Management, 21(1), 60–70. Moreland, R., & Myaskovsky, L. (2000). Exploring the performance benefits of group training: Transactive memory or improved communication? Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 82(1), 117–133. doi:10.1006/ obhd.2000.2891

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Saunders, C., Van Slyke, C., & Vogel, D. (2004). My time or yours? Managing time visions in global virtual teams. Academy of Management Executive, 18(1), 19.

Watson-Manheim, M., & Belanger, F. (2002). Support for communication-based work processes in virtual work. e-Service Journal, 1(3), 61-82.

Senge, P. (2006). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization (2nd ed.). Melbourne, Australia: Random House.

Wegner, D., Erber, R., & Raymond, P. (1991). Transactive memory in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(6), 923–929. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.61.6.923

Sofo, F. (2000). Human resource development: Perspectives, roles and practice choices. Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

Sofo, F. (2004). Open your mind: The 7 keys to thinking critically. Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin. Starke-Meyerring, D., & Andrews, D. (2006). Building a shared virtual learning culture. Business Communication Quarterly, 69(1), 25–49. doi:10.1177/1080569905285543 Steiner, I. (1972). Group process and productivity. New York: Academic Press. Stinson, L., Pearson, D., & Lucas, B. (2006). Developing a learning culture: Twelve tips for individuals, teams and organizations . Medical Teacher, 28(4), 309–312. doi:10.1080/01421590600726433 Thomas, D., Bostrom, R., & Gouge, M. (2007). Making knowledge work in virtual teams. Communications of the ACM, 50(1), 85–90. doi:10.1145/1297797.1297802 Walker, A., & Shuangye, C. (2007). Leader authenticity in intercultural school contexts in Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 35(2), 185-204. Watkins, K., & Marsick, V. (1993) Sculpting the learning organization. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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All-Hands Meetings: Regular information sessions that include all team members. Asynchronous Communication: Communication that occurs independent of time or location. Meeting Management Software: Assists the operation of virtual teams by enabling the sharing of information and processes. Online Learning Culture: Includes practices that value and use team ware as the prime communication venue. Team Ware: Software applications that act as collaborative tools for virtual team members: e.g., audio and video conferencing, instant messaging, e-mail, virtual spaces for document/idea sharing, and meeting management tools. Telecommuters: Workers or people who work from home (telecommute) using telephone, the Internet and other communication technologies. Teleworkers: People working remotely from their workplace (includes telecommuters). Virtual Team: A group of people who rely on communication technologies to achieve their goals. Trust: Refers to a sense of reliability and confidence necessary to complete tasks in a working environment.

Section 2

Concepts, Contexts, and Applications

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Chapter 13

Folksonomy

The Collaborative Knowledge Organization System Katrin Weller Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany Isabella Peters Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany Wolfgang G. Stock Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany

ABSTRACT This chapter discusses folksonomies as a novel way of indexing documents and locating information based on user generated keywords. Folksonomies are considered from the point of view of knowledge organization and representation in the context of user collaboration within the Web 2.0 environments. Folksonomies provide multiple benefits which make them a useful indexing method in various contexts; however, they also have a number of shortcomings that may hamper precise or exhaustive document retrieval. The position maintained is that folksonomies are a valuable addition to the traditional spectrum of knowledge organization methods since they facilitate user input, stimulate active language use and timeliness, create opportunities for processing large data sets, and allow new ways of social navigation within document collections. Applications of folksonomies as well as recommendations for effective information indexing and retrieval are discussed.

INTRODUCTION A key problem facing today’s information society is how to find and retrieve information precisely and effectively. Substantial research efforts concentrate on the challenges of information structuring and storing, particularly within different sub-disciplines DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch013

of computer science and information science. In this context, information retrieval studies focus on methods and algorithms to enable precise and comprehensive searching of document collections (Frakes & Baeza-Yates, 1992; Stock, 2007a). In addition, techniques of knowledge representation have been established (Cleveland & Cleveland, 2001; Lancaster, 2003; Stock & Stock, 2008). Most prominent are approaches of document indexing:

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Folksonomy

Figure 1. An exemplary tag cloud. Tag clouds display the most popular tags within a folksonomy based system. The bigger the font size, the more documents have been indexed with a tag.

i.e., assigning content-descriptive keywords to documents. This enhances retrieval techniques and aids users in deciding on a document’s relevance. Different knowledge organization systems (KOS) are developed to support sophisticated document indexing. Common examples of KOS include classification systems (taxonomies), thesauri, and controlled keywords (nomenclatures). Recently, a well-known problem of indexing documents with content-descriptive metadata has been addressed from a new, user centered perspective. Within the so-called “Web 2.0” (O’Reilly, 2005), web users have begun publishing their own content on a large scale and started using social software to store and share documents, such as photos, videos or bookmarks (Gordon-Murnane, 2006; Hammond, Hannay, Lund, & Scott, 2005). And they have also begun to index these documents with their own keywords to make them retrievable. In this context, the assigned keywords are called tags. The indexing process is called (social) tagging, the totality of tags used within one platform is called folksonomy. A tag cloud is a popular method for displaying most frequently applied tags of a folksonomy visually (Figure 1). Thus, a folksonomy is an indexing method open for users to apply freely chosen index terms. Peter Merholz (2004) entitles this method “metadata for the masses”; the writer James Surowiecki (2004) refers to it as one example of “the wisdom of crowds.” The term “folksonomy”, as a combination of “folk” and “taxonomy”, was introduced in 2004 by Thomas Vander Wal and cited in a blog

post by Gene Smith (2004). Smith uses the term “classification” for paraphrasing folksonomies. This term arouses a misleading and faulty connotation. The same holds for the term “taxonomy.” Folksonomies are not classifications or taxonomies, since they work neither with notations nor with semantic relations. They are, however, a new type of knowledge organization system, with its own advantages and disadvantages.

BACKGROUND Knowledge Organization Systems Knowledge representation methods are applied to provide a better basis for information retrieval tools. This may basically be done in two ways: by abstracting the topics of a document and by indexing a document, i.e., assigning content-descriptive keywords or placing it into a concept scheme (Cleveland & Cleveland, 2001; Lancaster, 2003). For indexing documents with content-descriptive keywords, different types of knowledge organization systems (KOS) have been developed. The most important methods – classifications, thesauri and nomenclatures – comprise a controlled vocabulary, which is used for indexing. The vocabulary of classifications and thesauri usually has the form of a structured concept hierarchy, which may be enriched with further semantic relations, e.g., relations of equivalence and concept associations (Peters & Weller, 2008; Weller & Peters, 2007). Recently, two new developments have entered the spectrum of KOS: folksonomies and ontologies (Weller, 2007). They complement traditional techniques in different ways. Folksonomies include novel social dimensions of user involvement; ontologies extend the possibilities of formal vocabulary structuring (e.g., Alexiev et al., 2005; Davies, Fensel, & van Harmelen, 2003; Staab & Studer, 2004). Both have revived discussions about metadata on the web (Madhavan et al., 2006; Safari, 2004) and have increased the

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Folksonomy

Figure 2. Classification of KOS according to complexity and broadness of the domain

awareness of knowledge representation issues in scientific areas and even within the common web-user community. We may classify different KOS according to the complexity of their formal structure (mainly defined by the number of specified semantic relations in use for structuring the vocabulary) and the extent of the captured domain (Figure 2). Both aspects are inversely proportional: the more complex the structure, the smaller the captured domain will have to be, due to feasibility reasons. Folksonomy is a completely unstructured method of document indexing. While in most other cases trained indexers or other experts are responsible for indexing documents, folksonomies allow the producers or the users of certain content to take over this task. There is no authority which controls the terminology in use. This also means that folksonomies are in no way limited to a certain domain of interest. They can be easily applied to all given contexts, as long as a community of interest exists.

Web 2.0 and User Collaboration The term Web 2.0 was coined during a discussion by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty from O’Reilly Media (O’Reilly, 2005). The phrase has

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since been widely assumed, yet definitions still vary slightly. Generally, it describes a new era of the World Wide Web, in which the users are in the spotlight and can to easily contribute to the creation of new web-content. The borders between “consumers” and “producers” of content are blurring; we may talk of a new type of web user: the “prosumer” as envisioned by Toffler (1980). Furthermore, the focus is on many-to-many relationships. The interrelation of groups of users (namely, communities) is emphasized. The collaboration of large communities enables the creation of content in new formats and of enormous scale. Thus, besides social networking and personal interconnections, the interlinking of topics and discussions plays a decisive role. Various new communication channels create a “matrix of dialogues” (Maness, 2006) across different types of content and different data formats (e.g., blogs, wikis, podcasts, multimedia content, discussions, forums, personal profiles). With this enormous growth of user-created content, new ways of navigating through it are needed. It was within social software platforms, that folksonomies have been introduced as an easy way to let users organize their data and make it accessible and retrievable: Everyone was allowed to tag documents with freely chosen keywords. With the success of the photo-sharing platform Flickr1, the video-community YouTube2, the social bookmarking tool Del.icio.us3, and the blog search engine Technorati4 the principles of searching documents by assigned tags became widely known.

FOLKSONOMIES AND SOCIAL TAGGING APPLICATIONS Characteristics of Folksonomies In folksonomies, we are confronted with three different elements (Marlow, Naaman, Boyd, & Davis, 2006): the documents to be described, the tags which are used for description, and the

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Figure 3. Interrelation of tags, users, and documents (adapted fromPeters & Stock, 2007).

users who are indexing the content. These three elements enable different dimensions of interconnections that can be used for browsing and navigation (Figure 3). Users as well as documents are interconnected with each other in a social network environment, in which the paths run along the tags. On the one hand, documents are linked “thematically” with each other when they have been indexed with the same tags. On the other hand, documents are related via users, so-called shared users. Finally, users are linked with each other when they use the same tags for indexing or when they index the same documents. Users are thematically related when they index with the same tags; they are coupled with shared documents when they index the same documents. Thus, tags can help to identify communities of interest. The extent of commonality may be illustrated quantitatively with similarity rates such as Cosinus, Jaccard-Sneath or Dice (Stock & Stock, 2008, p. 373), while communities of similar users can be detected by cluster analysis. All these interrelations can be used to browse a document collection. One may find interesting documents not only via tag searches, but also by following

links to documents, which related users have tagged or by using the tags that they also use. This can be described as one type of social navigation. The most popular tags of a folksonomy (via tag clouds) are another way for entering document collections and browsing for content (Sinclair & Cardew-Hall, 2008). According to Vander Wal (2005), one can distinguish between two types of folksonomies: broad folksonomies, where one document can be tagged by several users, so that tags can be assigned to each document more than once (e.g., Del.icio. us); and narrow folksonomies, where each tag is recorded for a document only once (e.g., Flickr, Technorati, YouTube) (Vander Wal, 2005; see also Peters & Stock, 2007). Usually the document’s author provides the tags, although occasionally other users are also allowed to add tags. The basis for tag clouds are platform-specific or resource-specific tag distributions which could be also represented by graphs (see Figures 4 & 5). Vander Wal (2005), Shirky (2005) and others state that in broad folksonomies the distribution of tags given to a document follows a Lotka-like power law (Egghe & Rousseau, 1990, p. 293; Egghe, 2005). If this assumption is true, we see a curve with only few tags at the top of the distribution, and a “long tail” of numerous tags on the lower ranks on the right-hand side of the curve (see Figure 4). Investigations of documentspecific tag distributions demonstrate that another prototypic tag distribution may appear as well. This inverse logistic distribution (Stock, 2006) shows a lot of relevant tags on the curve’s lefthand side (the “long trunk”) and the known “long tail” (see Figure 5). As both distributions share the characteristic “long tail,” they are difficult to differentiate. Therefore, they are both often called “power law.” The evolution of tag distributions with “long tail” characteristic is commonly explained by the known “rich gets richer” or “success breeds success” phenomena. Popular tags will be used more often because of their better visibility whereas

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Figure 4. Power law distribution of tags (based on tagging data from Del.icio.us retrieved May 15, 2008, http://www.go2web20.net).

unpopular tags may be used seldom and will form the “long tail” (Cattuto, Loreto, & Pietronero, 2007; Halpin, Robu, & Shepherd, 2007). Several studies showed that the characteristic shape of the distributions of document-specific tags (not the absolute number of tags) will remain stable at a certain point in time (Kipp & Campbell, 2006; Golder & Huberman, 1006; Halpin, Robu, & Shepherd, 2007; Maass, Kowatsch, & Münster, 2007). To enhance precision in folksonomy-based information retrieval systems, we may profit from this knowledge and work with power tags as an additional search feature (assuming that the most frequent tags are the most relevant ones and that less frequent tags can be neglected). In case of a power-law distribution we may consider only the first n tags (e.g., the first three tags) and in case of an inverse-logistic distribution we have

Figure 5. Inverse-logistic distribution of tags (based on tagging data from Del.icio.us retrieved May 15, 2008, from http://www.readwriteweb. com).

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to regard all tags of the long trunk up to the turning point of the curve (Peters & Stock, 2007). In most cases the “long trunk” will be shorter than the “long tail.” Searches using the option “power tags only” will enhance precision of search results due to the reciprocal relationship of recall and precision. As power tags prune the tag distribution at a certain threshold, the amount of searchable and retrievable resources will decrease and recall will diminish along with it.

Applications of Folksonomies By now, folksonomies are an essential part of many social software and Web 2.0-based applications. Users can tag various types of data, including scientific articles, references, bookmarks, pictures, videos, audio files, blog posts, discussions, events or even other users. The emergent contentdescriptive tags can be used as an additional access-point to data collections besides traditional folder structures. They are particularly needed to improve retrievability of non-textual documents, such as videos and photos. Based on an idea by Luis von Ahn (2006), Google uses a game-like application to incite users to tag pictures on the Web. With the Google Image Labeler5 metadata for large collections of images on the Web are collected to improve Google’s image search. Besides the various Web 2.0 applications, it is also possible to work with folksonomies in other contexts, e.g., in intranets of companies (Fichter, 2006), for indexing corporate blogs, podcasts and vodcasts (Peters, 2006), for corporate bookmarking services (Millen et al., 2006) and message boards (Murison, 2005). Commercial online information suppliers have started to work with folksonomies as well (e.g., Engineering Village6 by Reed Elsevier and WISO7 by GENIOS). Folksonomies are suggested for broader use within professional databases (Stock, 2007b) as well as libraries (Kroski, 2005; Spiteri, 2006). Single libraries have begun to implement social tagging applications for their catalogue

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Table 1. Benefits and problems with folksonomies Benefits Folksonomies • represent an authentic use of language • allow multiple interpretations • recognize neologisms • are cheap methods of indexing • are the only way to index mass information on the Web • give the quality “control“ to the masses • allow searching and – perhaps even better – browsing • can help to identify communities • are sources for collaborative recommender systems • are sources for the development of ontologies, thesauri or classification systems • make people sensitive to information indexing issues

Problems Folksonomies • have no vocabulary control and do not recognize synonyms and homonyms • do not make use of semantic relations between tags • mix up different basic levels • merge different languages • do not distinguish formal from content-descriptive tags • include spam-tags, user-specific tags, and other misleading keywords

(e.g., the University of Pennsylvania with its system PennTags8). Trant (2006) analyzes folksonomies as a user centered access point to art museums collections. One can furthermore envision social tagging as an addition to classificatory folder approaches, e.g., for online shopping portals. Some software developers have also integrated the tagging principle into their products. With Windows Vista, Microsoft enables tagging of several data formats, such as pictures, videos and Office files. A similar approach can be found with Apple’s iPhoto. Yet, as long as tagging is performed by single users within their personal workspace, the social component is lacking and we cannot speak of folksonomies in a strict sense, but of personomies (Hotho et al., 2006).

Benefits and Problems with Folksonomies Metadata produced by broad communities are costefficient and can easily be applied to large data collections. The pros and cons of folksonomies are well discussed (e.g., Kroski, 2005; Peters & Stock,

2007; Smith, 2008). Discussion on the quality of folksonomies often focuses on a comparison with other KOS. While traditional techniques are based on elaborated knowledge representations techniques, controlled vocabularies, and expert skills in indexing, folksonomies rely on the principles of “collective intelligence” (Weiss, 2005) and wisdom of the crowds. This leads to the following key aspects of a critical reflection on folksonomies, which will be discussed in more detail (Weller, 2007): (a) the confrontation of user’s language versus vocabulary control; (b) the social and personal objectives in tagging behavior; and (c) the contrast between retrieval and exploration. Table 1 summarizes the main benefits and problems with folksonomies. The main property of a folksonomy is that it authentically captures the language-use of its user community and reflects the prosumers’ conceptual model of information (Quintarelli, 2005). People are free to use whichever tags they want and do not depend on a predefined set of terms. This freedom in the choice of tags however means that folksonomies are entirely uncontrolled vocabularies, which leads to the well known “vocabulary problem” (Furnas et al., 1987; Furnas et al., 2006; Golder & Huberman, 2006; Mathes, 2004): Different people use different words to describe the same object. Synonyms, trans-language synonyms, spelling variants and abbreviations are not bound together. Thus, someone searching for “United States of America” will not find documents tagged with “US”, “USA”, “United States” or “America.” Homonyms and polysems are not distinguished, thus for example searching for “trunk” in Flickr’s folksonomy will retrieve photos of trees as well as suitcases and probably also elephants. As different languages are used within most folksonomies, additional trans-language homonyms may occur. Misspellings and encoding limitations are serious problems for folksonomies (Guy & Tonkin, 2006). All these peculiarities have to be kept in mind by the user when searching in folksonomy based systems. Alternatively, additional techniques of

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vocabulary control may be applied to avoid some of these problems. But still the flexibility in the choice of tags is probably also the greatest advantage of folksonomies: It enables timeliness and multiple perspectives. A controlled vocabulary is always bound to a certain point in time and to a certain point of view. Folksonomy users can create tags quickly in response to new developments and changes in terminologies (Kroski, 2005). Some tags may be neologisms. Mathes (2004) discusses the words “sometaithurts” (for “so meta it hurts”) and “flicktion” on Flickr. “Although small, there is a quick formation of new terms to describe what is going on, and others adopting that term and the activity is describes” (Mathes, 2004). Such an unanticipated and unexpected use of tags reflects a “communication and ad-hoc group formation facilitated through metadata” (Mathes, 2004). Collaborative tagging of documents leads to “multiple interpretations”, different and sometimes disparate opinions and “multicultural views” of the same piece of information (Peterson, 2006). Folksonomies “include everyone’s vocabulary and reflect everyone’s needs without cultural, social, or political bias” (Kroski, 2005), even niche interests can be represented. “Shared intersubjectivities” enable the users “to benefit, not just from their own discoveries, but from those of others” (Campbell, 2006, p. 10). Tags can be used as basis for recommender systems (Szomszor et al., 2007). Yet, the intentions of tags in social tagging systems are not always social. Users who tag documents do not necessarily do this with the objective of helping a community in finding relevant documents. Many users simply use tags to organize their own private documents. Vander Wal (2008) describes social tagging as being “collective” work rather than “collaborative.” Thus, many tags in use are personal rather than social (Guy & Tonkin, 2006). Some tags do not describe the document, but give a judgment (“stupid”). User-specific tags

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describe or evaluate a document only from the user’s very own perspective so that some tags “are virtually meaningless to anybody except their creators” (Pluzhenskaia, 2006, p. 23). Some other tags can be called “performative”: Often a planned or done activity is tagged, for example “toread” on Del.icio.us (Kipp, 2006a). Additionally, there are syncategorematic tags – terms which can only be understood in the specific context. A good example of this type of tag is the term “me” on Flickr, which describes a photo of the document’s author. Some keywords are even mere spam-tags. Overall, research has analyzed the nature of tags as well as the different functions of tags (see Al-Khalifa & Davis, 2007; Golder & Huberman, 2006; Kipp, 2006b). The strength of folksonomies lies in “serendipity” (Mathes, 2004), in discovering information via different paths, and in easy to handle search mechanisms (Quintarelli, 2005). “The long tail paradigm is also about discovery of information, not just about finding it”, Quintarelli (2005) adds. Folksonomies provide different entry points to document collections; as described above, users may browse along relations between tags, users and documents. Searching with tags is much easier for non-information professionals than searching with elaborated retrieval tools such as, for example, the International Patent Classification system. On the other hand, professionally generated metadata are usually segmented into different fields, such as the document type and the notations of classification systems. Here indexing distinguishes formal aspects from content-descriptive information (“aboutness”). In folksonomies a strict boundary between different metadata is lacking. There are tags that identify what a document is about. At the same time, one can find tags referring to formal descriptions at the same level: i.e., tags identifying the owner of the document or tags referring to file format (Golder & Huberman, 2006, p. 203). Within a library catalog, this can cause problems, as one could not, for example, clearly distinguish between books written by William Shakespeare and books about him.

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SOLUTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS There are basically three different approaches aiming to solve the present problems of folksonomies. All approaches complement each other. First, one can focus on the actors and try to educate users to improve “tag literacy” (Guy & Tonkin, 2006). The second approach comprises combinations of social tagging with other knowledge organization systems (Weller, 2007). And finally we may generally consider tags as elements of natural language and treat them by means of automatic methods of natural language processing (NLP) for better retrieval results (Peters & Stock, 2007; Stock, 2007a, chapter 13-18). Improvement of tag literacy would require a broader understanding of indexing principles within the folksonomy community. For training the user in selecting “good” tags, systems that suggest tags to the users (based on co-occurrences, lexical similarity or semantic relations) may be useful (MacLaurin, 2005; Xu et al., 2006). Yet, providing tag suggestions has influences on the classical “wisdom of the crowds” approach; the social component of folksonomies may get lost and the “success breeds success”-effect (Egghe & Rousseau, 1995) may adulterate the tag distributions. Combinations of folksonomies and other KOS are very promising: e.g., approaches of using clustering mechanisms to apply some structure for search result presentations or methods of automatic query expansion or query refinement (Grahl et al., 2007; Gruber, 2007; Kolbitsch, 2007). Some research is done in the field of emergent semantics: i.e., gradually growing semantic structures from folksonomies to more complex KOS (see Zacharias & Braun, 2007) for instance by identifying existing semantic interrelations between concepts (Angeletou et al., 2007; Peters & Weller, 2008). Related approaches of editing and improving unstructured folksonomies with basic vocabulary control are discussed as tag gardening (Governor, 2006; Weller & Peters, 2008).

The development and updating of structured KOS can profit from folksonomies (Aurnhammer et al., 2006; Christiaens, 2006; Gendarmi & Lanubile, 2006; Macgregor & McCulloch, 2006; Mika, 2005; Spyns et al., 2006; Zhang et al., 2006), because the tags, their frequency and their distribution are sources for new controlled terms, for modifications of terms and perhaps for deleting concepts in the sense of a “bottom-up categorization” (Vander Wal, 2005). In this way tags guarantee a fast response to changes and innovations in the knowledge domain. Generally, folksonomies should not be regarded as competitors for classical KOS but rather as a complement. According to Peters (2006) it is not advisable to work exclusively with folksonomies in professional environments (e.g., intranets, commercial online services), but to mix them with other indexing methods. Here, a layer model (Krause, 1996) for the combined use of folksonomies, thesauri, classification systems, etc. will work well. To revise applied tags for effective information indexing and retrieval, it is useful to treat them by means of NLP. After language identification and parsing of tags, typical NLP-tasks, including error detection, word form conflation, identification of named entities, phrase recognition, and decompounding, can be executed. In this way, the variety and ambiguity of tags can be reduced considerably.

FUTURE TRENDS The topics of information retrieval and relevance ranking within folksonomies have not yet been discussed exhaustively. First approaches try to implement a PageRank-like relevance algorithm, the FolkRank, for the ranking of tagged documents (Hotho et al., 2006): “The basic notion is that a resource which is tagged with important tags by important users becomes important itself” (Hotho et al., 2006, 417). A patent application by Yahoo!

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for its photo-sharing service Flickr proposes an “interestingness” ranking which takes into account, for instance, the user’s behavior in clicking and tagging or the number of assigned tags (Butterfield et al., 2006). All in all, three sets of applicable ranking factors can be determined: (1) tags, (2) collaboration, and (3) prosumers (Peters & Stock, 2007). Besides research efforts on improving the quality of folksonomies, some work is also done to use them as a basis for new applications (or as a source for data mining). For example, different methods for identifying communities of interest with the help of folksonomies are considered (Diederich & Iofciu, 2006; Wu et al., 2006), and analyses on how people tag documents on the web might lead to a better understanding of how humans organize and process information (Lodwick, 2005).

CONCLUSION Folksonomies present a valuable addition to the spectrum of knowledge representation methods. They appear in the context of user collaboration in Web 2.0 environment and provide easy and comprehensive access to large data collections. With web users taking control over document indexing, folksonomies offer an inexpensive way of processing large data sets. User centered approaches to tagging have multiple benefits, as they can actively capture the authentic language of the user, are flexible and allow new ways of social navigation within document collections. Yet some problems derive from the unstructured nature of tags which may be solved by improving the users’ tag literacy, by (automatic) query refinements, or by processing tags through natural language processing. In the future, the advantages and shortcomings of folksonomies will be considered more closely as advanced approaches to the use of social tagging applications are emerging. Folksonomies and traditional knowledge representation methods are

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not to be viewed as rivalling systems; additionally, new options for combinations of different techniques will be designed. This will also be particularly beneficial in specialized contexts, since the number of professional database providers, libraries, and museums that have adapted folksonomies continues to grow.

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Sinclair, J., & Cardew-Hall, M. (2008). The folksonomy tag cloud: When is it useful? Journal of Information Science, 34(1), 15–29. doi:10.1177/0165551506078083 Smith, G. (2004, August 3). Folksonomy: Social classification. Retrieved January 10, 2008, from http://atomiq.org/archives/2004/08/folksonomy_ social_classification.html Smith, G. (2008). Tagging: People-powered metadata for the social Web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Spiteri, L. F. (2006). The use of folksonomies in public library catalogues. The Serials Librarian, 51(2), 75–89. doi:10.1300/J123v51n02_06 Spyns, P., de Moor, A., Vandenbussche, J., & Meersman, R. (2006). From folksonomies to ontologies: How the twain meet. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4275, 738–755. doi:10.1007/11914853_45 Staab, S., & Studer, R. (Eds.). (2004). Handbook on ontologies. Berlin, Germany: Springer. Stock, W. G. (2006). On relevance distributions. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(8), 1126–1129. doi:10.1002/asi.20359 Stock, W. G. (2007a). Information retrieval: Informationen suchen und finden. München, Germany: Oldenbourg. Stock, W. G. (2007b). Folksonomies and science communication. A mash-up of professional science databases and Web 2.0 services. Information Services & Use, 27(3), 97–103. Stock, W. G., & Stock, M. (2008). Wissensrepräsentation: Informationen auswerten und bereitstellen. München, Germany: Oldenbourg. Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few. New York: Anchor Books.

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Szomszor, M., Cattuto, C., Alani, H., O’Hara, K., Baldassarri, A., Loreto, V., et al. (2007, June). Folksonomies, the Semantic Web, and movie recommendation. In B. Hoser & A. Hotho (Eds.), Bridging the gap between Semantic Web and Web 2.0 (pp. 71-84). Innsbruck, Austria: International Workshop at the 4th European Semantic Web Conference (SemNet 2007). Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave. New York: Morrow. Trant, J. (2006). Exploring the potential for social tagging and folksonomy in art museums: Proof of concept. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 12(1), 83–105. doi:10.1080/13614560600802940 Vander Wal, T. (2005, February 21). Explaining and showing broad and narrow folksonomies. Retrieved January 10, 2008, from http://www. vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=1635 Vander Wal, T. (2008). Keeping up with social tagging. In Workshop Good Tags – Bad Tags, Social Tagging in der Wissensorganisation, Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, Germany. Retrieved June 23, 2008, from http://www.e-teaching.org/ community/taggingcast von Ahn, L. (2006). Games with a purpose. IEEE Computer Magazine, 96-98. Weiss, A. (2005). The power of collective intelligence. netWorker, 9(3), 16-23. Weller, K. (2007). Folksonomies and ontologies: Two new players in indexing and knowledge representation. In H. Jezzard (Ed.), Online Information Conference Proceedings (pp. 108-115). London: Learned Information Europe. Weller, K., & Peters, I. (2007). Reconsidering relationships for knowledge representation. In Proceedings of I-KNOW ‘07, Graz, Austria (pp. 493-496).

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Weller, K., & Peters, I. (2008). Seeding, weeding, fertilizing – different tag gardening activities for folksonomy maintenance and enrichment. In Triple-I Conference, Proceedings of I-Semantics, Graz, Austria (pp. 110-117). Wu, H., Zubair, M., & Maly, K. (2006). Harvesting social knowledge from folksonomies. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (pp. 111-114). New York: ACM. Xu, Z., Fu, Y., Mao, J., & Su, D. (2006). Towards the Semantic Web: Collaborative tag suggestions. In Proceedings of the 15th International WWW Conference. Zacharias, V., & Braun, S. (2007). SOBOLEO. Social bookmarking and lightweight ontology engineering. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge (CKC), 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2007), Banff, Alberta, Canada. Zhang, L., Wu, X., & Yu, Y. (2006). Emergent semantics from folksonomies: A quantitative study. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4090, 168–186. doi:10.1007/11803034_8

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Broad and Narrow Folksonomies: Broad and narrow folksonomies differ in whether multiple assignments of identical tags are possible or not. Systems with broad folksonomies allow to assign the same tag to one document several times (thus the tag frequency can be counted), whereas narrow folksonomies record every tag only once. Folksonomy: An indexing method open for users to apply freely chosen index terms. The term “folksonomy” was introduced in 2004 by

Thomas Vander Wal as a combination of “folk” and “taxonomy.” Knowledge Representation and Indexing: In the context of information storage and retrieval techniques, knowledge representation is concerned with providing methods for organizing and representing knowledge domains and sorting documents accordingly. A traditional way to do this is by document indexing: i.e., by assigning keywords or notations (usually taken from a controlled vocabulary or classification scheme) to a document to describe its content. Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS): Knowledge Organization Systems are (structured) representations of a knowledge domain, used for document classification and indexing. Common classical knowledge organization systems include classifications (taxonomies), thesauri, and nomenclatures. Folksonomies and ontologies are new forms of KOS. Tag: Within a given context, a tag is a keyword assigned to a document to describe it. Tags can be used for document retrieval. Folksonomy tags can be freely chosen by the users of a folksonomybased system. Tag Cloud: A tag cloud displays the popularity of tags, either for tags assigned to one single document or for all tags within a complete folksonomy-based platform. The bigger and broader a tag is displayed in a tag cloud, the more often has it been used. Tag Distribution: The frequency of tags assigned to one document (or within a platform) can be counted and visualized as a tag distribution graph. Some specific forms of tag distributions are dominant within folksonomies: for example, the emergence of a “long tail”, which reacts to the rules of the power law. A “long trunk” may appear as well; the curve then follows an inverselogistic distribution.

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ENDNOTES

6

1

7

2 3 4 5

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Flickr: http://www.flickr.com You Tube: http://www.youtube.com Del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us Technorati: http://www.technorati.com Google Image Labeler: http://images.google. com/imagelabeler/

8

Engineering Village: http://www.engineeringvillage.com WISO: http://www.wiso-net.de PennTags: http://tags.library.upenn.edu/

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Chapter 14

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Creating Metadata through Collaborative Tagging Stefan Bitzer Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany Lars Thoroe Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany Matthias Schumann Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany

ABSTRACT Modern Web 2.0 technologies facilitate the collaboration and sharing of information among users, thereby enabling cooperative processes of information search. One kind of user participation is collaborative tagging, where individuals assign keywords to resources and objects on the Internet. Through the allocation of keywords, objects are enhanced with user-created metadata which results in the so-called folksonomies. This chapter focuses on the classification of tags based on function and user motivation, examines advantages and disadvantages of folksonomies, and provides a review of current applications using collaborative tagging. Future trends and potential developments are identified as they relate to the implementation of collaborative tagging in corporate settings.

INTRODUCTION Since the introduction of social software and Web 2.0 technologies, discussion about the influence and importance of a broad range of new tools for various fields has followed (Safran, Gütl, & Helic, 2007; Boulos & Wheeler, 2007). Considerable potential for Web 2.0-based applications is seen in supporting information retrieval and classificaDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch014

tion of online resources. The Internet offers a huge amount of information varying in content, format, and quality. This diversity poses a challenge for users seeking specific information. Modern Web 2.0 technologies facilitate the collaboration and sharing of information among users, thus enabling cooperative processes of information search. While in Web 1.0 the user was not integrated into the organization of content, in today’s Del.icio.us-type folksonomy-based systems the user is actively engaged via the newly emerged tag recommenda-

Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

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tion mechanisms. Such collaborative enrichment of web content enhanced with metadata is viewed as a step towards the Semantic Web (Xu, Fu, Mao, & Su, 2006).

Figure 1. Broad and narrow folksonomies

BACKGROUND Folksonomies and Tagging Vander Wal (2005) defines folksonomy as the outcome of individual free tagging of online content and resources in a social environment for one’s own retrieval. With this term, Vander Wal refers to the result of a process of collaboratively assigning keywords to resources or items on the Internet, the so-called collaborative tagging. Therefore, folksonomy is often used synonymously with the terms social classification, social indexing, or social tagging (Voß, 2007). Folksonomy is a portmanteau of the words folk and taxonomy (Bateman, Brooks, & McCalla, 2006). The naming, however, is disputed. Some see it as a misnomer because of the reference to taxonomy. A classification scheme like taxonomy is strictly hierarchic and contains relations, unlike a folksonomy, which consists of a flat namespace (Mathes, 2004). The vocabulary is not preassigned, instead the users describe the information and items within their own comprehension. The purpose of folksonomies is not categorization but connecting items and expressing their meaning through personal understanding (Vander Wal, 2005). In the context of folksonomies, three elements have to be considered (Marlow, Naaman, Boyd, & Davis, 2006), namely, resources, tags used for describing the resources, and users who assign the tags. In broad folksonomies (as in Figure 1), many users describe the same item with a term from their personal vocabulary. Hence, similar or different tags can be assigned to an object (from 1 to 5). On the basis of all assigned tags, users are able to retrieve the described object. A common example of an application of broad folksonomies is a popular social bookmarking service, Del.icio.

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us1 (Lux, Granitzer, & Kern, 2007). By contrast, in narrow folksonomies (Figure 1) there are only a few tags, mostly provided by the content creator and a group of a few people. Due to this, the number of tags and tagging persons is significantly lower than in broad folksonomies. Every tag is generally created and recorded once only, either by the content creator or a small group of selected users. Only new tags can be attributed to an object, which inhibits the possibility of counting tag frequencies. Accordingly, all tags are ranked equally and a tag distribution cannot be created. However, it can be shown via which tag users found the resource. The approach of the narrow folksonomy resembles professional indexing with controlled terms for thesauri or ontologies; in contrast, folksonomies have uncontrolled terms. Popular examples for narrow folksonomies (Cattuto, Loreto, & Pietronero, 2007) include services such as Flickr2 (photographs) or Technorati3 (blog posts). Today folksonomies are implemented in various fields. In addition to a high diffusion of Web 2.0-based services, folksonomies are employed in corporate applications (Fichter, 2006). Capabilities have been found in indexing corporate blogs, podcasts and vodcasts (Peters, 2006); corporate social bookmarking (Damianos, Griffith, & Cuomo, 2006; Millen, Feinberg, & Kerr, 2006); and message boards (Murison, 2005).

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Figure 2. A sample tag cloud

its quantity of assignment by different users (Hassan-Montero & Herrero-Solana, 2006). As mentioned, this weighted list is only possible in broad folksonomies.

Classification of Tags

Furthermore, the use of folksonomies in public facilities has also gained popularity, for example, in art museums (Trant & Wyman, 2006) or public library catalogs (Spiteri, 2006).

CREATING METADATA THROUGH COLLABORATIVE TAGGING As indicated, folksonomies are the result of collaborative tagging. In the process of tagging, an item is augmented with metadata in the form of descriptive keywords. Tagging an item yields a flat hierarchy of descriptors, called a tag cloud (see Figure 2), which is a weighted list, where each tag is visually highlighted according to

Tags are commonly classified according to two dimensions: function and motivation. Usually, the following functions of tags are distinguished (Golder & Huberman, 2005), see Table 1. Most tags fall in one of the first three categories which are relatively general. In contrast, tags of the last four categories are user-specific and not widely used. The second dimension for classifying tags is the motivation for their assignment. Reasons for tagging an item can be manifold depending on the target group and expectations for future use of the tag. The following motives can be distinguished (Marlow et al., 2006), see Table 2.

Table 1. Classification of tags based on their functions Function

Description

Examples

Identifying the topical context

These tags in the form of nouns describe the topics of the bookmarked resources. The topics can include people or organizations as well.

“folksonomy” or “collaborative tagging”

Identifying the type of item

As an extension of the topical description, tags can specify the type of a bookmarked item.

“article”, “study”, “blog” or “book”

Identifying the owner

Some tags identify the owner or creator of the bookmarked content. As a result of the apparent popularity of weblogs among Web 2.0 users, identifying content ownership can be particularly important.

“O’Reilly” or “Microsoft”

Refining categories

Tags of this category refine existing tags to improve their expressiveness.

Origin “folksonomy” → “critique of folksonomy”

Identifying qualities or characteristics

With this type of tag, the user expresses his opinion about the item.

Adjectives like “funny”, “informative” or “well arranged”

Self-reference

Tags starting with “my” characterize the relation between the content and the tagger.

“myHomepage”

Task organizing

Grouping task-related information to a website can be an important part of organizing while performing a task (Jones et al. 2005)

“print”, “jobsearch”

Benefiting user

Individual and community use

Individual use

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Table 2. Classification of tags based on user motivations for tagging Motivation for tagging

Description

Examples

Future retrieval

The motivation to tag one or various resources is to enhance its later information retrieval, be it for personal or common use.

“folksonomy” or “collaborative tagging”

Contribution and sharing

In this case the tags are used to introduce the item to either known or unknown audiences.

“class reunion_ housten_highschool_2008”

Attract attention

People can be attracted to resources by common tags. Tag clouds or other popularity reflecting lists are visible in the system, so users may be encouraged to contribute tags to influence the global view.

“excellent information” or “brand new”

Play and competition

Tags can be assigned based on an internal or external set of rules. These rules establish the conditions for different competitions, such as a specific manipulation of tag clouds or tagging of all items with a particular feature.

Tagging all photos with peculiar hats like “gigantic blue hat”

Self presentation

To identify the connection between a resource and a user, tags can mark and describe the relation in the form of personal comments.

Opinion expression

If a user wants to communicate his/her opinion to others, s/he can do it with corresponding tags.

Advantages of Tags In folksonomies the users act as producers and consumers of the tags and can thus be referred to as prosumers (Peters & Stock, 2007). The term prosumer is in this context a portmanteau word formed by contracting the words producer and consumer (Pettenati & Cigognini, 2007). As a result of this role-aggregation, the tags authentically represent the language of authors and users. This sort of indexing discloses diversified interpretations, different opinions, and multicultural views of the same content (Peterson, 2006). Ontologies, thesauri, or classification systems are the results of time-consuming and expensive procedures (Maedche, & Staab, 2000). Compared to this, folksonomies are significantly cheaper. The indexing is done by volunteers in a collaborative way and there is no complicated, hierarchically organized nomenclature to learn (Wu, Zubair, & Maly, 2006). In this context one speaks about low-entrance barriers for participating in creating folksonomies (Mathes, 2004). One advantage over automatic methods for indexing, like popular search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!), is that besides textual documents, non-textual documents

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“seen live” “informative” or “obsolete information”

(images, videos, music, etc.) are indexed as well. Folksonomies can also have a positive influence on the development and updating of controlled vocabularies (Aurnhammer, Hanappe, & Steels, 2006). The frequency of tag assignment can serve as a basis for new controlled terms, for modifications of terms, or for deleting concepts. In this manner tags offer a fast access to changes and innovations in the knowledge domain. Under the phrase “browsing vs. finding,” Mathes (2004) declares a new kind of finding information. In addition to a concrete search by entering tags, the user can browse the system following the related tags and thereby discover other potentially relevant content (Ohkura, Kiyota, & Nakagawa, 2006). In this manner the user can access additional contents, which he or she may have not found otherwise. A further advantage is assigned to the formation of desire lines. In the course of time the most common tags emerge and reflect in this way the choices in diction, terminology, and precision of the users. This makes it easier for the user to find the investigated information (Mathes, 2004). Another advantage is the feedback given in the process of tagging. As soon as a user assigns a tag

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to an item, the cluster of items that are marked with the same tag is displayed. If this cluster does not meet the user’s expectation, he or she can add a tag or change it to a more fitting description. Additionally the scope can be expanded to include all items from all users that match the tag. Thus the group norm in this context is shown, and the user can either adapt it or try to influence the group norm with his or her tag or both (Udell, 2004).

Figure 3. Semantic problems in folksonomies

Disadvantages of Tags The simple and convenient process of collaborative tagging has drawbacks. The uncontrolled vocabulary, especially as a main feature of folksonomies, leads to several limitations and problems. As users can describe items with various expressions, ambiguity of the tags can emerge. Ambiguities accrue, when users apply different terms to documents in different ways, because there are no explicit systematic guidelines and no scope notes. With homonyms and acronyms there are two different kinds of ambiguities (Mathes, 2004). A classic example for a homonym is the English word “coach”, which can be used for an overland bus or a sports manager. Also acronyms can lead to problems. “MIT” for example can be an acronym for “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” and “Made in Taiwan” (Hsieh, Lai & Chou, 2006). At the opposite end of the spectrum, the lack of synonym control can cause synonymous but different tags being used for the same item (Golder & Huberman, 2006). In practice, tag clouds show that most terms are used in plural and singular. Furthermore many users from different countries tag in their own language. Merging these can cause problems in trans-language synonymy and homonymy (Gordon-Murnane, 2006). Another problem is the widespread limitations of tags to a single word. This reduces the description alternatives extensively since in many cases two or more words can be more suggestive (Mathes, 2004). Figure 3 shows some exemplary problems

with folksonomies and the tags used. Besides the described vocabulary-based problems, folksonomies also have to deal with additional adversities. Prosumers tag in different contexts with different tasks and motivations, and they possess different expertise and cognitive talents. These different approaches can cause the folksonomy, as a result of the process, to be very heterogeneous. Moreover it is probably that a significant amount of tagging is done for personal use rather than public benefit (Golder & Huberman, 2006). Lastly the produced metadata through folksonomies have limitations compared to professionally generated metadata (Peters & Stock, 2007). Professional metadata is explicitly segmented into different fields (like document type or kind of content) and formal aspects are considered as well. In folksonomies, a separation between different metadata is missing; and, in the end, the flat hierarchy prevents a structural classification of the described item.

Applications of Collaborative Tagging Today, the implementation of collaborative tagging functionalities is still mostly limited to websites, where folksonomies are generated by users via tagging. CiteULike4 for example is a social bookmarking service which enables the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers

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(Hammond, Hannay, Lund, & Scott, 2005). The bibliographical description of an article is imported by a bookmarklet into a personal library. The user can structure his library with freely chosen tags which creates a folksonomy of academic interests. Youtube,5 as another popular example, allows the creation and exchange of tags for the uploaded videos. Flickr and Del.icio.us are among the most frequently used tagging websites (Hammond et al., 2005) and are described in more detail in what follows. Flickr provides users the possibility to administer their photos online. As aforementioned, Flickr constitutes a narrow folksonomy, because only the user himself or herself or a small group can tag the object. Registered users can upload their own photos, get in contact with other users, and exchange and mark up to 70 tags per photo. It is also possible to label only a specific part of a picture. Furthermore the uploaded images can be integrated to other websites, for example blogs. The user decides if his pictures are publicly available or not. Users with common interests can establish a group. For example the group called “Stockholm” only consists of members who uploaded pictures of Stockholm. The most frequently used tags are shown in a tag cloud. In addition, the personal tags of a user are shown to him as a separate tag cloud. For every uploaded picture, a title and a description can be registered. The related tags can be split up through a blank and joined via quotation marks, if a tag consists of two or more words (Xu et al., 2006). Del.icio.us saves and structures bookmarks. The objects, in this case websites, can be tagged by various users without a predefined vocabulary (Wu, Zhang, & Yu, 2006), which results in the development of a broad folksonomy (Lux, Granitzer & Kern, 2007). A gratis registration allows the user to save his personal bookmarks and enhance them with tags for a better and easier retrieval. The saved links and the assigned tags are shown as a list, whereas the tags can be also shown as a tag cloud. Furthermore the user can

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select the most popular or recent tags. By picking a specific tag, all bookmarks assigned with this tag are shown. In contrast to Flickr, Del.icio.us recommends proposals for potential tags. These proposals are based on existing tags of other users for similar websites (Veres, 2006). These two examples show the success of current applications of collaborative tagging. If this success continues, the question arises, how the availability of large amounts of metadata may shape the web in the future. One vision often mentioned in this context is the Semantic Web, which we will compare to folksonomies in the following section.

Folksonomies and the Semantic Web A widely discussed extension of the World Wide Web, which also relies on the assignment of metadata to web resources, is the Semantic Web. Folksonomies are often mentioned in the context of the Semantic Web (Specia, & Motta, 2007; Xu et al., 2006). However, despite similarities, these two concepts are fundamentally different, as will be shown in the following comparison. The term Semantic Web can be traced back to Tim Berners-Lee who in 1992 founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to standardize and advance the web. More specifically, the Semantic Web is a structuring extension of the World Wide Web. It is based on content which is readable and understandable by computers. Through metadata the content within the web is to be enhanced with meaning so that software agents can carry out sophisticated tasks for the user (Alesso & Smith, 2005). To achieve this, two basic requirements have to be met. First of all, a general and consistent processing of data integration and combination from various sources is needed. Secondly, computer languages for gathering relations between data and real world objects are required. Based on these requirements, the W3C Consortium in 2004 published the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL)

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Table 3. Comparison of folksonomies and the Semantic Web Folksonomies

Semantic Web

Based on tags

Based on ontologies (taxonomies, thesauri)

Created by users

Created by experts

No given rules

Predetermined rules

Free vocabulary

Predetermined vocabulary

Flat hierarchy

Hierarchic structure

No previous knowledge required

Previous knowledge required

Simple, cheap, uncomplex

Complex, extensive

as technical recommendations to facilitate standardization in this area (W3C Consortium, 2007). RDF is an XML-based, standardized language that is designed to describe information about resources on the Internet. To enable a semantic interpretation of these RDF statements, the language was extended by the RDF Schema. RDF Schema (RDFS) defines the vocabulary used in RDF statements with semantic meaning. Through these standards, machine-readable ontologies can be created and distributed using OWL. Both the Semantic Web and folksonomies have the ambition to augment web resources with metadata and improve the overall usability of the Internet. Nevertheless, they differ in major issues. The Semantic Web is based on expert-created ontologies, which in turn are built on taxonomies and thesauri. The predetermined vocabulary possesses a distinct structured hierarchy. Consequently, the creation of Semantic Web compliant metadata is a complex and extensive process. In contrast, collaborative tagging of web resources leading to a folksonomy can be accomplished by regular users without any need for previous knowledge. There are no restrictive rules and, as a rule, no controlled vocabulary. The result is a simple and flat hierarchy, see Table 3. The comparison shows that the approach of folksonomies is fundamentally different from the Semantic Web. With its unstructured approach, collaborative tagging avoids the inherent problem of the implementation of the Semantic

Web (Gruber, 2007): The increasing amount of information and websites on the Internet precludes that the existing content can be enhanced with machine-readable metadata in the form of ontologies by experts. This process would be far too cost-intensive and time-consuming. Collaborative tagging facilitates the distribution of the effort of creating metadata on to the community, even though only a flat unstructured composition evolves with the described problems. For this reason, folksonomies are often seen as supplemental to the Semantic Web (Gruber, 2007; Specia & Motta, 2007; Xu et al., 2006).

FUTURE TRENDS Due to the success of folksonomies on the web, the value of collaborative tagging for corporate applications has become visible (Millen, Feinberg, & Kerr 2006). This interest, for instance, can be observed in the acquisition of the two popular tagging systems–Flickr and Del.icio.us–by Yahoo! Inc. in 2005 (see Press Room, 2007 Press Room, 2007Yahoo! Press Room, 2007!!). The use of collaborative tagging in corporations is also called enterprise tagging (Muller 2007). On the one hand, the potential of collaborative tagging can be considered from the point of view of personal knowledge management of employees (Macgregor, & McCulloch 2006). In this case a person or a group of employees can tag objects

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and information for more effective retrieval, for example, from an organization’s Intranet. IBM, on the other hand, experiments with a company wide system called “Dogear” (Millen, Feinberg, & Kerr). Dogear is a shared bookmarking system within IBM Intranet site and is connected to the enterprise directory. This allows an association of tags to concrete employees who are known (or of interest) due to their expertise or professional role. Through this conjunction with real identities, the user can search both by people and by tag. In the process of tagging, the user is not limited by a predefined vocabulary: an auto-complete feature encourages consistency. So far IBM’s internal Dogear system stored over 300,000 bookmarks to internal and external information sources tagged by the employees (IBM, 2008). Whether broad or narrow folksonomies will prevail for corporate applications in the future is still under consideration. Some proclaim that to guarantee interoperability across distributed systems, controlled vocabularies are essential (Macgregor, & McCulloch 2006). This strengthens the case for narrow folksonomies. However, IBM’s system has shown that with an uncontrolled vocabulary and a large number of users (i.e. a broad folksonomy), a corporation can benefit as well (Millen, Feinberg, & Kerr, 2006). Meanwhile solutions for a reduction of the described disadvantages are developed. One approach tries to improve the tagging-capability of users by an enhanced visualization of synonyms and alternative spellings to the user (Ives, 2006). Others focus on automatic methods for processing tags (Peters, & Stock, 2007). Moreover, approaches to derive hierarchies, classifications, and ontologies from folksonomies are being developed. By means of an algorithm, a hierarchy of tags is automatically built from the data in a tagging system. The algorithm utilizes notions of similarity and generality in the data generated through tagging (Heymann, & Garcia-Molina, 2006). The development of these algorithms is crucial for structuring metadata generated by collaborative tagging. If these efforts prove successful, folksonomies may evolve as a pathway to the Semantic Web. 154

CONCLUSION The rising number of users participating in collaborative tagging shows acceptance and potential of folksonomies. The WWW with its billions of web pages continues to grow exponentially. Collaborative tagging can be one approach to augment content with metadata in order to improve the usability of information. Despite the described limitations and problems, folksonomies constitute an effective way of distributing the effort for generating metadata among community members. This new metadata significantly improves the retrieval of tagged resources (Hotho, Jaschke, Schmitz, & Stumme, 2006). Furthermore, the emerging flat hierarchy of keywords can be seen as a step towards the Semantic Web (Xu et al., 2006).

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Boulos, M. N. K., & Wheeler, S. (2007). The emerging Web 2.0 social software: An enabling suite of sociable technologies in health and health care education. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 24(1), 2–23. doi:10.1111/j.14711842.2007.00701.x Cattuto, C., Loreto, V., & Pietronero, L. (2007). Semiotic dynamics and collaborative tagging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(5), 1461–1464. doi:10.1073/pnas.0610487104 Damianos, L., Griffith, J., & Cuomo, D. (2006). Onomi: Social bookmarking on a corporate intranet. In Proceedings of the 17th conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. Davies, J., Studer, R., & Warren, P. (2006). Semantic Web technologies: Trends and research in ontology-based systems. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Fichter, D. (2006). Intranet applications for tagging and folksonomies. Online, 30(3), 43–45. Golder, S., & Huberman, B. A. (2006). The structure of collaborative tagging systems (HP Labs Tech. Rep.). Gordon-Murnane, L. (2006). Social bookmarking, folksonomies, and Web 2.0 tools. Searcher – The Magazine for Database Professionals, 14(6), 26-38. Gruber, T. (2007). Ontology of folksonomy: A mash-up of apples and oranges. International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, 3(1), 1–11. Hammond, T., Hannay, T., Lund, B., & Scott, J. (2005). Social bookmarking tools - a general review. D-Lib Magazine, 11(4). doi:10.1045/ april2005-hammond

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Macgregor, G., & McCulloch, E. (2006). Collaborative tagging as a knowledge organisation and resource discovery tool. Library Review, 55(5), 291–300. doi:10.1108/00242530610667558 Maedche, A., & Staab, S. (2000). Mining ontologies from text. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. Marlow, C., Naaman, M., Boyd, D., & Davis, M. (2006). HT06, tagging paper, taxonomy, Flickr, academic article, to read. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (pp. 31-40). Mathes, A. (2004). Folksonomies – cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata. Retrieved September 9, 2008, from http://www.adammathes.com/academic/ computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html Millen, D. R., Feinberg, J., & Kerr, B. (2006). DOGEAR: Social bookmarking in the enterprise. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 111-120). Muller, M. J. (2007). Patterns of tag usage in enterprise tagging services: A constraint on exploratory search? In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI 2007 Workshop on Exploratory Search and HCI: Designing and Evaluating Interfaces to Support Exploratory Search Interaction (pp. 13-16). Murison, J. (2005). Messageboard topic tagging: User tagging of collectively owned community content. In Proceedings of the 2005 Conference on Designing for User eXperience. Ohkura, T., Kiyota, Y., & Nakagawa, H. (2006). Browsing system for weblog articles based on automated folksonomy. In Proceedings of the WWW 2006 Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics.

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Peters, I. (2006). Against folksonomies: Indexing blogs and podcasts for corporate knowledge management. In H. Jezzard (Ed.), Proceedings of Preparing for Information 2.0. Online Information 2006 (pp. 93-97). London: Learned Information Europe. Peters, I., & Stock, W. G. (2007). Folksonomy and information retrieval. In Proceedings of the 70th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 45. Peterson, E. (2006). Beneath the metadata: Some philosophical problems with folksonomies. D-Lib Magazine, 12(11). doi:10.1045/november2006peterson Pettenati, M. C., & Cigognini, M. E. (2007). Social networking theories and tools to support connectivist learning activities. International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies, 2(3), 42–60. Safran, C., Gütl, C., & Helic, D. (2007). The impact of Web 2.0 on learning at a technical university – a usage survey. In Proceedings of World Conference on e-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (ELEARN). Specia, L., & Motta, E. (2007). Integrating folksonomies with the Semantic Web. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4519, 624–639. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-72667-8_44 Spiteri, L. F. (2006). The use of folksonomies in public library catalogues. The Serials Librarian, 51(2), 75–89. doi:10.1300/J123v51n02_06 Taniar, D., & Rahayu, J. W. (2006). Web semantics and ontology. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing.

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Trant, J., & Wyman, B. (2006). Investigating social tagging and folksonomy in art museums with steve.museum. In Proceedings of the World Wide Web 2006. Edinburgh, UK: ACM Press. Retrieved December 19, 2007, from http://www.archimuse. com/research/www2006-tagging-steve.pdf Udell, J. (2004, August 20). Collaborative knowledge gardening. InfoWorld. Vander Wal, T. (2005). Folksonomy definition and Wikipedia. Retrieved December 19, 2007, from http://www.vanderwal.net/random/entrysel. php?blog=1750 Veres, C. (2006). The language of folksonomies: What tags reveal about user classification. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3999, 58–69. doi:10.1007/11765448_6 Voß, J. (2007). Tagging, folksonomy & co. - renaissance of manual indexing? Paper presented at the 10th International Symposium for Information Science. Wu, H., Zubair, M., & Maly, K. (2006). Harvesting social knowledge from folksonomies. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (pp. 111-114). Wu, X., Zhang, L., & Yu, Y. (2006). Exploring social annotations for the Semantic Web. In Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, Edinburgh, UK (pp. 417-426). Xu, Z., Fu, Y., Mao, J., & Su, D. (2006). Towards the Semantic Web: Collaborative tag suggestions. In Proceedings of the workshop on collaborative Web tagging. Retrieved December 19, 2007, from http://www.ibiblio.org/www_tagging/2006/13. pdf

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Collaborative Tagging: The process of collaboratively assigning keywords to resources or items on the Internet. Enterprise Tagging: The use of collaborative tagging in a corporate environment. Ontology: Data model that constitutes a set of concepts within a domain. The model includes the relationships between those concepts as well as rules for inference and integrity. Semantic Web: Augmentation of online resources with unambiguous machine-readable descriptions of content or functions. While existing web resources are extended without modifying their original functionality, the boundary between human and automated understanding is abrogated. Tags: Descriptive keywords which users attribute to online resources. Tag Cloud: Weighted list with a visual description of user-generated tags. In tag clouds, tags are typically listed alphabetically, while the tag frequency is shown with font size or color. Taxonomy: Segmentation and classification of elements into a hierarchic category system on the basis of defined relations. Thesauri: Originating in bibliography, thesauri are taxonomies enhanced with primitive definite relations such as synonyms.

ENDNOTES 1 2 3 4 5

Yahoo! Press Room. (2007). Yahoo! continues social media expansion with MyBlogLog acquisition. Retrieved December 19, 2007, from http:// yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/inthenews. cfm?ArchiveWeek=20070112

http://www.del.icio.us http://www.flickr.com http://www.technorati.com http://www.citeulike.com http://www.youtube.com

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Chapter 15

E-Tagging in Context

Information Management across Community Networks Heather D. Pfeiffer New Mexico State University, USA Emma L. Tonkin University of Bath, UK

ABSTRACT This chapter examines social tagging as annotation: first from the perspective of classification research; and second from the perspective of knowledge representation and knowledge management. Using the context meta-model of the annotation, the authors demonstrate that the model is adequately represented in existing knowledge representation theory: specifically, from the perspective of socially constructed meaning in community networks. Furthermore, the set of tagging representations (that is, triadic networks of the individual, object, and annotation) are explored throughout the knowledge representation domain. In contrast to many commentators, the authors of this chapter conclude that social tagging may effectively be explored via a multidisciplinary approach linking knowledge representation and classification research and creating an open domain network.

INTRODUCTION Inter-site and intra-site variation of certain aspects of tag production, content, and patterns of use has recently begun to attract attention by commentators in knowledge management (KM) as well as in classification research (CR). Examples include variation in the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic context of tags, as well as in the patterns of production and use of tags within and between individuals and larger DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch015

social communities. It is conjectured that variation in features of tagging systems (such as user-interface concerns) are at the root of much of these variations, but there is also a great deal of variance within and between tag sites and communities that relates to the topic and character of the discussion, the nature of social tagging as a speech act, or as a performance that reflects on the identity that speakers construct for themselves. This variation may be seen through comparison of research results within and across various tagging systems, but the subject has not yet received large-scale, thorough investigation.

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The term social tagging appears to suggest that the process of tagging - annotating a resource with a free-text keyword or phrase - is understood to be connected to some form of underlying “community” or “network” structure. As a result, some perceive a dichotomy between semantic annotation or knowledge management, and the use of social tagging to aggregate opinions (Mika, 2007). In short, a distinction exists between well-formed semantic annotations that enable the development of efficient computational methods for analyzing and interacting with information and the free tags of social networks that are weakly defined and incompletely interpretable. Reflected is a historical bias towards a characterization of knowledge management systems as representative of consensus within a research community or other closed domain, whilst user classifications generally exhibit partial consensus within a loosely defined community. There is significant disagreement about the forms that this social dimension may take, just as there is a great deal of discussion about the uses of tagging that are considered valid and should be encouraged. The analysis of social tagging has been approached via a number of dimensions, of which the perspective of existing research into areas (such as classification research) is perhaps the most common, with the casting of the tag into broadly researched existing forms (such as keyword, label and annotation). Application of existing research perspectives and theory often highlights valid links with prior and related work and hence leads to productive research avenues at a cost perhaps of casting the data into a mould in which it fits uncomfortably. In this chapter, we bring together a set of perspectives on social tagging and cast them into existing models and theory drawn from the knowledge management domain, with the aim of demonstrating the sound theoretical basis for a rapprochement between the two domains. The familiarity of knowledge management research with systems thinking and knowledge as a

socially-constructed resource (Good, Kawas, & Wilkinson, 2007) suggests that bridging this gap provides the classification researcher with a rich set of tools and resources to complement existing approaches to research in this area. Knowledge itself is considered a manifestation of information in social systems, a result of interpretation of data (Fuchs, 2004). Many recent tools and techniques focus on exploring aspects of the connection between social tagging and the underlying community, in particular the role of tagging as a means of shared informal annotation. We summarize relevant research results, bringing together areas of investigation linked to various aspects of the process of authoring, reading and making use of tags, including facets of tag use other than the well-known model of personal or shared resource management. A broad, multidisciplinary view allows for more realistic models of tag generation and use, thereby providing a means to make more effective and varied use of existing research tools in the analysis and reuse of social tagging and networking data.

BACKGROUND Social tagging inherits from previous work on non-hierarchical file systems, designed to solve issues first identified by Barreau and Nardi (1995) that limit the usability and intuitiveness of the hierarchical file system paradigm. Barreau and Nardi found that hierarchical file organization suffered due to the variety of roles for information in the workplace, resulting in difficulty defining an appropriate filing scheme and increasing the cost in terms of time; they also noted that hierarchical filing schemes were perceived as complex to understand and use, points which may also be seen as valid criticisms of formal, particularly hierarchical, approaches to classification. Historical examples of attempts to solve these issues include MIT’s 1991-1992 Semantic File system project (Gifford, Jouvelot, Sheldon, & O’Toole, 1991) and

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XEROX PARC’s Placeless Documents initiative (Dourish et al., 2000). Social tagging is also often linked to work on keyword systems, in particular into intra-indexer and inter-indexer consistency (Leonard, 1975). Such pilot projects explored approaches to simplifying and reducing the cost of classification; they often bear many similarities to the social tagging systems of today with one significant dissimilarity being the intended audience and scale of each system; these systems were not in general used by large and varied communities, but were limited to personal information management or information management within the small office setting. Services made available to the Internet can quickly attain a large user base. As the number of users increases, so does the opportunity for many forms of collaborative use to take place; that is, there is a possibility that users no longer consider the service to be entirely for the purpose of personal (single-user) information management. It is reasonable to suppose that the user might then choose to treat the system: as a channel for information exchange between colleagues or user groups; as a means of persuasion or performance; as a means of developing a public identity or online profile (Zollers, 2007; Tonkin et al., 2008); or, as a means of making use of any of the subtler approaches to situating the written word within a socio-cultural context. In practice, tags are often employed to convey information beyond their primary use as symbols representing the theme or content of an object. As such, they may contain keywords, interpretative data, reactions, and functional/action tags (Golder & Huberman, 2006; Kipp, 2007). Several models of social tagging have been proposed that concentrate more closely on the network, system, and community interactions that underlie many social tagging services and their uses. For example, Zhdanova (2007) describes folksonomies via a model that is based upon existing models for semantic social network representation. Yeung and colleagues (2007)

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Figure 1. A is a set of annotations: A ⊆ U × T × R. Adapted from Yeung’s poster version of paper

begin from a tripartite graph of users, tags, and resources (see Figure 1) describing the effect of this linking as “mutual contextualization”; that is, through association with other elements, semantics is acquired. At the basis of this discussion, and particularly visible in Yeung’s work, is the assertion that the processes involved in tagging depend upon the same processes that govern lexical choice and pragmatic interpretation in natural language. When this is the case, the author of the annotation may be expected to apply a model of the perceived audience during that process, whilst the reader interprets the result in a similar manner via a model of the speaker’s knowledge and intentions. Such a process is consistent with a view of natural language as a “noisy information channel”: rather than the commonly applied model of stylized natural language in classification applied as a lossless conduit through which information is encoded, transmitted, and received without error. Precedent for this appears in classification research, in particular in discussion of inter-indexer consistency and intra-indexer consistency, the variation in term use by one or several individuals. Indexing and tagging are similar in the sense that in most circumstances, the expectation by system designers is that the user will attempt

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to find the term that most accurately conveys the intended semantic. The user is attempting to describe the resource so that others looking for a resource on that topic will be able to retrieve it. However, the individual classifying a web page in a social context seeks the term that is most likely to convey the correct image in a situated context, or indeed the term that reflects most appropriately on the individual, whilst formal indexing replaces this social context with a presupposition of joint adherence to a standardized set of definitions. Message formation occurs within a common ground framework (Krauss & Fussell, 1991), meaning that in order to maximize his or her chances of being understood, the individual encoding information – writing an annotation or description, for example – must guess at the most appropriate encoding. To do this, the author must look for background knowledge (common ground) that is likely to be shared by the reader. In constructing an analogous description within a knowledge management context, social contexts can be seen as ontologies, where hierarchies and relationships are the abstract elements of an ontology (Pfeiffer, 2007). This ontology is a synonym for the arrangement of a generalization hierarchy that classifies the categories or concept types of the hierarchy – formally, the term refers to the study of being (Sowa, 1991). The ontology also provides an encoded description of the relationships, operations, and constraints that are essential to help define the nature (knowledge) of our world or reality (Russell & Norvig, 1995). A general ontology defines an informal list of concepts that are part of the domain. Such concepts are seen as tags within the ontology and are defined by categories in which they are members. Individuals, however, may have differing levels of familiarity with a large set of social contexts. Each individual can therefore be thought of as having a slightly different set of concepts, or at least associated symbols, available to them. As described by Krauss and Fussell (1991), the individual encoding information must attempt

to construct the annotation so that it has the best chance of being understood by the intended audience, given that they share at best only a partial set of concepts or associated symbols.

Classification, Organization, Utterance, and Identity Current research focuses on deconstructing tag sets via various models: search, relation to knowledge management, linguistic model, social network discovery, affect and emotion, philosophical and epistemological, and comparison to controlled vocabulary (Shiri, 2007). It is helpful to understand how social tagging is used in context, just as analysis of written and spoken utterance is important to related technologies (such as the Semantic Web, natural language processing, and search methods across bodies of spoken and written text in information retrieval). Social tagging is cheap to implement and popular to use. Many effects obviously extant in the informal classification domain – such as semantic shift, drift and change in scope – are visible, though less obvious, in other knowledge management systems, including the Semantic Web. For this reason, results arising from the study of social tagging systems within a socio-cultural context may potentially lead to a better understanding of inconsistencies in other datasets over time or between physical or social contexts. Two principal approaches to the study of social tagging exist. The first is interpretive, focusing on analysis of specific annotation instances. The second examines tag application and could be described as structural; treating tags as symbolic markers across which a network, or graph, is defined. The former is not the primary focus of this chapter. However, findings from the interpretive approach are relevant to the latter, and therefore will be briefly summarized here. Several models have been developed describing tag networks according to the latter approach (see Figure 2). These concentrate on users tagging information,

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Figure 2. A combination of all three Zhen models. (1) User - Tag - Information; (2) User - Tag - User; and (3) Information - Tag - Information

users connecting to other users by way of tags, and information being connected to other information by way of tags (Zhen, 2007). This in itself can be related, from a knowledge management perspective, to Richards (Odgen & Richards, 1923), who applied the structure of a triangle of meaning combining reference, referent, and symbol, showing that there is a triadic relationship between the three entities. Peirce (1931-1958) clarified this description, describing a triangle relating concept, object, and sign.

Defining a CrossDisciplinary Meta-Model Within the management of knowledge, social systems are believed to become self-organizing (Fuchs, 2004). Knowledge is a manifestation of information in social systems that involve the interpretation, evaluation, and usage of data where individuals perform a re-organization of a knowledge system within a joint environment (Fuchs, 2003; Fuchs, 2004). Tags are often employed to convey information beyond their primary use as symbols representing the theme or content of an object (Tonkin et al., 2008). As such, they may contain keywords, interpretative data, reactions, and functional/action tags (Golder & Huberman, 2006; Kipp, 2007). They may also perform social

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Figure 3. A selection of tag types, represented according to placement on a simplified 3-D subset of Marshall’s (1998) dimensions of annotations

functions, such as persuasion, identity, and performance (Zollers, 2007). The widespread move in classification research towards definition of functional models, frameworks or typologies of tags can be described by regarding these models superposed upon a meta-structure -- the typology of physical annotations developed by Marshall (1998), which may be seen as an interpretive study. By examination of physical annotations, scribbles in the margin of a book made in biro or pencil, Marshall (1998) developed a set of dimensions describing variance in their use. Many annotations are well-formed, formal, completely specified and computationally tractable. Others exhibit some or all of the features of natural language (for example: incomplete, sparse, ambiguous and tacit, dependent on context). The full typology defines seven dimensions of variance. For ease of visualization, these are represented here according to the three major supersets that Marshall defines -- form, function, and audience (see Figure 3). This model again implies that tags are not undirected: that they are constructed with an intended audience. Marshall identifies as examples of possible audiences the user, a community, or a global audience of speakers of that language.

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Frameworks such as Marshall’s (1998) or models such as Zhen’s (2007) provide a means and a method for a rich, multi-dimensional model of social tagging, and explicitly model the social or pragmatic aspects as well as the semantic and syntactic. Accepting Marshall’s model as a valid meta-model describing in coarse grain the characteristics of tag classification systems, we then ask whether a preexisting representation equivalent to this model exists in the domain of knowledge representation (KR). From a knowledge representation perspective, this model is not unfamiliar. The tags are viewed as the “glue” between the user and information or meta-data (Pfeiffer, Chavez, & Hartley, 2005). Of primary importance is the insight, familiar to the knowledge representation domain, that formulation of a message implies reference to an audience -- that is, the information is formulated in such a way as to maximize the listener’s comprehension (Chavez & Hartley, 2005). The individual constructing a message works with reference to a representation of a listener. The speaker is not able to know the extent of knowledge of the listener, but must work from a theory constructed by reference to observable behavior (for example, Whiten’s “theory of mind” (1991).

Self-Organizing Social Systems Within the domain of knowledge management, social systems are often described as “self-organizing” (Fuchs, 2004). Knowledge is a manifestation of information in social systems that involve the interpretation, evaluation, and usage of data where individuals perform a re-organization of a knowledge system within a joint environment (Fuchs, 2003, 2004). A social tagging system in widespread use by a large variety of contributors provides many examples that are describable as symptomatic of this re-organization behavior. As a consequence of this characteristic, an ontology built for application within a dynamic social system is itself potentially subject to alteration,

both planned and consequent to external forces. Thus, an old annotation may become irrelevant or inaccurate. Furthermore, annotations may be assigned in KR much as described by Barreau and Nardi (1995), as instruments in a short-term task (Borri et al., 2006); such annotations may therefore be described as “transient” in much the same way as described by Marshall (1998). Audience plays an important role in KR. Social tagging in a community setting might be described as being built within collaborative testbeds (Keeler & Pfeiffer, 2005) - shared services that enable interaction between users and user groups. These testbeds are using a game interface for the development of a formalized interface to build rich context structures of tagging hierarchies for multiple contexts: such as, tools specification requirements for knowledge acquisition. The testbed allow users to discuss and define the tags for the ontology in a collaborative manner. Hovy (2005, within the critique found in this paper, argues that testbeds used by research communities often do not represent best practice in the domain, in that participants do not apply good methodologies in building ontologies and do not produce adequate ontological tags for the applications at hand. Instead, a game interface may be engineered that incorporates Peirce’s Theory of Inquiry (see Peirce, 1993), such that it requires that social tags cannot be added or modified in the ontology without stating a factual reason (Keeler & Pfeiffer, 2006). As a result, the process uses the scientific methodology of hypothesis generation, followed by experimentation, analysis of results, and presentation of conclusions: instead of purely representing social opinion, which may be illfounded or transient and is difficult to deconstruct after the fact. In a closed process involving only a single individual, this scientific methodology, whilst formal and well-documented, may lead to an insular and perhaps brittle or inflexible approach to knowledge representation and the developed ontology. By using a collaborative testbed, however,

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widespread accessibility and openness increases the effectiveness of the approach by ensuring that a wide variety of views and arguments are accessed during ontology development while still laying an emphasis on the central importance of well-founded argumentation.

Community as Context The term community covers a wide spectrum of functional or rhetorical applications of which a few characteristic definitions are represented here: •

•

•

• •

•

Language communities: Sharing a common language and perhaps a shared knowledge base; Speech communities: The term arises from linguistics; a speech community uses language in a shared manner, generally unique to that community; Discourse communities: Sharing common public goals, mechanisms for intercommunication, participatory mechanisms, discourse expectations/genres, specialized terminology, and a critical mass of experts (Swales, 1990); National communities:Nations of people of similar heritage; Research communities: Share a common ‘closed’ research area of interest when understanding methodologies and functionality of applications; Practice communities: Task groups, linked by a shared aim.

Many factors have an impact upon a given facet of measured “community membership”-including ideology, identity, shared interests and goals, and patterns of contact and communication. Community membership is complex to define and model; it may be partial, voluntary and circumstantial. Individual identity is sometimes referred to a self-image, bringing together certain interpersonal characteristics, roles, relationships and values

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(Huffaker & Calvert, 2005; Calvert, 2002), and may be developed through various means including experimentation, search and social interaction (Harter, 1998). Individual identity may reflect the individual’s chosen community affiliations, but is not limited by them – that is, individual identity may contain unique characteristics that are not copied from other community members. Language use and identity have become viewed as closely “linked” with participation in online settings being characterized by some as a form of identity exploration (Turkle, 1995). From both interpretive and structural perspectives, language use within a computer-mediated communication context is expected to show characteristics indicative of the underlying community network. In practice, communities are seldom monolithic, stable and simple meta-structures. An assertion that an individual’s language relates to membership in a given community or population may be accurate only to the extent that the community itself is clearly defined. Lassiter (2008) refers to this characterization of language, by analogy with political philosophy, as communitarianism. Other metrics that may be used to define a community, such as co-citation of thematically relevant resources (Moulaison, Tonkin, & Corrado, 2008) or other bibliometric approaches, are susceptible to similar objections. The grouping of individuals offers an opportunity to generalize across the activities of a large number of individuals, a process that is of course in many cases statistically defensible. Community structures have an objective, measurable existence and can be usefully studied (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). Many sites applying social tagging show overt characteristics of language-in-use. Terms are situated in context and often require pragmatic analysis -- examination of the context surrounding the use of terms -- to elicit meaning. Pragmatic analysis is linked to acceptance of the idea of the “semantic triangle” idea that links reference (sometimes known as concept), referent (or sign) and term (or symbol) in a tripartite graph (Odgen

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& Richards, 1923). The reference level is hidden, but there is an implication that examination of the wide variance in term use permits indirect examination of this landscape. Sowa (2005) argued that there are three identifiable basic fields involved in knowledge sharing: logic, ontology, and computation. These fields are used by bringing together logic and ontologies to construct different contextual models for different applications. The problem of aligning tags in a single ontology with another ontology is very similar to aligning words from the vocabularies of different natural languages as discussed in Yeung’s work (2007). Therefore, creation and modification of ontologies are related to the community in which they are used. When tags in a current ontology cannot be aligned within a community, a new ontology needs to be created. However, if communities can merge to create a new compound domain or expand one of the existing ontologies, then both domains can be represented as one ontology.

FUTURE TRENDS The recent resurgence of interest in social network analysis, identity, and community membership carries a risk of promoting an oversimplified view of a complex system – or, alternatively, of needlessly overcomplicating the problem. However, a critical approach to analysis acts to counterbalance the former complaint, promoting a more realistic and perhaps more sensitive perception of community membership and identity. As one of many community systems are built upon network effects and interaction between individuals, the process of social tagging is intimately linked to the structures that underpin language: the growth and dissipation of community structures and resources, identity and culture, and manifestation of expressed ideas and ideologies. The structure is rich, complex, and dynamic. It is possible that this aspect of technology dam-

ages retrieval performance, although solutions, often dependent upon the existence of underlying community structures that govern or direct usage patterns, have been identified for “several specific shortcomings” (such as disambiguation, hyponyms and synonyms). However, the richness of tagging networks as resources for identification of community structures (for example, via idiosyncratic use of terminology or choice of resources) has only recently become clear with widespread development and use of social tagging services. In addition, the area of community informatics is increasingly important as the web’s population grows and diversifies. Existing applications based around Web 2.0/user-contributed information show signs of the great potential of these techniques. Services such as Technorati presently combine social tagging of blogs with social network analysis techniques to help identify the primary subject area of a given site and to map how closely that author (or group of authors) is linked to others. This information is made available via a software interface so that it can be used by third-party programmers and applications as well as through a web interface. Other sites such as Cloudalicious (http://cloudalicio.us/tagcloud. php) and Flickr’s timeline and “interestingness” provide alternative views on display of tagging data that demonstrate features, such as shifting readership demographic or site focus and content. An increased focus on linking between social network and content network analysis constitutes an approach that the authors expect to be of some interest in the years to come.

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have highlighted various relevant areas of research and theory which in combination paint a multidisciplinary view of the research area. These perspectives describe various different aspects of the processes under-

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lying tagging and approaches towards practical analysis and use of this information corpus: such as applications in the area of information retrieval, application of tags as units of semantic annotation, and further processing via techniques such as sentiment analysis. We have described relations between relevant theory and historical work in the area of classification research, taking into account usability issues surrounding document classification, the process and constructs applied during classification, users’ motivations and aims in classification, and the cognitive processes involved in generating and interpreting an annotation. From the knowledge representation domain, we have examined the process of generating an ontology within a domain, highlighting the similarities of the triadic models described in Peirce (1993) and Richards (Odgen & Richards, 1923) semiotic triangle and the constructs described by classification researchers, the shared need to take the user and surrounding social structure into account, and the potential that knowledge representation constructs (such as the ontology) may benefit from development via an open, collaborative testbed similar to social tagging services. The authors have shown that knowledge management theory is more compatible with the developed models of social classification than is sometimes suggested, although the problem is greatly simplified in some communities (networks) by formalizing and limiting the scale and use cases of the domain ontology. Modeling different aspects of user behavior in tagging allow researchers in either the classification research or knowledge management domain to examine the role and influence of tagging behaviors in the development of a shared terminology or language. An emphasis on examination and description of social or cultural interconnections between users enables new views on the types of information that may be revealed via analysis of tag datasets and inspires novel methods for extracting such data. On a more general level, the authors contend that user-contributed content

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and community informatics are closely linked, but that a holistic, interdisciplinary understanding of the research area is useful. Many topic areas and academic structures contribute to the research area of formal and informal semantic annotation, amongst them: computer science, library and information science, linguistics and management studies. As a result of this heterogeneity, the field is uniquely challenging and rewarding.

REFERENCES Barreau, D. K., & Nardi, B. (1995). Finding and reminding: File organization from the desktop. ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 27(3), 39–43. doi:10.1145/221296.221307 Borri, D., Celino, A., Concilio, G., & De Liddo, A. (2006). Structuring short-term organizational memories by argumentation based transientscenarios. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA’06) (pp. 166-170). Calvert, S. L. (2002). Identity construction on the Internet. In S. L. Calvert, A. B. Jordon, & R. R. Cocking (Eds.), Children in the digital age: Influences of electronic media on development (pp. 57-70). Westport, CT: Praeger. Chavez, N., Jr., & Hartley, R. T. (2005). The role of object-oriented techniques and multi-agents in story understanding. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Integration of Knowledge Intensive Multi-Agent Systems, Waltham, MA (pp. 580-585). Dourish, P., Edwards, W. K., LaMarca, A., Lamping, J., Petersen, K., & Salisbury, M. (2000). Extending document management systems with user-specific active properties. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 18(2), 140–170. doi:10.1145/348751.348758

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Fuchs, C. (2003). The Internet as a self-organizing socio-technological system. Human Strategies in Complexity Research Paper. Retrieved September 30, 2008, from http://ssrn.com/abstract=458680 Fuchs, C. (2004). Knowledge management in selforganizing social systems. Journal of Knowledge Management Practice, 5. Retrieved September 30, 2008, from http://www.tlainc.com/articl61.htm Gifford, D. K., Jouvelot, P., Sheldon, M. A., & O’Toole, J. J. (1991). Semantic file systems. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (pp. 16-25). New York: ACM. Golder, S., & Huberman, B. A. (2006). Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science, 32(2), 198–208. doi:10.1177/0165551506062337 Good, B., Kawas, E., & Wilkinson, M. (2007). Bridging the gap between social tagging and semantic annotation: E.D. the entity describer. Retrieved September 30, 2008, from http://hdl. handle.net/10101/npre.2007.945.1 Harter, S. (1998). The development of self-representations. In W. Damon & N. Eisenberg (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 3. Social, emotional, and personality development (5th ed.) (pp. 553-617). New York: Wiley. Hovy, E. (2005). Methodology for the reliable construction of ontological knowledge. In F. Dau, M.-L. Mugnier, & G. Stumme (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Conference on Conceptual Structures (LNAI 3596, pp. 91-106). Berlin, Germany: Springer. Huffaker, D. A., & Calvert, S. L. (2005). Gender, identity and language use in teenage blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(2).

Keeler, M. A., & Pfeiffer, H. D. (2005). Games of inquiry for collaborative concept structuring. In F. Dau, M.-L. Mugnier, & G. Stumme (Eds.), Conceptual structures: Common semantics for sharing knowledge (LNCS 3596, pp. 396-410). Berlin, Germany: Springer. Keeler, M. A., & Pfeiffer, H. D. (2006). Building a pragmatic methodology for KR tool research and development. In H. Scharfe, P. Hitzler, & P. Ohrstrom (Eds.), Conceptual structures: Inspiration and application (LNCS 4068, pp. 314-330). Berlin, Germany: Springer. Kipp, M. I. (2007). @toread and cool: Tagging for time, task and emotion. In Proceedings of the 8th Information Architecture Summit, Las Vegas, NV. Retrieved September 30, 2007, from http:// eprints.rclis.org/archive/00010445/ Krauss, R. M., & Fussell, S. R. (1991). Constructing shared communicative environments. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine, & S. D. Teasley, (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition (pp. 172-200). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Lassiter, D. (2008). Semantic externalism, language variation, and sociolinguistic accommodation. Mind & Language. Leonard, L. E. (1975). Inter-indexer consistency and retrieval effectiveness: Measurement of relationships. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Marshall, C. C. (1998). Towards an ecology of hypertext annotation. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia (pp. 40-49). New York: ACM. Mika, P. (2007). Ontologies are us: A unified model of social networks and semantics. Journal of Web Semantics, 5(1), 5–15. doi:10.1016/j. websem.2006.11.002

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Moulaison, H. L., Tonkin, E., & Corrado, E. M. (2008). Linking communities of practice online: A comparative study of French and anglo biblioblogs. Paper presented at the Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication Conference, Nimes, France. Odgen, C. K., & Richards, I. A. (1923). The meaning of meaning: A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Peirce, C. S. (1993). Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A chronological edition (C. J. Kloesel, Ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press. Pfeiffer, H. D. (2007). The effect of data structures modifications on algorithms for reasoning operations using a conceptual graphs knowledge base. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM. Pfeiffer, H. D., Chavez, J. N., & Hartley, R. T. (2005). A generic interface for communication between story understanding systems and knowledge bases. Paper presented at the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, Albuquerque, NM. Russell, S., & Norvig, P. (1995). Artifical intelligence: A modern approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Russell, T. (2008). Cloudalicious: Watching tags over time. Retrieved August 30, 2008, from http:// cloudalicio.us/tagcloud.php Shiri, A. (2007). Trend analysis in social tagging: A LIS perspective. Paper presented at the 11th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Budapest, Hungary.

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Zollers, A. (2007). Emerging motivations for tagging. Retrieved August 28, 2008, from http:// www2007.org/workshops/paper_55.pdf

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Annotation: Additions to a digital object, such as marginal notes containing reactions, commentary, analysis, or links to related work. Community Network: Formally, community networks constitute systems supporting distinct geographical communities. Knowledge: A manifestation of information in social systems that involve the interpretation, evaluation, and usage of data. Ontology: Comes from the Greek words onto (being) and logos (study) meaning the study of being or the basic categories for existence.

Pragmatics: The meaning of an utterance or written sentence often differs from that gleaned from a semantic analysis of the sentence. Pragmatics represents the study of language in use. Semiotic Triangle: Richards (Odgen & Richards, 1923) applied the structure of a triangle of meaning (reference, referent, and symbol) to show that the object which is referred to by a given symbol or word is not static, but relative to each language user. Peirce (1931-1958) later utilized a similar notion, using concept instead of reference, object instead of referent, and sign instead of symbol. Social Tagging Services: Services that permit one or more individuals to provide short plaintext descriptions or metadata that create a unique identifier, usually a pointer to a digital object.

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Chapter 16

Using Notification Systems to Create Social Places for Online Learning James M. Laffey University of Missouri-Columbia, USA Christopher J. Amelung Yale University, USA

ABSTRACT Context-aware activity notification systems have potential to improve and support the social experience of online learning. The authors of this chapter have developed a context-aware activity notification system (CANS) that monitors online learning activities and represents relevant contextual information by providing notification and making the learning activity salient to other participants. The chapter describes previous efforts to develop and support online learning context awareness systems; it also defines the critical components and features of such a system. It is argued that notification systems can provide methods for using the context of activity to support members’ understanding of the meaning of activity. When designed and implemented effectively, CANS can turn course management systems (CMS) into technologies of social interaction to support the social requirements of learning.

INTRODUCTION Online learning in its various forms plays an increasingly important role in how students learn, how faculties teach, and how higher education meets the needs of its constituents. However, while online learning plays a powerful role in broadening access within and beyond campus sites, there is a growing concern that it may be diminishing the quality of teaching and learning by forcing instructors and DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch016

learners to view courses through the narrow lens afforded by contemporary software systems. Today’s approach to online learning is encapsulated in course management systems (CMS) of which Blackboard, WebCT and Sakai represent most popular applications. The CMS provide fairly effective ways for instructors to give and control access to course information (syllabus, assignments, grades) and instructional resources. They also present some facilities for direct interaction through discussion boards and chat rooms. The CMS approach helps manage the course and related information but is

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limited in supporting the interaction, coordination and cooperation between students and instructors. The authors of this chapter have developed a Context-aware Activity Notification System (CANS) (Amelung, 2007; Laffey & Amelung, 2007) as a mechanism for improving social ability in online learning (Laffey, Lin, & Lin, 2006). CANS is a software system that monitors activity within an information system, represents relevant contextual information (such as where, when or under what conditions), and provides notification to other participants about the activity. In traditional face-to-face courses instructors and students come to a physical place where they mutually act out the course activities. Coordination and cooperation are facilitated by cues and structures in the context: such as, a bell ringing to signify it is time to attend to the teacher, the clock on the wall providing a common marker for knowing how long an activity should last, or students passing completed work forward at the end of a class period. Seeing how others use these cues and structures also shapes interaction. However, in online learning the CMS is a black veil between the instructor and students and among the students. Faculty and students are limited in their knowledge about what is happening in the course to the “words” spoken. Students do not see other students working; nor for the most part do they see each other’s products. Instructors do not see students working and can only influence them with words. Similarly, students do not see instructors working outside of the formal presentations and feedback prescribed by the instruction. Seeing that an instructor has read your discussion post or looked at the file you uploaded to share with the class may encourage participation and develop a sense of an interpersonal relationship with the instructor. Evidence of high dropout rates in distance learning attests to the problems that students may have with this form of education. Chyung (2001) found that online learners who dropped out perceived that their online learning environment

was not engaging, had low levels of confidence while learning at a distance, and had low satisfaction levels for the instructional processes used in the online learning environment. The incidental learning that happens through working together, the social navigation that happens through observing others, and the motivation to keep learning that happens because of a sense of shared social experience are possible in a traditional classroom because members see and experience activity in context, but in online learning these outcomes are greatly constrained. However, there is potential for new social interaction technologies to improve the social experience and social support of online learning. These same approaches and technologies that have potential for supporting the social nature of online learning may also be important to online collaborative work and leisure activity. The ability to turn an online space into a social place is a challenge to the design and implementation of all forms of online activity and interactivity. This chapter describes one such social interaction technology, context-aware activity notification systems. These systems have the potential to make the activity of other members salient and to enhance the social nature of learning in an online space, in this case a course. To the extent that these notifications are provided in ways that are meaningful to the social roles and interactive tasks of being in a course, then the members will experience the online environment as a social place for learning and activity.

BACKGROUND The goal of transforming course management systems from information space to social place is in keeping with the recognition that education is a social activity and that information access and use has a social nature. In The Social Life of Information, Brown and Duguid (2000) summarized a growing recognition that information systems need to both support use in social contexts

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and represent the social nature of accessing and using information. For example, a tech support information system should be organized by the practices that people do which cause them to need tech support and include meta data about who has provided the information, how frequently it is used, and what other resources were used by the folks who used this one. In this way, the users do not simply have a static piece of information related to the problem they are solving; they can make attributions about the information, such as the likelihood of it being accurate or sufficient. Being able to make these attributions gives the information contextual meaning and helps the user have a sense of how that information fits into practices within a community, such as the importance and value of the information or perhaps peripheral status of the information. In this sense, having the relevant contextual information is seen as important or necessary for making decisions and solving problems effectively (Palumbo, 1990). By having a goal of transforming CMS in to a social place, we mean that the online system becomes a medium that represents both the explicit and tacit information of social activity and that the forms and objects of the system communicate possibilities for action (Harrison & Dourish, 1996). This emphasis on creating “place” foreshadowed Web 2.0 by emphasizing the value of supporting social practices rather than simply enabling information access and exchange. As discussed earlier for face-to-face classes, the awareness of what others are doing is necessary for social practice. What others do and how they use the elements of their environments stimulate us to action, provide feedback to our own actions, and support social navigation. Social navigation refers to the phenomena of people using what other people do as a guide for what to do (Benford, Bowers, Fahlen, Greenhalgh, & Snowden 1995; Gutwin & Greenberg, 1996). By context aware, we refer to how we use cues from our environment to make sense of the situation and decide what to do. In education many of

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these cues represent the social circumstances and include the physical and historical circumstances that may have a role in shaping activity. Early work on context awareness emphasized the need to design computer systems in ways that accounted for the social contexts of the environments in which they were being used (Moran, 1994): for example, how the computer activity fits into the broader scheme of activity in which the computer activity occurs, is but one of the processes that shapes the meaning of the computer activity for the participants. More recent work has shown the value and role of context awareness for ubiquitous and pervasive computing (Moran & Dourish, 2001; Kaptelinin & Czerwinski, 2007). The potential and new insights for context awareness for CMS is that there is social activity and a social context “within” the CMS, and that the appropriate use of notification systems can change the information spaces of CMS into social places for collaborative and social learning. Carroll, Neale, Isenhour, Rosson, and McCrickard (2003) investigated the role of notification systems in supporting collaborative awareness in a virtual school context. Their study found that three types of awareness information contributed to the productivity of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration: social awareness (“who is around”), action awareness (“what is happening to objects”), and activity awareness (“how are things going on”). Unlike some types of notification systems that simply and straightforwardly provide information about events, Carroll and his collaborators found substantial complexity in maintaining awareness for the long-term activities of their educational site. They also found that in some cases the relevant information for maintaining context awareness can be provided as notes about discrete events while in other cases the notes should be snapshots that aggregate series of events. They conclude that to coordinate and effectively work in the online cooperative world of educational settings, users (teachers and students) need sets of tools for: (1) managing objects in the

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learning process, (2) knowing when someone does something to an object, and (3) keeping track of objects over a span of time and work practice. Their work suggests the need for notification systems that not only convey information, but also put that information into the context of work practices and social roles. Yang (2006) and colleagues showed how matchmaking between learner and service ontologies enables interactive matchmaking in collaborative learning environments. Learner profiles consist of entities, such as student accessibility preferences, calendars, and locations. Service profiles consist of knowing such entities as who is online, how to get in touch with classmates, and how to find relevant course materials. The goal is to augment collaborative learning by providing the student user with information relevant to educational purposes, such as whether other authors of a collaborative work are online for discussion. Our interest in context awareness emerged from our development and implementation of an online learning system back in the late 1990’s. As we used and studied the system, we noticed that users (instructors and students) were using what we called activity information to navigate the system. Our online system had an “activity monitor” that displayed recent activity of others in the system on the home page. We noticed how we were drawn to using the monitor to click through to see what had been done rather than using the normal navigation tools of opening the library or discussion applications and then navigating to the target. It became clear that students were doing the same. However, as the semester marched on, the performance of our activity monitor slowed as it had to handle more and more activity. The architecture and mechanisms of the monitor needed to be reconsidered and redeveloped. Chris Amelung, a doctoral student at the time, took on the redevelopment for his dissertation work and the result was the first implementation of CANS (Amelung, 2005).

CANS has a vocabulary of activity and monitors those activity events in a CMS, such as when a discussion board item is read, a resource is uploaded or an announcement is posted. CANS also has a registry of preferences which it uses to distribute notifications. Instructors and students can create reporters to establish and manage notification. For example, an instructor could create a reporter for the time period of a course unit that would keep him abreast of how students are doing and if any are falling behind. Similarly students could create reporters for a work group to know when others in the group have contributed or reviewed work, thus facilitating coordination of activity and keeping a sense of group work even when members never see each other. Notifications are currently packaged as e-mail digests, widgets (small applications that stay resident on a computer desktop), or web pages within the CMS.

NOTIFICATION IN COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS The above discussion shows that context in educational settings is quite complex, social, and important. A variety of notification and awareness services are potentially meaningful, but the constructs upon which researchers are building systems of awareness for collaborative and educational purposes are still in formation. This section will examine the components of notification systems and identify approaches to design for context awareness as well as issues in creating a sense of place associated with the various components. It should be noted that almost all CMS have some notification functionality tied to specific applications within the system with possible aggregation for notification, but the objective here is to identify a comprehensive framework that can apply to the full course experience and not simply augment a specific application.

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Monitoring

Storage

The most straightforward way to monitor online activity is by recording all mouse clicks or keystrokes. This approach is sensible if there is no a priori schema for differences among these actions. However, in CMS almost all acts can be understood by application and function. For example, a specific mouse click in a discussion board can be recognized as opening a message for viewing or as starting a reply or new thread. Thus, similar to the ontology constructed by Yang (2006) or the vocabulary constructed by Amelung (2005), the monitor can create a specific set of events to monitor, based on a framework for what would be meaningful to members and impact behavior. In the case of CANS a listener was created and tuned to certain events and not others. The listener needs to record the event and appropriate context information which may include actor, time and application specific attributes, such as the name of the thread being read. Building the ontology or vocabulary for the system is a substantial task of marrying the specific functionality of the CMS to a pedagogical schema for knowing what is relevant and important for teaching and learning behavior. It is also important to keep in mind that CMS’s are growing and evolving systems that add and modify functionality over time. The monitoring mechanisms must adapt and be able to include new functionality as changes in the CMS dictate. CMS such as Sakai have numerous applications and an institution may choose to activate or disable some of this functionality. Because CANS systems are applied across a variety of institutions, they must be sensitive to the local implementation and accommodate new functionality as they become available. In all aspects of the development of monitoring mechanisms that are attuned to CMS functions and are adaptable to changing functions, a critical concern is that the monitoring process does not negatively impact the performance of the CMS.

Since almost all implementations of CMS are sensitive to system performance, how data are handled is a concern. One form of notification, streaming or tickertape type applications requires no substantial storage. The data is usually limited in scope and distributed as a stream to anyone who signs up for it. CMS usually require more complex forms of notification. As suggested by Carroll, there is a need to keep track of information over a span of time and for aggregation to answer complex questions, such as which students are behind on an expected activity during a particular unit of the course. The CANS system stores data on a secondary server to the CMS. This allows minimal impact on CMS performance, having data available for a variety of reporting functions and requests, and affording the opportunity to merge activity information across multiple online systems. However, for notification systems that seek to also enable dynamic interactivity with the notifications, such as comparing today’s level of activity with that over the last three days, then hybrid storage forms may be required to accommodate both massive storage and quick retrieval within sets of data.

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Processing Processing refers to matching event information to requests for notifications. The simplest form of this is to program for all users to get the same information. Under some circumstances this may be reasonable, but in online learning there is considerable variety in user roles, how users want to work and the interdependency of information. Subsequently, customizing outputs to users and contexts seems necessary. In CANS administrators can establish what information will be monitored for their site, and instructors can establish what information within the set enabled by administrators will be monitored for their course. Users can then create reporters which allow one time

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requests for certain types of reports: such as, what was the activity level in my course for this past semester or subscriptions to information reports such as receiving an e-mail note each morning of the semester reporting on the activity of the previous day.

Figure 1. CANS e-mail notification

Representation Representation has two considerations. First, what is the mechanism for delivering the notice? In many cases notification outside the CMS is desired or required. External notices can be provided via e-mail, external web pages, widgets or even phone calls. In some cases notice within the CMS is desired. Awareness information could be embedded within an application. For example, posts in a discussion board or files in a resource section can be labeled with frequency of reads. Additionally, within CMS awareness, information could be provided within a special application that allowed requests for custom reports of archived data as well as interaction with the data. For example an instructor may want to see when during the course of an assignment students actually used the resources made available to them, and then once the findings are available the instructor may want to sort by attributes of the data. The second consideration for representation is how the notice should be displayed. Figure 1 illustrates a text-based digest of information currently used in CANS. This form is effective for communicating both general information about the level of activity and detail about who did what. However, as the amount of information increases, the effectiveness and efficiency of this form decreases. Figure 2 shows a visual representation that provides a quick summary for a large amount of information but requires interactive capabilities for drilling down into the data for the user who wants more detail. Figure 3 uses social comparison for organizing the data and shows how the choice of representation impacts the meaning of the information. In this case users see how their activity level compares

to the activity level of a high performer and to the class average. We have discovered that an important issue in representation is identity. What identity does the notice represent? For example the representations can include names of the actors or not. Under some circumstances, having your name on a list that shows who has done the most activity can bring social pressure to motivate more activity. In teaching, this is a tool that an instructor can use to motivate students. However, students are likely to not want such a list and some may feel it is a violation of their privacy. Under some circumstances, university policies or government regulations may even be issues to consider. Additionally there is always the law of unintended consequences to Figure 2. Visualization for large group

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Figure 3. CANS social comparison digest

consider. An instructor may want to motivate students to further effort, but may engender activity that simply tries to cheat the notification system by opening items without reading them. Our best judgment is to provide a variety of ways to represent identity so that the circumstances of the institution and course and the pedagogical approaches of the instructor can determine the form taken. One approach as is illustrated in Figure 3 is to keep the members anonymous. Comparison information is provided but it preserves the privacy of the individual members. However, the form shown in Figure 3 requires an individual representation for each member, so the benefits of both comparison and privacy come at the cost of added design and processing. An alternative identity to basing notification on who has done what is to use system objects as the design center. For example, rather than pointing out who has read a discussion board message, the system can report that a particular message has been read 5 times. This approach may meet the need of supporting social navigation without risking privacy concerns, but may impact the social nature of the course differently than when the members are the design center for activity notification. As with many of the points discussed in this chapter, this is an issue for further research.

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Management Educational coursework and the participants in the coursework have great variety. No one size or form of notification will suit all types. For example, the type of notification system that fits a small enrollment graduate course being taught online is likely to be inappropriate for a large enrollment undergraduate on-campus course. The online graduate course may benefit from a high level of student-to-student awareness and personalization, but the same approach in the undergraduate class may be overwhelming with the amount and detail of information provided. Similarly, different institutions or instructors may wish to manage privacy concerns differently. For example, while in some cases knowing the name of who has read a discussion board post may benefit group interaction, in others it may be seen as a violation of one’s privacy. Thus the capabilities of the system must be customizable by those who implement the system and then again by those who use the system. CANS allows management in a tiered fashion. The CANS implementation for a site or multiple sites allows the course management administrator to set permissions for monitoring and notification functionality. Within this set of permissions an instructor or course manager can set permissions for how the course will work. These permissions then provide the functionality that members use to create reporters and notification representations. Figure 4 is a prototype for how permissions may be managed in the Sakai implementation of CANS. Within Sakai, members have roles that correspond to having access or having rights to maintain sites and collections. The system administrator can set the permissions that will be the default for the roles in each course. Instructors can reduce permissions within their courses but not add those restricted by the administrator. Items such as id.open prescribe whether a member in the role can see the personal identifier for the actor opening an object in Sakai. With this schema members could be given permis-

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Figure 4. Setting monitoring and notification permissions in CANS for a Sakai implementation

sion to know who posted something but not who read it or vice versa.

FUTURE TRENDS A few years ago the dominant experience of being online was accessing information or making transactions. Today, especially for youth, being online is a social experience. Taken from another perspective, social activity is increasingly mediated by technology and the Internet. We interact with colleagues, friends, family and absolute strangers through e-mail, chat rooms, shared documents, video conferencing, and 3D virtual environments. As we become socially networked via technology, we will also need forms of social information that fit these new environments and relationships. Attending to the behavior of others and using that behavior to help shape our own behavior and serve as a basis for the types and levels of relationships we form with others is a natural part of human everyday experience. Context awareness and notification tools for online environments can facilitate the attention and sense making that happens rather intuitively in natural settings. But, how to make this happen in ways that resonate with us when we are online constitutes a design challenge and an area in need of further research. Our experience suggests that these tools are likely

to come in many forms that are appropriate for the nature of the communities or relationships being formed in online spaces. For example, online auctions such as eBay provide mechanisms to keep track of the status of your bid in an auction based on what others are doing. The designers of eBay recognized that what motivates a person to place a higher bid in a traditional auction is hearing another person make a bid higher than your last one. Similarly, the pace of bidding and other contextual factors influences bidders. Designing a user experience that makes these circumstances of one’s auction activity salient in an online space has substantially impacted the use and ways of using eBay and other online transaction systems. The task then is to design context awareness and notification that are appropriate to the task, community, and individuals involved in online spaces. One of the key challenges we see for our design efforts for context awareness in teaching and learning was foreshadowed by Carroll, Neale, Isenhour, Rosson, and McCrickard (2003) when they discussed the need to keep track of objects over time. Most events are not just moments in time. They have a past and a future as well as a present. When the stock market ticker shows the current price, it also shows the change from the last price. For most activity this sense of trajectory is also a key part of making sense of the information and being able to use the activity information to make choices about one’s own behaviors. One way of addressing this need is to provide more and more data so that users can use what is relevant in their eyes. For example, the e-mail digest of Figure 1 can become more verbose about each event and show more events. However, this method rapidly runs into diminishing returns as the data fairly quickly overwhelm us and become noise. Visualization as in Figures 2 and 3 are part of the solution to making more information available and valuable. Our experience suggests that there are two aspects of visualizing data in context awareness

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that have potential for making information more salient for users and their choices. The first is having visualizations that fit the context. In a sense we mean context aware representation. For example Figure 2 is a useful way of representing information for a large class but may be irrelevant to the needs of a smaller class. Our second key aspect is interactivity. We want the ability to ask questions of our data representations, such as sorting and filtering information. Similarly we want the ability to compare information. For example, an instructor may look at a display of yesterday’s activity that shows 2 or 3 students with a very low level of activity. The instructor may want to then see what happened over the last week to see if the same pattern is evident. The CANS project faces challenges of integrating activity information into the core teaching and learning activities of CMS. Current capabilities allow notification through e-mail digests. The next steps include embedding information into the CMS home pages and applications so that notifications can provide both peripheral awareness and be embedded in learning tasks. Embedding information into the CMS is of course a technical challenge that will require innovative solutions; but if we truly hope to move from information space to social place, the embedding will require that we understand how the activity information relates to teaching and learning practices. This requires a socio-technical solution for connecting a member to his or her group and points to the need for improved methods of designing systems. Similarly, institutions of higher education are concerned with regulations about releasing information about students, and students are concerned about maintaining a sense of privacy and security in their work. These issues require political-technical solutions for connecting members to their community. While the future of notification systems promise ubiquity, rich media representations, integration across systems, and customization to improve meaning and salience, the future

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also demands technical solutions that fit social customs, motives and regulations. It is important to remember that just because information can be provided and may be useful does not mean it should be provided. The application of context awareness in the service of making information systems more social requires interdisciplinary thinking and research across social psychology, organizational development, learning technologies and computer science.

CONCLUSION The preceding discussion has briefly presented a rationale and framework from prior work that shows the value of making online learning more social and the potential for using social interaction technologies, such as context-aware activity notification systems. The authors identified the components of such a system and highlighted some of the design and implementation complexities and issues. The chapter has also highlighted that while context awareness is a natural and necessary part of human activity and human learning, there is much work to be done to make it a powerful and integral part of course management systems. Although making social information available, salient, and meaningful in online systems and for online learning seems a natural progression of system capabilities in a Web 2.0 and beyond world, little is known about how to do so in ways that provide the information as natural components of a social place for activity, optimize the beneficial effects on teaching and learning, and maintain comfort levels of institutions and individuals for privacy and security. Efforts such as the research and development underway for the CANS project are needed to identify the best fit of information to the social nature of online learning and to identify the best technical solutions for efficiency and useful features for processing, representation, and management of activity information. The challenge is clear, however, as the online

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lives of students outside of their courses become ever richer and more social with new interaction technologies. If the online experience of courses through CMS fail to keep up with the increasing sociality of being networked, online learning will miss its potential both as a medium for learning and as a transformation of society that can increase access to higher education.

REFERENCES Allen, E., & Seaman, J. (2007). Online nation: Five years of growth in online learning. Babson Park, MA: The Sloan Consortium. Amelung, C. (2005). A context-based activity notification framework for developers of computer supported collaborative environments. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri, Columbia.

Chyung, S. Y. (2001). Systematic and systemic approaches to reducing attrition rates in online higher education. American Journal of Distance Education, 15(3), 36–49. Gutwin, C., & Greenberg, S. (1996). Workspace awareness for groupware. In Proceedings of the Common Ground: CHI’96 Conference Companion (pp. 208-209). Vancouver, Canada: ACM Press. Harrison, S., & Dourish, P. (1996). Re-place-ing space: The roles of place and space in collaborative systems. In M. S. Ackerman (Ed.), Proceedings of the ACM 1996 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 67-76). Boston, MA: ACM Press. Kaptelinin, V., & Czerwinski, M. (Eds.). (2007). Beyond the desktop metaphor: Designing integrated digital work environments. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Amelung, C. (2007). Using social context and elearner identity as a framework for an e-learning notification system. International Journal on E-Learning, 6(4), 501–517.

Laffey, J., & Amelung, C. (2007). Cues and mechanisms for improving the social nature of online learning. In Proceedings of the AACE World Conference on Education Multimedia and Hypermedia, Vancouver, Canada.

Benford, S., Bowers, J., Fahlen, L. E., Greenhalgh, C., & Snowden, D. (1995). User embodiment in collaborative virtual environments. In Proceedings of CHI’95 (pp. 242-249). New York: ACM Press.

Laffey, J., Lin, G., & Lin, Y. (2006). Assessing social ability in online learning environments. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 17(2), 166–173.

Brown, J., & Duguid, P. (2000). The social life of information. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Carroll, J. M., Neale, D. C., Isenhour, P. L., Rosson, M. B., & McCrickard, D. S. (2003). Notification and awareness: Synchronizing taskoriented collaborative activity. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 58(5), 605–632. doi:10.1016/S1071-5819(03)00024-7

Moran, T., & Dourish, P. (2001). Introduction to this special issue on context-aware computing. Human-Computer Interaction, 16(2, 3 & 4), 87-95. Moran, T. P. (Ed.). (1994). [Special issue on context in design]. Human-Computer Interaction, 9, 1–149. doi:10.1207/s15327051hci0901_1 Palumbo, D. (1990). Programming language/ problem-solving research: A review of relevant issues. Review of Educational Research, 60(1), 65–89.

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Yang, S. J. H. (2006). Context aware ubiquitous learning environments for peer-to-peer collaborative learning. Educational Technology & Society, 9(1), 188–201.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Context-Aware Activity Notification System (CANS): A software system that monitors activity within an information system and represents relevant contextual information, such as where or when or under what conditions, and provides notification to other participants about the activity. Context Awareness: In a general sense, it means the salience of physical, social, historical or other circumstances that may have a role in shaping activity. The term has been appropriated within a movement toward ubiquitous computing (moving computing beyond the desktop and into the world of activity) to indicate awareness within the computing system of physical conditions outside the system, such as location or user attributes. Course Management System (CMS): A software system that simplifies the tasks of managing course content and interaction to help teachers

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organize and facilitate instruction. Typically systems provide security and some process support for teacher and student work. Online Learning: Multiple terms including e-learning, networked learning and cyber learning, as well as online learning, are used to refer to educational practice that takes place via networked computers. The general benefit is to allow learners to learn from any place (at a distance) and anytime (asynchronously). Social Ability: A person’s capacity to associate with fellows and to use the members, resources and tools of the social context to achieve something of value. Used to represent a sense of competence for social interaction in online environments Social Navigation: A construct that represents being aware of what others are doing as a primary guide for one’s own actions. Research on social navigation has shown that people move in an information space based on where other people are, what they have done, or what they have looked at. Social Place: A construct used in humancomputing interaction to refer to designing the information space to represent cues and markers for social practices.

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Chapter 17

Peer Learning and Social Interactions in an Asynchronous Learning Environment Angela T. Ragusa Charles Sturt University, Australia

ABSTRACT This chapter explores how Internet-based asynchronous communication forums utilized in teaching undergraduate courses affect social interactions and student satisfaction. Drawing from an analysis of qualitative data, such as student and teachers’ perceptions, this case study reveals four key factors that affect learner satisfaction: (1) trust of people and technology, (2) awareness of how technically-mediated interactions differ from face-to-face interactions, (3) peer-based learning opportunities, and (4) integration of relevant learning materials and opportunities for social engagement. The findings suggest that when asynchronous forums are used as the principle vehicle for communication and learning, students feel less socially isolated, report a sense of belonging, and positively evaluate learning outcomes. The case study identifies asynchronous electronic forums as an effective tool for peer learning and social interactions among upper-level distance education students in Australia.

INTRODUCTION Electronic communication has irrevocably changed the way learners and educators approach education. Internet-based communication forums are one specific venue in today’s network society enabling and facilitating dialogue across cultures, geographies and generations. This chapter explores some key issues facing developers, users, and evaluators of DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch017

software for distance education. Drawing from distance education learning and teaching experiences in Australia and conceptualised within a global learning environment, this chapter emphasizes advantages and disadvantages of incorporating asynchronous electronic forums as educational technology in teaching advanced sociology subjects. By presenting empirical qualitative data, informed by the social theory of Symbolic Interactionism, this chapter demonstrates how Internet-based social interaction technology can enhance learning

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and communication among undergraduates by creating a shared purpose and awareness among otherwise isolated users. The study presented here is contrasted with recent e-learning research that questions both the utility of specific communication technologies as well as the pedagogical appropriateness of their application. The overarching objective of this chapter is to provide an alternative perspective. Distance education technologies are often characterized as mediocre and supplemental tools whose primary purpose is to augment traditional classroom-based learning. In contrast, this chapter reveals how the adoption of asynchronous forums as the principal learning and communication vehicle in a seniorlevel correspondence-based distance education course resulted in enhanced student satisfaction. It is argued that high-quality social interactions pursued for the purpose of higher education can be attained virtually, without face-to-face interaction, although the interactions experienced may differ in a number of ways. Ultimately, while identifying and acknowledging the complexity of virtual communication, this research questions the fundamental assumption that virtual classrooms are a priori inherently inferior to those occurring face-to-face.

BACKGROUND Social interactions exist and are understood from both lay and professional vantage points. In this section a sociological definition of social interactions is offered to inform and conceptualise the ensuing analysis of student-student and studentteacher interactions occurring in asynchronous subject forums. The present case study seeks to offer researchers, practitioners, and users theoretically grounded, yet concrete and tangible advice, on users’ and designers’ perceptions and experiences in a distance education environment. The research purpose is to inform users and planners of distance learning courses about asynchronous

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forums as communication, interaction and networking tools to facilitate learning and student engagement.

Social Interaction and Knowledge Society From a sociological perspective, social interaction involves tacit knowledge, shared meaning systems and negotiated agreements about the norms, purpose and process of communicating. Classical symbolic interactionists, such as George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman, provide a useful theoretical framework to understand social interaction as fluid, mutable and subjective. According to Goffman (1967, p. 9), “the definition of the situation” is both contingent and social. By using this theoretical approach to frame contemporary communication technologies, such as asynchronous forums, we may improve our understanding of how individuals and institutions “do” education. Historically, learning in the modern era was a passive activity (Palloff & Pratt, 2001) where students attended geospatially “real” schools to learn objective facts, histories and skills necessary to participate in society. Today, knowledge-based economy (OEC, 1996) is redefining the purpose and focus of education specifically, and knowledge production, or epistemology, more broadly. In our new knowledge society, knowledge is no longer handed down but rather exists as an interaction between learner and environment which subsequently reconfigures both (Semple, 2000). In contrast with modernist science, which was resolved to operate under the constraints of the natural world, post-modern science and technology “is not concerned with discovering ‘laws of nature’, as it is [seeking] the reinvention of nature itself” (Holmes, Hughes, & Julian, 2007, p. 66). Contemporary educators, particularly in higher education, occupy social roles demanding flexibility and cultural awareness in addition to disciplinary and trans-disciplinary expertise.

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“Revolutions” in communications and information technologies (Aronson, 2001) have fundamentally altered the structure of our global world economy and its social institutions. Education is one such institution. Global communication technologies have permitted the growth of global and virtual classrooms. Virtual classrooms, upon which distance education increasingly relies, transcend the national and physical boundaries of traditional classrooms (Ragusa, 2007) and create learning environments mediated by computers and reliant on global telecommunications systems.

Virtual Classrooms and E-Learning Debates Despite the initial use of e-learning for distance education students, virtual classrooms are increasingly being used to supplement traditional learning environments. Learning environments utilizing blended, or hybrid, teaching styles incorporating traditional lectures supplemented by virtual learning have been found to be both productive and appropriate (DeCastro, Munoz, De Freitas, & El-Hani, 2008). However, lack of research on “purely” distance education delivery appears to be leaning to perhaps premature generalizations, such as the assertion that successful distance learning requires both synchronous and asynchronous communication modes in order to be successful (Yucel, 2006). A persistent theme in debates is the notion that distance education is an inferior, albeit perhaps necessary, mode to reach non-traditional and rural students who otherwise are unable to access higher education (E-Learning, 2007). According to Maeroff, Online learning seems to be still living down the early days. Those who thought that this was going to be a whole revolution with everybody moving courses online were so wrong. People who saw piles and buckets of money at the end of the rainbow were just misguided. It is clear now that, more than anything, e-learning benefits people who are mature, self-motivated, and looking for

classes that teach various aspects of career and professional development…. Also, e-learning will never, and probably should never, be the dominant method of educating students. But it will be a fixed part of the delivery system of higher education. (cited in E-Learning, 2007) Although this may characterize perceptions about higher education in the U.S., in Australia there is a continuing trend among universities to not only move components of courses to electronic delivery, but moreover for electronic/distance learning to be the dominant method of education particularly at a number of specific universities. Statements such as, “e-learning will never, and probably should never be the dominant method of educating students” reveal deep-seated values and beliefs about the role, (in)adequacies and purpose of technology in higher education. Such values and beliefs are fundamentally connected to societal norms regarding social interactions. Distance education implementing forums generally relies upon two types of communication: synchronized and/or asynchronised (Yucel, 2006). Synchronized forums are characterized by real-time/simultaneous communication where dialogue occurs at the same time yet is mediated by technology. In contrast, asynchronous forums utilize a static form of communication, akin to posting a message on a billboard and then awaiting others to view and/or reply. In Australia, the introduction of asynchronous forums has enabled academics to create learning and assessment tasks that transcend traditional correspondence-based tasks characteristic of distance education. This technology has dramatically changed the structure of distance education, from a passive to an interactive learning experience (Anderson & Garrison, 1995) permitting the fostering of critical thinking skills if appropriately structured (Yang, 2005). Despite changes in practice, little research explores the use of asynchronous forums in Australia and virtually none comes from the discipline of sociology. Traditionally, distance education students independently read

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and completed written assignments, submit them for marking and wait for written feedback. The process relies heavily on introverted characteristics and independent work. Consequently, distance education students identify isolation as one of the principle barriers they struggle to overcome (Ragusa, 2006). Jorgensen (2002) articulates that active involvement in collaborative online learning is key to equalizing quality, cautioning “when individuals are simply receiving posted material and sending back individual work, the results are poorer then in traditional classrooms” (p. 9). Indeed, recent research shows variation in preference for online forum interaction is associated with perceived isolation (Ragusa, 2006). In sum, historically shaped structural and subjective factors work to influence the social interactions and communications of asynchronous forum managers and users both overtly, via concrete technical systems, and more subtly, via socialization and normative expectations. Previously, research on asynchronous forums has focused on: netiquette and didactic guidelines (Buelens, Totte, Deketelaere, & Dierickx, 2007), the timing, rate and role of instructors and student perception and participation (Mazzolini & Maddison, 2007; Yang, 2005), discourse and content analysis (Beuchot & Bullen, 2005; Perrotta, 2006; Schrire, 2006; Zhu, 2006), flaming (Lee, 2005), professional development (Barnett, 2006) and meta-analyses of research methodologies to assess discussion forums (Marra, 2006). This research is mainly conducted in North America and Europe. Only van Aalst and Chan (2007) ask how collaborative computer-supported learning can be assessed, although their research focuses on portfolios of graduate and Grade 12 students in Hong Kong and Canada. The present study examines student satisfaction with learning using asynchronous forums.

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Asynchronous Forums as Social Interactive Communication Environments Surveys of large introductory courses (N=100-350 students) demonstrate inconsistency in student endorsement and satisfaction in distance education broadly and asynchronous forums specifically (see Ragusa, 2006). Differences in support services offered by Australian Technical and Further Education (TAFE) and high school environments, compared to universities providing distance education, is one element augmenting first year students’ reservations about virtual forms of learning. To explore student experiences with communication technologies, this research prioritizes senior students’ perceptions assuming that they have over time adapted to tertiary environments. Due to attrition rates and disciplinary specialization, advanced courses contain far fewer students than first year subjects. As such, this research offers an in-depth, case study of final year experiences and does not seek broad extrapolation from the experiences of 22 students in their senior year (“third-year” in Australia) enrolled in social theory courses (in 2006 and 2007). The insights presented are derived from learner/educator communications whereby the only mechanisms for social interaction available were virtual, either via e-mail or through accessing the subjects’ asynchronous forums. Data were gathered via surveys for two consecutive years (with a 30% response rate in 2006 and 88% rate in 2007) and student reflections (100% response rate in both 2006 and 2007) designed to explore communication and isolation issues raised by the introductory student surveys more deeply. Students’ only contact with the lecturer was by written comments returned via the post on essay assignments. Student dissatisfaction with non-interactive correspondence-based learning is expressed in a number of survey comments: such as, (1) “It was great to have to work more closely/ directly with other students. This was such a nice

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change, especially as a distance education student” (Student R, 2007); (2) and “The online format made the subject easier to understand increasing my enthusiasm for the learning environment” (Student Q, 2007); and, (3) “The sub-forum design is excellent and I would like to see this used in other subjects. This also helped to build relationships with classmates - a rare opportunity for distance students” (Student U, 2007). Sixty-three percent (2007) and 100% (2006) of the students agreed they would like to see the same online forum approach used in other subjects; all agreed responses to their subject forum postings helped their learning. In both cohorts, asynchronous forums were used for assessment. Unlike the predominant use of electronic communication for the distribution of information, this subject used asynchronous forums as a virtual classroom enabling students to prepare and conduct class presentations, lead and manage formal discussions with their peers and reflect on how the “tyranny” of distance may be mitigated by technology.

Four Key Lessons to Inform Virtual Interactions To understand the pedagogical implications of electronic communication and interaction, students in both cohorts were asked to reflect on their experience of using technology to coordinate an assessment item with their peers, use asynchronous forums to lead and participate in virtual classroom discussions, and learn social theory. From these reflections, four key lessons about the complexity of virtual social interaction emerge:

1. Electronic Communication Requires Trust - of People and Technology Identified as one of the greatest challenges was developing a working relationship “with an unseen partner and impression management, which was tentative and gradual on both sides” (Student A,

2007). To accomplish this, students “worked hard at communicating to each other, establishing and re-establishing guidelines continuously over the time committed” (Student A, 2007). While for some establishing communication norms and guidelines proved challenging, for others the limitations of technology posed greater complexities and was frequently contrasted with face-to-face interaction. Asynchronous forums possess temporal drawbacks and advantages different from traditional classrooms: A compounding factor was the difficulty for XX in contacting her fellow team member due to circumstances beyond the control of both of us. These included technological difficulties and complications. Although we finally managed to get in touch, it should also be noted, that as distance education students, communication was somewhat slower than what it may have been had we been able to communicate face to face. For example, if one of us had an idea or a problem that needed to be discussed with the other then we would have to e-mail the other person and wait for a response, which usually wouldn’t be until the following day. As such a simple question, or idea, which may usually only take minutes or a couple of hours to work through face to face, took at least a day. (Student O, 2006)

2. Interactions Mediated by Technology are Different in Kind Interacting with people via the Internet remains different from face-to-face interactions for a number of reasons. Communication, cognitive, literary and technical skills are thrust into a public arena for viewing causing some personal discomfort: “This presentation brought my predominantly private studies, interpretations, and academic ability into the public sphere, with the potential of judgement by peers, which I felt to be the most daunting aspect of the exercise” (Student G, 2007). Second, that one may never meet those with whom one is working/ conversing is an unusual reality for some:

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One of the challenges of this project was to work with another person who lives too far away from me to meet face to face…the distance factor was definitely a challenge. This was resolved by my partner and I contacting each other by phone, but this was still a challenge for me. (Student B, 2007) …juggling a full time job and then a second shift as wife and mother, followed by a third shift as student. I was often very tired by the time the books came out; The challenges faced once the presentation was launched were entirely different, now it was a race against the clock to check the forum for a response, formulate a reply and have it posted in order that there was time for other participants to respond and develop a dialogue. I feel that my partner and I were able to overcome the problems of distance and timing to coordinate a comprehensive presentation that facilitated the learning of our fellow students (Student F, 2007). The main challenge is distance, not knowing the audience I am addressing and not being provided with the knowledge gained through non-verbal communication. Not being able to sit down and communicate thoroughly. Found it difficult to communicate effectively over phone and net. Nothing beats real life one on one formal communicating. As responses are not instant you as a student and a worker have to juggle work and study, sometimes they don’t correlate as well as you like and have to wait for an answers or other students have to wait for your reply, which doesn’t always lend itself to effective communicating (Student N, 2006). On the positive side, I met a new person from a totally different world who was similar in age with similar commitments trying to better her life. Having two people work on the same subject is positive as it gives different perspectives and ideas. This assessment was definitely an achievement in that I have never done one with this format (i.e. a forum discussion). Having positive input

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from fellow students and the lecturer was also encouraging. (Student M, 2006). Holding logistical issues constant, interaction and communication norms themselves become subject to review. As one astute student deduced: This project has enabled us to gain an insight into both Symbolic Interaction and electronic forms of communication. The greatest difficulty encountered in this activity has been, ironically, interpretation. Electronic communication is a difficult medium in which to express ideas and concepts. It is made harder when comprehension is not equal amongst participants…Examples are good, if used academically and with a full understanding…Symbolic interaction concerns the negotiation of shared meanings, and, as the discussions emphasised, such a negotiation is often a very precarious business. This is the greatest assistance of these discussions: it has been made patently clear that people use their past to interpret their present and future…Distance and communication issues have made writing and contributing to a joint venture a difficult undertaking. Different approaches to work and time constraints have been equally constricting. However, it has been a positive experience. As a peer of this student identified, often being challenged can be daunting: “I felt with the discussion that everyone knew a lot more than me which challenged me to read more...this exercise emphasized the difference between distance education and face to face – there are definitely negatives!” (Student M, 2006).

3. Electronic Communication Technologies hold Potential for Making Distance Education less Individualistic As noted, isolation, both physical and social, is a prominent barrier to distance education students’ success. This research shows communication

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technologies hold great potential for substantially altering distance education experiences: “It [the asynchronous forum] was a different method of studying from my prior experiences and it was nice to feel like the class was learning together instead of just individually” (Student C, 2007). The creation of virtual classrooms that prioritise meaningful interactions offers an example of how technology can facilitate peer-based collaborative learning. As Student D (2007) notes: I believe that the sheer ability to work with a ‘distant’ partner…has been a success as life tends to get in the way of doing things like this. XX and I had some excellent exchanges and discussions via e-mail, instant messaging and telephone and I believe we communicated and coordinated this assignment as well as we possibly could. I am pleased that when I couldn’t understand something – I was able to consult with XX and with other classmates via the forum. The multiplicity of technologies available, combined with a positive approach, can assuage demands facing distance education students who also are employees, parents, etc: “Interaction with my project partner held some challenges as we quickly found out that we worked different hours which allowed us to rarely work jointly, however, this was overcome by constant daily e-mails and openness” (Student E, 2007). This experience proved to be common as nearly every student mentioned competing life demands and put forth their opinion about the flexibility, or inflexibility, of communication technologies.

4. Electronic Communication Forums hold much Potential for Greater Perceived Relevance and Engagement in Learning Tasks A common question from students is the relevance of subject material to their lives and careers. In this subject, learning and practicing PowerPoint

software offered a tangible skill for use beyond the classroom. Surprisingly, although only a minority of students had past experience and some approached the task with trepidation, not one negative comment resulted. Student E (2007) stated, “It provided me with an opportunity to present an assignment in a unique style, one that I am not familiar with, instead of another long winded essay.” By listing the achievements gained (“allows recounting of subject material; allows structured interaction; maintains a high level of precision and accuracy; always encouraging trying something new and succeeding (hopefully); putting together a comprehensive power point presentation; overcoming communication difficulties”), Student N (2006) shows us how learning outcomes from AOF compare with those of traditional classrooms. As Student S (2006) commented, “I found that the online discussion was really helpful - most times when I was unclear of an aspect of a topic somebody online was able to clarify and give examples - very good way to learn this topic.” Yet, to achieve successful outcomes, electronic interactions require different strategies: Being used to working in isolation requires adjustments when asked to work with another person, and I don’t believe that we allowed ourselves enough time to cover the ‘space and time’ aspect, given that we are both in the workforce. The greatest achievement was that we managed to present one presentation, which I believe appeared interesting, and on time. The exercise showed me that I am capable of undertaking new ventures (learning Powerpoint), and work under pressure, rather better than I had previously thought. (Student H, 2007). Along with learning technical skills, electronic interactions permit the exchange of different types of social engagement. Specifically, written dialogue has potential to be far more detailed and personal than traditional classroom communications: “The discussions gave me a much better understanding of sociological theory and enabled me to apply the theories to everyday life” (Student

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W, 2007). While in some cases this has negative consequences (Ragusa, 2007), it also holds great potential for developing deeper learning and critical thinking:

“facts” demand analysis and critical thought. Student O (2006) notes this learning objective was best achieved through academically guided peer discussions:

I actually got more out of the group forum discussions than I thought I would. I was apprehensive initially about a group assignment and hosting a forum, but found the support of my peers, their willingness to participate and their honesty so rewarding…I felt I received the support I needed from my peers on the forum” (Student I, 2007).

Both of us found the varying opinions of all of the discussion participants somewhat fascinating and even more enlightening. The discussion was extremely beneficial to our learning in that it gave us a clearer perspective of the varying viewpoints of our fellow students. Having this interaction with them allowed both of us to ponder many issues in relation to the theory which they otherwise may not have considered. We gradually gained more confidence to participate in the discussions with our peers…We both found it a little challenging and intimidating when we attempted to respond to the opinions of classmates, without sounding condescending or too light-hearted. As it turned out many of the participants were able to apply life experiences to the responses, and this in turn meant that the discussion was led into other aspects that were surprising.

Learning to work in a discussion group and being totally fascinated how a project can come together via e-communications. The amazement that questions you created can create such thought provoking material from people all over the country – not because they have to but because they were genuinely interested…I feel creating this is a gratifying achievement” (Student L, 2006). All participants of the 2006 cohort strongly agreed they were “encouraged to think critically about the subject.” Still, the key to fostering a nurturing environment lies in the structure and management of technology. Asynchronous forums themselves do not create positive communication environments. Comparing this subject to another, Student J (2006) notes, “I made the point to another student that this is the first “discussion forum” that I have had the opportunity to debate/discuss issues at length.” Student T (2007) states, “The forum leadership and discussion was thoroughly enjoyed as it assisted in learning the various themes involved and compared our learning with others.” According to Student K (2006), “Of particular use is the discussion format. It is only there that we can see whether our statements have been clear, or if we have a correct understanding of the topic.” Structuring asynchronous forums as “safe” environments to explore the complexity and multiplicity of ideas is particularly suitable for social sciences and areas where ethics and

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Continuing the practice of offering situated “knowledges” (Harding, 1992), whereby researchers let “the researched” speak on their behalf, this final student quote echoes well the main points: Some students made insightful and fascinating comments that had not been raised in any book I had read. It was good to learn Powerpoint, I found that once I started putting in pictures and messed about with settings, it was hard to stop… Another thing that really impressed me was how well the class was able to discuss the subject with maturity and manners. Distance education was possibly of great assistance as the passionate few did not dominate a verbal discussion and there was no authoritative presence ‘correcting’students with different opinions. Most students submitted different, sometimes very different opinions on the forums… Receiving a forum posting was rather like getting a personal e-mail, and gave me a rather

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revelatory sense of fellowship or community with my classmates which I have not otherwise experienced in distance education. Distance education is quite an isolated experience with most interaction of ideas occurring between oneself and the reading materials rather than with other people.I found that some who may have known the subject the best were not the most effective communicators. The two skills (understanding the subject and being able to communicate ideas about the subject) were neither inclusive nor exclusive to each other, just totally separate skills. I concluded from this that it is more important to be able to communicate clearly a little of what you have learned, than to learn much and not to be able to communicate any of it. (Student P, 2006)

Comparative Evaluation of Learning Outcomes Overall, experiences of the two cohorts show that asynchronous forums are valuable learning tools. Empirically, on a scale of 1 (very strongly disagree) to 7 (very strongly agree), subject evaluations confirm this finding. Evaluations for the 2007 cohort are presented in the charts in Figure 1 on the left and exist in contrast with the 2006 cohort evaluations for the same or similar items depicted in the charts on the right hand side. As the charts demonstrate, all students completing the evaluations reported they agreed, strongly agreed or very strongly agreed that the subject, learning materials and assessment tasks utilizing asynchronous forums were beneficial to their learning. These evaluations demonstrate widespread support of asynchronous forums in these two cohorts where they were used for both supporting and assessment tasks. However, as detailed in the next section, the qualitative nature of this research warrants caution in generalizing the findings. Still, the general lessons learned are noteworthy and may serve as guidelines for future users and

developers of asynchronous forums for distance education students.

FUTURE TRENDS In discussing what it would take to have an education revolution in the U.S., Robert Zemsky, a member of the U.S. Department of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, asks: “How many distance-education courses do exactly online what we do on the classroom? We did not want it to be that way. E-learning was supposed to be the different space, not the replicated space” (cited in E-Learning, 2007). Although the research results presented in this chapter cannot endeavor to explain Australia’s progress towards an education revolution, it does contribute evidence towards viewing virtual learning as indeed a “different space.” However, what appears to remain the same at this point in time are some educational institutions’ stereotypes and norms about what constitutes quality education. In Australia, as elsewhere, social change is occurring in relation to the nature and praxis of education. Future research should focus on the parameters of this social change, noting resistance as well as adoption of educational technologies while paying close attention to how social expectations impact interactions. Despite distance education students’ embracement of social interaction technologies, such as asynchronous forums, and request for them to be more widely adopted as noted in this research, uptake by individual academics has been exceedingly low in parts of Australia over the past several years due to perceptions of heightened workload. In response to changing student needs in a technologically-driven society, some Australian universities have institutionalised interactive technology by requiring all subjects to operate using a Sakai platform. The imperative for all teachers and learners to socially interact using communication technologies demonstrates a distinct change

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Figure 1. Evaluation items comparable across two cohorts

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from correspondence-driven learning and supports Lynch’s (2002) identification of communication cues and interaction opportunities as key criteria differentiating traditional classrooms from online learning environments. Large-scale change points to the need for new methods of planning, evaluating and altering how distance education delivery is conducted and affected in this new social structure and raises many questions including: What new skills are required by learners, administrators and teachers? How does electronic learning differ from face-to-face? What equity and social justice issues accompany different communicative abilities and technical access? These and other questions highlight ethical considerations about ownership of ideas, privacy, identity and the infiltration of personal lives into public spaces which all require further exploration.

CONCLUSION Electronic communication forums, specifically asynchronous forums, are arguably better planned and executed when communication norms and expectations are made explicit. This research has provided firsthand accounts of asynchronous forum users from two senior courses an Australian university. Conceptualised within a sociological framework prioritising users’ perceptions and experiences with asynchronous forums as a vehicle for peer learning and social interaction, the findings support the claim that asynchronous electronic forums can be used effectively in among upper-level distance education courses. By focusing less on the technical structure of electronic communication forums in favour of analysing users’ experiences with asynchronous forums as social interaction tools, with potential to bridge demographic and socio-cultural divides (multigenerational, multinational, multicultural, geospatially disparate, etc.), this chapter identified and evidenced four key lessons for future users, planners, and evaluators. These lessons reveal

asynchronous forums hold potential for generating positive learning experiences, particularly among small cohorts of senior students. Incorporating well-structured asynchronous forum assessment tasks into distance education develops life skills: such as, greater technological competence, leadership and critical thinking, making abstract theories and subject information relevant by encouraging application and connection to everyday life, and working to assuage the social isolation some students experience by fostering group solidarity, integration, and dialogue with peers.

REFERENCES Anderson, T., & Garrison, D. R. (1995). Critical thinking distance education: Developing critical communities in audio teleconferencing context. Higher Education, 29(2), 183–199. doi:10.1007/ BF01383838 Aronson, J. D. (2001). The communications and Internet revolution. In J. Davis & S. Smith (Eds.), The globalization of world politics (pp. 540-558). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Barnett, M. (2006). Using a Web-based professional development system to support preservice teachers in examining authentic classroom practice. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 14(4), 701–729. Beuchot, A., & Bullen, M. (2005). Interaction and interpersonality in online discussion forums. Distance Education, 26(1), 67–87. doi:10.1080/01587910500081285 Buelens, H., Totte, N., Deketelaere, A., & Dierickx, K. (2007). Electronic discussion forums and medical ethics education: The impact of dialectic guidelines and netiquette. Medical Education, 41(7), 711–717. doi:10.1111/j.13652923.2007.02793.x

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DeCastro, L. N., Munoz, Y. J., De Freitas, L. R., & El-Hani, C. N. (2008). A virtual laboratory on natural computing: A learning experiment. International Journal of Distance Education Technologies, 6(2), 55–73. E-learning. Successes and failures. (2007, January). The Chronicle of Higher Education, 53(18). Retrieved October 6, 2008, from http://chronicle. com/weekly/v53/i18/18b02001.htm Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behaviour. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Harding, S. (1992). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Holmes, D., Hughes, K., & Julian, R. (2007). Australian sociology: A changing society. Frenchs Forest, NSW, Australia: Pearson Education Australia. Jorgensen, D. (2002). The challenges and benefits of asynchronous learning networks. In H. Iver (Ed.), Distance learning: Information access and services for virtual users (pp. 3-17). New York: Haworth Information Press. Lee, H. (2005). Behavioral strategies for dealing with flaming in an online forum. The Sociological Quarterly, 46(2), 385–403. doi:10.1111/j.15338525.2005.00017.x Lynch, M. (2002). The online educator: A guide creating to virtual classroom. London: Routledge Falmer. Marra, R. (2006). A review of research methods for assessing content of computer-mediated discussion forums. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 17(3), 243–267. Mazzolini, M., & Maddison, S. (2007). When to jump in: The role of the instructor in online discussion forums. Computers & Education, 49(2), 193–213. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2005.06.011

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Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OEC). (1996). The knowledge-based economy. Paris, France: OECD. Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2001). Lessons from the cyberspace classroom: The realities of online teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Perrotta, C. (2006). Learning to be a psychologist: The construction of identity in an online forum. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 22(6), 456–466. doi:10.1111/j.13652729.2006.00193.x Ragusa, A. T. (2006). Student expectations of distance education: A qualitative analysis exploring the culture, virtual geography and sociology of higher education at an Australian university. In K. Purnell, J. Lidstone, & S. Hodgson (Eds.), Changes in geographical education: Past, present and future (pp. 353-357). Brisbane, QLD: Queensland University of Technology. Ragusa, A. T. (2007). The impact of socio-cultural factors in multi-cultural virtual communication environments. In K. St-Amant (Ed.), Linguistic and cultural online communication issues in the global age (pp. 306-327). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Schrire, S. (2006). Knowledge building in asynchronous discussion groups: Going beyond quantitative analysis. Computers & Education, 46(1), 49–70. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2005.04.006 Semple, A. (2000). Learning series and the influence on the development and use of educational technologies. Australian Science Teachers Journal, 46(3), 21–28. van Aalst, J., & Chan, C. K. K. (2007). Studentdirected assessment of knowledge building using electronic portfolios. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 16(2), 175–220.

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Yang, Y.-T. C. (2005). Using Socratic method to promote critical thinking skills through asynchronous discussion forums in distance learning environments. American Journal of Distance Education, 19(3), 163–181. doi:10.1207/s15389286ajde1903_4 Yucel, S. A. (2006). E-learning approach in teacher training. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 7(4). Zhu, E. (2006). Interaction and cognitive engagement: An analysis of four asynchronous online discussions. Instructional Science, 34(6), 451–480. doi:10.1007/s11251-006-0004-0

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Asynchronous Forums: An Internet-based electronic communication environment, which permits users to post messages for some or all of the members to view. Messages remain posted until a forum moderator removes them. Asynchronous refers to the static nature of the environment. Postings are done one at a time, anonymously or not, and offer a written electronic record of the communications conducted. Knowledge-Based Economy: A phrase used to describe economies in which information and

knowledge hold greater contributing power to the economic welfare of nations than in industrial societies. Network Society: A term used to characterize the changes in a society brought about by the Internet communication technologies and in which individuals and groups organised around digital information networks. Peer-Based Collaborative Learning: A teaching and learning strategy which places emphasis on group work and interactions among students in contrast to traditional teacher-centered learning. Social Interaction: The exchange of verbal and nonverbal communication in a society. Within the social sciences Symbolic Interactionism, stemming largely from the works of George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman, is a theoretical tradition that studies the relationship between “self” and society. Situated Knowledges: A view of social reality put forth by the feminist social philosopher, Sandra Harding, which argues that our social position in the world affects, and creates, the types of “knowledges” and worldviews we experience. In other words, what we think and believe is “socially situated” and socially constructed. Sub-Forum: An online communication environment that exists as a subset to a larger electronic forum.

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Chapter 18

Educational Podcasting

A Taxonomy of Pedagogical Applications Catherine McLoughlin Australian Catholic University, Australia Mark J. W. Lee Charles Sturt University, Australia

ABSTRACT The proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies generates a new wave of online behavior, distributed collaboration, and social interaction. They are already having a transformative effect on education, triggering changes in how teachers and students communicate and learn. The chapter illustrates the new forms of learning, communication, and participation enabled by podcasting and the pedagogical innovations that are possible with this audio-based Web 2.0 technology. Beyond having access to a wider range of content, learners can engage in creative authorship by producing and manipulating digital audio content and making it available for consumption and critique by classmates, teachers, and a wider audience on the Web. A range of podcasting activities are described in contemporary learning environments. The emphasis is on tertiary education settings where students are engaged in content creation, self-directed learning, and metacognitive skill development. These examples are discussed in terms of how they are indicative of the pedagogical choices now available to teachers and learners.

INTRODUCTION Podcasting technology allows audio content from one or more user selected feeds (channels) to be automatically downloaded to one’s computer as it becomes available, and later transferred to a portable player for consumption at a convenient time and place. It has enjoyed phenomenal growth DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch018

in mainstream society, alongside other Web 2.0 technologies that enable Internet users to author and distribute rich media content. Jon Udell (as cited in Campbell, 2005) attributes this growth to five main factors: 1. 2. 3.

The pervasiveness of the Internet; The rapid growth of broadband; The widespread availability of the multimedia personal computer;

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4.

5.

The blurring of the distinction between streaming and downloading media content; and The rapid uptake of portable MP3-capable devices.

Adam Curry (2004), of MTV fame, first coined the term “podcast,” which is a portmanteau word that combines the words ‘iPod’ (the name of Apple Computer’s popular music player) and “broadcast.” Podcasting has also been likened to a TiVo or similar device that uses a process of time shifting to allow for flexible viewing at a time convenient to the user. Once downloaded, audio podcasts can be transferred to a variety of portable devices, including but not limited to dedicated music players such as Apple’s iPod, handheld computers, as well as many modern mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Podcasting has the potential to support learning in a range of settings and across the disciplines. This chapter outlines innovative pedagogical uses and applications of podcasting across a range of settings, including student-generated audio segments for distribution to and critique by peers. Students at colleges and universities worldwide are now engaged in creative authorship by being able to produce and manipulate audio files and video clips, tag them with chosen keywords, and make this content available to their friends and peers worldwide through media sharing websites and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. Such applications are reflective of the new emphasis on user-generated content, creativity, and community-based knowledge building that are characteristic of Web 2.0.

it becomes available, for transfer to or synchronization with a portable device when the user is next able to physically access his/her computer. The editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary declared “podcasting” the “Word of the Year” for 2005; they defined the term as “a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player” (Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 1). This is but one testament to the burgeoning growth of the technology and its au courant status in mainstream society. In fact, the word “podcast” has spawned a number of associated words, each with a particular meaning as Table 1 displays. The popularity of podcasting has resulted in a situation whereby many authors, educators, and educational technologists tend to use the term very loosely to refer to any digital audio content that is broadcast over the Internet (for which the correct term is “audiocast,” as seen in Table 1). One definition that remains true and accurate to the use of the word by its originator (Curry, 2004), is that proposed by Dixon and Greeson (2006), who highlight three key characteristics of podcasting: 1.

2.

3.

BACKGROUND Podcasting allows users to receive new audio material on their desktop computers automatically by subscription. It offers a low-cost, low-barrier solution for the timely delivery of fresh content as

It uses file-based downloads – As opposed to streaming, which by definition means playing the media as it downloads, podcast files are downloaded in their entirely before they are consumed; It is subscription-based – The user preselects one or more feeds or channels of his/ her choice and podcasts are automatically “pushed” to his/her computer on a regular schedule; The content is consumed on portable devices, such as dedicated MP3 players (including but not limited to iPods), mobile phones, as well as personal digital assistants (PDAs) that have MP3 playback capabilities. However, according to a survey by Bridge Data (n.d., cited in Dixon & Greeson, 2006) more than

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80% of podcast downloads never make it to a portable player or another device – they are consumed on the PC, or perhaps never listened to. The subscription-based download of podcast media files is made possible by Really Simple

Syndication (RSS Advisory Board, 2005), a technology originally designed to facilitate the syndication of text summaries of additions to frequently updated websites, such as news sites. RSS 2.0 feeds permit the inclusion of enclosures, which in the case of podcasts are simply references to MP3 audio files. A podcast-aware aggregator or

Table 1. Some podcasting-related terms Term

Likely origin / source

Explanation

Podcast

Curry (2004)

A portmanteau that combines the words “iPod” (the name of Apple Computer’s popular music player) and “broadcast.” Podcasts are typically audio files in MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) format.

Audiocast

Unknown

Any digital audio content that is broadcast over the Internet. The term serves as somewhat of an umbrella term for audio content that is distributed through various mechanisms, including podcasting, streaming, etc.

Enhanced podcast

Apple Computer (2005)

An (audio) podcast synchronized with static images such as artwork, photos, or slides. (Not to be confused with a vodcast, which contains video content.) Apple’s proprietary MP4a format is typically used, which also allows the inclusion of chapter marks (used to divide a lengthy podcast into sections) and clickable hyperlinks.

Vodcast

van der Ziel (2005)

The publishing/syndication of video files instead of audio files using the same technology as podcasting. Sometimes also referred to as a “vidcast.”

Screencast

Udell (2004)

A type of vodcast that contains a (video) recording of the activity on a computer screen, possibly with an audio track consisting of sound output from the computer whose screen is being recorded, or from an external source, such as voice narration or music.

Narrowcast

Unknown

Refers to audio or video programs (such as many podcasts or vodcasts) that target a specific audience demographic, as opposed to a broadcast, which is pitched at a mass audience.

Skypecast

Skype Limited (2007)

A conversation conducted over the free Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service Skype that has been recorded and made available as a podcast.

Mobcast

Carvin (2005)

A podcast created using a mobile phone (smartphone). The term combines the concept of mobile podcasting with “Smart Mobs” (Rheingold, 2002), which is used to describe self-structuring social organization and collective action enabled by the use of modern ICTs.

Palmcast

Unknown

A podcast that is created and/or consumed using a Palm Pilot or similar Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).

Punchcast

Unknown

A term used to describe the process of downloading a podcast or vodcast from a media server on the Internet, directly onto an Internet-connected mobile device (such as a PDA or smartphone), without the use of a desktop or laptop computer. Punchcasts can be either live or recorded for on-demand use following the live broadcast.

Phonecast

PhoneCasting LLC (2007)

A form of punchcast that specifically involves Internet transmission of audio or video content directly to a mobile phone.

Zencast

Creative Technology (2007)

A proprietary term that refers to a vodcast consumed using Creative’s Zen digital media device.

Autocast

Mike (2005)

An automatically generated audio podcast, created by processing textual information such as blog entries using a combination of software including XML parsers, text-to-speech software, and audio conversion utilities.

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“podcatcher” application on the user’s desktop is configured with the URL of the feed(s) to monitor for newly added MP3 enclosures.

PODCASTING AS PART OF THE WEB 2.0 MOVEMENT “Web 2.0” refers to a new generation or improved form of the World Wide Web that emphasizes collaboration, participation, and sharing of knowledge and content among users. While Web 2.0 does not entail radical changes in the technical specifications of the web, most proponents of the concept describe it in terms of new possibilities and applications. O’Reilly (O’Reilly 2005a, 2005b) believes that these new applications have emerged due to a changing socio-cultural context, giving rise to the perception of revolutionary new uses for the same technologies. Characteristic of Web 2.0 are socially-based tools and systems referred to collectively as social software, which includes but is not limited to weblogs (blogs), wikis, RSS, peer-to-peer (P2P) media sharing applications, social bookmarking utilities, and of course, podcasting. These new tools make possible a range of online behaviors, distributed collaboration, and social interaction, and are already having a transformative effect on society, triggering changes in how people communicate and learn (McLoughlin & Lee, 2008). Advocates of Web 2.0 assert that the terms “co-creation” and “users add value” encapsulate the practices of those who participate in and use social software, showing that that is not just an assembly of tools, but a set of concepts, practices, and attitudes that define its scope. Users can participate and create content, and in doing so become “prosumers” (both consumers and producers); this openness is a characteristic hallmark of Web 2.0, in which users mix, amend, and recombine content, collaboratively and open to a global audience, inviting revision and commentary. The added dimension of scale means

that the more people using the tools, the greater the network effect. The combined efforts and collective intelligence of hundreds of individuals can result in the co-production of resources such as Wikipedia entries, illustrating the power of the “wisdom of crowds” (Surowiecki, 2004). The “wisdom of crowds” concept acknowledges that when working cooperatively and sharing ideas, communities can be significantly more productive than individuals working in isolation. It is this “architecture of participation” (Barsky & Purdon, 2006, p. 65) that ensures that Web 2.0 is continually responsive to users. These concepts are central to the philosophy and ethos of the Web 2.0 movement, and inspire and underpin the various exemplars of educational podcasting described later in this chapter.

EDUCATIONAL USES OF PODCASTING: BEYOND CONTENT DELIVERY Many existing educational uses of podcasting focus on employing the technology to deliver instructional content such as lectures, which can lead to questions of pedagogical soundness and can also have adverse effects on class attendance. Used appropriately, however, podcasting can enhance classroom learning by engaging students in the material and adding yet another modality of learning (Carson, 2006). Recent innovative developments and pedagogic applications of podcasting are promising examples of how the technology is moving away from didactic modes of teaching and transmission of content to enable greater student agency in the learning process (McLoughlin, Lee, & Chan, 2007). Schlosser (2006) reminds us that “[t]he use of audio in education is not new, but is experiencing a renaissance fuelled by the ubiquity of portable audio players, broadband Internet, and software tools that allow the relatively easy creation and distribution of audio files” (p. 1). The authors of the present

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chapter believe the true potential of podcasting lies in its community-building value, and its use as a vehicle for disseminating learner-generated content. This view is echoed by Atkinson (2006), who agrees that podcasting has limited impact as a mere method of distribution. According to him, “The emerging developmental and research direction seems … to be learning through creating podcasts and similar, in contrast to learning from podcasts” (p. 21, emphasis in original). There is an increased recognition that learnergenerated content distributed via podcasting technology is a form of knowledge creation, and associated with the development of peer-to peer collaboration and learning (Lee & Chan, 2006). This is not tantamount to declaring that digital audio will replace listening to live lectures or reading; instead, podcasting can augment these forms of activity, while increasing the portability and accessibility of learning resources for learning “on the go,” or mobile listening (Bull, 2005). The implementation of innovative applications of podcasting can be demonstrated by a number of exemplary practices by tertiary teachers at various institutions worldwide, as shown in Table 2. Instead of using the affordances of this technology merely to deliver content to students, examples are provided where learners have both control and agency in creating and distributing audio learning materials. Creating a productive and satisfying learning experience involves actively engaging students and having them take responsibility for their own learning (Pintrich, Wolters, & Baxter, 2002); pedagogical applications that enable active learning through audio learning are discussed, in particular the use of podcasting to support learnergenerated content in ways that foster self-directed learning. The aforementioned philosophy and ethos of Web 2.0 are also clearly evidenced in the examples presented.

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EDUCATIONAL PODCASTING MODELS Podcasting to Support LearnerGenerated Content Chan and Lee’s (2005; Lee, Chan, & McLoughlin, 2006) podcasting approach is centered around 3 to 5 minute talkback radio-style “shows,” in which two or more students participate in informal discussions on pertinent issues related to the relevant unit and its content. The podcast production process is driven entirely by a group of volunteer students, with minimal intervention from their lecturer. Following on from this, Lee, McLoughlin, and Chan (2008) sought to investigate the knowledge building and construction processes that these student-producers engaged in as they worked individually as well as collaboratively as a team, as well as the levels of reflection and metacognition that occurred as a result of their participation in the creation of podcasts. The views and experiences of the student-listeners, and the impact of the podcasts on these students, form the topic of a number of other publications (for example, see McLoughlin, Lee, & Chan, 2007; Lee & Chan 2007a, 2007b).

Podcasting to Foster Knowledge Creation In today’s knowledge society (Bereiter, 2002) there is a premium on the processes of creation, innovation, and discovery, as these are the means by which social and cultural capital are increased. The concept of knowledge has attained increasingly complex meanings, combining expertise, concepts, and skilled performance. This complexity is illustrated through the proliferation of concepts distinguishing between knowledge types, for example, situated and abstract forms of knowledge, and semantic, logical, empirical, systemic, procedural metacognitive, and conditional knowledge. The multiplicities of knowledge are also reflected in an ever-broadening view of

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Table 2. Examples of podcasting in tertiary teaching and learning Reference/ author

Institution/ Country

Description of technology use

Key pedagogical features

Read (2005)

Drexel University, USA

Drexel distributed iPod Photo players to their Education freshmen in September 2005. Read reported there were plans for a variety of learner-centered applications, including but not limited to having students record study-group sessions and interviews, as well as having them maintain audio blogs to connect with administrators and peers during the work experience semester.

Peer-to-peer learning; distributed intelligence approach

Lee, Chan, and McLoughlin (2006)

Charles Sturt University, Australia

Second year undergraduate students take charge of producing talkback radio-style podcasts to assist first year students undertaking a unit of study that the former group previously completed.

Learner-centered instruction; student-generated content

Evans (2006)

Swathmore College, USA

Students studying a literature course read short passages aloud and record them as podcasts, as well as creating separate podcasts discussing the passage they chose and its relationship to other material.

Development of digital and social competencies

Miller (2006, 2007)

University of Connecticut, USA

Three types of podcasts are used to support a General Psychology Blending of formal and course: • iCube podcasts – Informal discussions with students informal learning; mobile, following each week’s lectures; • Precasts – Short enhanced ubiquitous learning podcasts previewing material prior to each lecture; • Postcasts – Short post-lecture podcasts containing re-explanations of selected concepts.

Frydenberg (2006)

Bentley lege USA

Col-

Students in an introductory information technology class work in pairs or groups to produce vodcasts to teach topics from the course schedule to their peers.

Peer teaching; reciprocal learning

Edirisingha, Salmon, and Fothergill (2006)

University of Leicester UK

Students make use of “profcasts,” i.e. material designed to support learning distinct from that which is facilitated through structured on-campus or e-learning processes alone. E.g., weekly profcasts to supplement online teaching through updated information and guidance.

Extended learning, enrichment and extension activities; personalization of learning content

Kukulska-Hulme (2005)

Open University, UK

Students studying German and Spanish courses in distance mode use digital voice recorders and mini-camcorders to record interviews with other students and with native speakers, as well as to create audio-visual tours for sharing with their peers.

Peer-to-peer learning; learner-generated content

McCarty (2005; 2006); Sener (2007a)

Osaka Jogakuin College, Japan

Students are interviewed by their professor, perform roles, and/ or present their own creations, in contribution to the professor’s bilingual podcast feed and blog targeted to those studying Japanese or English as a foreign language.

Cross-cultural collaborative work using student-generated content

Chan, Frydenberg, and Lee (2007)

Bentley College, USA and Charles Sturt University, Australia

Undergraduate students studying first year (freshman) level introductory information technology subjects at Charles Sturt University and Bentley College work in teams consisting of a mixture of students from each institution. Each team is given the task of collaboratively producing a short podcast, to be recorded using the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) tool Skype, i.e., a “Skypecast” (Skype Limited, 2007), in which members discuss issues of relevance to topics that are common to the curricula at both institutions.

Cross-cultural, Internet-mediated collaborative learning and exchange

Australian Catholic University, Australia

McLoughlin, Brady, Lee, & Russell (2007)

Pre-service teachers studying secondary teaching courses use podcasting and blogs to engage in peer mentoring with their classmates while undertaking their teaching practicum, during which they are assigned to geographically dispersed schools. They share experiences, stories and anecdotes, as well as offering support, feedback and encouragement to one another via podcasting.

Peer mentoring and personalization of learning

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attributes and skills required of graduates, ranging from generic skills to domain knowledge coupled with a demand for hard-core entrepreneurship and innovation (McLoughlin & Luca, 2006). In planning for the educational application of technology, besides technical and social infrastructure, educators and designers need to consider the epistemological foundations of learning. Extant theories and models help to explain the role of different agents (for example, individuals, communities, networks) in knowledge creation, the mechanisms of knowledge advancement (for instance, how new ideas are generated and advanced), and processes of inquiry (such as the role of questions and activities to promote learning). The metaphor of learning as knowledge creation appears to help to overcome the separation of the cognitive (the acquisition metaphor) and the situative (the participation metaphor) perspectives (Sfard, 1998). Learning as knowledge creation means that knowledge is valued, sought, and emphasized, as in the acquisition and participation metaphor, but the processes involved are different: Learners are required to engage in social interaction, knowledge building dialogue with a focus on developing and creating knowledge. For example, Lee, Chan, and McLoughlin (2006) worked with second year undergraduate students and guided them to take charge of producing talkback radio-style podcasts to assist first year students undertaking a unit of study that the former group previously completed. The entire podcast production process, from inception and scriptwriting to the final recording, was driven by the student-producers, with minimal instructor intervention. Learners were not there to simply participate in activity and acquire skills, but also to produce shared outcomes and advance the intellectual capital of the group, by generating content to be shared with a group of peers.

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Podcasting to Support Metacognitive Skill Development To support his course in General Psychology at the University of Connecticut, Miller (2006, 2007; Sener, 2007b) hosts weekly informal discussions with students following each week’s lectures. During these discussions, students are able to seek clarification on the course material and talk about it in greater depth, as well as to discuss issues not covered during the lecture. The discussions are recorded and made available to other members of the class as a series of podcasts. In this way, the podcasts are about course content (metacognitive) rather than simply being recordings of the course content itself (transmission of content). The process of creating and participating in the discussions is an instance of learner-generated content creation. All students in the cohort are welcome to submit questions in advance of the discussion via email; these answers, as well as those asked by students who attend in person, are answered during the discussion, and the dialogue can be captured, used, archived, and re-used, and become part of the overall resource pool.

Podcasting for SelfRegulated Learning At Bentley College, USA, Information Technology (IT) students enrolled in Mark Frydenberg’s (2006) IT Intensive course purchase Pocket PCs instead of textbooks, which they use to explore technology concepts in a hands-on, learner-centered approach. Participants form pairs or groups and work together to plan and produce vodcasts. Each group produces a vodcast on one of the topics in the course schedule for sharing with the rest of the class. This may be viewed as a novel form of peer and reciprocal teaching, and serves a dual purpose: In the process, students not only display their understanding of the course topics through the production of content for their peers, but also develop and exercise IT skills that are directly linked to the objectives of the course.

Educational Podcasting

Podcasting and Personalization of the Learning Experience Podcasting can be used to personalize the learning experience to suit the needs, characteristics, and preferences of the individual learner. This necessitates acknowledgement that learning is multi-episodic and that informal as well as formal events contribute to the learners’ repertoire of skills. To achieve personalized learning, a range of tools can be used to support learner interaction in multiple contexts. In a study conducted by McLoughlin, Brady, Lee, and Russell (2007) pre-service teachers studying secondary teaching courses used podcasting and blogs to engage in peer mentoring with their classmates while undertaking their teaching practicum, during which they were assigned to geographically dispersed schools. They shared experiences, stories and anecdotes as well as offering support, feedback, and encouragement to one another via podcasting. Another example of the use of podcasting to support personalized learning is the research of Edirisingha, Salmon, and Fothergill (2006). Students are given aces to “profcasts,” i.e. material designed to support learning distinct from that which is facilitated through structured on-campus or e-learning processes alone. This material is based on student interests and learning needs and therefore enriches the learning experience while catering for diversity while weekly profcasts supplement teaching through updated information and guidance.

PODCASTING, WEB 2.0, AND EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION So, what do podcasting and Web 2.0 mean for education? The advent of this new wave of tools and technologies provokes us to consider the implications for and potential applications to formal spaces of learning in colleges and universities (Berg, Berquam, & Christoph 2007).

Social software applications can also be viewed as pedagogical tools that stem from their affordances of information discovery and sharing. Anderson (2004) observes that “The greatest affordance of the web for educational use is the profound and multifaceted increase in communication and interaction capability” (p. 42), which is even more evident in Web 2.0 when compared to the set of linked information sources that characterized “Web 1.0.” Drawing on extant Web 2.0 research and practice, some examples of the pedagogical applications of social software tools in general that apply to educational podcasting are discussed below.

Connectivity and Social Rapport Social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Ning, and Friendster attract and support networks of people and facilitate connections between them. They are representative of what Gee (2004) calls affinity spaces, in which people acquire both social and communicative skills, and at the same time become engaged in the architecture of participation of Web 2.0. In these spaces, users engage in informal learning, and creative, expressive forms of behavior and identity seeking, while developing a range of digital literacies.

Collaborative Information Discovery and Sharing Data sharing is enabled through a range of software applications, and experts and novices alike can make their work available to the rest of the virtual world, for example through podcasts, blogs, and wikis. Social bookmarking tools such as Del.icio. us, Furl, and Digg allow people to build up collections of web resources or bookmarks, classify and organize them through the use of metadata tags, and share both the bookmarks and tags with others. In this way, users with similar interests can learn from one another through subscribing to the bookmarks and tags of others, and actively

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contribute to the ongoing growth and evolution of web-based information and knowledge.

Content Creation Web 2.0 emphasizes the pre-eminence of content creation over content consumption. Anyone can create, assemble, organize, and share content to meet their own needs and those of others. Open source and open content (cf. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008; MERLOT, 2008) initiatives, as well as copyright licensing models such as Creative Commons (2008), are helping fuel the growth of user-generated content.

Knowledge/Information Aggregation and Content Modification The large uptake of RSS, as well as related technologies such as podcasting and vodcasting, is indicative of a move to collecting material from many sources and using it for personal needs. Hilton (2006) describes these technologies as part of a move from “producer push” to “demand pull,” whereby students are now accustomed to obtaining and consuming content “on demand.” There is also a trend towards the rise of “microcontent” (Lindner, 2005, 2006; Haque, 2005), or digital content in small fragments that are loosely connected, and which can be re-mixed and reformulated by individuals to produce new patterns, images, and interpretations (see also Mejias, 2005; Weinberger, 2002). (This is representative of the concept of a “mash-up.”)

FUTURE TRENDS The developments and pedagogic applications of podcasting now emerging worldwide are promising examples of how the technology is moving away from didactic modes of teaching and transmission of content to enable greater learner agency in the teaching-learning process, increased

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recognition that learner-generated content is a form of knowledge creation, and the development of peer-to peer forms of collaboration and learning. This is not tantamount to declaring that digital audio will replace listening to live lectures or reading from texts, but podcasting can augment these forms of activity, while increasing the portability and accessibility of learning resources for demand-driven learning. Judging by current approaches and application, pedagogies for podcasting within Web 2.0 are learner centered and socially rich, and students operate increasingly in an egalitarian electronic space. While teachers might act as facilitators and provide support, they are not necessarily primarily responsible for the creation of the content. In many of the educational scenarios depicted in Table 2, learners interact with and create podcast resources, individually as well as in collaboration with peers and experts. In addition, there is much evidence of podcasting and other Web 2.0 tools being used to facilitate greater levels of learner choice and autonomy, especially in terms of the ways in which content is distributed and consumed. The authors believe that a key future trend will involve the integration and use of podcasts to support personalized learning not as isolated resources or artifacts, but as part of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) (Downes, 2005; Attwell, 2006, 2007), which affirm the role of the individual in organizing, customizing, and shaping his/her own learning environment. A PLE may be broadly defined as a learning environment in which learners manage their own learning using various software and services. In contrast to an institutionally controlled Learning Management System (LMS), a PLE provides contextually appropriate toolsets by enabling individuals to adjust and select options based on their needs and circumstance, resulting in (ideally) a model where learner needs, not technologies, drive the learning process. This approach to learning means that learning content is created and distributed in a very different manner to the traditional approach:

Educational Podcasting

Rather than being composed, organized, and packaged, content is syndicated. From there, it is re-mixed and re-purposed (“mashed up”) with the student’s own individual application in mind, the finished product being fed forward to become the raw material other students’ reading and use. In a PLE, a student is able to customize, control, and shape his/her own “Personal Learning Landscape” (Tosh & Werdmuller, 2004; Werdmuller & Tosh, 2005), integrating multiple feeds and sources to allow for the aggregation of a range of multimedia content not limited to podcasts. For example, the audio material may be intermingled with text from blog entries, images, videos (vodcasts), animations, SlideShare presentations, and so on. This illustrates the concept of “Small technologies loosely joined” described by Lamb, Levine, & Norman (2004; see also MacLearning.org, 2007), where RSS and other syndication technologies that form the basis of podcasting are the conduit joining the various technology pieces in a Web 2.0-based architecture. It is also reflective of a new learning paradigm called micro-learning, which involves learning through relatively small learning units and short-term learning activities. Micro-learning processes often derive from interaction with “micro-content” or “micro-media,” which “can be consumed in unbundled microchunks … and aggregated and reconstructed in hyper-efficient ways.” (Haque 2005, slide 33). This atomization of learning beyond the learning object (Menell, 2005) results in personalized smaller units of information that can be learned and recombined, enabling greater relevance for learners as well as allowing for just-in-time learning. Taking a broader view, these developments highlight the way in which informal and incidental learning and knowledge acquisition are increasingly occurring through small chunks of learning content and the use of flexible technologies that can enable learners to access the content, as well as creating new content, easily, anywhere, on demand, and on the move.

CONCLUSION The conceptual tenets of Web 2.0 envision the specifics of the next generation of learners as selfmotivated and capable of using the new tools, and that learning environments can be controlled by students is at once both empowering and fraught with tensions and risk. The indications are that new forms of innovative pedagogy are emerging, with the powerful multimedia aspects of the web enabling access to information on a global scale, coupled with socially rich, participatory, and interconnected experiences that allow students to create and contribute ideas. In this constantly morphing educational landscape, there still remains a need for gatekeepers, for structured and scaffolded learning resources, and for expert feedback. How educational podcasting applications will continue to evolve, as well as how teachers might leverage the medium of digital audio, depends on student needs, availability of technological infrastructure, and teacher confidence with new media. Podcasting, as part of the raft of Web 2.0 technologies, may be used creatively to bring about a substantive change in teaching and learning, to support genuine learner-generated content and knowledge creation as the examples in Table 2 demonstrate, or it can simply be used to reinforce existing didactic pedagogies and content delivery. To conclude, there are several implications for educators interested in using podcasting to support and/or enhance learning. While many reports and articles on podcasting are informational and technical in nature, more studies are emerging that provide evidence of the technology’s pedagogical value. Key findings indicate that student flexibility and access to educational resources are major strengths of audio-based learning (Schlosser, 2006). Emerging research is giving increased attention to the applications of podcasting in improving the quality of teaching, to engage students and to provide for diverse learner needs. Practitioners need to consider the educational goals and learning outcomes they

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are trying to achieve using podcasting, so that instructional design is not driven simply by the availability and ease of use of the technology. Other researchers emphasize that podcasting lends itself to an innovative, student-centered learning paradigm where student agency in the creation of podcasts as shared learning objects is central. For example, as seen in Lee, McLoughlin, and Chan, (2008), the production of podcast episodes for sharing among peers can serve as a catalyst for student engagement, if creation of the scripts and audio files is undertaken by learners and teachers in a collaborative effort. Furthermore, supporting and encouraging knowledge building processes can be achieved by instructors in variety of ways, through task design supported by social software tools to promote high levels of self-regulation, collaborative inquiry, and peer-to-peer dialogue. Overall, if podcasting activities are planned in such a way as to move beyond the mere provision of information and learning resources to students, to incorporate learner creation of content, peer-to-peer sharing, and collaboration, they can provide considerable scope for valuable sociocollaborative and experiential modes of learning. However, such approaches are not without their challenges, as they call for educators and institutions to relinquish some degree of control and to look beyond the traditional view of classroom authority.

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Chan, A., & Lee, M. J. W. (2005). An MP3 a day keeps the worries away: Exploring the use of podcasting to address preconceptions and alleviate pre-class anxiety amongst undergraduate information technology students. In D. H. R. Spennemann & L. Burr (Eds.), Good practice in practice: Proceedings of the student experience conference (pp. 58-70). Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia: Charles Sturt University. Creative Commons. (2008). Retrieved July 12, 2008, from http://creativecommons.org/. Creative Technology. (2007). ZENcast.com – largest collection of free video, blogs, vodcasts, podcasts and tech news. Retrieved March 21, 2007, from http://www.zencast.com Curry, A. (2004). iPodder – a brief history. Retrieved April 23, 2005, from http://www.ipodder. org/history Dixon, C., & Greeson, M. (2006). Recasting the concept of podcasting (part I). Retrieved September 20, 2006, from http://news.digitaltrends.com/ talkback109.html Edirisingha, P., Salmon, G., & Fothergill, J. (2006, October). Profcasting: A pilot study and a model for integrating podcasts into online learning. Paper presented at the Fourth EDEN Research Workshop, Castelldefels, Spain. Evans, L. (2006). Using student podcasts in literature classes. Retrieved January 23, 2007, from http://www.academiccommons.org/ctfl/vignette/ using-student-podcasts-in-literature-classes Frydenberg, M. (2006). Principles and pedagogy: The two p’s of podcasting in the information technology classroom. In D. Colton, W. J. Tastle, M. Hensel, & A. A. Abdullat (Eds.), Proceedings of ISECON 2006 (§3354). Chicago, IL: Association of Information Technology Professionals. Retrieved November 27, 2006, from http://isedj. org/isecon/2006/3354/ISECON.2006.Frydenberg.pdf

Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. New York: Palmgrave-McMillan. Haque, U. (2005). The new economics of media: Micromedia, connected consumption, and the snowball effect. Retrieved January 5, 2006, from http://www.bubblegeneration.com/resources/ mediaeconomics.ppt Hilton, J. (2006). The future for higher education: Sunrise or perfect storm? EDUCAUSE Review, 41(2), 58–71. Kukulska-Hulme, A. (2005). The mobile language learner—now and in the future. Retrieved February 3, 2006, from http://www2.humlab.umu.se/ video/Praktikvision/agnes.ram Lee, M. J. W., & Chan, A. (2006). Exploring the potential for podcasting to deliver mobile ubiquitous learning in higher education. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 18(1), 94–115. doi:10.1007/BF03032726 Lee, M. J. W., & Chan, A. (2007a). Pervasive, lifestyle-integrated mobile learning for distance learners: An analysis and unexpected results from a podcasting study. Open Learning, 22(3), 201–218. Lee, M. J. W., & Chan, A. (2007b). Reducing the effects of isolation and promoting inclusivity for distance learners through podcasting. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 8(1), 85104. Retrieved May 22, 2008, from http://tojde. anadolu.edu.tr/tojde25/pdf/article_7.pdf Lee, M. J. W., Chan, A., & McLoughlin, C. (2006). Students as producers: Second year students’ experiences as podcasters of content for first year undergraduates. In Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (pp. 832-841). Sydney, NSW: University of Technology.

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Lee, M. J. W., McLoughlin, C., & Chan, A. (2008). Talk the talk: Learner-generated podcasts as catalysts for knowledge creation. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(3), 501–521. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00746.x Lindner, M. (2005). Wild microcontent. Retrieved December 12, 2006, from http://phaidon.philo.at/ martin/archives/000318.html Lindner, M. (2006). Use these tools, your mind will follow: Learning in immersive micromedia and microknowledge environments. In D. Whitelock & S. Wheeler (Eds.), The next generation: Research proceedings of the 13th ALT-C conference (pp. 41-49). Oxford, UK: ALT. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (2008). MIT OpenCourseWare. Retrieved July 12, 2008, from http://ocw.mit.edu McCarty, S. (2005). Spoken Internet to go: Popularization through podcasting. The JALT CALL Journal, 1(2), 67–74. McCarty, S. (2006). Japancasting. Retrieved May 3, 2008, from http://stevemc.blogmatrix.com. McLoughlin, C., Brady, J., Lee, M. J. W., & Russell, R. (2007, November). Peer-to-peer: An e-mentoring approach to developing community, mutual engagement and professional identity for pre-service teachers. Paper presented at the 2007 Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Conference, Fremantle, WA. McLoughlin, C., & Lee, M. J. W. (2008). Future learning landscapes: Transforming pedagogy through social software. Innovate: Journal of Online Education, 4(5). Retrieved July 11, 2008, from http://innovateonline.info/index. php?view=article&id=539

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McLoughlin, C., Lee, M. J. W., & Chan, A. (2007, June). Promoting engagement and motivation for distance learners through podcasting. Paper presented at the European Distance Education and E-Learning Network (EDEN) Annual Conference 2007, Naples, Italy. McLoughlin, C., & Luca, J. (2006). Applying situated learning theory to the creation of learning environments to enhance socialisation and self-regulation. In A. Herrington & J. Herrington (Eds.), Authentic learning environments in higher education (pp. 194-213). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Mejias, U. (2005). A nomad’s guide to learning and social software. The knowledge tree: An e-journal of learning innovation, 7. Retrieved December 10, 2006, from http://knowledgetree.flexiblelearning. net.au/edition07/download/la_mejias.pdf MERLOT. (2008). Retrieved July 12, 2008, from http://www.merlot.org Mike. (2005). AutoCast. Retrieved January 10, 2007, from http://www.autocastsoftware.com Miller, D. B. (2006, October 18). Podcasting at the University of Connecticut: Enhancing the educational experience. Campus Technology. Retrieved January 20, 2007, from http://campustechnology. com/news_article.asp?id=19424&typeid=156 Miller, D. B. (2007). iCube. Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://icube.uconn.edu/ O’Reilly, T. (2005a). Web 2.0: Compact definition? Retrieved November 28, 2006, from http://radar. oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/web_20_compact_definition.html O’Reilly, T. (2005b) What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Retrieved December 15, 2006, from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/ news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

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Oxford University Press. (2005). All hail “podcasting”: More also-rans for the 2005 WOTY. Retrieved July 3, 2006, from http://blog.oup.com/ oupblog/2005/12/podcasting_is_t.html PhoneCasting LLC. (2007). PhoneCasting— phonecasting and podcasting for wireless devices. Retrieved April 10, 2007, from http://www.phonecasting.com Pintrich, P. R., Wolters, C. A., & Baxter, G. P. (2002). Assessing metacognition and self-regulated learning. In G. Schraw & J. C. Impara (Eds.), Issues in the measurement of metacognition (pp. 43-97). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Read, B. (2005, March 2). Drexel U. will give free iPods to students in School of Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved May 8, 2005, from http://chronicle.com/ free/2005/03/2005030203n.htm RSS Advisory Board. (2005). Really simple syndication: RSS 2.0.1 specification (revision 6). Retrieved March 2, 2006, from http://www.rssboard. org/rss-2-0-1-rv-6 Schlosser, C. A. (2006). Audio in online courses: Beyond podcasting. Paper presented at E-Learn 2006 World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education. Retrieved October 20, 2006, from http://www. nova.edu/~burmeist/audio_online.html Sener, J. (2007a). Podcasting student performances to develop EFL skills. Retrieved March 10, 2007, from http://www.sloan-c-wiki.org/wiki/index. php?title=Podcasting_Student_Performances_to_ Develop_EFL_Skills Sener, J. (2007b). University of Connecticut – beyond lecturecasting: Using podcasts for discussion and student content creation. Retrieved March 10, 2007, from http://www.sloan-c-wiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=University_of_Connecticut_--_Beyond_Lecturecasting:_Using_Podcasts_for_Discussion_and_Student_Content_Creation

Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27(2), 4–13. Skype Limited. (2007). Skypecasts. Retrieved July 21, 2008, from https://skypecasts.skype.com/ skypecasts/overview.html Surowiecki, K. (2004). The wisdom of crowds. New York: Doubleday. Udell, J. (2004, November 17). Name that genre: Screencast. Retrieved November 18, 2005, from http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/17. html van der Ziel, S. (2005). VODcast. Retrieved December 10, 2005, from http://www.vodcast.nl Weinberger, D. (2002). Small pieces loosely joined: A unified theory of the Web. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Mash-Up: Content or material that is collected from several web-based sources, and then modified, re-mixed, and/or re-combined to create a new formulation of the material. A mash-up is typically a digital media file including one or more the following: text, graphics, audio, video, and animation. Mash-ups are commonly seen in “Web 2.0” services such as blogs, wikis, RSS and podcast feeds, media sharing sites (e.g. YouTube) and social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook). Micro-Content: Small, basic units of digital content or media that can be consumed in unbundled micro-chunks, and aggregated and reconstructed in various ways. Micro-content often forms the basis of micro-learning. Micro-Learning: An emergent paradigm that involves learning through small learning units (micro-content) and short-term learning activities.

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MPEG Layer 3 (MP3): A digital audio encoding format that makes use of a lossy compression algorithm, which sacrifices the fidelity of the audio to reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording, thereby resulting a file size that is suitable for transmission over the Internet. Since the compression works by reducing the accuracy of certain parts of sound that are deemed beyond the auditory resolution ability of most people, for most listeners, an MP3 file sounds like a faithful reproduction of the original audio. MP3 is commonly used format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players. Most podcasts are produced in MP3 format. Personal Learning Environment (PLE): A system, application, or suite of applications that assists learners in taking control of and managing their own learning. It represents an alternative approach to the Learning Management System (LMS), which by contrast adopts an institutioncentric or course-centric view of learning. Key PLE concepts include the blending of formal and informal learning, participation in social networks that transcend institutional boundaries, as well as the use of a range of networking protocols (RSS, peer-to-peer [P2P], Web services) to connect systems, resources, and users within a personally managed space.

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Podcasting: A portmanteau word that combines the words “iPod” (the name of Apple Computer’s popular music player) and “broadcast.” Refers to the distribution of digital audio files, typically in MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) format, through a syndication protocol such as RSS. The user subscribes to one or more feeds or channels of his/ her choice using a podcast aggregation program, which periodically polls the feeds for new audio files and downloads them automatically to the user’s hard disk as they become available. Really Simple Syndication (RSS): A technology originally designed to facilitate the publication of text summaries of additions to frequently updated websites, such as news sites and blogs. The user subscribes to the feed(s) of one or more RSS-enabled websites by configuring a news reader or aggregator program installed on his/ her computer with the URL(s) of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) file(s) that comprise the feed. The program perodically checks the feed for new content and downloads it as it becomes available. RSS 2.0 feeds permit the inclusion of enclosures, which permit multimedia files (such as MP3 files in the case of podcasting) to be referenced in the feed. Vodcasting: The publishing/syndication of video files instead of audio files using the same technology as podcasting.

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Chapter 19

Wiki Use in Higher Education Implications for Group Size and Task Complexity Elizabeth Koh National University of Singapore, Singapore John Lim National University of Singapore, Singapore

ABSTRACT In recent years, the field of education has discovered the educational value of social interaction technologies, including Wikis. However, a lack of conceptual understanding and operationalization of Wiki use has prevented a more extensive adoption of this collaborative technology by educational institutions. The present chapter provides insights into the functionality of Wikis and their educational implications for higher education. The authors contend that a conceptualization of Wiki use in the classroom context can be derived from a typology of online interactive pedagogies. The proposed conceptualization is based on the assumption that certain kinds of Wiki-related activities correspond to certain levels of classroom interactions: namely, social interaction, general discussion, topic focused discussion, and collaborative activities. Additionally, group size and task complexity should be considered as criteria for Wiki implementation. The main premise of the chapter is that the instructional use of Wiki-based classroom technologies can enhance student learning.

INTRODUCTION Due to the collaborative nature of Wiki technologies, Wiki has become a buzzword in 21st century higher education. A Wiki is a platform for content creation and negotiation by user audiences. Students use Wikis for collaborative writing exercises, completing group assignments, service learning, DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch019

and community outreach projects (Hamer, 2006; O’Shea et al., 2007; Wheeler, Yeomans, & Wheeler, 2008). Instructors implement an assortment of Wiki functions for content management systems and for various class-related activities (Bruns & Humphreys, 2005; Glogoff, 2006). These activities have been carried out with varying degrees of success in achieving student learning outcomes. It has been established that online education, with its emphasis on student-centered learning, can benefit from the

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Wiki Use in Higher Education

addition of Wiki tools to the higher education landscape (Bower et al., 2006; Fuchs-Kittowski & Köhler, 2005). However, as Wang and Turner stressed, Wiki deployment in online learning has led to considerable dilemmas that necessitate further investigation (2004). Addressing the issue of technology-mediated communication in online learning communities, Geer (2006) developed a comprehensive pedagogical framework which integrates three essential elements: learning outcomes, interactive pedagogies, and interactive technologies. This framework can inform instructors’ adoption of interactive technology tools in online learning environments. As Geer wrote: Central to the framework are the specific types of activities that support varying levels of interaction, ranging from very general to more specific and focused activities. These activities which have been derived from a reading of the literature and also from university teaching experiences, include social interaction, general discussion, topic focused, scripted, cooperative and collaborative activities. Such interactive pedagogies could be used to support student interactions and learning (p. 132). Geer placed Wikis exclusively within the category of topic focused interactive pedagogy used for achieving such learning outcomes as analysis, interpretation, exploration, reflection, and experiential learning (p. 133). After carefully reviewing the existing research of Wiki implementations in the higher educational context, the authors propose expanding the range of interactive pedagogies that can inform Wiki use to include social interaction, general discussion, and cooperative activities. That will allow broadening the range of possible student learning outcomes to encompass: information exchange, observation, clarification, comparison, and task division (p. 138).

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BACKGROUND The term Wiki refers to both technology and a concept of how one can create and edit online content (Louridas, 2006). In essence, Wikis are editable websites that enable users to apply simple markup language to build content and collaborate (Lamont, 2007). Developing Wiki pages involves three simple steps: write (or edit), save, and display (Klobas, 2006). Known as “open editing,” Wikis allow users to browse through Wiki pages, edit existing pages, or create new ones (Leuf & Cunningham, 2001). Wikis encourage internal linking of pages but limit the appearance of the so-called “orphaned pages” (i.e., pages that have no direct links to them); thus, a constantly changing body of content is evolving (Wang & Turner, 2004). Besides, Wikis offer an opportunity for groups of users to join their efforts in developing content. Many Wiki systems utilize web-based opensource software technologies (Raman, 2006). The users can choose to either install or run a Wiki on their own computer or use Wiki hosting services. Wiki pages can be displayed by any web browser, are available anytime, and can be accessed from anywhere. Wiki platforms are highly flexible in terms of their structure and can be customized to suit various purposes. In addition, Wikis can have different read-and-edit access permissions (Chawner & Lewis, 2005; Leuf & Cunningham, 2001); they are either open (anyone can edit the Wiki) or allow only registered members or selected persons to access and edit the Wiki. The ease and speed with which web pages can be created are the fundamental concepts in Wiki deployment. High flexibility and functionality of Wikis have led to their rapid proliferation in many areas (Louridas, 2006). Examples of successful Wiki implementations can be found in the practices of many organizations and corporations (Bean & Hott, 2005; Raman, 2006). Wikis have also become common in the educational landscape (Parker & Chao, 2007; Raman, Ryan & Olfman, 2005; Schwartz et al., 2004).

Wiki Use in Higher Education

Conceptualizing Wiki use in Higher Education A review of the recent scholarly literature reveals multitudinous ways in which Wikis have been employed in higher education. One of the forerunners of Wiki systems in education is the Collaborative Webs project (CoWebs) implemented at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Leuf & Cunningham, 2001). CoWeb (originally known as “Swiki”) has been successfully applied for information sharing and distribution, creation of collaborative artifacts, reviewing classroom material, and storing student work online (Guzdial, Rick, & Kehoe, 2001; Lueg & Fisher, 2003). Tonkin (2005) highlighted four instructional methods for Wiki use: (1) single-user Wikis for students to take notes and present information; (2) lab book Wikis which allow for peer reviewing; (3) collaborative writing Wikis to enable web-based group authoring; (4) and knowledge-based Wikis which provide a web-based knowledge repository for a group. Other models incorporate creating online spaces to store and edit work done by students (Bower et al., 2006; Wheeler et al., 2008) or student team Wikis (Hamer, 2006; Trentin, 2008). Hamer (2006) reported on the results of a case study which examined how Wiki technology was used to allow teams of students to create their own collaborative workspace, record work-in-progress, and participate in class activities. The Wiki and the implemented pedagogy challenged students’ communication and writing skills, helping them to actively construct knowledge instead of being passive recipients. The mutual performance of students was central to their learning. Other common applications of Wikis include: Wiki “micropedias,” FAQ Wikis, problem solving Wikis, and Wikis being used to create operating guidelines, tutorials, and project spaces (Bower et al., 2006; Bruns & Humphreys, 2005; Parker & Chao, 2007). Wikis can be used for keeping and annotating lecture notes collaboratively. This allows instructors to verify what students learned

Table 1. Categories of Wiki use Wiki Use

Operational Definitions

Examples

Wikis for social interaction

Activities that build communal bonds and relationships among learners

Icebreaker activities, personal Wiki spaces

Wikis for general discussion

Broad based dialogue where any topic can be raised and discussed

Class discussion spaces, extending discussions beyond the classroom

Wikis for topic focused discussion

Discussion that is focused upon a specific subject matter

Topical writing, micropedias, glossaries

Wikis for cooperative activities

Tasks in which groups of learners work together to achieve common goals

Group authoring, project spaces

during the lecture (O’Neill, 2005; O’Shea et al., 2007). However, there is still a lack of conceptual understanding and operationalization of Wiki use in higher education that prevents both educational institutions and educators from a higher adoption rate of this promising interactive and collaborative technology. The authors of this chapter contend that a conceptualization of Wiki use in the classroom context can be derived from a typology of online interactive pedagogies developed by Geer (2006). These pedagogies encompass various forms of learning that can be supported by instructional technologies. The authors use the pedagogies of social interaction, general discussion, topic-focused activities, and cooperative activities to conceptualize the educational implications of Wikis (see Table 1). The proposed conceptualization is based on the assumption that certain kinds of Wiki-related activities correspond to certain levels of classroom interactions, group size, and task complexity.

Wikis for Social Interaction Learning is a highly social process in which the exchange of meaningful personal information is crucial to learners’ cognitive development

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(Leidner & Jarvenpaa, 1995). A Wiki need not only be a task-focused or content-filled system; it can also be a system that fosters social interaction in the classroom (Augar, Raitman, & Zhou, 2004). Social interaction refers to activities that build communal bonds and develop interpersonal relationships among learners. Educational research has pointed out the importance of a climate of open-mindedness to encourage the formation of trust and cooperation (Hughes et al., 2002). Augar and colleagues (2004) reported than an icebreaking activity using Wikis at Deakin University in Australia has been successful in fostering social interaction. Wikis provide opportunities for social interaction as shared collective spaces where information can be easily created and can flow bi-directionally between students and instructors. Wikis can coordinate the sharing of information among groups of students. Students can set-up personal profile pages so that their peers may know more about them; other students can then comment on their pages and interact with them (Schwartz et al., 2004; Hamer, 2006). When a supportive and rich social environment facilitates the formation of a collaborative learning community, students are more likely to attain their personal learning goals.

Wikis for General Discussion Another key utility of the Wiki is its use in general discussion especially in large classes. General discussion refers to a broad-based scope of dialogue where any topic can be addressed. Students can raise questions and clarify (or provide) information that relates to the course. An exchange of different viewpoints encourages participants to rethink their own views and promotes critical thinking. Wikis can successfully host class discussions either within the main course page or on specifically created discussion pages (Fuchs-Kittowski & Köhler, 2005). If the discussion occurs on the main page, it is easy for the instructor and the students

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to connect ideas and concepts through internal linkages. This enables students to relate to ideas more easily and to learn collaboratively. For instance, Farabaugh (2007) focused on the instructional use of QwikiWiki and MediaWiki for maintaining student discussions. After completing the readings and submitting short writing assignments to the course Wiki, students were able to reflect on each other’s work and even take the discussion beyond the classroom. The instructor reported that the Wiki was a useful tool to enhance reflective and associative thinking among the students. Similarly, Wheeler and colleagues (2008) wrote that students were able to sharpen their critical thinking skills through a class discussion on a Wiki.

Wikis for Topic-Focused Activities As previously suggested (Geer, 2006), Wikis can be used in topic-focused discussions to foster a deeper sense of engagement with course content. Examples of topic-focused activities include: review and discussion of examination questions, “micro encyclopedias” which detail facts and analyses of concepts in a specific area, glossaries which succinctly define keywords of module content, and topical writing which entails reports aligned to a particular subject. These activities typically require one integrated solution. Guzdial and colleagues (2001) described a simple way of carrying out a topic-focused activity which involved posting past-year examination questions on the Wiki. Students could post questions, answer them, and critique others’ responses. Bruns and Humphreys (2005) reported using the Wiki-based encyclopedia format in a New Media Technologies course, while Lund and Smødal (2006) utilized it in English as a Foreign Language. In the latter, Lund and Smødal deployed Wikis for designing two encyclopedia-type collaborative activities. The first was a collective assignment carried out over a two-week period on a singular topic while the second (in response to

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feedback from the earlier project) extended over an entire term and involved a topic that called for more role-playing. The second project also included a greater teacher presence in the Wiki via the discussion pages. The results showed that some students who were used to independent writing were uncomfortable with collective writing practices. Still, they were able to overcome the individual attribution and became engaged in the collective creation of knowledge. The study found that both projects enabled students to form a learning community. Thus, Wikis have a positive impact on topic-focused activities.

Wikis for Cooperative Activities “Cooperative activities” refer to tasks in which a group of learners works together to achieve a common goal. Members of the group are individually responsible for their own tasks, while the efforts of the whole group are aggregated. The term cooperative learning is often associated with the term collaborative learning. Some researchers contrast the two terms and view cooperation as a division of labor in which individuals achieve their objectives jointly and collaboration as a commitment to succeed (Jones et al., 2006; Paulus, 2005). Others reveal that there are more similarities than differences between them (Strijbos, Martens & Jochems, 2004). Researchers have found that collaborative groups tend to divide the tasks before integrating them – choosing to cooperate rather than collaborate (Hathorn & Ingram, 2002). Cooperative groups are characterized by active learning in small groups with the teacher as facilitator with teaching and learning being shared experiences (Kirschner, 2001). Wiki functionality includes: (1) open editing (to enable group authoring), (2) versioning (an ability to track the updates to the group project), (3) and maintaining a discussion space (for further elaboration). These features aptly support cooperative learning (Schaffert et al., 2006). Cooperative activities include group writing exercises, project

work, or any group work that requires the creation of collaborative documents. These tasks are usually problem-oriented and require the combination of multiple members’ contributions for the group to succeed. Nicol, Littlejohn, and Grierson (2005) examined a cooperative activity that involved co-creation of engineering designs using two components: an Orbit repository and a TikiWiki. The Wiki, in particular, afforded teams the ability to share resources, allowed easy display and description of files, and encouraged the contextualization of the content. Schwartz and colleagues (2004) note how Wikis form a community of practice through: “a virtual presence, a variety of interactions, easy participation, valuable content, connections to a broader subject field, personal and community identity and interaction, democratic participation, and evolution over time” (p. 2). Indeed, cooperative learning is enhanced when it occurs within a community of practice (Parker & Chao, 2007). Cooperative activity facilitated by the capacities of the Wiki also increased the perceived writing and critical thinking skills of students (Trentin, 2008; Wheeler et al., 2008). A conclusion can be drawn that the functionality of a Wiki is salient for cooperative activities; this will in turn enhance student learning.

Group Size The authors have taken into account that group size and task complexity are both key considerations in the classrooms (Cohen, 1994; Lim & Zhong, 2005). The four instructional pedagogies discussed above can be grouped into a matrix with group size as one dimension and task complexity as the other (Table 2). The size of the group involved ranges from small to large while the complexity of the task varies from simple to complex. As an important criterion in collaborative learning (Lim & Zhong, 2005; Tolmie & Boyle, 2000), group size can be classified as small or

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large. Small groups consist of two to six members while large groups have seven members or more (Strijbos et al., 2004). For social interaction and general discussion, group sizes are typically large. In contrast, topic-focused and cooperative activities are more suitable for smaller group sizes because they require higher levels of interaction. Communication in small groups is characterized by openness and accuracy (Lowry et al. 2006). It has been documented that successful use of online collaboration is typically associated with smaller groups in face-to-face (Johnson & Johnson, 1996) and online settings (Tolmie & Boyle, 2000). This leads to the first proposition: Proposition 1: The effect of group size is manifested in such a way that Wiki-based learning will be more effective utilizing cooperative and topic-focused pedagogies (associated with smaller groups) than general discussion and social interaction methods (associated with larger groups).

Task Complexity The nature of tasks is another dimension important to the study of collaborative learning (Strijbos et al., 2004). Past research has delineated several characteristics of tasks: such as idea generation, discussion, problem solving tasks (Hackman, 1968), and task complexity (Payne, 1976). Complex tasks have more cognitive demands, are more challenging and difficult, contain several desired outcomes, uncertainties, conflicts and multiple decision paths (Campbell, 1988). In contrast, simple tasks contain none of the above attributes and tend to have one solution or opinion. The different types of pedagogies discussed in this chapter correspond to various levels of task complexity. Social interaction is considered a simple task since students share their own opinions and do not require much specialized information to make decisions. Topic-focused activities tend to have a single solution or a set of related solutions which denotes them as simple tasks. In contrast, cooperative and general discussion pedagogies

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Table 2. Group size vs. task complexity Task

Simple

Complex

Small group

Topic focused

Cooperative

Large group

Social interaction

General discussion

are positioned as complex tasks as they involve coordination, conflicting information, and multiple solutions. Complex tasks would engender more collaborative learning than simple tasks since complex tasks would require participants to come to an understanding of other views, possibly to reach a consensus and attain coordination (Cohen, 1994; Johnson & Johnson, 1996). Research has provided evidence of the importance of negotiation, teamwork, and collaboration for Wiki implementations that employ cooperative and general discussion activities (Bruns & Humphreys, 2005; Hamer, 2006). In contrast, simple tasks involve participants sharing facts about themselves without requiring integration of conflicting ideas. In this activity, individual student contributions are added together to yield a meaningful outcome (Campbell, 1988), and there is less learning from other learners. In this regard, collaborative learning in simple task assignments would be lower than in complex tasks. This leads to the second proposition: Proposition 2: The effect of task complexity is manifested in such a way that Wiki-based collaborative learning will improve by employing general discussion and cooperative activities (associated with complex tasks) rather than topicfocused and social interaction methods (associated with simple tasks). There is also a possible relationship between group size and task complexity. Curral and associates (2001) found that large teams and complex tasks were not a predictor of performance as they had higher process losses compared to smaller teams performing the complex task. Process losses

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in large teams include “free riding” (Valacich, Dennis, & Nunamaker, 1992) and “social loafing” (Chidambaram & Tung, 2005). In contrast, Wiki-based cooperative learning have been theorized and found to produce higher learning outcomes (Bruns & Humphreys, 2005; Parker & Chao, 2007). These observations suggest that collaborative learning may be higher when small groups perform complex tasks. This leads to the third proposition: Proposition 3: Wiki-based collaborative learning will be more effective for cooperative pedagogy (associated with complex tasks and small groups) than social interaction activities (associated with simple tasks and large groups). The proposed conceptualization can serve as a reference point assisting instructors in choosing Wiki-based course assignments and activities that facilitate student learning. The key premise is that carefully selected pedagogies can generate higher levels of learning. An instructor may want to evaluate the size of a group and then proceed with choosing the type of pedagogy that will help to determine the complexity of the task. Another option would be to consider the discussed pedagogies as an integrative set of activities in a course that is highly reliant on Wikis.

FUTURE TRENDS Teaching and learning can be considered an exemplary field for Wiki deployment (Glogoff, 2006; Leuf & Cunningham, 2001; Parker & Chao, 2007). In the last few years, Wiki software has been incorporated by the institutions of higher learning as stand alone platforms or a part of course management systems. As a result, many Wiki-based educational websites have emerged providing resources in subjects ranging from mathematics to literature. These institutional developments were preceded by the grassroots implementation of Wikis by individual instructors who have become the

early adopters of Wiki technology. They have successfully utilized Wikis for their classrooms and courses. This trend has been facilitated by the availability of free Wiki services and is most likely to continue. Indeed, the outlook for Wiki adoption in higher education is bright with more diverse uses expected in the future. Similar to any educational activity, the adoption of Wiki technologies should benefit from new conceptual models and theoretical frameworks. Future research should focus on integrating related concepts from the fields of educational psychology, information systems, and computer supported collaborative learning. Such a cross-disciplinary approach could lead to creating a theoretical framework that can function as a reference point for further development and implementation of Wikis in higher education and that can serve as a guide for educators, instructional designers, and researchers.

CONCLUSION In recent years, the field of higher education has discovered the educational value of social-interaction technologies, including Wikis. However, a lack of conceptual understanding and operationalization of Wiki use has prevented an increase in the adoption of this collaborative technology by educational institutions. The present chapter has provided insights into the functionality of Wikis and their educational implications for higher education. The authors contend that a conceptualization of Wiki use in the classroom context can be derived from an existing typology of online interactive pedagogies. The proposed conceptualization is based on the assumption that certain kinds of Wikirelated activities correspond to certain levels of classroom interactions: namely, social interaction, general discussion, topic focused discussion, and collaborative activities. Furthermore, group size and task complexity should also be considered as criteria for Wiki implementation.

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In addition to mapping Wiki use in the higher education landscape, this chapter raises awareness of the utility of Wikis in education. Wiki technology is a highly suitable and flexible tool for collaborative learning which offers educators numerous opportunities for customizing it for instructional purposes. However, there are certain limitations in using Wikis in teaching. As regard intellectual property rights, plagiarism can easily occur when students post copyrighted material. Another disadvantage of Wikis stems from their novelty, as users are unfamiliar with this technology and are accustomed to “read-only” web-based systems (Raman, 2006). Although the learning curve is short, instructors and students need time and training to learn how to use the systems. Finally, Wiki interfaces may be considered aesthetically unattractive (Klobas, 2006). A simple and somewhat chaotic Wiki page may disappoint visitors who are used to well-designed websites. Still, this can be circumvented by Wiki administrators who can add more stylistic features to the interface. The main premise of the chapter is that the instructional uses of Wiki-based classroom technologies can enhance student learning and assist in maximizing student learning outcomes. In light of the present discussion, the conceptualization contained in this chapter aims to provide an identification and categorization of interactive pedagogies as they apply to integrating Wiki tools in the classroom. As the authors seek to determine the best possible fit between interactive pedagogies, group size, and task design, the proposed conceptualization can assist instructors in planning and implementing Wiki-based classroom activities, assignments, collaborations, and interactions.

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Bean, L., & Hott, D. D. (2005). Wiki: A speedy new tool to manage projects. Journal of Corporate Accounting & Finance, 16(5), 3–8. doi:10.1002/ jcaf.20128 Bower, M., Woo, K., Roberts, M., & Watters, P. Wiki pedagogy: A tale of two Wikis. In Proceedings of the ITHET2006 (pp. 191-202). Bruns, A., & Humphreys, S. (2005). Wikis in teaching and assessment: The M/Cyclopedia project. In [New York: ACM Press.]. Proceedings of the WikiSym, 2005, 25–32. doi:10.1145/1104973.1104976 Campbell, D. J. (1988). Task complexity: A review and analysis. Academy of Management Review, 13(1), 40–52. doi:10.2307/258353 Chawner, B., & Lewis, P. H. (2005). WikiWikiWebs: New ways to communicate in a Web environment. Information Technology and Libraries, 25(1), 33–43. Chidambaram, L., & Tung, L. L. (2005). Is out of sight, out of mind? An empirical study of social loafing in technology-supported groups. Information Systems Research, 16(2), 149–160. doi:10.1287/isre.1050.0051 Cohen, E. G. (1994). Restructuring the classroom: Conditions for productive small groups. Review of Educational Research, 64, 1–35. Curral, L. A., Forrester, R. H., Dawson, J. F., & West, M. A. (2001). It’s what you do and the way that you do it: Team task, team size, and innovationrelated group processes. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 10(2), 187–204. doi:10.1080/13594320143000627 Farabaugh, R. (2007). ‘The Isile is full of noises’: Using Wiki software to establish a discourse community in a Shakespeare classroom. Language Awareness, 16(1), 41–56. doi:10.2167/la428.0

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Fuchs-Kittowski, F., & Köhler,A. (2005). Wiki communities in the context of work processes. In [New York: ACM Press.]. Proceedings of the WikiSym, 2005, 33–39. doi:10.1145/1104973.1104977 Geer, R. (2006, July). A pedagogical framework for technology-mediated interactions. In Proceedings of the 2006 Australian Teacher Education Association Conference (pp. 130-141). Retrieved November 8, 2007, from http://www.atea.edu.au/ ConfPapers/2006/geer.pdf Glogoff, S. (2006). The LTC Wiki - experiences with integrating a Wiki in instruction. In S. Mader (Ed.), Using Wiki in education. Retrieved August 9, 2008, from http://www.wikiineducation.com Guzdial, M., Rick, J., & Kehoe, C. (2001). Beyond adoption to invention: Teacher-created collaborative activities in higher education. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 10(3), 265–279. doi:10.1207/ S15327809JLS1003_2 Hackman, J. R. (1968). Effects of task characteristics on group products. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 4, 162–187. doi:10.1016/00221031(68)90040-1 Hamer, J. (2006). Some experiences with the “contributing student approach.” ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 38(3), 68-72. Retrieved November 8, 2007, from http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1140123.1140145 Hathorn, L. G., & Ingram, A. L. (2002). Cooperation and collaboration using computermediated communication. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 26(3), 325–347. doi:10.2190/7MKH-QVVN-G4CQ-XRDU Hughes, S. C., Wickersham, L., Ryan-Jones, D. L., & Smith, S. A. (2002). Overcoming social and psychological barriers to effective on-line collaboration. Educational Technology & Society, 5(1), 86–92.

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (1996). Cooperation and the use of technology. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of research for educational communications and technology (pp. 1017-1044). New York: Macmillan Library Reference. Jones, C., Cook, J., Jones, A., & de Laat, M. (2006). Collaboration. In G. Conole & M. Oliver (Eds.), Contemporary perspectives in e-learning research (pp. 174-189). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Kirschner, P. A. (2001). Using integrated electronic environments for collaborative teaching/ learning. Research Dialogue in Learning and Instruction, 2(1), 1–10. doi:10.1016/S09594752(00)00021-9 Klobas, J. (2006). Wikis: Tools for information work and collaboration. Oxford, UK: Chandos Publishing. Lamont, J. (2007). Blogs and Wikis: Ready for prime time? KM World, 14(1), 14-15, 26. Leidner, D. E., & Jarvenpaa, S. L. (1995). The use of information technology to enhance management school education: A theoretical view. MIS Quarterly, 19(3), 256–291. doi:10.2307/249596 Leuf, B., & Cunningham, W. (2001). The Wiki way: Quick collaboration on the Web. Boston, MA: Addison Wesley. Lim, J., & Zhong, Y. (2005). Cultural diversity, leadership, group size and collaborative learning systems: An experimental study. In . Proceedings of the HICSS, 2005, 1–9. Louridas, P. (2006). Using Wikis in software development. IEEE Software, 6, 88–91. doi:10.1109/ MS.2006.62

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Lowry, P. B., Roberts, T. L., Romano, N. C. Jr, Cheney, P. D., & Hightower, R. T. (2006). The impact of group size and social presence on small-group communication: Does computer-mediated communication make a difference? Small Group Research, 37(6), 631–661. doi:10.1177/1046496406294322 Lueg, C., & Fisher, D. (2003). From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with social information spaces. London: Springer. Lund, A., & Smødal, O. (2006). Is there a space for the teacher in a WIKI? In Proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis (pp. 3746). New York: ACM Press. Nicol, D., Littlejohn, A., & Grierson, H. (2005). The importance of structuring information and resources within shared workspaces during collaborative design learning. Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, 20(1), 31–49. O’Neill, M. E. (2005). Automated use of a Wiki for collaborative lecture notes. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 37(1), 267–271. doi:10.1145/1047124.1047440 O’Shea, P. M., Baker, P. B., Allen, D. W., CurryCorcoran, D. E., & Allen, D. B. (2007). New levels of student participatory learning: A Wiki text for the introductory course in education. Journal of Online Interactive Learning, 6(3). Retrieved June 24, 2008, from http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/ issues/viewarticle.cfm?volID=6&IssueID=21& ArticleID=110 Parker, K. R., & Chao, J. T. (2007). Wiki as a teaching tool. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, 3, 58–72. Paulus, T. M. (2005). Collaborative and cooperative approaches to online group work: The impact of task type. Distance Education, 26(1), 111–125. doi:10.1080/01587910500081343

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Payne, J. W. (1976). Task complexity and contingent processing in decision making: An information search and protocol analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 366– 387. doi:10.1016/0030-5073(76)90022-2 Raman, M. (2006). Wiki technology as a ‘free’ collaborative tool within an organizational setting. Information Systems Management, 23(4), 59–66. doi:10.1201/1078.10580530/46352.23.4 .20060901/95114.8 Raman, M., Ryan, T., & Olfman, L. (2005). Designing knowledge management systems for teaching and learning with Wiki technology. Journal of Information Systems Education, 16(35), 311–320. Schaffert, S., Bischof, D., Buerger, T., Gruber, A., Hilzensauer, W., & Schaffert, S. (2006). Learning with semantic Wikis. In . Proceedings of SemWiki, 2006, 109–123. Schwartz, L., Clark, S., Cossarin, M., & Rudolph, J. (2004). Educational Wikis: Features and selection criteria. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 5(1). Retrieved October 3, 2007, from http://www.irrodl.org/ index.php/irrodl/article/view/163/692 Strijbos, J. W., Martens, R. L., & Jochems, W. M. G. (2004). Designing for interaction: Six steps to designing computer-supported group-based learning. Computers & Education, 42(4), 403–424. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2003.10.004 Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations. New York: Doubleday. Tolmie, A., & Boyle, J. (2000). Factors influencing the success of computer mediated communication (CMC) environments in university teaching: A review and case study. Computers & Education, 34(2), 119–140. doi:10.1016/S03601315(00)00008-7

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Tonkin, E. (2005). Making the case for a Wiki. Ariadne, 42. Retrieved June 4, 2008, from http:// www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/tonkin/ Trentin, G. (2008). Using a Wiki to evaluate individual contribution to a collaborative learning project. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. Retrieved May 9, 2008, from http://www.blackwellpublishing.com. Valacich, J. S., Dennis, A. R., & Nunamaker, J. F. Jr. (1992). Group size and anonymity effects on computer-mediated idea generation. Small Group Research, 23(1), 49–73. doi:10.1177/1046496492231004 Wang, C.-M., & Turner, D. (2004, April). Extending the Wiki paradigm for use in the classroom. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing, 2004. Proceedings, 1(5-7), 255–259. Wheeler, S., Yeomans, P., & Wheeler, D. (2008). The good, the bad and the Wiki: Evaluating student-generated content for collaborative learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(6), 987–995. doi:10.1111/j.14678535.2007.00799.x

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Collaborative Learning: A pedagogy that engages students in teamwork and is closely related to cooperative learning. It is based on the assumption that learning goals are maximized by sharing knowledge among learners. Community of Practice: A group of people who are mutually engaged in achieving a common purpose by sharing of resources. CoWeb (Collaborative Web) or Swiki: CoWeb is a web-based group collaboration tool written in Squeak, an open-source programming language. It has been developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999 for educational use. MediaWiki: A popular Wiki engine developed in 2002 and written in the PHP programming language. MediaWiki is used for maintaining Wikipedia. Micropedia: An online encyclopedia that contains a limited amount of content and is typically limited to a certain topic. QwikiWiki: A Wiki software engine written in PHP programming language. Wiki: A collaborative website in which anyone can freely create and edit content.

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Chapter 20

The Hybrid Course

Facilitating Learning through Social Interaction Technologies Lorraine D. Jackson California Polytechnic State University, USA Joe Grimes California Polytechnic State University, USA

ABSTRACT This chapter surveys the benefits and challenges of hybrid courses, which blend face-to-face instruction with online learning, and opportunities provided by the introduction of Web-based social interaction technologies. It discusses the pedagogical implications of various Web 2.0 tools: that is, asynchronous discussion boards, blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, e-portfolios, folksonomies, educational gaming, data mashups, and simulations. The authors argue that as hybrid courses continue to evolve to meet the needs of students, instructors, and institutions of higher learning, the integration of Web 2.0 applications in a hybrid model requires thoughtful course design, clear educational objectives, and carefully planned activities.

INTRODUCTION The traditional face-to-face classroom, in which an instructor lectures, demonstrates, and leads discussion, has been the primary method for acquiring an education in colleges and universities. However, advances in social interaction technologies have resulted in greater variation in educational experiences for online learning. A study by the National Center for Education Statistics surveying over 4,000 two and four year degree granting institutions found DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch020

that 88% plan to increase or start offering courses using asynchronous computer based instruction as the primary mode of delivery (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003). Asynchronous instruction means that students and faculty are not required to be present at the same time (either electronically or in person) to participate in the class. Technology is clearly transforming the educational landscape. On the continuum from fully face-to-face to fully online courses, hybrid or blended courses are centered somewhere in the middle merging the most desirable aspects of both approaches (So & Brush, 2008). In a hybrid course, students spend more

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The Hybrid Course

time learning online through planned activities, tutorials, assignments, and discussion. To make time for online activities, the face-to-face class meeting time is reduced significantly. Unlike the traditional lecture-based classroom (also known as face-to-face teaching), students have more flexibility regarding the time and place where learning occurs (Aycock, Garnham, & Kaleta, 2002). Some contend that this promotes students’ active engagement in their learning, typically called student-centered or constructivist learning. Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) argue that active, as opposed to passive, learners are better able to understand complex information, are more likely to transfer concepts learned in one setting to another, and are more likely to retain information.

BACKGROUND As recently as the mid 1990’s, most students did not own a personal computer, used single function technologies (e.g., phone, camera, video player), and had irregular access to the Internet. Today’s students typically own computers, have multifunction mobile technologies, and use the Internet on a daily basis (McGee & Diaz, 2007). The technological environment continues to change for faculty as well. During the 1990’s the “technology” in the classroom originally consisted of chalkboards, overhead transparency projectors and VCRs. Classroom Internet access was not common. Additionally, faculty may or may not have had access to email from home, and if they did, dial-up service made home use of the Internet slow and sometimes unreliable. Today, more classrooms are equipped with various types of technology including Internet access, integrated projectors for computers and DVDs, audio and video devices for distance learning, and document cameras, to name a few. Typically, faculty members have home access to campus computing resources using improved broadband connections.

Learning management systems, sometimes called course management systems, are becoming more commonplace and are enabling communications, learning materials, assignments, and grading to occur online. Although face-to-face lecturing is still a mainstay of many professors’ teaching repertoire, emerging technology is shifting the methods used by faculty (Maloney, 2007). Educators are no longer solely lecturers, but are increasingly becoming designers and facilitators of learning environments. Along with changes in technology, advancements in learning theory also play a role in this paradigm shift. Educators are now advised to incorporate more constructivist pedagogy in which active learning is accomplished (Rovai, 2007). Instead of focusing exclusively on the transfer of knowledge from teacher to student, educators are encouraged to find ways to motivate and involve students in the discovery and even the creation of knowledge. The expected outcomes of effective teaching are also changing. As educators move from a teaching-centered to a learning-centered model, student recall of information is not necessarily the preferred outcome. Student understanding, integration, and application become salient desirable outcomes. Indeed, changes in technology and learning theory are having an impact on how contemporary educators approach instruction. Many educators are beginning to teach in ways that differ from how they were taught when they were students (Hartman, Dziuban, & BrophyEllison, 2007). According to Burbules (2007), education needs to be understood in the current context of technological ubiquity. Although definitions of Web 2.0 vary, the term acknowledges development of web applications beyond read-only websites that now allow Internet users to increasingly become content providers as well as receivers. The earlier developments on the World Wide Web served to disperse information in a top-down manner. Today, the web has evolved to be more participatory with collective users building information from the bot-

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tom up or interacting with each other in real time or asynchronously. The web is also increasingly accessible and user-friendly. Web feeds or web syndications update relevant information automatically, harnessing the combined intelligence of users. Social networking and resource sharing sites have emerged rapidly and “students have turned these sites into the nexus of their social and even academic universe” (Hartman, Dziuban, & Brophy-Ellison, 2007, p. 66). The current uses of technology are blurring traditional spheres previously viewed as separate. Work and play, learning and entertainment, accessing and creating, and public and private areas are no longer demarcated with clear distinction (Burbules, 2007). This chapter reviews newer and emerging applications of technology, many of which are being used in education, particularly in hybrid courses blending traditional face-to-face teaching with enhanced technology. Learning management systems, user-created content, social networking, collaborative learning, podcasting, virtual worlds, and educational gaming are beginning to broadly affect higher education, and will continue to do so in the near future. The benefits and challenges of these emerging applications for hybrid learning are discussed.

HYBRID COURSES AND SOCIAL SOFTWARE Courses taught in hybrid mode do not simply “add technology” to the existing curriculum, but should involve thoughtful course redesign in order to apply principles of good pedagogy fully augmented with outside-of-class activities enabled with technology. Bloom’s taxonomy describes several categories of learning. In the cognitive learning domain, instructional activities range from lower levels to higher levels of learning. For example, as one moves up the hierarchy (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) the development of intellectual

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attitudes and skills become increasingly sophisticated (Bloom, 1956). Higher thinking rests on a foundation of lower order thinking. For most courses, hybrid mode is best implemented by having the students do preparatory work outside of class so the in-class activities can provide an opportunity for learning at higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy with very little traditional lecturing occurring. A Learning Management System (LMS) is an important component of most hybrid courses. It is a software application or web-based instructional technology used to develop, implement, and evaluate student-learning activities. Examples of learning management systems include Blackboard®, Webboard®, or WebCT®. Some faculty members create their own websites providing resources analogous to an LMS. An instructor may use the LMS to provide learning materials (e.g., readings, assignments, brief video, links to external websites, etc.) and social software applications (e.g., interactive chat, blogs, etc.). A typical tool embedded in an LMS is an asynchronous discussion board. According to Martyn (2003), the asynchronous discussion board lets the students post technical and content-oriented questions, clarify assignments, post and answer each other’s questions under the supervision of the faculty member, and build community. Gannon (2004) explains how she incorporated active learning into her course by giving students weekly online assignments, which included using the discussion board. Students were informed that their postings would be graded for quality and quantity, and Gannon observed that most students were motivated to participate and successfully completed the work. Likewise, a sample of 413 students in a hybrid setting reportedly found the discussion board tool more useful than in-class discussions because: (a) they could take their time to compose a response, (b) they were required to participate online as opposed to face-to-face where participation was not required, and (c) students who normally do not participate in class

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were less reluctant to participate online (AmreinBeardsley, Foulger, & Toth, 2007). There is also evidence that participation in online discussion can enhance engagement during face-to-face inclass discussions (Vess, 2005). Rovai (2007) provides a thoughtful synthesis of current techniques for facilitating online discussion effectively. Among his recommendations, instructors should provide forums for socio-emotional discussions as well as content and task oriented discussions. This serves to build a sense of community within the course. Similarly, instructors should balance developing a social presence in the virtual environment while avoiding monopolizing discussions. Additionally, instructors need to attend to social equity issues, and have an awareness of the communication patterns of culturally diverse students. The LMS can also be used to observe student participation online, evaluate student work, exchange material with students, hold virtual office hours or classes, manage groups or teams, anonymously deliver student evaluations and grades, and provide for wikis or blogs. One study found that students identified the online grade book and announcements as most useful (Amrein-Beardsley et al, 2007). In this study, students appreciated timely posting of assignment grades, found it helpful to monitor their progress, and felt more college instructors should use the tool. A web-based LMS should have the capability to link transparently to other web resources such as educational games, simulations, or other resources. Often a teacher will collect a number of resources in an organized fashion within the LMS, known as a learning module. The learning module enables students to accomplish one or more learning outcomes by performing a series of activities in an organized fashion. An LMS may be open-source, purchased for a license fee, or developed by a teacher to meet specific course requirements. LMS developers are encouraged to adhere to standards by following the Shared Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) to enable

compatibility between LMS (for more information about SCORM, see http://www.adlnet.gov/ scorm). LMS can have various Web 2.0 capabilities including: blogs, wikis, virtual classrooms, podcasting, Really Simple Syndication (RSS®), and e-portfolios, which are described below.

Blogs A blog, short for weblog, provides the capability for the user(s) to post information about a particular topic or to maintain a diary with entries typically posted in reverse chronological order. Currently the fastest growing area of the web, blogs account for around 27% of all Internet use (Ramos & Piper, 2006). In March 2005 there were approximately two million blogs worldwide. Technorati®, a blog search engine, is now tracking over 70 million blogs, and notes about 120,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day. In academic settings, student blogs may be used to share information, to report on events, to practice writing, to develop argumentative and editing skills, and to engage in collaborative design. Students reading blogs may benefit from exposure to a variety of perspectives, values, and life experiences. Ramos and Piper (2006) argue that as the Internet becomes more accessible around the world, so do “the voices in the blogosphere, representing viewpoints from a diversity of cultures, and allowing glimpses into people’s lives that have never before been possible” (p. 571). Blogs can be authored by groups or individuals, and may be authored by instructors or students. Research on blogs has looked at their personal journal or storytelling function. Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, and Wright (2005) examined a random sample of blogs and found that more than 70% could be classified as personal journals. However, blogs differ from diaries in the sense that they are public and others can comment on blog entries. Stefanone and Jang (2007) studied the personality characteristics of bloggers and observed that individuals high in extraversion and self-disclosure

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tend to have larger online social networks with stronger ties. Furthermore, they found that rather than promoting isolation, blogs tend to enhance existing relationships. Research on educational uses of blogs is presently limited. Stefanone and Jang (2007) remark that the potential exists for studying the effects of public accessibility of personal information. Other potential research areas include: the strategic use of blogs by students, student decision-making on blog content, demographic and psychological factors affecting blog behavior, perceived student benefits of blogging, and faculty experiences with the use of blogs as an educational tool.

Wikis A wiki is a writing space that is created and edited by a community of users (Saxton, 2008). Wikis provide the opportunity for educational collaboration where users may create text, link web pages, and edit their work. Wikis enable bottom-up editing where expertise is not limited to a few, but rather emerges from the combined efforts of the many (Ramos & Piper, 2006). Wikis and blogs can incorporate text, images, audio and video. They may be included in an LMS, or available as an open source product or licensed product. Wikis may be private to the class, often by authentication through the LMS, or open beyond the class. It is important to choose a wiki that meets the instructor’s educational objectives. Phillipson (2008) identifies several different types of educational wikis, three of which are presented here. For example, he describes the resource wiki as an assemblage of a collaborative knowledge base, much like the popular Wikipedia®. The presentation wiki, on the other hand, may aim to represent class content to the outside world, and may also highlight the process the class followed to assemble the information. A simulation wiki is an interactive environment where exploration, decisions, and branching pathways dominate. Phillipson (2008) describes how students involved in

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the Holocaust Wiki Project, used background information to invent a family. Then, using multiple actors, narratives and story lines, they were able to explore and study this historical event through participation in the wiki. Although these and other potential uses of wikis as an educational tool are just beginning to be explored, clearly, wikis have wide ranging potential in student learning.

Podcasts Podcasting, a term derived from the combination of Apple’s iPod® and broadcasting, involves transferring digital media files, such as audio and video, over the Internet for replay using portable media players and/or personal computers. The function of a podcast is communicative; it is useful for sharing ideas and information, and enables learning to occur in a convenient and portable format. Podcasts appear to have significant potential as a mobile learning tool. Evans (2008) explored the use of podcasts as a method for students to review material after taking a traditional lecture class, but prior to their final examination. In this study, podcasts were not used as an alternative to attendance, but rather as a supplemental method of review. The findings demonstrated that students were receptive to using podcasts and felt that podcasts were more effective than their own textbooks and notes in helping them to learn. Podcasting can also make material more accessible to diverse learners (Cebeci & Tekdal, 2006). Some have even converted entire lecture courses into podcasts, allowing class time to be dedicated to problem solving and group project sessions. However, McGee, and Diaz (2007) advise against transmitting entire lectures through podcasting; instead, they recommend selecting shorter, more pointed segments for transmission which they contend will result in more student use. Villano (2008) provides practical advice for designing better podcasts in areas, such as communication skills, sound quality, length, and editing, to name a few. Additional research is needed on the effec-

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tiveness of podcasting as a learning tool (Evans, 2008). Podcasts have the ability to be syndicated, or subscribed to using an aggregator, such as an RSS® reader.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS®) An RSS® reader receives feeds from content that is frequently updated, such as blog entries, podcasts, and/or news headlines. The reader or aggregator will frequently check the content of subscribed sites for updates and will display the new material. It will aggregate material from multiple sites into one location so that the user does not have to check multiple sites for updates. The RSS® reader may be incorporated in other educational tools, such as an LMS, wikis, or blog.

an e-portfolio format that meets the instructor’s education requirements.

Virtual Classroom Another possible component of some hybrid courses is the virtual classroom. “Virtual office hours” are possible through synchronous interactive chat (the equivalent of Instant Messenger®). The virtual classroom also provides other resources, such as an online “whiteboard” which has the capability to project material onto a “shared” screen which can be viewed by students when they are online. These sessions may be recorded and made available so that students can view them at a later time.

Folksonomies E-Portfolios E-portfolios are an integrated collection of webbased multimedia documents that may include curriculum standards, course assignments and corresponding student artifacts, and reviewer feedback to the student’s work (Gathercoal, Love, Bryde, & McKean, 2002). The evolution of web-based technology has made it easier to construct, store, and present evidence of academic work online. This, coupled with a shift toward competency-based education where students demonstrate what they have learned makes electronic portfolio development a growing trend (Johnson & Rayman, 2007). One example is the Digital Notebook project at Georgetown University. Students have an online space for learning, creating, collaborating, and storing the evidence of their work. Maloney (2007) explains: “Our hope is that the Digital Notebook will help students track how their thinking developed from their freshman to their senior year, in part by giving them the tools to map connections between the pieces of information they have learned and to share those connections and knowledge with others” (B27). As a practical matter, it is important to choose

With this capability, it is possible to add tags (keywords) to information providing the user with the ability to manage the information. This is also known as collaborativetagging and socialclassification. These tools make it possible to categorize and annotate content using tags and to provide the capabilities to associate tags with individuals. A folksonomy is user-driven and directly reflects the vocabulary of users. Folksonomies often arise in communities of web users, such as the Flickr® photo sharing site. It is anticipated that they will become popular because they place the responsibility of organization on the user. Folksonomies will likely become an important tool in student learning.

Educational Games The video game market is currently the third fastest growing segment of the entertainment media market, and is expected to be a 48.9 billion dollar industry in 2011 (Scanlon, 2007). Two areas slated for growth are the so-called “serious games” which are used for non-entertainment or educational purposes, and the innovative attempts to begin

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combining gaming with the social networking features of Web 2.0 (Scanlon, 2007). These games (sometimes called Massively Multiplayer Online Educational Gaming) bring multiple players together in a goal-oriented activity that can be collaborative or competitive in nature. Educational games (edugames) typically involve role-playing exercises where player-learners work towards achieving educational objectives. For example, games designed to make business deals and build wealth help learners practice strategy and apply knowledge competitively (New Media Consortium, 2007). Another educational game might include virtual immersion (Multi-User Virtual Environments) in a foreign language or culture, where players read directions, travel, and interact with others to complete a quest. One advantage of these games is that learning may be accelerated when there is an emotional response involved, such as excitement or interest (Waters, 2007). Another advantage is that the virtual world may provide a safe environment for trying new skills and making mistakes. In the virtual world, player-learners often use avatars (a computer user’s one, two or three dimensional representation of himself or herself). These representations can enable player-learners to save face as they try to improve their skill (Waters, 2007). Research demonstrates that well designed edugames have the potential advantage of increasing intrinsic motivation and deepening learning (Moore, Fowler, & Watson, 2007). Although educational gaming is not heavily used today, the proliferation of open-source gaming engines will make it more realistic for developers to produce these tools for educational purposes.

Data Mashups According to Maloney (2007), mashups are websites that “take dynamically changing pieces of information from completely different sources and compile the data into an integrated user experience, one that continues to change and grow as

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the underlying information changes” (B26-27). For example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has created a Google® Earth mashup that generates maps of the earth displaying air quality based on pollutants from businesses (New Media Consortium, 2008). It is anticipated that mashups will help educators show their students relationships between large data sets in ways that are meaningful. They can also be used for artistic and creative expression.

Simulations Because it is impractical or too costly to execute some educational experiments or events, often simulator tools are used to represent key elements of a physical or conceptual system. Because of the complexity of many of these systems, it is necessary to limit the number of elements represented. The simulation may be used to represent such things as a scientific experiment, a business process, or an engineering system. There are tools available for creating simulations such as those developed by Carnegie Mellon University as a part of their Open Learning Initiative. As these and other tools are developed further, it is anticipated that hybrid courses will play an important role in the evolution of the educational landscape.

BENEFITS OF HYBRID COURSES Well designed hybrid courses have the potential to benefit students in a variety of ways. Students have access to multiple course resources, and are not limited to learning in a particular physical space. In many ways, hybrid courses shift the focus away from the instructor, and promote a more learner-centered model. The extended access to the materials allows students to learn at their own pace. Additionally, students typically participate in online discussion and networked shared learning. So and Brush (2008) found that students who perceived high levels of collabora-

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tive learning in their course tended to be more satisfied with their hybrid experience. Building community, having exposure to other points of views, expressing ideas, and giving and receiving peer feedback are important aspects of hybrid courses. Students also benefit from practicing technical and online skills they will need upon entering the workforce. Marcketti and Yurchisin (2005) emphasized that undergraduates preferred the hybrid format to traditional offline format, and to a course that had exclusively online elements. Some argue that a good hybrid design can result in better student learning of past course objectives and achievement of new objectives. DeNeui and Dodge (2006) observed a significant positive correlation between students’ usage of online components and their success in the course. In their study, those who used Blackboard® more frequently scored better on exams than those who used it less frequently. Furthermore, research using a blind review process demonstrated that students in well-designed hybrid courses completed projects that scored between 10-12% higher grades than those written by students in lecture format classes (Martyn, 2003). Also, well-designed hybrid courses add new learning outcomes, such as life-long learning and team-based learning skills. Institutions with increasing enrollments and limited physical space may find that reducing in-class time can lead to more effective utilization of classrooms and meet the greater demands for education (Olapiriyakul & Scher, 2006).

of the project. This will provide an opportunity to consider the various factors that are either favorable or unfavorable. The results of the analysis will be unique to the faculty member and the course involved. There are several good models for moving to a hybrid mode on various university websites. Also, some learning modules have been developed by universities and are freely available for use by other universities. The efforts of Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are noteworthy. Other modules are generally available on the Merlot.org website, and there are commercially developed products. In addition to the specific technical aspects of the LMS software and other technology, faculty may need training in pedagogical principles that apply to hybrid courses. Training may include understanding the impact of various learning styles and principles, creating learning outcomes, and designing appropriate online content, assignments and assessment methods. Faculty members need institutional support in the form of incentives or release time from teaching to take on the additional work that comes with converting a faceto-face course into one with an online component (Grosjean & Sork, 2007). They also need access to faculty development professionals who have technical and pedagogical knowledge, as well as awareness about how to facilitate compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Some of the other challenges that faculty and administrators should consider follow: 1.

CHALLENGES OF HYBRID COURSES Developing new methods of teaching takes motivation and an investment of time. When considering hybrid courses and the use of social software tools, it would be worthwhile for educators to conduct a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis of the objectives

Faculty who are using hybrid mode will find it beneficial to explain to students how the use of this approach will help to achieve specified learning outcomes. In other words, explaining why they are participating in new educational activities is helpful. “Today making the transition from passive to active learners means engaging them [students] in the conversation from the beginning” (Moore, Fowler, & Watson, 2007, p. 52).

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2.

3.

4.

5.

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Because this may be a new experience for the students, they will also need training and rules for professional behavior (“netiquette”) in this environment. The skills of research, critical thinking, and evaluation will be increasingly important to students who have unprecedented and instant access to user-created content of varying quality (New Media Consortium, 2007). Most student evaluations of teaching effectiveness instruments were designed to assess face-to-face instruction, focusing primarily on an individual instructor. In hybrid courses, a broad spectrum of elements shapes the learner’s experience (Grosjean & Sork, 2007). Some of these include the technology itself, the design of content, the organization and integration of materials, and even the faculty member’s ability to moderate an online community. Methods of evaluating instructors may need to be modified to assess the instructor as a designer and facilitator of an interactive learning environment. In this learning environment, teaching excellence is becoming more multifaceted (Hartman et al, 2007). Because faculty may be using the web and commercial products, they need to be aware of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) requirements as well as copyright and intellectual property requirements when using the products of others, including the copyright and intellectual property rights of their students. Hybrid courses emphasize more self-regulated learning on the part of students. Although this develops students’ active involvement, the research by Aycock and colleagues (2002) suggests that students’poor time management skills can be an obstacle. Understanding student motivation, appropriately pacing workload, providing sequential tasks, and having discussions about students’ self-directed learning roles may be helpful.

6.

It is also useful when implementing new instructional methods to provide students with opportunities for regular feedback. Grosjean and Sork (2007) recommend that instructors should be prepared to change aspects of their hybrid course if something is not working as intended. Evaluation, feedback, and reflection are necessary to make adjustments to hybrid courses over time.

FUTURE TRENDS Although there is extensive research on students’ satisfaction and perceptions of learning, only a few empirical studies have examined the influence of hybrid course technology on objective measures of student learning (DeNeui & Dodge, 2006), and more outcome-based research is needed. As a result, professional conferences and workshops related to hybrid learning are increasing in number and quality, with the non-profit Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) as one of the leaders (http://www. sloan-c.org). Shih, Feng, and Tsai (2008) examined research and trends in the field of e-learning between 2001-2005 and concluded that studies related to instructional approaches, information processing, and motivation will likely be influential topics for subsequent research. They predict that an essential issue in future research will be “how to maintain and enhance students’ learning motivation and teachers’ teaching motivation in a constantly changing educational environment” (p. 965). Additionally, they contend there may be enhanced “personalization” of education, whereby increased variety in the ways in which teaching occurs can accommodate various learning styles. Many of the Web 2.0 tools now available have been developed with little thought about using them for educational purposes. It is anticipated that the future will bring seamless ties between these tools allowing them to be geared more towards

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educational applications. For example, although not used significantly in education currently, it is anticipated that social resources, such as Second Life®, will be incorporated as a learning tool along with social software networks that were developed primarily for industrial use. According to the most recent Horizon Report (New Media Consortium, 2008), as globalization increases, online collaboration webs and the tools that support them are also expected to increase. Collaborative webs are networking sites that interested individuals or groups can access to foster educational sharing capabilities. Some examples include San Francisco State University’s Digital Information Virtual Archive (diva.sfsu.edu) and Skoolaborate® (www.skoolaborate.com). As ubiquitous as the broadband mobile phone has become, the varied features of it have also become more common: e.g., music playing, recording, camera and video capability, and photo storage. It is anticipated that these portable multimedia features will also be increasingly used for educational applications (New Media Consortium, 2008).

CONCLUSION This chapter has discussed the benefits and challenges of hybrid courses that blend face-to-face instruction with online learning and opportunities provided by the introduction of web-based social interaction technologies. The best hybrid courses are based on thoughtful design and utilize active learning, both in online education and interactive face-to-face meetings. The success of a hybrid course will be enhanced by: (a) effective planning and integration of the face-to-face and online activities to achieve the desired learning outcomes for the course; (b) choosing the appropriate tools to achieve the desired outcomes; (c) faculty preparation to enable the effective use of the new learning environment; and (d) developing a plan positioning students to understand their new role

and how they can be successful in it. If a hybrid course is designed properly, the strengths are likely to be: (a) increased learning by students; (b) more engagement by students because the course can be designed to allow them to bear responsibility for its success; (c) more enthusiastic participation by the students; (d) an opportunity for faculty to participate in a completely new way of teaching by having student-centered activities; and (e) ultimately a course that is more organized. The use of technology and development of hybrid courses will continue to evolve to meet the needs of contemporary students, faculty, and institutions of higher learning.

REFERENCES Amrein-Beardsley, A., Foulger, T., & Toth, M. (2007). Examining the development of a hybrid degree program: Using student and instructor data to inform decision-making. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 39(4), 331–357. Aycock, A., Garnham, C., & Kaleta, R. (2002). Lessons learned from the hybrid course project. Teaching with Technology Today, 8(6), 1-5. Retrieved July 9, 2008, from http://www.uwsa.edu/ ttt/articles/garnham2.htm Bloom, B. S. (Ed.). (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals: Handbook I. Cognitive domain. New York: Longmans, Green. Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Burbules, N. C. (2007). E-lessons learned. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 106(2), 207–216.

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Cebeci, Z., & Tekdal, M. (2006). Using podcasts as audio learning objects. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, 2, 7–57. DeNeui, D. L., & Dodge, T. (2006). Asynchronous learning networks and student outcomes: The utility of online learning components in hybrid courses. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 33(4), 256–259. Evans, C. (2008). The effectiveness of m-learning in the form of podcast revision lectures in higher education. Computers & Education, 50, 491–498. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2007.09.016 Gannon, E. J. (2004). Bringing active learning into a hybrid course. Academic Exchange Quarterly, 8(4), 253–257. Gathercoal, P., Love, D., Bryde, B., & McKean, G. (2002). On implementing Web-based electronic portfolios. EDUCAUSE Quarterly, 2, 29–37. Grosjean, G., & Sork, T. J. (2007). Going online: Uploading learning to the virtual classroom. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 113, 13–24. doi:10.1002/ace.243 Hartman, J. L., Dziuban, C., & Brophy-Ellison, J. (2007). Faculty 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review, 42(5), 62–76. Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. (2005). Weblogs as a bridging genre. Information Technology & People, 18(2), 142–171. doi:10.1108/09593840510601513 Johnson, G., & Rayman, J. R. (2007). E-portfolios: A collaboration between student affairs and faculty. New Directions for Student Services, 119, 17–30. doi:10.1002/ss.246 Lam, P., & McNaught, C. (2006). Design and evaluation of online courses containing media-enhanced learning materials. Educational Media International, 43(3), 199–218. doi:10.1080/09523980600641403

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Maloney, E. (2007). What Web 2.0 can teach us about learning. [from Academic Search Elite Database.]. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 53(18), B26–B27. Retrieved July 9, 2008. Marcketti, S. B., & Yurchisin, J. (2005). Student perceptions of a hybrid course. Academic Exchange Quarterly, 9(3), 317–320. Martyn, M. (2003). The hybrid on-line model: Good practice. EDUCAUSE Quarterly, 1, 18–23. McGee, P., & Diaz, V. (2007). Wikis and podcasts and blogs! Oh my! What is a faculty member supposed to do? EDUCAUSE Review, 42(5), 28–40. Moore, A. H., Fowler, S. B., & Watson, C. E. (2007). Designing change for faculty, students and institutions. EDUCAUSE Review, 42(5), 42–60. National Center for Education Statistics. (2003). Distance education at degree granting postsecondary institutions 2000-2001. Retrieved March 2, 2008, from http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/peqis/ publications/2003017/ New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. (2007). The horizon report. Retrieved March 11, 2007 from http://www.nmc. org/horizon/ New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. (2008). The horizon report. Retrieved July 10, 2008, from http://www.nmc. org/horizon/ Olapiriyakul, K., & Scher, J. M. (2006). A guide to establishing hybrid learning courses: Employing information technology to create a new learning experience, and a case study. The Internet and Higher Education, 9, 287–301. doi:10.1016/j. iheduc.2006.08.001

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Phillipson, M. (2008). Wikis in the classroom: A taxonomy. Wildwiki. Retrieved July 10, 2008, from http://www.wildwiki.net/mediawiki/ index.php?title=%E2%80%9CWikis_in_the_ Classroom:_A_Taxonomy%E2%80%9D Ramos, M., & Piper, P. S. (2006). Letting the grass grow: Grassroots information on blogs and Wikis. RSR. Reference Services Review, 34(4), 570–574. doi:10.1108/00907320610716459 Rovai, A. P. (2007). Facilitating online discussions effectively. The Internet and Higher Education, 10, 77–88. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2006.10.001 Saxton, B. (2008, Winter). Information tools: Using blogs, RSS®, and Wikis as professional resources. Young Adult Library Services, 27-29. Scanlon, J. (2007, August). Getting serious about gaming. Business Week Online, 10. Shih, M., Feng, J., & Tsai, C. (2008). Research and trends in the field of e-learning from 2001-2005: A content analysis of cognitive studies in selected journals. Computers & Education, 51, 955–967. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2007.10.004 So, H., & Brush, T. (2008). Student perceptions of collaborative learning, social presence and satisfaction in a blended learning environment: Relationships and critical factors. Computers & Education, 51, 318–336. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2007.05.009 Stefanone, M. A., & Jang, C. Y. (2007). Writing for friends and family: The interpersonal nature of blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). Retrieved July 8, 2008, from http:// jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/stefanone.html Vess, D. L. (2005). Asynchronous discussion and communication patterns in online and hybrid history courses. Communication Education, 54(4), 355–364. doi:10.1080/03634520500442210 Villano, M. (2008). Building a better podcast. T.H.E. Journal, 35(1), 30–37.

Waters, J. K. (2007). On a quest for English: Online role-playing games, which take players on explorations of medieval fantasy worlds, are showing the potential to be a powerful tool for ESL learning. [Technological Horizons in Education]. T.H.E. Journal, 34(10), 26–31.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Asynchronous Discussion Board: An online bulletin board where users may post and respond to messages in forums which are specific topic areas for discussion. Subordinate discussions within a forum are often called threads. Since users do not have to be online at the same time, they can enter the discussion board according to their own schedules. Avatar: A computer user’s one, two or threedimensional representation of himself or herself in a virtual space (See Multi-User Virtual Environment). Blog: Short for weblog, a blog provides the capability for the user(s) to post information about a particular topic or to maintain a diary with entries typically posted in reverse chronological order. Electronic Portfolios or E-Portfolios: An integrated collection of web-based multimedia documents that may include curriculum standards, course assignments and corresponding student artifacts, and reviewer feedback to the student’s work. Folksonomy: Also known as collaborative tagging and social classification, folksonomies make it possible to categorize and annotate content using tags (keywords) and to provide the capabilities to associate tags with individuals. Learning Management System (LMS): A software application or web-based technology used to develop, implement, and evaluate student-learning activities. Examples of Learning Management Systems include Blackboard®, Webboard®, or WebCT®.

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Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE): A virtual environment that enables simultaneous participants to represent themselves with avatars, interact with other participants and digital artifacts, and practice building skills or solving problems that have applications in real world contexts. Podcast: A method of publishing digital media files for transfer to and playback on a computer or a portable media player. Web 2.0: An improvement in the application of the web infrastructure to support communities

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on the web and deliver services such as wikis, blogs, folksonomies, and other social interaction technologies. Wiki: Software that provides the infrastructure for faculty and/or students to collaboratively develop and link Internet web pages. Each wiki has its unique characteristics, but most have tracking of individual effort and recovery of past versions.

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Chapter 21

The Use of Social Interaction Technologies in E-Portfolios Lina Pelliccione Curtin University of Technology, Australia Catherine Pocknee Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Julie Mulvany Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

ABSTRACT The chapter focuses on the potential of electronic portfolios (e-portfolios) to engage and motivate the learners and presents a framework for the informed inclusion and adoption of social interaction technologies as a means to increase the effective use of e-portfolios. Electronic portfolios are a Web-based format for providing genuine evidence of student performance, self-reflection, competence, career planning and leadership. The e-portfolios meet the needs of the digital learner in the knowledge society. The collaboratively constructed artifacts enable the articulation of shared knowledge building and selfreflective practice, further confirming the status of e-portfolios as living documents. By their electronic nature, e-portfolios open promising opportunities for the assimilation of social interaction technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, video, and photo sharing. The authors trace the development and use of e-portfolios within the context of higher education. Various e-portfolio tools are discussed along with their educational potential and the associated challenges.

INTRODUCTION A significant body of research exists that identifies electronic portfolios (e-portfolios) as a first-rate tool for providing genuine evidence of performance, selfreflection, competence and leadership in students. The collaboratively constructed artifacts enable the DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch021

articulation of shared knowledge building and selfreflective practice, further confirming the status of e-portfolios as living documents. e-portfolios, by their electronic nature, open promising opportunities for the integration of various social interaction technologies, such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, video, photo sharing, and others. The chapter focuses on the potential of social interaction technologies to engage and motivate

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learners to extend their participation in the eportfolio process and so enable them to document lifelong learning capabilities as well as promote deeper learning (Tosh & Werdmuller, 2004). The authors trace the history, development and use of e-portfolios within the higher education context. Theoretical frameworks and educational potential are addressed along with the associated developmental challenges including individual commitment and engagement, deep learning and reflection, and assessment. The theories of “constructivism” and “connectivism” (Siemens, 2004) that underpin the adoption of social interaction technologies are reexamined. Finally the chapter concludes with arguments for the informed inclusion of social interaction technologies as a means to address factors currently impeding the effective use of e-portfolios.

BACKGROUND The use of e-portfolios in higher education is preceded by the traditional use of paper-based portfolios. Portfolios have had a long history as the showcase tools of artists, whereby they contained completed pieces of work to demonstrate skills and talent. Since this time portfolios have been widely used in a variety of disciplines, particularly in the field of education. The extensive use of paper-based portfolios in education (Tomkinson, 1997) has informed the transition to electronic portfolios, also known as e-portfolios. In the U.S. and Western European education and training, extensive resources have been allocated to assist in a system-wide adoption of e-portfolios. Portfolios are being increasingly used as a career advancement tool (Redish, Webb, & Jiang, 2006). In Europe, The Centre for Recording Achievement in the United Kingdom (Beetham, 2006) and the European Institute for eLearning (The Higher Education Academy, 2005) are promoting the use of Personal Development Plans whereby each individual has a personal electronic

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portfolio that contains “evidence of an individual’s achievements over a lifetime of learning and employment.” In the teacher education sector, for example, some graduates in the United States are required to demonstrate mandated National Standards prior to being granted teacher registration (Ma & Rada, 2005). With the introduction of Teacher Registration Boards and other accreditation bodies in all Australian States, it appears that Australia is moving in the same direction. In its simplest form, an e-portfolio is a collection of evidence that reflects a learner’s progress, development and achievement over time. Depending on the discipline, the e-portfolio usually contains education history, certificates, work-samples, awards, personal values, interests, photos, videos, observation, feedback from supervisors/peers, evaluations, and—importantly— reflections on each piece of evidence. The reflective comments highlight the reason for selection and the learning that occurred. These reflective processes and comments are the key to an e-portfolio. It is through this reflective process that the learner is provided with “learning spaces where he or she “can gain insights and a better understanding of him/herself as a learner” (Greenberg, 2003, p.12). The expansion of the World Wide Web has considerably transformed the potential of eportfolio. The graphical nature of the web and ability to link digital artifacts has revolutionized how information is located and reviewed. Web technologies now allow authors to seamlessly integrate text with graphics, audio and video. This visual capacity provides additional options for showcasing the authors’ accomplishments. Importantly, the linking mechanism of the web allows for tight integration between the elements of a portfolio and adds opportunity to connect the portfolio to the whole world. According to Siemens (2004), the growth of e-portfolios has been “fuelled by three broad factors: the dynamics of functioning in a knowledge economy, the changing nature of learning, and the changing needs of the learner.” In a knowledge

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economy, he argues, it is important for individuals to demonstrate their knowledge effectively, and the e-portfolio can display competencies and attributes undetected in an academic transcript. Siemens (2004) asserts that learning is also changing and that it is important to recognize that learning occurs in communities. Formal education becomes simply one aspect of one’s learning journey. The final factor influencing the adoption of e-portfolios, as Siemens (2004) claims, is that the social impact of technology has changed learners’ needs. Learners currently entering higher education are comfortable with the electronic environment, and actively seeking to engage with it. Although, e-portfolios, conceptually are similar to paper based portfolios, they have some distinct advantages over their paper counterparts. It is easier to organize, view and search an electronic portfolio. Depending on the software being used, a larger number of records can be securely stored, retrieved, and managed, and records and artifacts can be refined with little effort. e-portfolios enable the inclusion of more varied and extensive material, such as audio and visual artifacts, thus allowing for a multidimensional representation of the learner. The electronic nature of the e-portfolio enables a more creative and non-linear organizational structure. Their reduced size enables easy portability and access. This ease of access allows the learner to receive rapid and regular feedback from others. Unlike traditional portfolios e-portfolios may be reviewed by anyone, anywhere and anytime, and the author can control the nature of the interaction through organizing access (Greenberg, 2003). Exchanges can be private or public – teachers can provide feedback and discuss the student’s progress, students might discuss their work with each other, feedback can be sought from a wider audience, and individuals can reflect on their learning experiences (Greenberg, 2003). Eportfolios are relatively simple and inexpensive to reproduce and distribute. In addition, e-portfolios can showcase the technical and communication

skills of the creator. A growing body of research documents the advantages of electronic over paper based portfolios to enhance student reflection and learning and to provide improved evidence of student achievement to external groups (see, for example, Barrett, 2000; Butler, 2006; Greenberg, 2003; Jafari & Kaufman, 2006; Wetzel & Strudler, 2005). The use of e-portfolios in an educational environment facilitates student centered, reflective learning practices to complement flexible curriculum design. In addition, it provides students with a vehicle to demonstrate the acquisition of attributes and competencies valued by potential employers.

Integrating Electronic Portfolios with Web 2.0 Technologies Institutions of higher learning around the world are embracing student centered learning as a dynamic and effective approach for higher education: an approach which places the student at the center of their own learning experience and allows them to become active participants in their learning endeavors, constructing knowledge on their own terms (Biggs, 2003; Entwistle, 1997; Entwistle & Ramsden, 1983; Laurillard, 2002). In response to this trend, curriculum design in colleges and universities is increasingly focusing on capabilities rather than content. Students are progressively being asked more to demonstrate not only their general knowledge and skills within their discipline areas but also to articulate explicitly how they analyze, reconstruct and apply knowledge contextually in a variety of real life learning situations (Bowden, 2004; Bowden & Marton, 1998). Student e-portfolios are extremely responsive to current curriculum reform because they can be used to satisfy a variety of assessment and evaluation requirements in courses and programs. e-portfolios offer a suitable environment for a range of summative assessment tasks, as well as provide for continuous growth and reflection in

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the formative development of students and professionals alike. They are particularly well suited to holistic and iterative assessment and offer a forum where group work, self-assessment, and other employability skills can be articulated and evidenced. By their very nature e-portfolios are flexible tools which can be tailored to specific educational contexts (Meeus, Questier, & Derks, 2006) and are used in a wide range of ways in student learning contexts. Meeus, Questier and Derks (2006) suggest that e-portfolios are grounded pedagogically or educationally because they are student centered, competence oriented, and multimedia oriented; they are also cyclical with regard to action and reflection. It is these characteristics and the flexible nature of the technology which optimizes their educational use. From a learning theory perspective, e-portfolios support student centered learning approaches as they give students the opportunity to display a broad range of learning skills and attributes across an extensive range of learning domains (Knott, Lohani, Griffin, Loganathan, Adel, & Wildman, 2004). However, as Norman (1993) points out, modern day curricula often provide students with learning activities that are more concerned with experiencing various phenomena than encouraging reflective cognition. Electronic portfolio practitioners (Barrett, 2006; DiBase, 2002; Knott et al, 2004; Lambert & Corrin, 2006; Richards, 2005) claim that e-portfolios facilitate the reflective process in students by recording and articulating students’ learning experiences on multiple levels, thus enhancing the learning experience and engaging the student in a more profound analysis of the subject content. David DiBase (2002) in his long term eportfolio work at Pennsylvania State University notes that the key benefits of e-portfolios relate more to the process of developing and constructing the portfolio than to the final portfolio product. The constructive stages of collection, selection, reflection, projection, and presentation of the e-

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portfolio help to facilitate and encourage students to adopt a more reflective approach to learning. It is through this constructive process that students become more actively involved in planning their learning and more personally responsible for setting and achieving their educational goals (DiBase, 2002; Meeus et al., 2006). e-portfolios empower learners by allowing them to take control over their personal learning journey (Siemens, 2004; Tosh & Werdmuller, 2004). The reflective nature of e-portfolios encourages transformative practice. This notion is consistent with constructivist theory which argues that learners construct their own knowledge rather than simply receive it from others. Institutes who have a university wide commitment to curriculum that is student centered, or based on authentic learning models, are more likely to be able to encompass the broad range of educational opportunities that e-portfolios can provide. The adoption of a more student centered, authentic approach to learning ultimately promotes the notion of life-long learning. e-portfolios can be shared with other staff members and a systematic record of student progress can be established. When staff members collaboratively participate in the assessment process of e-portfolios, either formative or summative, they not only provide students with feedback concerning their progress toward achieving their learning goals, but also provide feedback about the effectiveness and impact of the learning experiences the course provides. When this process is adopted, students have evidence they can plan the advancement of their personal learning and staff can see how their teaching, and ultimately the course, can be improved (Raison & Pelliccione, 2006). This three-way approach benefits the learner, staff and the institution. Traditionally universities have been successful at developing knowledge and skills within defined discipline areas; however, both global challenges and pressure from industry to produce work ready graduates (see, e.g., European Ministers of Educa-

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tion, 1999; UNESCO, 1998) has forced academic staff to rethink how they can explicitly develop and assess less tangible capabilities. These include: the ability to deal with new, changing situations and problems, self-reflection and critique, the application of prior learning to new contexts, the ability to understand and deal with others’ perspectives, and how individual students can work within a team to resolve and deal with multiple issues and problems. These skills and abilities are frequently referred to as graduate attributes, key competencies or generic attributes. Many colleges and universities are now looking to e-portfolios as tools to demonstrate and articulate students’ acquisition of these attributes. Social interaction technologies, often referred to as “Web 2.0 technologies,” are providing academics with flexible online learning environments to stimulate and record complex social interactions that can evidence student acquisition of “workready” attributes and skills. These new technologies along with other “digital traces” or “digital knowledge artifacts” (such as writings, images and digital media files) are already allowing for sophisticated representation of relational concepts or processes (Vuorikari, 2005). A range of Web 2.0 technology tools is being utilized for e-portfolio development which afford learners different degrees of control, flexibility, and skill requirement: including specifically designed digital portfolio systems (such as PebblePad, Learning Assistant, and QuickStep); and, content-management systems offering e-portfolio functions (for example, Blackboard, WebCT, and LearnWise). Weblogs and wikis are being increasingly and successfully used within electronic portfolios to establish collaborative learning environments that both engage and motivate students, and promote greater retention of knowledge (BECTA, 2007, Shelley, Cashman, Gunter & Gunter, 2007). Hiler (2003) refers to the blog as “the latest disruptive technology” and the “killer application.” He claims that blogs provide a space for a variety of interests and promote collaborative activity, knowledge

sharing, reflection and debate. Oravec (2002) also found that blogging encourages personal reflection and collaboration. The exposure to blogging tools empowers students and encourages them to become more sophisticated critical and analytical thinkers (Ferdig & Trammel, 2004; Oravec, 2002). In addition, Ferdig and Trammel (2004) suggest that the relaxed and conversational tone makes the experience more conducive to improved student and lecturer relationships. The potential of Web 2.0 technologies to enhance educational learning environments, in particular e-portfolios, has not escaped the notice of commercial vendors. Waters (2008a, 2008b) documents the influence of these new tools on a number of commercial electronic portfolio systems -- Digication, Desire2Learn, Angel Learning and Epsilen. Waters (2008a) refers to the Epsilen as a “new species of electronic portfolios.” The Epsilen software was developed by the CyberLab at the Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis which is directed by Ali Jafari, computer technology professor, who has a long history working with electronic portfolios. A basic Epsilen e-portfolio account is available free to registered students and staff at all United States colleges and universities. They currently have members from 950 institutions (Epsilen, 2008). A similar environment to Epsilen, named PebblePad, was developed in the UK and claims to bridge the gap between social and institutional learning: “PebblePad supports personal learning whilst providing a powerful suite of tools to improve learning in institutional contexts” (PebblePad, 2008). In addition, a number of open source e-portfolio systems have embedded various Web 2.0 features, such as blogging, wikis, messaging and group collaboration capabilities. An example of this system is the OSPortfolio (OSP) which is part of Sakai (an open source web-based collaboration and courseware management platform); it has been adopted by at least 60 institutions across 8 countries (Cambridge, 2008). One of the most recent open source e-portfolio systems was

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designed and funded in New Zealand by New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Commission’s elearning Collaborative Development Fund (2006). Mahara, which is colloquial Maori for “think” or “thought,” is an open source e-portfolio, weblog, resume building and social networking system. It differs from other e-portfolio applications by its particular emphasis on social networking and system architecture inspired by Moodle for better interoperability (Wyles, 2008). Integration of the Web 2.0 technologies and electronic portfolios continues. In a recent paper “The Value of eJournals to Support e-portfolio Development for Assessment in Teacher Education” presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Crichon and Kopp (2008) introduced an application called Electronic Documentation of Learning (eDOL) which allows students to document their field experiences in the form of an eJournal using text, photo, and video entries. Other software developers also continue to refine the assessment mechanisms of e-portfolio systems and are now attempting to extend the learning capabilities of the e-portfolio by taking advantage of the interactive facilities of the Web 2.0 technology. Subsequently, e-portfolios are beginning to take the form of a collage with various applications: namely, file sharing, databases, search facilities, wikis, podcasting, and other social media. Perhaps, the future of these new and other emerging tools will see the merging of e-portfolio systems with the personal learning environments (PLE) of new digital age students.

FUTURE TRENDS Gary Brown, the director for the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at Washington State University, has argued that the advent of Web 2.0 technologies will invariably change the boundaries between e-portfolios and personal learning environments (cited in Waters, 2008b).

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He views electronic portfolios as being part of a continuum with assessment management systems at one extreme and personal learning environments at the other. Personal learning environments can be viewed as systems that are designed to help learners take control and manage their own learning space. It is argued that a personal learning environment can enable students to set their own learning goals, monitor their progress, manage the process and content of their learning, and set up communication networks that support both their formal and informal learning. In an earlier article from Handley and colleagues (Handley, Wilson, Petersen, Brown, & Ptaszynski, 2007) the concept of creating personal learning spaces in higher education is further explored. The authors suggest that university educators move beyond the traditional “walled gardens” approach to the point of designing learning spaces for each learner. In this way the learner is able to “aggregate, synthesize and reflect upon their learning.” The key concept is to place the learners at the center of their educational universe by providing them with the tools to control who has access to their own personal “walled garden.” The Microsoft SharePoint System (2007) is seen as a functional platform that can provide such an environment. Washington State University has recently adopted this collaboration and documentsharing platform to introduce e-portfolios across the university. Specifically they suggest: “In the model facilitated by SharePoint as an e-portfolio, the student is the central node in the learning network. A course, learning object, learning activity is available and students are invited to engage, but they are the owners of their own space and the work they will do, share, and showcase in that space” (Handley et al., 2007, p 3). Siemens (2006) stresses that educators need to continuously reflect on how learning has changed and how this change impacts the way the learning spaces and structures are designed. He argues that the utilization of new technology tools alters the way people work and function and posits a new

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theory of learning called “connectivism.” This theory acknowledges trends in learning, the use of technology and social and learning networks, and the “diminishing half-life” of knowledge (2005, 2006). Connectivism integrates elements of a number of learning theories, social structures, and technology to present a theory more conducive to the needs of the knowledge society. Siemens (2006) notes: Our desire to connect – to externalize – is a vital component of the learning process. Instead of merely developing learners for careers, we have an obligation to create a learning ecology where learners are able to shape their own meaning. Siemens (2006) challenges educators to design learning spaces that reflect a new understanding of learning and meet the needs of the digital learner in the knowledge society. The challenge has implications for the future landscape and use of e-portfolios. He claims that freedom and flexibility to design such learning spaces will be lost if the trend to centralize and standardize e-portfolio tools and services continues (2004). The web is shifting from being a utility where information is transmitted and consumed into a platform where content is created, shared, and remixed with a community of learners (Downes, 2006). Brown (2002) considers this as a fundamental shift from using technology to support the individual to using technology to support relationships between individuals. The new social media applications and social networking sites support learning communities by providing tools that enable and promote dialogue, collaborative content building, and the sharing of information, giving learners access to a range of knowledge and ideas (Lee & McLoughlin, 2005). The merge of e-portfolio tools and processes with social software has the potential to deliver the dynamic and flexible learning spaces required for digital age learners. This union will not only build knowledge but will build relationships and encompass the

powerful elements of reflective practice, higher order thinking, learner control, “connectivism,” community of learners, social integration, and lifelong learning. There are many benefits associated with the use of e-portfolios; there are also many hidden costs, obstacles, and challenges involved in their implementation (DiBase, 2002). Most practitioners and institutions that adopt e-portfolios report that they are labor intensive and require considerable time in planning, monitoring and provision of feedback to students (Linn & Gronlund, 2000; Strudler & Wetzel, 2005). Students need time, support, technical training and guidance (Heath, 2005; Pecheone et al, 2005; Smith & Tillema, 2003; Tosh et al, 2005; Wade & Yarbrough, 1996). Technical skills required may disadvantage the student if the student is being assessed on their technology skills over their learning (Abrami & Barrett, 2005). If used predominantly for assessment purposes, e-portfolios can be difficult to assess, requiring extensive preplanning in the establishment of reflective evaluation and performance (Abrami & Barrett, 2005). Students also need to be given clear guidelines as to the validation of claims and authenticity of evidence as artifacts are easily plagiarized from the Internet (Abrami & Barrett, 2005). Students need briefing about issues surrounding digital rights, intellectual property, copyright, privacy and free speech (Challis, 2005; DiBase, 2002). Many of the Web 2.0 technologies require extensive moderation and skill development. Institutions need to be aware of the ramification on their curriculum accreditation processes, professional development of staff, and the hidden costs associated with the technological “up-skilling” of students. Institutions will need to address ways of storing the large volume of data produced by students as well as developing policies on how long they support and maintain the data. Issues of access, security and privacy will also need to be addressed. Future consideration will need to be given to the development of new learning spaces to enable

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the crossing of the social, educational, cultural, professional, and political boundaries of students to give voice to a learner’s efficacy in a variety of overlapping contexts. E-portfolios will need to become living documents that are “portable” through the life of the learner to meet a variety of usages encompassing assessment, promotion, cultural identity and professional reflection (Vuorikari, 2005). An integrated approach to e-portfolios can certainly support community building among learners but is unlikely to be driven by educational agendas alone. The technology associated with these new environments will also need to deal efficiently with the rapid re-contextualization of content for a variety of different purposes in the learner’s life.

CONCLUSION Electronic portfolios offer students the prospect of reflecting on their personal and profession skills and the opportunity to demonstrate a range of lifelong capabilities. e-portfolios can be used to reflect the knowledge and skills obtained in an academic context; they can also incorporate social abilities and skills acquired in community, work and familial settings. e-portfolios can be constructed in such a way that they become living transportable documents used in a variety of career and professional contexts. The e-portfolio has the potential to become a living document managed and maintained dynamically over time; it can be constructed and reconstructed to meet a variety of social, professional and personal needs. Social interaction technologies have the power to add dynamic dimension to the e-portfolio process by creating spaces that encourage the development of a reflective community of learners that will motivate and inspire individuals to revisit, revise and reshape their experiences to reflect their learning journey.

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Tertiary Education Commission. (2006). Elearning collaborative development fund. Retrieved July 3, 2008, from http://www.tec.govt. nz/templates/standard.aspx?id=755 The Higher Education Academy. (2005). Personal development planning and employability. York, UK: Higher Education Academy. Tomkinson, B. (1997). Towards a taxonomy of teaching portfolios. Retrieved September 21, 2007, from http://www.lgu.ac.uk/deliberations/ portfolios Tosh, D., Light, T. P., Fleming, K., & Haywood, J. (2005). Engagement with electronic portfolios: Challenges from the student perspective. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 31(3). Retrieved January 24, 2008, from http://www.cjlt. ca/content/vol31.3/

Waters, J. K. (2008a). In the driver’s seat. T.H.E. Journal, 35(6), 43–50. Waters, J. K. (2008b). Unleashing the power of Web 2.0. Campus Technology. Retrieved July 1, 2008, from http://campustechnology.com/printarticle.aspx?id=63551 Wetzel, K., & Strudler, N. (2005). The diffusion of electronic portfolios in teacher education: Next steps and recommendations from accomplished users. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 38(2), 231–243. Whelan, D. (2003). In a fog about blogs. American Demographics, 25(6), 22–23. Wyles, R. (2008). Mahara - open source ePortfolio. Retrieved July 1, 2008, from http://www. eportfoliopractice.qut.edu.au/docs/AeP_presentations_web/AeP_SC_Mahara_6Feb08.pdf

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RESOURCES

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

Angel Learning - http://www.angellearning. com

E-Portfolio: A collection of evidence that reflects a learner’s progress, development, and achievement over time in a digital format. E-Portfolio Artifacts: Tangible evidence (i.e., work samples, reflections, photos, videos, feedback from supervisors/peers, awards, etc.) that demonstrates knowledge and skills and their application to various tasks and situations. Epsilen: A comprehensive e-learning environment designed in the U.S. that includes an e-portfolio feature. PebblePad: A flexible commercial e-portfolio system designed in collaboration with the University of Wolverhampton, UK. Personal Learning Environments (PLE): Learning systems that are purposely designed to help learners take control and manage their own learning space. Sakai: An open-source course management system that includes a full-featured online portfolio. Student Centered Learning: An instructional approach that places the student at the center of the learning experience and allows students to become active participants in their learning endeavors and construct knowledge on their own terms.

Australian ePortfolio Project - http://www. eportfoliopractice.qut.edu.au Blackboard - http:// southbank.blackboard.net The Centre for International ePortfolio Development - http://www. nottingham.ac.uk/eportfolio Digication - http:// risd.digication.com Desire2Learn - http://www.desire2learn.com Epsilen - http://www.epsilen.com European Institute for E-Learning (ElfEL) - http:// www.eife-l.org/about Learning Assistant - http://www.learningassistant. com Learnwise - http://vle.bilborough.ac.uk Mahara - http://www.mahara.org Moodle - http://moodle.com.au OSPortfolio http://osportfolio.org/testimonials PebblePad - http://www.pebblepad.com/default. asp Sakai - http://sakaiproject.org

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Chapter 22

Commerce and Gender Generating Interactive Spaces for Female Online Users Noemi Maria Sadowska Regents Business School, Regent’s College, UK

ABSTRACT Internet technology presented the women’s magazine industry with new prospects for publishing and user interaction. The case of BEME.com, the UK online commercial portal targeting female users, exemplifies the tendency for a commercial context to trade in and on gender stereotypes instead of pursuing opportunities for novel conceptions of interaction with users. Contemporary design practices together with a feminist framework are drawn on to explore these issues. It is argued that although design managers and producers might have been aware of the Internet potential to foster new forms of interactive spaces for female users, these advances did not fit within the existing business models of commercial portals. The notions of “becoming” and “user interaction” are suggested as alternative approaches to the development of female oriented Internet portals.

INTRODUCTION Historically, the women’s magazine publishing industry has traded in and on gender. Its goals and successes are measured by commercial standards where gender stereotypes define its inherent nature, communicate meanings, and users’ perception of what is being sold. Although it is not the only example, the business success of this interplay between commerce and gender owes a great deal to DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch022

the highly sophisticated visual language developed through years of design practices and enhanced by the adoption of computer-based publishing. In the past decade, magazine publishers have expanded into the realm of the World Wide Web exploring novel opportunities for online user interaction. It is argued that interaction has been a key component of the women’s magazine publishing industry. Whether in terms of inviting contributions from female readership, engaging readers in competitions, responding to readers’ questions and issues in advice columns, these tools of social

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interaction have informed notions of communities of readers and readership based on brand loyalty. However, the extent to which this interaction and brand-driven commercial model has also relied on, but moreover perpetuated, gender stereotypes has been the subject of considerable debate (Attfield, 1989; Gauntlett, 2002; McRobbie, 1999). This chapter investigates Internet spaces defined as commercial portals targeting female users and their role in developing online social interactions. In particular, the intention is to illuminate the impact of a commercial context on the generation of novel interactive spaces for female Internet users. Against the backdrop of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 growth, the case of BEME.com provides an opportunity to examine an online space developed directly out of the women’s magazine publishing tradition in the United Kingdom. A product of IPC Media, one of the leading U.K. consumer magazine publishers which specialises in what are referred to as traditional women’s magazines (including Marie Claire and Woman’s Own), the portal’s development in 1999 and launch in February 2000 was a direct response to an electronic commerce boom of that time. Initially, it was somewhat unusual in that developing BEME.com content and editorially driven brand was given priority over an e-commerce profit-driven strategy. However, at the beginning of 2001, limited commercial success triggered a redesign, strengthening its connection to a traditional woman’s magazine industry approach. When these hasty measures failed to generate sufficient advertising revenue, BEME.com was closed in August 2001. The chapter highlights how a traditional commercial print publishing concept has maintained a stronghold on the idea of interaction in an online environment. Whilst Web 2.0 technology has presented new possibilities for interaction, this new technology - even in latest commercial portals targeting female users - is not widely applied, and designers of commercial online spaces intended to attract female users do not seem capable or willing to break with gendered visual norms.

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Contemporary design and Internet practices and a feminist framework provide illuminative lenses with which to explore these issues. The data used in support of this argument derives from the author’s doctoral research asserting the potential of online portal design to offer alternative ways of communicating to female users in order to resist and combat the gendered status quo.

BACKGROUND Beetham (1996) argues that women’s magazines are situated at the crossroads of the following agendas: “money, public discourse and individual desire” (p. 2). As the Internet entered the women’s publishing industry, it did so against a broader background which questioned the potential of this technology to facilitate social interactions amongst its female readership. On the one hand, Spender (1995) claimed that Internet technology was close to the core values of femininity and Braidotti (1996) contended that it “enables a transgression of the dichotomous categories of male and female, constructing transgender or even genderless human identities and relations” (as cited in van Zoonen, 2002, p. 6). On the other hand, Wakeford (1997) argued for recognition of the opportunities of becoming connected but believed that stereotypes tend to overshadow the creative and political uses to which female users have adapted the Internet. Pohl (1997) concluded that whether or not women find specific places or ways to behave or interact on the Internet, these would always be gendered: “Gender-specific behaviour can be found on two levels. The first is the actual behaviour of the Internet users, and the second focuses on the stereotypes and images people have” (Pohl, 1997, p. 193). Indeed, evident within commercial women’s portals are conceptualisations of social interaction defined as female consumption opportunities underpinned by gender stereotypes. Weale (2000) observed that this is “one of the key differences in the

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way women are targeted. They are seen first and foremost as shoppers; everything is dictated by the commercial imperative.” Many of the debates around women’s magazines focus on the capacity of these artifacts to affect their readers’ identity construction, and these no less apply to online portals produced by women’s magazine industry. To inform this discussion, it is instructive to turn to the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. First, Foucault theorises how power relations can operate within a social context. He focuses on the notion of power which he does not see as an “asset which a person can have; rather, power is something exercised within interactions” (Gauntlett, 2002, p. 117). Furthermore, Foucault explains that access to power is unequal. He proposes the notion of “forced relations” as a platform of social inequality against which all the power interactions take place. Moreover, he points out that these can form “states of domination” where the power relations become so entrenched that they appear “one-sided and unchangeable” (Foucault, 2000, p. 283). As Gauntlett (2002) sums up, the point Foucault puts across remains: “power simply cannot be held by one group: power is everywhere and plays a role in all relationships and interactions … Power does not exist outside of social relationships; it’s exactly within these relationships that power comes into play” (p. 118). The value of Foucault’s argument on power stems from his belief that “where there is power, there is resistance.” Furthermore, “points of resistance are everywhere in the power network” (Foucault, 1998, p. 95). Therefore, just as power flows through networks so do points of resistance appear all over. These might become strategically mobile or remain dissipated and disorganised (Foucault, 1998). Second, Butler’s analysis of the process by which an individual assumes a subject position provides a useful lens through which to analyse the consequences of women’s magazine consumption for female readers. Rather than starting from an essentialist point of view, Butler argues for a

processual understanding of identity. To account for such a process, she traces the genealogy of the conditions of emergence of a subject position wherein sex and gender are effects rather than causes of institutions, discourses, and practices. As Salih (2002) comments, “Butler has collapsed the sex/gender distinction in order to argue that there is no sex that is not always already gender” (p. 62). This suggests that all bodies are gendered from the moment of and due to their social existence and there is no existence outside of the social. Thus, Butler argues that it is not about what someone is, but rather it is about what someone does, a sequence of acts, a “doing” rather than “being.” However, gender is a particular rather than generic process whereby the subject is not free to choose which gender they will enact; rather it is always determined by the “regulatory frame” in which the subject has limited choice. Butler’s further analysis of gender identities presents them as neither “straight, straightforward [n]or singular” but rather as “unstable” and “resignifiable” allowing for subversive “working against the grain” practice (Salih, 2002, p. 71). In a similar vein, Radner (1995) sees identities not as a moment but as “trajectories of perpetual movement within the confines of a specific social and cultural architecture – itineraries of dissatisfaction but also of pleasure in the movement itself, of returning and departing, only to return again” (p. xiv). Her reflection on notions of femininity and their incorporation in women’s magazines is based on recognition that “[f]emininity can be achieved with a minimum of effort for a certain socio-economic class able to afford the consumerism invoked through the image” (p. 177). However, she acknowledges that the images contained in women’s magazines “impose a tyranny” that the supporting text tries to deny. Although there is room for dispersion of meaning, the nature of the magazine will always re-center it back to the magazine’s focus on the female body and its definition through product consumption (Radner, 1995).

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Critiques of the women’s publishing industry along with gender theorising and debates on the potential of Internet technology are revealing of a relationship between interaction and gender construction and also alert us to the fact that even the latest interactive and collaborative Internet design (encapsulated by Web 2.0) faces issues of gender complicity where perceptions of commercial risk can outweigh technological and imaginative potential.

GENERATING INTERACTIVE SPACES FOR FEMALE ONLINE USERS: THE CASE OF BEME.COM The case of a woman’s commercial online portal BEME.com exemplifies two intentions common to many portal designs. These are: (a) the development of an online brand that fosters emotional attachment enabled by appropriate web design and interactivity; and (b) development of an online branded community that combines both social interactions as well as participation in the commercial aspects of the portal. In the case of BEME.com, IPC attempted to achieve both to generate an online portal that also abides by business imperatives.

Defining the Target Audience and Developing an Online Brand With a formidable and trusted presence in the U.K. women’s publishing sector, IPC Media continued to search for new ways to expand its market share by cultivating a sense of special relationship with the readers. As the corporate statement asserted, “[w]e’re using our powerful relationships with readers to stretch our brands across different media – including specials, masthead TV and events – and to grow share of spend” (IPC Connect, 2000). Consumer loyalty provided a strong base for IPC to confidently spread out into new markets and experiment with new web-based

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technologies. The corporate statement reasoned: “we’re not just focused on print-led brands. It’s well documented that women are currently the fastest growing community online, and we’ve leveraged IPC’s commanding number one position within the Women’s market to launch BEME. COM” (IPC Connect, 2000). Initially the BEME.com target audience was believed to spread from 18 to 60 years of age and covered a wide range of different lifestyles. However, following mid-point re-design of the site, the target audience was revised as 20 to 35 year-old women. Thus, the readers were expected to be of upper to lower middle class social status. At the same time, their occupations would range from higher to junior managerial, administrative or professional positions including supervisory or clerical responsibilities. They were also seen as a heterogeneous set of women at various stages of life (IPC Connect, 2000), where the geographical focus or limit was the Western hemisphere. However, as is often noted by feminist research, this understanding represents a particular, homogenised and stereotypical view of women strongly rooted within patriarchal social structures. In this case, the audience was positioned within “a web of psycho-social relationships which institute a socially significant difference on the axis of sex, which is so deeply located in our very sense of lived, sexual identity that it appears to us as natural and unalterable’ (Pollock, 1982, p. 10). Thus, BEME.com female users were positioned within a Western social, cultural and political milieu with strong ties to the practice and tradition of reading women’s weekly or monthly print magazines. These magazines have long instructed female users in the consumption of femininity and, as Gough-Yates (2003) and McRobbie (1999) argue, in forms which reflect multiplicity, fragmentation and contradiction. However, Ballaster, Beetham, Frazer, and Hebron (1991) observe that female users have become accustomed to being addressed as consumers of the “message of the text and of the commodities”

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and suggest that these magazines [or portals] are crucial in constructing female identity (p. 12). In addition, they claim, these conceptualisations of femininity are reiterated across the communication medium at any point in its history, providing an overall unifying message. Such positioning of BEME.com, backed up by decades of publishing tradition, resulted in a communication pattern transcending the design output from paper into portal publishing. Consequently, the BEME.com female users were considered to have an insider’s knowledge of the communication codes and design tools learnt and absorbed from the paper magazine industry. Building on such a description of its target audience, the BEME.com brand was coined as an experience defined by “AND” or “BOTH” descriptors. On the surface, this appeared to be a novel departure from the traditional approach where readers subscribed to “ONE” ideal, such as the “Cosmo girl” or the “ELLE woman.” The BEME. com approach encouraged female users’identification with a mother role “AND” engagement with fashion; these women could be career-minded professionals “AND” be looking to redesign their home interior or throw a spring party for friends. The focus of the brand was intended to acknowledge the many sides and uniqueness of subscribing female users; the “AND” or “BOTH” notion opened up the definition of the target audience by creating an infinite number of combinations. Thus, one was led to believe that the key to this Internet specific brand was an invitation to its female audiences not only to interact and engage with physical aspects of the portal by clicking through its pages but also to actively participate in generating its meaning to suit their own circumstances: “BE ME” or be yourself. This aligned with a brand-centric business model wherein the customer develops an emotional response to an organisation and where design facilitates and animates that bond. From a corporate perspective, the interactive nature of the BEME.com portal offered great opportunities for commercial success.

Development of an Online Branded Community Expanding IPC’s solid positioning within the women’s publishing market, BEME.com (2000) aimed to provide informative content that appealed to users “across a broad range of life stages.” However, developing a new brand was only part of its potential success. To strengthen the IPC’s online presence, BEME.com was intended to create an online branded community. The interactive nature of the portal was seen as similar to a television set, navigated by clicking through various channels. The content was meant neither to be “fluffy” nor totally serious. Its role was to entertain, inform and connect female users; its purpose was to offer women a communicative space online. However, following the portal’s redesign, the new female executive editor stated that: “[t]he new design will help us to showcase the best content for women on the net, updated at a pace that keeps up with women’s lives. It’s a focused, quality offering that’s funny, opinionated, stylish and direct” (IPC Media, 2000, pp. 30-33). Thus, the resulting product was based on what was already “out there” for women in the form of other portals, taking into consideration female users’ online consumption patterns. The female senior producer had desired that the portal offer something alternative to print magazines: …what … [female users] want to be using [BEME. com] for was more, we thought, tools and communication. So rather than using it as an offline, as a paper magazine would be used, i.e., just to read articles or whatever. It would be the whole kind of email to a friend, the chat, the forums all of those things. (Anonymous, personal communication, November 28, 2001). She strongly believed that the portal strategy should be built around and support social interactions: “to get women talking about BEME and

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talking to each other … It was to communicate … to keep them there and to keep them in the community aspects” (Anonymous, personal communication, November 28, 2001). Her observations and reflections indicate that the site had far more potential as a women’s online communicative space than just a promotion-driven shopping experience, and the male design manager/designer’s interpretation teased out the personal side of the BEME.com experience. The aim was to create a visually driven Internet communicative space that was personal. The notion of one-to-one direct communication facilitated by the design made the experience unique to each female user, emphasising her individuality and, at least initially, BEME.com offered a personal area specific to each user. However, in the course of production this area was buried in the structure of the portal and completely dismounted during the redesign. As the male design manager/designer commented, “I thought that was a big shame … because you can go and get a woman’s magazine and the Internet is far more a one-on-one experience, so I think they missed out an opportunity to have something far more personal” (Anonymous, personal communication December 11, 2001). The portal was instead developed with commercial interests in mind that muted the potential of BEME.com to facilitate an online community. The BEME brand that might have fostered personal attachment and interaction gave way to the promotion of an online branded community intent on commercial success on the same basis as women’s magazines. IPC incorporated the opportunities of the Internet to appeal to the female user on a personal and emotional level but to merely build on rather than depart from their commercial success in print-media.

IMPACT OF COMMERCIAL CONTEXT AND GENDER STEREOTYPES Although the BEME.com case offers interesting insights into potentially new ways of generating

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interactive spaces for female online users, it also illuminates poignant critiques of the ways in which commercial success has rested on the reproduction of gender stereotypes. Here, the role of design practice within this context is discussed.

Nothing More Than an Online Magazine Although, at the time of the research, access to those who engaged in BEME.com community was not possible, interviews were conducted with potential users to explore their involvement with commercial portals. How the interviewees defined themselves as potential BEME.com users was influenced by the types of experiences they had on the Internet in general, and how they saw themselves as consumers of women’s paper magazines in particular. In particular, they believed BEME.com to be a finished design outcome without possibility of adjustment as with a printed magazine. BEME. com design did not hold great value for the participants, reflecting their ambivalent attitudes towards women’s glossy magazines. For the most part, the site was evaluated in terms of how long it took for visual elements to download and therefore in terms of usability. The female users expressed no great interest in changing the design of online content, unless it infringed on their access and interests. Neither did they express particular need to protest against gendered content; approached as a finished product they could choose to navigate away from pages they disliked. Thus, notions of community or concepts of interactive spaces, from the perspective of female users, were clearly grounded in the traditions of paper publishing. The space and its design did not redefine these notions or alter patterns of meaning or identity construction. These interviews pointed to the conclusion that the introduction of the Internet as a new technology within the context of women’s magazines was seen only as a new, more accessible way of reading these periodicals.

Commerce and Gender

Although BEME.com claimed to promote individual experience, it did classify users as belonging to one group defined by gender. Feminist scholars’ critique of the commercial application of the Internet - where female users are seen as a gendered niche market addressed in one voice (Paasonen, 2002; Sadowska, 2006) - was echoed by the interviewees. They wanted to be in control of their interaction with BEME.com and did not believe they should be perceived as one group characterised solely by their gender. Fundamentally they perceived themselves as individuals who have developed a relationship with the Internet in general and in a multifaceted fashion supported by the interactive qualities of the medium. However, due to the limited interactive aspects of BEME. com, the habits of reading a women’s magazine overshadowed the potential sets of new social interactions an online space such as BEME.com could offer.

Design Practice Implicated in the Commercialisation of the Internet Analysis of the UK context of commercial online portals targeting female users points to a specific historically framed design genre. The investigation of BEME.com and its competitors (handbag.com, icircle.com and femail.co.uk) revealed a recurring and closely related set of design practices being applied to Internet output. Their very similar design style raised several questions, specifically: (a) what advantage was gained from creating portals with the same “look and feel”; (b) whether this design process had an effect on the perception of the Internet as democratic; and (c) the extent to which the Internet was a decentralised medium. In an environment that posed unknowns, portals might have begun with different content-structuring models represented by different interface design. However, following from what has been done/is being done, what has worked/is working within the women’s commercial online portals meant that successful features were being repeated at

the expense of elements of difference (Miller, 2000). O’Leary (1998) calls such a process the “Law of Merging Models,” where with time online content and services begin to resemble each other. Moreover, as portals moved away from a simple process of taking a customer from point A to point B, they focused on attracting users to online advertisements, in turn gaining commodity status themselves. Such a move from anonymous searching to the development of portal branding has seen portal interfaces become increasingly similar, certainly in terms of their range of functions (Miller, 2000). Miller (2000) argues that increased commercialisation of the Internet is resulting in its content and services being held in fewer and fewer hands. Therefore, qualities of the Internet that often inspire enthusiasm – such as the potential for a democratic decentralised approach to communication – are being eliminated in the case of commercial portals. The domination of a small number of old and new media firms has resulted in online portals redesigning and restructuring to maintain high market capitalisation and economic stability rather than offering opportunities for marginalized content and voices to come to the fore. This is evident in the way that portal interfaces are becoming more and more similar in their design. With reference to women’s commercial portals in particular, gender should also be recognised as an additional ingredient influencing the homogeneity of design outcome. Gender acts as a unifying and differentiating element amongst the many commercial portals attracting both male and female users online. Analysis of their visual language (Sadowska, 2002) attested strongly to a link between the visual canons of women’s paper magazines and women’s commercial portals and revealed different ways in which gender has been built into visual language through the design process. The key to understanding this design genre is the notion of gender which, to the publisher, provided a fundamental constitutive structure for the design

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of a women’s online portal. As within women’s paper publishing, female users were equated with their gender. The portals did not address female users as individuals with particular interests but as a gender group with gender-determined interests. This was symptomatic of both the nature of online portals targeting a “faceless mass” and the origins of these online portals, namely in the traditions of women’s paper publishing; an industry, as Ferguson (1983) argues, propagating ideologies which rely “on the premise of biological predestination and gender determinism” (p. 189). By generating online outcomes that mirrored their paper counterparts, online design practices disregarded qualities made possible by the Internet, such as interactivity and its potential to share and generate meaning with and for users.

Online Social Interaction Replaced by Online Shopping Whereas printed media, although full of alluring ads, does not offer immediate access to the purchase of promoted products, online portal technology and its latest developments have increasingly been utilised to ease the potential shopping experience for its female users. A study by Cyr and Bonanni (2005) indicated that although there are no significant gender differences in online customer loyalty and trust associated with particular websites or the security of the online transactions, there are “significant differences in perceptions of website design and website satisfaction between the genders” (p. 565) when it comes to shopping experiences. With ever developing online design practices and the coming of age of online visual communication, the inherent nature of the design of online portals targeting female users should also be changing. However, browsing BEME.com’s competitors which survived the Internet bust of 2001, it is evident that little has changed. These remaining sites continue to prescribe gendered content and community aspects, if any, are buried in layers of advertisements.

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It was clear that IPC management and BEME. com designers were aware of the Internet’s interactive potential. However, as the conceptualisation of BEME.com stemmed directly from the traditions of women’s magazine publishing, many aspects that might have supported social interaction were not prioritised. The model of generating beautiful but static content became the preferred design choice. Where Burnett and Marshall (2003) argue that online interactivity encourages users to engage in a different kind of literacy encompassing simultaneous reception and production, to have understood consumers simultaneously as producers would have had a profound impact on the way BEME.com was conceptualised and created as a commercial portal. Unfortunately, the traditions of women’s magazine publishing, along with predefined content supported by gender stereotypes, were barriers to implementing and facilitating this new kind of interactive literacy. Moreover, the graphic design roots of magazine publishing did not translate very well into the online interactive environment. Thus, the online community which IPC so clearly wanted to establish did not materialize and BEME.com was no more than an online version of a paper magazine. Furthermore, BEME.com generated a set of social interactions, embedded within site layouts, exemplifying Foucault’s argument of “states of domination.” The portal reproduced the power relations inherent in the commercial tradition of women’s magazine publishing which has always relied on gender to generate profit.

FUTURE TRENDS Where the prevailing trend in Internet technology is a focus on the abilities of any participant to become a content creator (Cormode & Krishnamurthy, 2008), defining female users through gender stereotypes and dictating the “appropriate” online content available in such commercial online portals is a sign of inherent conservatism on the

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part of women’s magazine publishing industry. Furthermore, in a context where the Internet is moving towards the facilitation of social networks, prioritising bi-directional communication, various “glue” technologies, and significant diversity in content types (Cormode & Krishnamurthy, 2008), there is a growing need for online commercial spaces that are targeting female users to move away from the traditional models and follow more closely the developing trends of technology itself. Under such circumstances, three key suggestions for their design emerge from the BEME.com case. They are: (a) centring all aspects of the design process on the actual end-user [and recognising the potential for that user to take on the role of both producer as well as consumer]; (b) consciously recognising the folly mistake of using gender alone as an appropriate description of female audiences; [and] (c) being aware of social, cultural, and political factors that exert influence over the design process. (Sadowska, 2007, p. 172). However, changes applied only to online design are inadequate in themselves to break the mould. Alternative business models need to be developed and applied in this context. There is growing interest in focusing on cultural differences as a means to offer opportunities of the localisation of Internet content as a means to develop new business tools within commercial spaces online (Cyr, Bonanni, & Ilsever, 2004; Cyr, Bonanni, Bowes, & Ilsever, 2005; Egger, 2001). Furthermore, Cyr and Bonanni (2005) argue that: [a] match of website characteristics to cultural preferences and sensitivities is, in fact, critical to building relationships in an environment where buyers and sellers are without personal contact. It may be that better understanding of gender preferences on the web is the new vanguard of localisation for the Internet (p. 579).

Taking a broader view of the developments in Internet social interaction technologies, the impact these have on the online design practice and the continued resistance of the women’s publishing industry to participate in the resulting changes, point to an ever growing need to research the role gender plays in defining spaces for online female communication. Could conscious recognition of potential gender differences be used in more “positive” ways to create online spaces where design practices acknowledge the individuality of female online users? What opportunities for alternative readings could Butler’s concept of a regulatory framework (Salih, 2002) offer, if recognised as part of the design process and commercial process, both at the point of production and consumption? If, as it has been argued already, female users cannot exist outside of gender, then recognising performative aspects of gender and emphasising the concept of “becoming” rather than “being” could serve as an interesting and potentially radical starting point for design practice. Such an alternative reading could lead to unconventional commercial opportunities that align well with the interactive nature of the Internet. One thing is clear, evident lack of change within existing commercial portals targeting female users demands further investigation into the relationships between such spaces, business models, gender values and design practices that bring these into being. As Wakeford (2000) proposes, this “will require a far wider variety of metaphors in a continuing attempt at a new vocabulary of women and technology” (p. 63).

CONCLUSION Dictation and prescription of the content and positioning of female users as mere observers is still a prevalent conceptualisation of social interaction within commercial portals targeting female audience. A traditionalist approach stemming from the women’s magazine industry does not truly support

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users’ social interactions and the basis of its commercial success in the trading of gender stereotypes inhibits the conceptualisation of female users as potential producers. Where many non-commercial sites have offered female users unprecedented opportunities for establishing novel forms of social interaction, the commercial context can be described as unsupportive. The case of BEME.com clearly indicates that although designers might have been aware of the potential of the Internet and its capacity to foster new forms of interactive spaces for female users, these advances did not fit within the business models supporting such commercial portals. The commercial traditions that underpin the production and consumption of such portals as BEME.com are so locked into place that even today, seven years after the portal closure, the same attitudes persist. Web technology formed the foundations of how commercial online portals targeting female users have been received by their audiences. Although the technology has moved on, the combination of business and visual offerings has not changed drastically. The injection of new modes of interaction through the development of social networking sites has enhanced the experience; however, it has not altered the paradigm. There is no denying that as with their paper counterparts, women’s commercial online portals have become part of the history of the growth and development of interactive spaces created specifically to target online female users. With the changing uses of the Internet technology these spaces are becoming less prominent, replaced by more interactive sites such as MySpace.com or Facebook.com which encourage a user/producer approach to content development. There is a growing understanding that emerging commercial online spaces for female users will have to alter their approach to achieve popularity and commercial success. This is likely to require a novel approach to their design: an approach which explicitly plays with rather than trades on gender stereotypes in which notions of “becoming” drive the design of and for spaces of interaction.

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REFERENCES Attfield, J. (1989). FORM/female FOLLOWS FUNCTION/male: Feminist critiques of design. In J. A. Walker (Ed.), Design history and the history of design. London: Pluto Press. Ballaster, R., Beetham, M., Frazer, E., & Hebron, S. (1991). Women’s worlds: Ideology, femininity and the woman’s magazine. London: Macmillan Press. Beetham, M. (1996). A magazine of her own? Domesticity and desire in the woman’s magazine, 1800-1914. London: Routledge. BEME. com. (2000). Retrieved November 15, 2000, from http://www.ipcmedia.com Braidotti, R. (1996). Cyberfeminism with a difference. Retrieved August 10, 2005, from http://www. let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm Burnett, R., & Marshall, P. D. (2003). Web theory: An introduction. London: Routledge. Connect, I. P. C. (2000). Press release. Retrieved November 15, 2000, from http://www.ipcmedia. com Cormode, G., & Krishnamurthy, B. (2008). Key differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. First Monday, 13(6). Retrieved July 4, 2008, from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index. php/fm/article/view/2125/1972 Cyr, D., & Bonanni, C. (2005). Gender and Website design in e-business. International Journal of Electronic Business, 3(6), 565–582. doi:10.1504/ IJEB.2005.008536 Cyr, D., Bonanni, C., Bowes, J., & Ilsever, J. (2005). Beyond trust: Website design preferences across cultures. Journal of Global Information Management, 13(4), 24–52.

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Cyr, D., Bonanni, C., & Ilsever, J. (2004). Design and e-loyalty across cultures in electronic commerce. Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC04). Ferguson, M. (1983). Forever feminine: Women’s magazines and the cult of femininity. London: Heinemann. Foucault, M. (1998). The history of sexuality (Vol. 1, The will to knowledge, R. Hurley, Trans.). London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2000). Ethics: Subjectivity and truth. In P. Rabinow (Ed.). Essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984. London: Penguin. Gauntlett, D. (2002). Media, gender and identity: An introduction. London: Routledge. Gough-Yates, A. (2003). Understanding women’s magazines: Publishing, markets and readership. London: Routledge. McRobbie, A. (1999). In the culture society. London: Routledge. Media, I. P. C. Press Office. (2001, April 6). New strategy, new look and new structure for BEME. com. Retrieved September 17, 2001, from http:// www.ipcmedia.com Miller, V. (2000). Search engines, portals and global capitalism. In D. Gauntlett (Ed.), Web. studies: Rewiring media studies for the digital age. London: Arnold. O’Leary, M. (1998). Web directories demonstrate an enduring online law. Online, (July/August), 79-81. Paasonen, S. (2002). The woman question: Addressing women as Internet users. In M. Fernandez, F. Wilding, & M. Wright (Eds.), Domain errors: Cyberfeminist tactics, subversions, embodiments. New York: Autonomedia.

Pohl, M. (1997). The Internet - a ‘feminine’ technology? In R. Lander & A. Adam (Eds.), Women in computing. Exeter: Intellect. Pollock, G. (1982). Vision, voice, and power: Feminist art history and Marxism. Block, 6, 2–21. Radner, H. (1995). Shopping around: Feminine culture and the pursuit of pleasure. New York: Routledge. Sadowska, N. (2002). Women’s Internet sites: A search for design strategies to engage the female viewer. In M. Consalvo & S. Paasonen (Eds.), Women and everyday uses of the Internet: Agency and identity. New York: Peter Lang. Sadowska, N. (2006). Design and women’s expectations of WWW experience. In E. M. Trauth (Ed.), Encyclopedia of gender and information technology. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Sadowska, N. (2007). Interpreting the female user: How Web designers conceptualise development of commercial WWW sites to satisfy specific niche markets. In S. Kurniawan & P. Zaphiris (Eds.), Advances in universal Web design and evaluation (pp. 154-176). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Salih, S. (2002). Judith Butler. London: Routledge. Spender, D. (1995). Nattering on the Net: Women, power and cyberspace. Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press. van Zoonen, L. (2002). Gendering the Internet: Claims, controversies and cultures. European Journal of Communication, 17(1), 5–23. Wakeford, N. (1997). Networking women and grrrls with information/communication technology: Surfing tales of the World Wide Web. In J. Terry & M. Calvert (Eds.), Processed lives: Gender and technology in everyday life. London: Routledge.

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Wakeford, N. (2000). New media, new methodologies: Studying the Web. In D. Gauntlett (Ed.), Web.studies: Rewiring media studies for the digital age. London: Arnold. Weale, S. (2000). Women of the world click here! RetrievedFebruary7,2001,fromhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3952603,00. html

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS BEME.com: Women’s commercial online portal launched in the United Kingdom in February 2000 by IPC Media. BEME.com has established itself as one of the top three women’s websites in the U.K. By the end 2000, BEME.com was garnering 1.5 million page impressions per month and was named the Best Designed Magazine on the Web. Commercial Online Portal: These are portals that are either general in their services or niche portals that specialise in specific interests: however: in all cases they are seen as “gateways” to the Internet content, acting as points of reference for the users on how to view and organise the information they access online. A commercial portal is one conceived and created as a business. Reliant on financial revenue for its survival, it is subject to financial goals which, if unmet, threaten its closure Feminist Framework: A feminist framework occupies a political position seeking changes on behalf of women by focusing on promoting an understanding of women as a group amongst many within any society identified by different needs, desires, values, and priorities due to their role and the position they occupy within these societies. The feminist framework offers new understanding of gender, questioning its “naturalness” in relation to the man/woman dichotomy by shifting the old

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patterns of description to reformulate them as fluid, culturally located negotiations. Gendered Design Practice: Design practice is understood as a combination of the process of designing (making) and its design outcome (the resulting artifact). The term also makes reference to design practitioners’ ability to not only create something new within pre-existing conditions, but also to imbue it with meaning decoded and understood by others. In cases where gender is not explicitly recognised as a factor of (or having influence over) the design process (or outcome) the design practice is then termed as gendered. Thus, gendered meanings are taken for granted leading to perpetuating gender stereotypes that disadvantage women through design processes or its outcomes. Interactivity: For the most part, interactivity is understood as an ability to facilitate interactions similar to interpersonal communications. Considered from within a feminist framework, interactivity is situated within a social, cultural, political and economic context. From design perspective it is an activity that sets online communication apart from other media such as print, film or animation. IPC Media: The leading U.K. consumer magazine publishing company and the largest publisher of women’s magazines in Europe. Women’s Magazine Publishing Industry: A specific area of commercial publishing practice often referred to as the commercial production of women’s glossy magazines or “glossies” for female readers. With the introduction of the Internet, the term has also been used to indicate online sites specifically targeting female audiences that subscribe to the traditional values and practices of the women’s paper magazine production and publication.

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Chapter 23

Social Interaction Technologies A Case Study of Guanxi and Women Managers’ Careers in Information Technology in China

Jiehua Huang Guangzhou University, China and Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland Iiris Aaltio University of Jyväskylä, Finland

ABSTRACT This chapter explores a relationship between social interaction technologies (SIT) and guanxi, a major Chinese informal style of networking, in the context of the careers of women managers in the information technology (IT) field in China. Addressing women’s under-representation in non-traditional occupations (such as IT), prior research has established that networking, especially informal, is an important career management tool for women. Recent advances in social capital theory and social network analysis provide a framework for understanding the role of social processes in achieving career success. Today, the growing Web-based social and professional networking in China weighs against the traditional forms of relationships, such as personal networks based on guanxi. The study indicates that SIT and guanxi should be viewed as complementary rather than mutually exclusive influences.

INTRODUCTION Careers are a window to a network of values of the institutions where they are actually made. Recent advances in social capital theory have helped analyze the ways in which the social networks of individuals affect their careers in organizations (Burt, 1997; Coleman, 1990; Ibarra, 1995; Kanter, 1977; Lin, 1999; Podolny & Baron, 1997). This theoretical DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch023

background provides scholars with knowledge for understanding the role of social processes in career success. Information technology (IT) and information and communication technology (ICT) refer to an industry that broadly covers the technologies of information and communication. In China, as in other countries around the world, more and more women are today working in this field as managers—although only a few at the top level (Aaltio & Huang, 2007). Ahuja (2002) stated that the barriers to female positioning in the IT industry

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are due to an “old boys network”—a large pool of more qualified and experienced male professionals, the lack of female role models and mentors, and established discriminatory practices. Kaplan and Niederman (2006) argued that inadequate social networks, skill obsolescence and limited vertical/internal job mobility present challenges to the career success of women in IT. In contrast, women who have more demographically diverse networks generally experience greater levels of career success (Cox, 1994; Ely, 1994; Ibarra, 1995). A lack of social networks and role models has been related to women’s under-representation in the field of IT. Social relations and ties between actors characterize today’s business culture. As expected, prosperity and social capital cumulate in the interplay between human partners and organizations (Bourdieu, 2005). There is a trend to understand business life more as a product of collective and shared interactions than separate individual efforts. This collectivity is not universal by nature but has country-specific and local features. Recently, guanxi, a major Chinese networking style, has been receiving a heightened research interest in the Western management field, with a major expansion in the literature on the growing importance of networks, networking, and network organizations (Puhakka, 2002; Steier & Greenwood, 2000; Tallberg, 2004; Wellman, Chen, & Dong, 2002). This is partly driven by the continuing and changing impact of ICT and the technological and social aspects of networking through them (Wellman, 2001). The very nature of ICT, incorporating both information and communication technologies, reflects how computers, communication, and social networks have become intertwined in people’s everyday life. This is also in line with the argument according to which networks have a positive impact on entrepreneurial success (Puhakka, 2002; Steier & Greenwood, 2000). Leung (2000) points out that gender issues and Chinese cultural traditions, such as guanxi, are major factors influencing career development and managerial growth in China.

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The development of Internet-based social networking sites have advanced social interaction, collaboration, and sharing of information (Boase & Wellman, 2006; Kavanaugh, Reese, Carroll, & Rosson, 2005), which weigh against the traditional forms of relationships—the social network and guanxi. According to Barry Wellman and collegues (2002), guanxi can be studied with a social network approach. According to social network analysis (SNA), Internet-based social networking enlarges people’s weak ties, which are different from the strong ties in guanxi and are essential to the effective spread of information between people in separate clusters (Burt, 1992; Granovetter, 1973; Wellman, Chen & Dong, 2002). From this perspective, SIT should enhance women’s networks and, therefore, benefit women IT managers’ career development. Based on a social network perspective and guanxi, this chapter explores the impact of SIT and guanxi on women managers’ careers in the context of the IT field in China. The chapter starts with a literature review on guanxi, SIT, and women’s careers in IT. The authors then analyze the results of a case study conducted in China and continue by covering future trends, a discussion, and a conclusion.

BACKGROUND Guanxi and guanxi ties In the Chinese language, guanxi has different meanings. It could refer to one of three things: (1) the existence of a relationship between people who share a group status or are related to a common person, (2) the actual connections with people and frequent contact between them, or (3) a contact person with little direct interaction (Bian, 1994). Commonly, guanxi is defined as the special relationships that two individuals have with each other, referring to a relationship between a person who needs something and a person who has the ability to give something.

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According to Fei (1992), the Chinese society is organized by concentric guanxi circles, extending outward from the family (the core) to relatives, friends, and business colleagues. The core of Chinese values is the differentiated attitudes toward parents, children, siblings, kinsmen, and friends, which Fei (1992) calls the “differentiated mode of association”: “No tie, no obligation, and no rights” (Lee & Dawes, 2005, pp. 29). Guanxi is based implicitly on mutual interests and benefits (Yang, 1994): such as, respect towards seniors coupled with respect from juniors, or the soliciting and giving of favors explicitly or implicitly (Wong & Slater, 2002). Yang (1994) categorizes interpersonal relationships (guanxi) in China into three groups: (1) between family members; (2) between familiar people (such as neighbors, friends, classmates and colleagues); and (3) between strangers or mere acquaintances. This classification is consistent with that of Hwang (1987) who argues that the relationships with family members primarily consist of expressive ties, with strangers of instrumental ties, and with familiar people of mixed ties. Instrumental ties are unstable and temporary, impersonal and utilitarian, and based on the norm of equity (resource allocation based on contribution). Mixed ties are in between and somewhat permanent and stable, such as those between friends, within the hometown, the same area, and the same school.

The Impact of SIT on Social Networking and guanxi The development of web-based social networking sites weighs against the traditional forms of relationships—personal networks and guanxi— and has significant implications for the way people acquire information, interact with each other, learn, and entertain themselves. Social networking proliferated before the coming of the Internet and the web. Since the 1990s, there has been a shift from place-to-place networking towards person-to-person network-

ing, which Wellman (2001) calls networked individualism, meaning that people have flexible autonomy using social networks. This is enhanced by the application of the Internet and its progeny, following a myriad of SIT: instant messages, webcams connecting individuals; chat rooms connecting groups; and blogs, photoblogs and podcasts to broadcast thoughts, pictures and sounds. Meanwhile, there has been a global expansion of mobile phone use, carrying both voice and text. People’s social interactions are mediated by modernity and technologies. The authors use social networking software to find, connect and capitalize on thousands of current, former, and potential network members. To note, one person achieved nearly 8,000 connections through LinkedIn (Mayaud, 2005). Early literature on the Internet’s role in society often made assertions that were either extremely optimistic or pessimistic (Boase & Wellman, 2006). Recently, research has begun to address this issue by providing evidence about the relationship between Internet use and contacts with friends and family, the extent to which the Internet is used to form new relationships, and the web’s role in neighbor relations. Based on an investigation with 350 randomly selected English-speaking non-frail adult online Toronto residents, the results of Connected Lives Project (Wellman et al., 2006) supported the theory of networked individualism—the Internet does not turn people away from their supportive ties. Internet-based social interaction software help people get a variety of social support—major and minor goods and services as well as emotional support. The findings from these studies indicate that the web adds to the overall volume of communication, helping maintain various kinds of relationships. Networking through Internet-based SIT can reduce the perceived hierarchies because gender, social class, ethnicity, age, life-style, etc. are less visible. Social capital is captured from embedded resources in social networks. The premise behind

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this notion is investment in social relations with expected returns (Lin, 1999). This is parallel with the nature of guanxi—reciprocity (Luo, 1997). For example, when one person offers a favor to another, the recipient must do an even bigger favor for him/her later: “The concept of social capital in a Chinese social context has been closely linked with the concept of guanxi” (Putnam, 2004). Guanxi also carries the meaning of power, social status, social capital, and resource transmission. It has been found that guanxi is a source of sustainable competitive advantage (Tsang, 1998), and Chinese managers’ career success depends on ties within and outside their firm (Dittmer & Lu, 1996). However, during the past two decades, China has experienced great economic and technological progress, which in turn affects people’s social interaction. As people are more mobile, the types of ties that lead to strong guanxi are presumably harder to maintain. The increase of information flows through SIT also weighs against the traditional forms of relationships, as people have more direct sources of information and influence. From this perspective, the application of SIT can surpass the hierarchical organization structure and gendered guanxi (examined in more detail in the third section) to facilitate personal networks, especially women’s networking.

SIT and Women’s Careers in IT The extensive application of IT has restructured the world economic system and exerted a great influence on women’s role in the world economies. However, the IT industry is also one of the most competitive industries around the world. Most IT companies are in their infancy. Growth in business and changes in the business environment have happened continuously. This situation causes pressure on management. In IT companies, there exists a need to accordingly develop management and leadership methods. Rapid movements in business have decreased systematic development. The span of planning has become short-term and

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plans may be controlled yearly, quarterly or even monthly. Profitability is now more important than growth. The most important target of human resource management (HRM) is personnel motivation and satisfaction. The CEOs of small IT companies take care of personnel matters with other responsibilities in the firm. The most important HRM practices in small-medium enterprises of IT seem to be recruitment, familiarizing, development, and motivation. In contrast, HRM processes in bigger companies are more precisely defined and planned. A study conducted by the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University shows that in a typical IT enterprise in China, females are concentrated in the departments of human resources and administration (73%) and marketing and financing (60%). From women employees, 12% are research employees and 16% of those in manufacturing (Shen & Ge, 2005). Women IT managers face both opportunities and challenges in their career. On one hand, they have passion and confidence. As among the female university graduates who can choose their career, the IT industry still takes precedence and becomes the most preferred occupation. Moreover, women’s average salary in the IT industry is 5 to 15% higher than that in other sectors (Shen & Ge, 2005). On the other hand, there are still many constraining factors preventing women’s career development in the IT industry. The report of the Blue Ribbon Panel (ITAA, 2003) lists five reasons for possible barriers women face in their entry into IT careers. These include the lack of role models and networking opportunities, the information gap about the academic requirements expected of high school students to enter the field, the unattractiveness of IT as a work environment, the lack of strong corporate commitment, and gender-related stereotypes that may impede women’s hiring and advancement opportunities. The lack of social networks and role models has been related to women’s under-representation in the IT field (Ahuja, 2002; Kaplan & Niederman,

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2006). Companies like hiring and promoting individuals with personal connections because those personal connections provide greater assurances that the individual will fit into the culture. Women in IT are still searching for appropriate expressions of behavior and values in organizations. Research has shown that women (in male dominated organizations) and minorities who have more demographically diverse networks generally experience greater levels of career success (Cox, 1994; Ely, 1994; Ibarra, 1995). The application of SIT makes it possible to facilitate women’s social networking. For example, WorldWIT (World Women. Insights. Technology) is the largest online networking group for women in business with free chapters in 24 countries. WorldWIT (2004) is the women’s version of social networking: a true community offering career advice, job opportunities, and business planning tips. As in “I know a guy who knows a guy,” it is the virtual solution to the old boys’ network. Mimi Francis, WorldWIT’s Chief Revenue Officer says: “Men tend to network on the golf course, which has historically left many professional women out in the cold. Today, women are networking on WorldWIT.” As the founder of WorldWIT, Liz Ryan says: “In today’s business climate, networking has become increasingly vital, especially for women. WorldWIT … is about making very real connections with other women who are hiring, mentoring, and building businesses.” Another study (Rutkowski et al., 2002) also indicates that Groupware, and particularly Group Support System (GSS) tools, support organizational co-ordination and interaction between various organizational structures. This implies that distance education, when employing group communication software, can produce educational results as good as face-to-face learning.

Case Study To explore guanxi from gender and career perspectives, the authors conducted an empirical study

focusing on the characteristics of guanxi bases of women managers in IT in Mainland China1 (Huang & Aaltio, 2008). The study is based on a social network theory perspective, which focuses on the structure of social interactions and how these structures enhance or constrain access to valued resources (Burt, 1992, 1997; Granovetter, 1973). Concerned with the fact that only few women in China play a part in the management, the authors specifically explore the composition and structure of these women IT managers’ guanxi bases and how they affect their careers and lives, partly using SNA. With the snowball sampling method (Singleton & Straits, 1999), the data about 21 women IT managers in southern China (Aaltio & Huang, 2007) was collected based on a face-to-face in-depth interviews and a questionnaire. The participants were asked to provide information on their associates in five network contents. The name-generator approach (Marsden, 1987) can be employed to ascertain the composition of social networks. This approach focuses on a core discussion network. A simplified name-eliciting method that allowed the associates to remain anonymous was adopted. This works well to help dismiss the suspicion of the participants. Since previous results indicate that 95% of people report fewer than five individuals in their (core discussion) networks (Marsden, 1987), the participants were asked to identify up to five persons with whom they had discussions: (1) to seek advice on a decision you have to make, (2) to seek information on what is going on in the organization, (3) to seek help when you want to influence the outcome of an important decision at work, (4) to seek help in times of (personal) crisis, and (5) to socialize with outside work. The five questions summarize the network contents of these IT women concerning their work and lives. For each associate identified, the participant was asked about her relationship with the associate and the associate’s demographic characteristics, including age, gender, education and marital status. Table 1 shows the characteristics of the

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Table 1. Demographic characteristics of the participants and their associates

Age

Participants (%) (n = 21)

Associates (%) (n = 190)

100

46.4

≤30

23.8

21.6

31-35

28.6

23.2

36-40

33.3

22.1

41-45

14.3

10.0

45+

23.2 A

Married

52.4

72.1

College degree (Master’s degree and above)

90.5 (33.4)

69.5 (24.2)

A

29% of the participants were married and had one child.

participants and their associates. By exploring the composition and structure of the associates, the authors found that the guanxi bases of these IT women are limited. The findings show that the average network size of these women IT managers is about 9 individuals. Compared with 14 individuals in the study of Chow and Ng (2004) in which the majority of the participants were male, our participants’ average network size is significantly smaller. The study also found the effect of female-to-male dyads, which are mainly within power-related and work-related guanxi. Women, who have a successful managerial career in IT, get wide guanxi networks and their career success network ties, especially power ties, are with men. For example, the majority of these women’s supervisors are over 45 years old (50%) and male (78.6%). The main role of supervisors is that of influence. This indicates the masculine and hierarchical managerial model even in a new industry such as IT. Female-to-female dyads are mostly related to socialized guanxi. The results demonstrate that the first three largest guanxi bases are coworkers, classmates, and family members. This indicates that women IT managers’ networks are mainly work-related (or professional) networks, although personal

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life and family ties are also important for them. Coworkers, especially supervisors, are the most important guanxi base for these women managers concerning career and work. Classmates are also a very important guanxi base to the participants. As one participant reported: “Classmates are important for me because by interacting with my classmates, it’s quite possible for me to get access to their networks.” Obviously, the role of classmates is in personal life and career networks. The age of classmates shows that most of them are younger than the participants; this indicates the tendency of on the job training and lifelong learning in the IT industry; and, it supports the research finding that women are more likely than men to try to learn more and to want more education as career tactics (Granrose, 2007). The results indicate that the majority of guanxi ties which have an impact on career (influence ties) are with older men, and these networks of ties are smaller than those of men’s as shown by Chow and Ng (2004). This implies a relatively narrow scope for women’s informal networking and weak ties. Researchers have argued that informal networks and weak ties are more important for women’s career success (e.g., Burt, 1992; Travers & Pemberton, 2000). However, women in organizational settings are often reported to experience a limited or indeed no access to informal networks (Kanter, 1977; O’Leary & Ickovics, 1992). This means that women’s access to the instrumental resources is limited, which are critical to one’s job effectiveness and career advancement, and are allocated by these networks. Besides, informal networks also provide friendships and social support. The disadvantages of experiencing difficulty in getting access to the networks include restricted knowledge of what is going on within the organization (or information) and difficulty in forming alliances—these in turn may be linked to career advancement issues, such as limited mobility and the glass ceiling effect. Obviously, networking with supervisors (most of them are older men, as shown by the results)

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concerning work and career issues is one of the strategies these women IT managers adopt. This to some degree limits women’s weak ties. Besides, all formulations and applications of the concept of guanxi are based on the idea of reciprocity as a key mechanism by which relationships may be transformed into a variety of assets. Researchers differ with respect to assessing the effects of reciprocal obligations on action. Some see reciprocity as the primary basis of social identity, leading to strong social relations, conveying a sense of belonging, and creating a clear normative order within which individuals can optimize their performance (Podolny & Baron, 1997). Others view reciprocity as a potential source of “structural arthritis” (Burt, 1997) because cohesive social ties may lock individuals into a continued mutual exchange. For example, one participant said: “I have good guanxi with my supervisor. Because of this, I can always get positive support and valuable information from him for my work. You know this is very important for my career…Of course I work hard in return.” There are two sides to a coin; thus reciprocity obligations, cemented by strong social ties, may make it difficult for individuals to extricate themselves from those obligations and to cultivate new relationships. Sometimes guanxi receivers feel a burden to “pay back.” As one participant emphasized, “After I got support or help from my coworkers, especially from my supervisors, I always think of “paying back” somehow one day. Sometimes this is really a burden for me. Because of this, I gave up an opportunity to work for another company with higher salary last year… I don’t know if I will regret, but this is what I should follow…” This implies that women are experiencing some emotional costs for maintaining the guanxi ties. From the in-depth interviews, it was found that in the gendered IT industry, women managers are finding a way of coping with the limited network. They either try to cope at work by somehow negating their gender, by being an “it” in IT (Adam et al., 2006), by networking in accordance with the

principles of guanxi, or by using SIT to widen their networks and keep contact with their networks. Some participants talked about how they have joined the web-based communities and share information among members. SIT provide people with alternative ways of acquiring information and interacting with each other regardless of time, space, and physical presence. This makes it possible for these women to surmount gendered guanxi and the perceived hierarchies in an organization because the gender, social class, age, etc. are less visible in SIT-based networking. Based partly on the social network analysis, SIT-based networking can enlarge women’s weak ties and release the “paying back” burden for these women. For instance, one participant reported she got her recent position (vice president) through an Internet-based headhunter company. Another participant, who is the CEO of a cross regional IT company, talked about how she managed her company through an Internet-based platform. When talking about SIT and guanxi, one participant noted: “Networking through SIT looks easy and simple; however, there exists uncertainty because of less, even no commitment and obligation between networking individuals. From this perspective, networking by guanxi is more efficient because it is based on obligation and long-term trust.” This indicates that the use of SIT as an efficient way of networking for women IT managers has just begun. This also implies the significant effect of the traditional culture on people’s lives and communications. Overall, the study indicates that SIT and guanxi should be viewed as complementary rather than mutually exclusive or separate influences.

SIT and Women in China Traditionally people in China, as in other emerging markets and developing nations, rely on their social networks as information sources, and public institutions tend to be fairly weak as citizen resources. With the development of the information technology, social software has shown

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itself to have significant potential for people’s interactions. According to The 22nd Statistics Report of China’s Networks Development issued by the China National Net Information Center (CNNIC, 2008), the domestic IT industry and market in China have undergone rapid development, with the number of Internet users reaching 253 million and the number of mobile phone users nearing 592 million. Chinese female netizens totaled 46.4% of all Internet users, which has formed a subset of IT users with strong potential. Compared with men’s use of the Internet, Chinese women mainly use the web for entertainment, sensibility needs, information, and networking with friends. It is interesting to note that more women (17%) than men (7%) in China use the Internet for developing friendships (Shen & Ge, 2005). This indicates that Chinese women emphasize the social networking function of the Internet more than men. Networking online affords people the ability to maintain larger networks of weak ties with a minimum effort, however, such networks can be viewed as physically distant, sparsely knit, transitory, socially diverse, and weak (Boase & Wellman, 2006; Wellman, 2001). Since the face-to-face network is still a key component of people’s daily life in China, it is not surprising that mobile phone usage is outpacing the rate of Internet adoption. The use of text messaging through mobile phone is an inexpensive way to maintain contacts with friends and family; it is also a mode of information exchange within a professional network. Social software applications used for networking (e.g., QQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, and Google Talk) have been widely adopted among certain demographics for a variety of purposes including career management. In China, a growing number of companies are applying SNS for employment recruitment (e.g., Zhaopin Ltd.2). Weblogs (or blogs) are becoming a “new form of mainstream personal communication” (Rosenbloom, 2004, p. 31) for millions of people

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to publish and exchange knowledge and information as well as to establish networks or build relationships. In 2007, there were about 46.98 million bloggers in China, which is about 26.1% of the netizens (CNNIC, 2007). Recent releases of blogging tools provide enhanced features for between-blog interactivity, thus promoting the creation of social networks among bloggers. As innovative social interaction technologies, these advances enable web-based word-of-mouth (through blogging activities) and demonstrate that it is not accidental that just a few years ago blogs were identified as being among the top “10 tech trends to watch” by the Fortune magazine (Vogelstein et al., 2005, p. 43). Additionally, webbased SIT are being increasingly used by Chinese women as efficient tools for compensating their inadequate networking in the male-dominated industries.

FUTURE TRENDS Since guanxi networks include connotations that are gendered and culturally bound, the authors argue that the research of professional networking in China needs to address the nature of social ties that create networks. These networks can be based on local and country-specific traditions even when displaying similarity with Western prototypes at the surface level. The present case study indicates that the application of SIT to personal networking can weaken the negative impact of gendered guanxi and expand the women’s network. The implementation of SIT can be a positive strategy for women’s managerial careers. These findings have important implications for organizations’ human resource management practices. Future research should focus more specifically on the impact of SIT on social networking in China, especially from the gender perspective: for example, showing how women can be trained to use SIT, comparing how women and men can equally benefit from using SIT, and drafting a legal framework

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to support the application of SIT. Furthermore, the application of SIT within cross-cultural contexts should be examined to understand how Chinese women’s social networking differs from their Western counterparts, considering guanxi as a central concept in Chinese society.

important cross-gender networking concerns. Based on the results of the above case study and social network perspective, the authors can explicate about the ways SIT may impact women managers’ networking: •

CONCLUSION The under-representation of women in the IT sector worldwide, especially in managerial positions, has been widely documented in the research literature. Most of the studies reported that inadequate networking and the lack of female role models and mentors are the main barriers for women entering the IT industry. The case study conducted in China and presented in this chapter also found evidence of the gendered guanxi and women’s limited networking abilities (Huang & Aaltio, 2008). In practice, women respond to male-dominated organizational cultures in a variety of ways, including the development of female associations or networks (Mills & Murgatroyd, 1991). Within the IT field, women have taken advantage of the emerging SIT to develop support networks to reach beyond organizational boundaries and create associations in cyberspace (see Lahey, 2002; WorldWIT, 2004). These female-centered formal and informal networks are aimed at encouraging and promoting IT as a professional field for women and developing effective networking and mentoring relationships for women across industries and IT interests (Ahuja, 2002). However, some scholars warn that organizations should be careful about the obvious matching of women with women in mentoring programs. Kaplan and Niederman (2006) argue that selecting women as mentors is perfectly suitable as long as the potential mentor has a diverse and powerful social network; otherwise, all else equal, a potential female protégé could arguably benefit more by being paired up with a male mentor, as this would address the

•

•

•

Advice and Information: Both consultation (advice) and information (guanxi) have been successfully linked to the strength-ofweak-ties hypothesis (Granovetter, 1973). Therefore, SIT may allow for better networking, enlarge the possibility to seek advice and new information by using their effective communication abilities, and lessen the gender inequality based on “old boys” networks. Influence: By using SIT, women can overcome old normative barriers which are based on traditions and gender stereotypes. Seeking Help: SIT may help women contact their affective guanxi networks (family, relatives, friends, etc.) when they are distant. Socializing: SIT can help women build careers and use networking strategies based on technology applications.

Overall, although the impact of SIT is not revolutionary, new technologies enlarge possibilities for networking and create situations in which the impact of traditions, norms, and gendered values is lessened. Therefore, the influence of SIT is empowering for women who build careers in the IT industry. For most of the women IT managers, a career epitomizes the advancement of individual abilities. Successful functioning in professional networks requires efficient communicational skills. Because much of their work is based on collaboration, women need to adapt to this reality if they seek to be successful in their careers. At the same time, the increased use of the multidimensional networks of organizations as vehicles for economic and political decision-making requires a distinct set

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of organizational, communication, and managerial skills, in which women have traditionally been considered proficient (Fountain, 2000; Morrison, Randall, & Van Velsor, 1992). Currently, the IT industry is in transition between the old sense of identity, which is based on masculine culture (the technical side), and the new one, based on inherently female values (the communication side) (Colwill & Townsend, 1999). Gender-biased cultural expectations still create a barrier to female managers’ careers in IT. However, the changing nature of IT work and the implementation of SIT opens it to diverse expertise and values. Considering that China is in transition at both social and organizational levels, the authors suggest that IT organizations may develop mentoring programs, especially informal ones, to address inadequate representation of women in the field and to support women managers’ careers in IT. Besides, women need to be more strategic when deciding how to develop relationships within and outside their organizations, which will benefit their career development in the field of IT.

Bian, Y. J. (1994). Work and inequality in urban China. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Boase, J., & Wellman, B. (2006). Personal relationships: On and off the Internet. In D. Perlman & A. L. Vangelisti (Eds.), Handbook of personal relations (pp. 709-723). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2005). The social structure of the economy. UK: Polity Press. Burt, R. S. (1992). Structural holes: The structure of competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burt, R. S. (1997). The contingent value of social capital. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42(2), 339–363. doi:10.2307/2393923 Chow, I. H., & Ng, I. (2004). The characteristics of Chinese personal ties (guanxi): Evidence from Hong Kong. Organization Studies, 25(7), 1075–1093. doi:10.1177/0170840604045092

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Social Network: Refers to a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency (such as values, visions, exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, trade, or sexual relations). Social Network Analysis (SNA): Views the attributes of individuals as less important than their relationships and ties with other actors within the social network. SNA has turned out to be useful for explaining many real-world phenomena, but it leaves less room for individual agency. It provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Career: Consists of the sequential choices made by an individual, and is a development process of creating and managing a professional identity and personality. Culture: A process of constructing shared meaning and is based on a unique human capacity for self-consciousness and awareness of others. Gender: Refers to the cultural construction of femininity and masculinity. Guanxi: A central concept in Chinese society, is defined as a personal network, a network of ties, or as a special relationship between two or more individuals, which has wide cultural implications Guanxi Base: Defined as a shared common identification held by two or more persons.

ENDNOTES 1

2

This study was supported by the Social Sciences Fund of Guangdong Province, China (No. XLY0313). Founded in 1997 and with branch offices in over 30 cities, Zhaopin Ltd. (www.zhaopin. com) is one of the leading recruitment and management agencies in China. Its services include: Internet-based and traditional media recruitment, campus recruiting, human resources outsourcing, corporate training, and staff assessment. Currently, there are hundreds of online-based recruitment companies in China.

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Chapter 24

Online Participation Shaping the Networks of Professional Women Helen Donelan The Open University, UK Clem Herman The Open University, UK Karen Kear The Open University, UK Gill Kirkup The Open University, UK

ABSTRACT Social interaction technologies present women with powerful tools to extend their network of professional contacts. This chapter considers the use of online networks by professional women, specifically those working in science, engineering, and technology, who may face particular barriers in advancing their careers; it explores the potential offered by online participation and interaction for overcoming these difficulties. Recent discussions about women’s networks and networking strategies are extended, and the authors investigate how these strategies are being affected by the growth and evolution of online social networking. Different approaches to online networking for career development are discussed, together with an examination of associated Internet and Web 2.0 technologies and the potential these approaches and tools present to women working in science, engineering, and technology.

INTRODUCTION Networking with other professionals may benefit an individual’s career and bring advantages to the organisations that they are affiliated with (Brass, Galaskiewicz, Greve, & Tsai, 2004; Emmerick, Eu-

wema, Geschiere, & Schouten, 2006). Networking enables new business contacts to be established (Lea, Yu, Maguluru, & Nichols 2006) and provides the means by which to sustain existing ones. Associated activities may include: participating in organised events or training opportunities; socialising; and the sharing of experiences, exemplars of good practice,

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch024

Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

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knowledge and resources. There has been much interest recently in how online networks are being used for professional networking purposes (Stone, 2007). That is, using tools such as web forums and social network sites to foster the relationships, and undertake the activities, described above. Online networking strategies may be particularly beneficial to women working in male-dominated professions. The challenges facing these women are numerous and can be exacerbated by limited possibilities for face-to-face networking (Brass, 1985) or by participation in networks that are not well recognized or connected (Vinnicombe, Singh, & Kumra, 2003). Online environments, where connections may be formed regardless of physical restrictions, can be used to provide networking opportunities for women striving for career development. Science, engineering and technology are sectors that have particular difficulties in recruiting and retaining women (Bebbington, 2002). This chapter considers the use of online networks by women working in these sectors in the U.K. It explores the different approaches to online networking that can be adopted and the tools available to participate in such activities. The chapter discusses the potential these approaches and tools present to women, and whether this potential is currently being realized. The current state of research pertaining to online social networking by women in general is also reviewed.

BACKGROUND The challenges facing women working in professions (such as science, engineering and technology) are well documented (Bebbington, 2002; Fox & Anderson, 2004; Michie & Nelson, 2006). Issues such as “macho” workplace cultures, inflexible career paths and reward systems, and extreme work pressures are still a major contributor to the low entry and retention rates (Bebbington, 2002; Fox & Anderson, 2004; Hewlett et al., 2008). However,

isolation and restricted opportunities for interacting with other professionals can exacerbate these problems. Inadequate social networks can limit progression opportunities (Kaplan & Niederman, 2006), provide access to too few role models and lead to isolation and insecurities (Hewlett et al., 2008; McCarthy, 2004). This chapter focuses on science, engineering and technology since the challenges facing women employed in these sectors are particularly prominent. However, the issues presented and patterns of online networking activity observed may also be pertinent in other male-dominated professions. Different approaches to tackle the networking difficulties facing women are being used. One response has been the formation of women’s corporate, public or professional face-to-face networks (McCarthy, 2004; Singh, Vinnicombe, & Kumra, 2006). Professional networks aim to overcome organizational and social barriers that may be present and provide a platform for women to meet and share career development strategies. Features that these environments provide include support, extended access to female role models and contemporaries (Singh, Vinnicombe, & Kumra, 2006) and relationships fostered within a social atmosphere. However, to achieve work-life balance, time constraints are often in place and these can limit travel options and render some of these face-to-face networks inaccessible. Therefore, additional communication channels that facilitate interaction over long-distances and support asynchronous participation could be beneficial. The growing online social networking culture is increasingly being used as a tool for career progression (Boyd & Ellison, 2007; Gefter, 2006). Many professionals have been using e-mail, mailing lists and web forums for conducting career or business related interactions for well over a decade. As Internet technologies and applications evolve, social network sites are becoming more and more popular for facilitating online social interactions. In addition, specialist career-based social network sites are now available that allow people to increase

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their professional visibility through the building of an online professional profile and a network of work-based contacts.

ONLINE NETWORKING FOR WOMEN’S CAREER DEVELOPMENT Online networking encompasses an extensive range of activities and interactions. Categorising different types of online networks is complex, as their nature can vary significantly over time with the composition and requirements of members and the evolution of social interaction technologies. We can, however, compare different approaches and specific tools that are currently being employed. We consider how these are being used to extend women’s access to other professionals and the impact this has on career development.

Approaches to Online Networking The term network-centred can be used to describe environments such as web forums and discussion groups, where a definable group is created that people may subsequently join or subscribe to. These groups may be stand-alone networks that have found a niche and exploited the Internet to connect a group of people with the same professional interests for the first time. They may also exist as a subsidiary of a larger existing online or offline network or organisation. Some of these groups are information-orientated, where the primary aim is distribution of information relevant to specific groups of people. These groups are typically characterised by a one-way online exchange, although discussions may arise infrequently on a member-wide basis. The relationships between members are likely to be weak (Haythornthwaite, 2000). Whilst it is debateable how much networking takes place in such groups, they can facilitate some discussion and do provide a means of sharing information throughout a group of people with similar pro-

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fessional interests. In this way they extend each member’s access to other professionals, providing many diverse, and potentially very useful, contacts. Alternatively, these groups may have a more interaction-orientated focus. That is, they exist primarily to provide access to other professionals for advice (technical, professional or even personal) or support. Whilst the distribution of information may still be one of the uses, here members are more likely to know other members and one-to-one and/or one-to-many online exchanges occur as a matter of course. The boundaries between information-oriented and interaction-orientated online networks are blurred and some networks may change between the two at different stages of the network’s evolution. Others may more obviously be one of the two types. For example, mailing lists are useful for the distribution of information but often provide a convenient channel for holding a conversation with many contributors. Online forums tend to be interaction orientated and encourage discussion between members, but they can also be used as a channel for information sharing. A second approach to online networking, which can be described as user-centred, is the use of Internet technologies, most noticeably Web 2.0 services (such as social network sites) to organise and structure one’s own social network. Instead of joining an existing group, this involves an individual creating her or his own online profile, extending invitations to others to join their network, and responding to similar invitations. Use of the Internet has evolved over recent years and social networking is now one of the major uses. The prevalence of social network sites has thus changed how online communities are structured (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Previously groups of people came together, focused around a personal or professional need or interest, but increasingly online communities are built around what social network analysts may call an egocentric or personal network (Wellman & Berkowitz, 1988). User generated content has become a major

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source of new online material, and the anonymity of chat rooms and web forums has been reduced, as users publicly display photos and personal information in the form of profiles. Messages are exchanged with others in blogs and on social network sites. There has been much speculation in published works, the media and numerous blogs on how these sites distort the boundaries between the private and public spheres and what the social impact is of this (Donath & Boyd, 2004; Gross & Acquisti, 2005). Inevitably, this also means the boundaries between personal and professional identities are becoming vague. Associations or friendships are being formed within these sites between colleagues, ex-colleagues, or other professional peers. This permits insights into each other’s personal lives which may not naturally occur through other day-to-day interactions. Boyd and Ellison (2007) discuss how this “collapse in social contexts” was one of the problems faced by some of the early social network sites. However, this does not seem to have hindered some of today’s thriving sites that, although having an unreservedly social foundation, are impinging on the professional arena. Emerging within some of these socially founded sites are profession-based groups of people coming together from all over the world with little in common but their area of work. Formerly, web-based forums or discussion groups endeavoured to recruit members and then relied upon them to regularly visit the website, make contributions and maintain the group dynamic. There is now, though, less demand placed on members to be proactive, because RSS feeds or forwarding of new postings to an individual’s e-mail account enable participation through more accessible routes. In comparison, the professionbased groups being formed within social network sites (e.g., Facebook, currently one of the most popular social network sites in the U.K.) appeal to people who are typically already visiting the site regularly for social purposes. This may therefore be more compatible with people’s

existing online habits and less of a challenge to incorporate regular interaction with the group into their daily routines. In addition, social network sites facilitate an atmosphere based on social and informal interaction rather than one dictated by professional protocols. Other associations being formed between the personal and professional via these sites are more surreptitious. For example, some employers have been reported to be using sites, such as Facebook, to perform unofficial background searches on potential employees (Bennett, 2008) whilst individuals could potentially use the same methods to retrieve information on potential interviewers and employers. These searches may be performed covertly to elicit information that may not be disclosed in a face-to-face interview or even in a one-to-one online exchange. These different approaches and orientations offer a wide range of potential environments for women wanting to develop and extend their network of work-based contacts. The next section identifies the main tools that may be used to create and support these networks.

Tools for Online Networking Social Network Sites The above two examples of online networks take a network-centered approach. That is, there is a definable group that exists for people to join or subscribe to. These lists and forums may well continue to be useful in meeting some needs that are effectively addressed through an enclosed online space. In contrast, social network sites adopt a user-centered approach. Individuals build a public profile and create a network of online connections with others (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). There are career-based social network sites, for example LinkedIn,1 that specifically target those wishing to build up a professional network of contacts. These place more emphasis on employment and educational information than on other personal details. Links are made between trusted

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contacts and introductions facilitated by others through these contacts. The resulting network may provide the career progression opportunities being sought. The public display of connections is an important part of all online social networks and provides other viewers with indirect information about an individual (Donath & Boyd, 2004). In career-based sites, where connections are intended to be professional contacts, links can serve as unofficial recommendations, as they are made by mutual consent and therefore some degree of professional regard between connected members must be present. In addition, more formal recommendations of individuals can be created, and made visible, within the site.

Web-Forums Web forums (also known as e-groups or bulletin boards) allow groups of people to post and read messages about topics of interest to them. The messages are typically organised into conversational threads of messages and responses. Some forums also indicate which messages have already been read by the user (Preece, 2000). Through technologies, such as web feeds, new postings made within these forums can be forwarded to an individual’s e-mail account. Various women’s online forums currently exist. Some of these are associated with professional institutions, such as BCSWomen, a specialist group of the British Computer Society.2 Others are stand-alone networks that are connecting women for the first time. Some of these networks, such as BCSWomen, have hundreds of members and have successfully targeted a subset of women that benefit, personally and professionally, from interactions with other women in similar circumstances. Due to the geographical distribution of members, online interaction within these groups is the major form of communication, although some also organise infrequent face-to-face gatherings that are both socially and professionally driven. Web forums tend to be more interaction orientated than the mailing lists discussed previously.

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Observation of the online discourse in some of these forums indicates that activity is often most intense following, and in response to, appeals for help or advice and messages announcing members’ professional achievements. The supportive atmosphere previously sought by women in face-to-face networking environments (Singh, Vinnicombe, & Kumra, 2006) is also a major characteristic of these groups. Whilst they are bringing together women with technical or professional skills in common and are often used to access technical expertise, for many involved it is the support and solidarity aspect that is the main reason for becoming and remaining a member (Donelan, Herman, Kirkup, & Kear, 2007).

Mailing Lists Mailing lists (also called listservs) are used extensively to distribute information relevant to specific groups of people (Preece, 2000, p. 237). Mailing lists aimed at connecting and distributing information to women in science, engineering and technology currently exist. For example, Daphnet3 is an unmoderated mailing list of over 400 professional women that forwards information and announcements from various sources such as the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) and the Women in Physics Group (WiPG) of the Institute of Physics. The relationships between most members of such lists are likely to comprise little more than vaguely recognising other members’ names. Although the interaction that takes place via these lists may be limited, they can facilitate discussion and provide a means of sharing information throughout a group of people with similar professional interests. The lists therefore serve to extend each member’s access to other professionals. The most conclusive indicator of career development taking place within a network would be individuals successfully finding new jobs or achieving promotion as a result of membership. Past research has shown that people find jobs more

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effectively through “weak” rather than “strong” ties: i.e., acquaintances rather than friends (Brass, Galaskiewicz, Greve, & Tsai, 2004; Granovetter, 1982). The implication is that mailing lists, which foster such weak ties, have the potential to provide new career development opportunities through extending access to a wider and more diverse network of contacts.

Online Networks and Women in Science, Engineering and Technology A recent study (Donelan, Herman, Kirkup, & Kear, 2007) has demonstrated the extent to which different types of online network are being used by women working in science, engineering and technology (SET) in the U.K. Some of the findings of this study are summarised below. The research found that many women in SET are still using the more traditional forms of electronic communication such as e-mail, mailing lists and web forums. These still fulfil many career development needs, particularly those associated with accessing information or communicating with existing work-based contacts. The majority of those taking part in the research used mailing lists or web forums associated with their profession and felt they had benefited from these through access to information that had led to the development of their skills or knowledge. In addition, online forums were also sought out by women in SET to provide new contacts that could offer new job or training opportunities, support and collaboration. The study found that career-based social network sites are being used by a number of women in SET. These sites provide a convenient and accessible method for maintaining weak connections to a large number of professional contacts. They also create an awareness of the contacts, and therefore routes for advice and information, available. However, it is currently difficult to measure the long-term potential these present.

Many women cite “increased professional visibility” [sic] as reasons for joining these sites; yet, unless this leads to other more measurable results, such as a new job, business or training opportunity, it is difficult to determine the career development taking place. The study also implied that sites with a social foundation, for example Facebook,4 are impinging on the professional arena. Users are adding colleagues and other professional peers to their online social networks, thus allowing these colleagues an insight into their personal lives which may not naturally occur through other day-to-day interactions. In addition to the well established women’s online networks hosted via web-forums, groups are also being formed within social network sites to connect women with similar professional backgrounds or interests. For example, the Women in Technology group within Facebook had over 800 members at the time of writing. Although these groups are profession-based, they are defined by the social focus of the site itself and are therefore founded on informal interactions rather than dictated by professional protocols. Women appear to be joining both the more traditional web forums and the newer groups on social network sites in search of support and collaboration partners (Donelan, Herman, Kirkup, & Kear, 2007). Finally, the study also indicated that the majority of women in profession-based groups on social network sites already had online or offline connections with at least a few other existing members when they joined, whereas the traditional forums were more likely to connect women for the first time. Other research has shown that, in a non-career context, the primary use of Facebook is to connect people who already have an offline association, rather than those who are looking for new connections (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007; Lampe, Ellison & Steinfield, 2006). It may be that many of the profession based groups on social network sites are actually emerging from existing women’s online networks. Whilst the enabling tools are changing, the membership base

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is remaining fairly static. It is worth considering the potential effects of this on established ties within existing mailing lists and online forums. As one member of a list or forum initiates exploration of a social network site they may extend invitations to their associates, including other list/forum members. One consequence of this is the emergence of new communication channels outside of the original group context. These new groupings may have a more social perspective and therefore influence the nature of the relationships. A second consequence is the potential to form new contacts through “friends of friends” that may not have occurred through the original group setting. Another consideration that merits further research is the effect that the use of different types of online tools has on the gender mix of the networks of professional women. Some of the networks referred to in this chapter, whilst not exclusively for women, are nevertheless aimed at women. The networks are therefore biased towards women’s needs and particularly promote women networking with women. These networks have been shown to provide the support that is often being sought by women. However, it would be interesting to compare the resulting levels of access to well-connected ties with those provided by mixed gender online networks. Such ties can be invaluable for career advancement. Women’s use of online communication tools has changed considerably over the past decade. Recent figures indicate that women are spending more time online with the primary purpose of communicating with others. In the U.K., a recent study has shown that whilst overall men account for 55% of all time spent online, in the 25-34 age range it is women that account for the majority of time online. The implication is that this is due to the rise of social networking (Ofcom, 2008). These figures are supported by a U.S. study which indicated that young women are more likely to use the Internet than young men and are more enthusiastic online communicators

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(Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2005). This is a sizable shift from the 1990s when there was significant concern about the digital gender divide and the danger of women missing out on the benefits of the emerging Information Society. The transformation of the Internet from the early hacker culture where women felt excluded or even harassed, and in particular the emergence of Web 2.0 applications, has resulted in a more equal gender balance in online usage in the U.K. and many other industrialized countries. Indeed patterns of Internet usage largely reflect the demographics, concerns and behaviours of mainstream society (Herring, 2004). Yet this “normalisation” also implies that inequalities and gendered patterns of interaction continue to be replicated within online environments and networks. The long-term impact of these trends on women’s professional networking and career progression is not yet known. The implications are that online social networking, where communities may be formed regardless of geography and time limitations and where social interactions play a central role may provide an effective and complementary networking solution for women striving for career advancement. Continued research is needed that explores how these environments can be used to enable women to extend their networks and make them more effective.

FUTURE TRENDS The possibilities that online networks present for career development continue to be explored, as new users are introduced to them through contacts who are already users themselves. Today’s graduates have had exposure to the online social networking phenomenon from an early stage. As these young people enter the workplace, it is likely that online social networking techniques will bear more and more significance on the way professional people network. As communication technologies and appli-

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cations evolve, new methods for forming and maintaining networks become available. Current developments in web-based social interaction technologies, described as “social software” or “Web 2.0” are offering a range of new approaches to communication and collaboration. Many of these can be used effectively for professional and personal development (Freedman, 2007). For example, networks of bloggers and micro-bloggers are developing which allow their members to share information, resources and experiences (Java, Song, Finin, & Tseng, 2007; Mason & Rennie, 2008; Pedersen & Macafee, 2007). Wikis can be used for similar purposes, typically within smaller groups of people who are interested in a common topic and who contribute collaboratively to creating knowledge and resources around this topic (Mason & Rennie, 2008). It will be interesting to see whether young women embarking on careers in male-dominated sectors use social networking and other collaborative communication technologies for developing and strengthening their work-based contacts. If so, we should consider how this alters the shape and substance of their social networks and interactions, in comparison to women who already have established careers and networking practices.

CONCLUSION Social interaction technologies present women with powerful tools to extend their network of professional contacts. Recent research has implied that online networks can provide women, particularly those working in the science, engineering and technology sectors, with a means for finding avenues of support and collaboration within a professional context. Many of the networks currently available are facilitated through mailing lists and web forums. However, associations and groups continue to emerge within social network sites. More women in science, engineering and technology begin to use specialist career-based social

network sites to increase their professional visibility. The interactions these facilities provide may help alleviate some of the problems professional women face in male-dominated professions. It is impossible to predict whether the tools currently being used by professional women to network online will survive more than a few years. Given the life span of most Internet technologies this seems unlikely. However, if they positively influence attitudes towards networking, and increase awareness of its importance for career progression, the effects may be more long lasting than the technologies themselves.

REFERENCES Bebbington, D. (2002). Women in science, engineering and technology: A review of the issues. Higher Education Quarterly, 56(4), 360–375. doi:10.1111/1468-2273.00225 Bennett, R. (2008, March 25). Plea to ban employers trawling Facebook. Times online. Retrieved July 21, 2008, from http://technology.timesonline. co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3613896. ece Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). Brass, D. J. (1985). Men’s and women’s networks: A study of interaction patterns and influence in an organisation. Academy of Management Journal, 28(2), 327–343. doi:10.2307/256204 Brass, D. J., Galaskiewicz, J., Greve, H. R., & Tsai, W. (2004). Taking stock of networks and organizations: A multilevel perspective. Academy of Management Journal, 47(6), 795–817. Donath, J., & Boyd, D. (2004). Public displays of connection. BT Technology Journal, 22(4), 71–82. doi:10.1023/B:BTTJ.0000047585.06264.cc

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Donelan, H., Herman, C., Kirkup, G., & Kear, K. (2007). Online participation and preferences: Shaping the professional networks of women in SET. UK Resource Centre for Women in SET. Retrieved January 10, 2008, from http://www. ukrc4setwomen.org/html/research-and-statistics/ partner-projects/ Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook “friends”: Social capital and college students’ use of online social networks sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), 1143–1168. doi:10.1111/j.10836101.2007.00367.x Emmerick, H. V., Euwema, M. C., Geschiere, M., & Schouten, M. (2006). Networking your way through the organization: Gender differences in the relationship between network participation and career satisfaction. Women in Management Review, 21(1), 54–66. doi:10.1108/09649420610643411 Fox, C., & Anderson, J. (2004). Asset 2003: The Athena survey of science, engineering and technology in higher education. London: The Athena Project. Retrieved June 6, 2006, from http://www. athenaproject.org.uk/reports/Report26.pdf Freedman, T. (2007) Web 2.0 in professional development. Retrieved July 30, 2008, from http://terry-freedman.org.uk/artman/publish/ article_1149.php Gefter, A. (2006). This is your space. New Scientist, 16, 46–48. doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(06)605009 Granovetter, M. (1982). The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited. In P. V. Marsden & N. Lin (Eds.), Social structure and network analysis (pp. 105-130). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Gross, R., & Acquisti, A. (2005). Revelation and privacy in online social networks (the Facebook case). In S. De Capitani di Vimercati & R. Dingledine (Eds.), Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (pp. 71-80). New York: ACM Press. 278

Haythornthwaite, C. (2000). Online personal networks: Size, composition and media used among distance learners. New Media & Society, 2(2), 195–226. doi:10.1177/14614440022225779 Herring, S. (2004). Slouching toward the ordinary: Current trend in computer mediated communication. New Media & Society, 6(1), 26–36. doi:10.1177/1461444804039906 Hewlett, S. A., Luce, C. B., Servon, L. J., Sherbin, L., Shiller, P., Sosnovich, E., & Sumberg, K. (2008). The Athena factor: Reversing the brain drain in science, engineering, and technology. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved July 31, 2008, from http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp. harvard.edu Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., & Tseng, B. (2007, August). Why we Twitter: Understanding microblogging usage and communities. Paper presented at the Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Data: The 9th WebKDD, San Jose, CA. Kaplan, D. M., & Niederman, F. (2006). Career management concerns for women in IT. In E. M. Trauth (Ed.), Encyclopedia of gender and information technology (pp. 84-89). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Lampe, C., Ellison, N., & Steinfield, C. (2006). A Face(book) in the crowd: Social searching vs. social browsing. In P. J. Hinds & D. Martin (Eds.), Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 167-170). New York: ACM Press. Lea, B., Yu, W., Maguluru, N., & Nichols, M. (2006). Enhancing business networks using social network based virtual communities. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 106(1), 121–138. doi:10.1108/02635570610641022 Mason, R., & Rennie, F. (2008). E-learning and social networking handbook. New York: Routledge.

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McCarthy, H. (2004). Girlfriends in high places: How women’s networks are changing the workplace. London: Demos. Retrieved April 21, 2006, from http://www.demos.co.uk Michie, S., & Nelson, D. L. (2006). Barriers women face in information technology careers: Self-efficacy, passion and gender biases . Women in Management Review, 21(1), 10–27. doi:10.1108/09649420610643385 Ofcom. (2008). Social networking: A quantitative and qualitative research report into attitudes, behaviours and use. Retrieved July 7, 2008, from http://www.ofcom.org.uk/advice/media_literacy/ medlitpub/medlitpubrss/socialnetworking/ Pedersen, S., & Macafee, C. (2007). Gender differences in British blogging. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4). doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00382.x Pew Internet and American Life Project. (2005). How women and men use the Internet. Retrieved July 7, 2008, from http://www.pewinternet.org/ PPF/r/171/report_display.asp Preece, J. (2000). Online communities: Designing usability; supporting sociability. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Singh, V., Vinnicombe, S., & Kumra, S. (2006). Women in formal corporate networks: an organisational citizenship perspective. Women in Management Review, 26(6), 458–482. doi:10.1108/09649420610683462 Stone, A. (2007, February 4). Get a lift from virtual networking. Times online. Retrieved July 31, 2008, from http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ business/entrepreneur/article1321067.ece

Vinnicombe, S., Singh, V., & Kumra, S. (2003). Making good connections: Best practice for women’s corporate networks. London: Opportunity Now. Retrieved May 2, 2006, from http:// www.opportunitynow.org.uk/resources/opportunity_now_publications/blank_2_1.html Wellman, B., & Berkowitz, S. D. (1988). Social structures: A network approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Career Development: The professional growth of an individual through activities associated with career progression and satisfaction. Career-Based Social Network Site: Social network site that allows individuals with career or business interests in common to form online connections. Mailing List: A list of subscribers who are recipients of distributed e-mail messages on a particular topic. Network: A set of relations or ties among people who have a common focus or goal. Networking: The process of maintaining ties with others in a social network and of generating new ties through contact with those people. Online Network: A network of people connected primarily via information and communication technologies. Social Network Site: A website that allows individuals to build a public profile, create online connections with other users of the site and extend their network through new associations. Web Forum: A web site providing facilities for holding asynchronous discussions between individuals with some common interest.

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ENDNOTES

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1 2

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http://www.linkedin.com http://www.bcs.org/bcswomen

http://www.wes.org.uk/daphnet.html http://www.facebook.com

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Chapter 25

Women Bloggers Seeking Validation and Financial Recompense in the Blogosphere Sarah Pedersen The Aberdeen Business School, The Robert Gordon University, UK

ABSTRACT Previous researchers investigating motivations for blogging have suggested mainly intangible benefits: for instance, documenting the author’s life, providing commentary and opinions, expressing deeply felt emotions, working out ideas through writing, and forming and maintaining communities and forums. The research detailed in this chapter focuses on the materialistic motivations of women bloggers in the U.K. and U.S. The author suggests that a need for validation and a strong financial stimulus should be added to this list of incentives.

INTRODUCTION This is not going be one of those spiritually uplifting blogs in which I name every fetus I’ve ever lost and then derive comfort from the fact that I have so many little angels looking down on me from heaven. No, this is going to be an angry blog, so please spare me the lectures about my attitude....I get plenty of opportunities to be a smiley-faced trooper in my real life. This is the only place where I get to be plain old pissed off at the universe.

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch025

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the motivations of women who blog, and the audience for whom they consider themselves to be writing. What makes a woman, like the one in the passage quoted above, write about her anguish, her hopes, her feelings of loss and pain and her plain anger in a publicly accessible website, where her words can be read by total strangers all over the world? What makes writing a blog different for a woman from simply writing in a diary or constructing a personal web page? And what, in particular, attracts women to journal blogging – North American studies suggest that more than half of all journal blog authors are women, that they persevere longer and write more (Henning, 2003) and that at least 50% of bloggers

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Women Bloggers Seeking Validation and Financial Recompense in the Blogosphere

in particular are female (Herring, Kouper, Schiedt, & Wright, 2004). This chapter summarises research into the motivations of women bloggers in the U.K. and the U.S. undertaken between 2005 and 2007 (see also Pedersen, 2006; Pedersen & Macafee, 2007; Pedersen 2007a). It suggests that female bloggers in particular are motivated by a need for validation and that there is a growing financial motivation to be found in the blogosphere, amongst men and women, but of particular interest to women looking for ways of earning income from home.

BACKGROUND From a handful of link-driven, internet-filtering sites in 1997 (Blood, 2000), blogging has taken off rapidly. The basic form of a blog is generally accepted to be brief, dated posts, collected on one web page. They are chronologically ordered rather than by topic or argument. At first, the use of blogs was restricted to those who had the necessary advanced programming skills. Such early blogs were primarily link-driven sites with editorial commentary – so-called filter blogs. However, with the introduction of free or inexpensive and easy-to-use blogging services, such as Blogger since 1999, the number of blogs has expanded rapidly (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, & Wright, 2004). In 2008, the blog-tracking directory Technorati claims to be tracking over 112 million blogs. Filter sites have been joined by a second type of blog – the journal blog, which is essentially an online diary. The newer journal blogs have a commentary concentrated style, which may also include links and reader responses, depending on the theme and purpose of the blog. Whereas filter blogs are heavily reliant on links to and from their site and the comments of readers, researchers have suggested that journal blogs tend to have smaller audiences and fewer links to other sites (Nardi, Schiano, & Gumbrecht, 2003 Herring, Kouper, Scheidt, & Wright, 2004). Links-driven

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filter blogs tend to be focused on external events, while journal bloggers write about events in their own lives. However, it is important not to make too rigorous a distinction between the two types of blog – filter bloggers often write about their own lives and thoughts and journal bloggers will comment on external events such as politics and international affairs. While blogging as a form of online social interaction has attracted a growing amount of academic investigation in recent years, until recently the majority of such research has focused on the North American experience. This imbalance is now being redressed in relation to non-English language blogging. For example, examination of the state of the Polish blogosphere by Trammell, Tarkowski, Hofmokl, and Sapp (2006), Tricas-Garcia and Merelo-Guervos’work on the Spanish blogosphere (2004), and Abold’s (2006) discussion of the use of blogs in the 2005 German election campaign. Work on the Asian blogosphere has also developed rapidly (for example, see Hsi-Peng & Kuo-Lun, 2007; Miura & Yamashita, 2007) There has also been a limited amount of research into the U.K. blogosphere. Discussion of gender issues within the U.K. blogosphere has been undertaken by Pedersen and Macafee (2007) while Auty (2005) has investigated the blogs of U.K. politicians. Thelwall and his team have undertaken interesting research into bloggers’ reporting of and reaction to events such as the London bombings and the Danish cartoon controversy, demonstrating that blog search engines offer a unique retrospective source of public opinion (Thelwell, 2006; Thelwall, Byrne, & Goody, 2007; Thelwell & Stuart, 2007). From the outset, journal blogs have been associated with women. The research of teams led by Herring, for example, suggests that women write more diary-like blogs while male bloggers write more of the opinion-focused ones (Herring & Paolillo, 2006), and that journal bloggers are at least 50% female (Herring et al, 2004), while Henning (2003) suggests that women bloggers

Women Bloggers Seeking Validation and Financial Recompense in the Blogosphere

persevere longer and write more. The number of journal blogs is growing and now accounts for around 70% of all blogs on the Internet – meaning that the number of women bloggers is rising. In fact, according to a Nielsen/Net Ratings report published in the U.K. in May 2007, young women aged between 18 and 34 are now the most dominant online group in the U.K., marking a major shift from traditional male internet dominance. It is suggested that British women in this age category spend, on average, around 60 hours a month online (Nielsen Net Ratings, 2007). However, a substantial number of women bloggers has not necessarily lead to female dominance in the blogosphere. Here, popularity is measured in terms of links and it has been remarked that men tend to receive more links to their blogs from other bloggers (for references to the extensive online debate, see Pollard, 2003; Ratliff, 2004; Garfunkel, 2005). Ratliff has also produced evidence that men’s postings receive more comments than women’s (2006). Meanwhile, women’s blogs make up only 15% (Henning, 2003) of all blogrolls (the list of recommended links on a blog), and women bloggers are more even-handed in their blogroll linkages than male bloggers, who demonstrate a clear preference for linking to other male bloggers (Pedersen, 2007b). It has also been claimed that a greater amount of attention is given in the media to male bloggers (Herring et al, 2004; Pedersen & Macafee, 2006), while the apparent lack of women bloggers on political issues prompted Taylor (2004) to ask, “Is Blog a Masculine Noun?” One of the reasons suggested for such an imbalance is that blogs about technology and politics, which are popular subjects throughout the Internet, are more likely to be authored by men. It is suggested that men are more likely to blog about external events, rather than personal ones, and are therefore more likely to be found by prospective readers when using a search engine. Such discussions have lead to the establishment of the BlogHer movement in the United States with the mission to create oppor-

tunities for women bloggers to pursue exposure, education and community.

WOMEN’S MOTIVATIONS FOR BLOGGING The work of teams led by Schiano and Nardi on the motivations of bloggers suggested five main reasons for blogging (Nardi, Schiano, & Gumbrecht, 2003; Schiano, Nardi, Gumbrecht, & Swartz, 2004). These are: documenting the author’s life, providing commentary and opinions, expressing deeply felt emotions, working out ideas through writing, and forming and maintaining communities and forums. The research detailed below focused on women bloggers’ motivations for blogging; it suggests that a need for validation and a strong financial motivation need to be added to this list of motivations. A pilot analysis of 50 U.K. and U.S. women’s blogs focused on women’s reasons for blogging. The blogs were selected using the randomizer function from the blog directory Globe of Blogs. The criteria for selection were that: (1) the blogger had to have posted on her blog within a month of the start of the selection process; (2) the blog was written in English; (3) the blogger was resident in either the U.K. or the U.S.; and (4) the blogger was a woman over the age of 18. It was decided to exclude teenage blogs from the sample. A large proportion of blogs is written by adolescents: bloggers under 19 made up 58.3% in Henning’s 2005 figures (2005b), up from 52.8% in 2003. This population of bloggers is usually studied separately, since teenage blogging is acknowledged by most researchers to be a very different type of online communication from that of adult bloggers, associated generally with the use of community sites such as Bebo and MySpace. Therefore, it was decided to focus only on bloggers over the age of 18, which also avoided many ethical issues (Huffaker, 2004; Kumar et al., 2004; Lenhart & Madden, 2005). The analysis focused on reported

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motivations for blogging stated either in the “About Me” section that most blogs offer or in the blog itself. Blogs usually contain an archives section where all previous blog entries can be read, and the majority of the blogs analysed for this research contained two or three years’ worth of entries in such archives. A second, larger, blog analysis plus a survey was undertaken in two stages the following year. Overall 160 U.K. and U.S. bloggers (equal numbers of men and women and equal numbers from each country) were surveyed about their approaches to blogging, including blogging techniques, habits, motivations and rewards. At the same time, data was collected directly from respondents’ blogs and by means of online tools. Statistics for the sampled blogs were obtained from a range of blog-monitoring sites. These included: the ranking of the blog on two blog directories: Technorati and The Truth Laid Bear; a figure for the number of inward links, averaged from Technorati and BlogPulse figures (over variable periods of time depending on the content of the blogs’ feeds); and the number of outward links and images in the current feed, expressed as figures per 1000 words, based on data from SurfWax. Characteristics of the blog that were visible to inspection were noted, following the grounded theory approach of Herring and others (2004). These included: (1) the age of the blog (in months), based on the starting point of the archives; (2) links in the blogroll; (3) the number and nature of enhancements to the blog, such as site meters and logos or links for other blog services; (4) if there was a site meter, whether visitor statistics were hidden; and, (5) where available, the average number of visitors per day. The bloggers were identified through the use of the blog directories - Globe of Blogs and BritBlog. Both directories offered the opportunity to identify a blogger’s home county or state, which meant that it was possible to ensure a wide coverage of both countries. In addition, a blog related to the research was

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established. This gave first-hand experience of the challenges of blogging and also offered the opportunity for further data collection since the surveyed bloggers were invited to comment on the research as it was ongoing, an opportunity which they took up with enthusiasm. Most women bloggers in the sample attempted to come to grips with their reasons for blogging at the start of writing their blogs. However, the motivations expressed at the start of a blogger’s career might change and adapt over time. As one blogger wrote: This site started as a rather sad collection of pages containing fonts, files, and a bit about me back in 1996. I started a ‘Thoughts’ page; a list of bulleted random thoughts updated every few months. At that point, I could count all the visitors on one hand and I knew who every one of them was. Now I get 50,000+ hits a month, so this page has become a lot less personal (e.g. I won’t lament about my deepest thoughts and feelings and write sad poems about my cat). I now blog for a variety of reasons and people back home use it to see what’s up with me, but it’s mostly a way to sneak in some creative writing when I’m not writing software user guides. Several of the blogs analysed were originally established as part of the writer’s career or studies. However, these blogs might become less focused. A librarian who had started her blog as part of her continuous professional development, “to stay informed about changes and developments in our field,” was surprised to find that this was not all she wanted to write about and that life outside the library continually intruded into her blog entries. She accepted this and adapted her blog. What was surprising is the way in which some bloggers refused to allow their blog to adapt to include references to matters outside its stated purpose. Recipe blogs were “phased out” because the blogger “rarely had anything to add”; a blog focused on the South Beach diet stopped when

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the diet stopped, but the blogger reported that she would start a more general blog instead – “I have so much else to write and the topic of this blog has limited me.” Some women even managed to keep more than one blog on the go at the same time to fulfil different needs. Several of these second blogs documented the writers’ sex lives, although one woman wrote a separate blog about her pet hedgehog. This brings us to the question of who these women bloggers were writing for. Many of them were writing, firstly and most importantly, for themselves. The blog was used to vent their rage or celebrate their achievements in a more formal way than merely telling their family or friends. One blogger commented: “Unfortunately for you, dear readers, I am writing to myself as the primary audience and you all as the secondary. So it might not be as interesting for someone else to read. And for that, my apologies, but I won’t be changing the behaviour.” This writer had not told her family about her blog, which meant an irregular approach to her entries, caused by the need to keep her blog – and the comments about her family to be found within it – a secret. Other women, however, did inform their families and friends about their blogs and actually used them as a form of communication with loved ones, particularly if they lived away from them. Such bloggers commented as they posted that they were aware that their postings were being read by people who knew them in “RL” – real life. A student in Bloomington, Indiana, was “wierded out” to be informed by her boyfriend that his mother now read her blog, while a woman in the middle of a divorce settlement was warned by her lawyer to start a new blog under a different name so that her soon-to-be ex couldn’t use any statements in the blog as evidence in his battle to be granted custody of their children. Although most of the bloggers studied had “come out” to their loved ones about their blogs, they were still very aware, and mostly appreciative, of the total strangers who read and sometimes

commented on their posts. Many had regular readers, who became virtual friends and offered support and encouraging words on a daily basis – some even reported exchanging presents with regular readers. Those who left comments on a blog were likely to have a blog of their own, and dialogues over two blogs, with associated links, are common. Bloggers often apologize to their readers for boring them or not blogging for a day or two. This is the essential difference between a blog and a diary – the feedback from readers, and it is argued that the validation offered by such feedback is one of the main motivators for women who write journal blogs. Readers frequently commented on the latest blog entry and such comments were almost always supportive: either contrasting the blogger’s experience to their own, offering advice or simply using the oft-repeated phrase “You go, girl!” It was noticeable that commentators were usually similarly situated and therefore felt that they understood the blogger’s experience. Perhaps this is not an unexpected finding. Working mothers commented on the blogs of other working mothers, ditto stay-at-home moms or home educators. Supportive comments on sites dedicated to miscarriages or attempts to conceive came from other women in the same situation. On rare occasions, a negative comment might be made. The useful thing about a blog is that the blogger is the editor and can immediately remove such a comment – thus making the “public” sphere more “private” again. However, in the time that this comment existed, the blogger was usually inundated by many more supportive comments than usual. Bloggers asked their readers for comments and frequently thanked individuals for making a useful, wise or just funny reply. One woman urged readers to seek out her mother’s new blog and to leave a comment so that she knew that people were reading her. Another, an administrator from Minnesota, ruminated on how her attitude toward blogging had changed in the two years she had been writing:

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Suddenly it feels like it has become less of an outlet, less of a “journal” and more of an opportunity for me to seek the opinions of others - opinions that I’d never come across in offline-life, due to my fairly small circle of friends. I crave comments. I crave support. I crave attention. I crave the feedback.

A Financial Motivation As part of the survey, bloggers were asked about the usefulness of blogging: 29 respondents (18 of whom were women) agreed that blogging was useful because it brought customers for their business and 31 indicated that one of their reasons for keeping a blog was the hope that it would generate income. Such a financial motivation was particularly strong amongst women bloggers who were looking for ways in which to generate income as an alternative to full-time employment outside the home. Of the 31 respondents who mentioned a financial motivation in their written responses to the survey, 21 were women, and their responses showed very clearly that they were hoping that their blogging would lead to some sort of financial gain. As one U.K. woman respondent stated: “I hope to eventually make enough money from my blog to support my family; I see it as the beginnings of an online business.” The ways in which bloggers hoped to make money through their blogging differed. Some bloggers used their blog as a marketing tool for themselves or for their businesses. For example, one U.K. woman explained: “I started the blog as a way of promoting my online business, enhancing online word-of-mouth marketing … and developing my brand.” Her business sold home furnishings online and the blog described how she tracked such objects down. Another U.K. woman, who blogs about parenthood, stated that her blogging had started as a leisure activity but was now opening up serious work opportunities. One respondent, who worked as a children’s book

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illustrator, reported that she showcased her work and sold associated greetings cards through her blog. Another respondent, who described herself as an English courtesan, stated that many of her clients came through her blog, which offered details about her rates and specialisms. Direct financial reward was reported less often, but at least two women bloggers had managed to turn their blogging into a career – one U.K. respondent worked as a freelance blogger, setting up blogs for West End shows and individual actors. As she put it herself: “instead of blogging to moan about my lack of a decent job, I blog for money!” An American woman respondent reported that her blog of film criticism, originally set up for her friend’s amusement, was now syndicated across three newspapers in her home state. Of course, blogs can also make money through carrying advertising or requesting subscriptions. Heather B. Armstrong, the writer of the blog Dooce.com, famously supports her entire family through the advertising that her blog carries. As well as carrying advertisements on their blogs, bloggers might also earn money through “payper-post” advertising where bloggers write about certain products or services in their blogs in return for payment, although there is unease about this development in the blogosphere, which is seen as a morally ambiguous area because of the damage it might do to the editorial integrity of a blog, and no respondent in this study admitted to such activity. Bloggers might even hope for income through the printed publication of their entire blog. Blogs which have been successfully published as books include: Belle de Jour: Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl; Tom Reynolds’ Blood, Sweat and Tea: real life adventures in an inner-city ambulance; and The World According to Mimi Smartypants. In spring 2007 press coverage in the U.K. focused on the £70,000 book deal given to ex-Sunday Times education correspondent Judith O’Reilly for her blog Wife in the North. In August 2007 award-winning blog My Boyfriend is a Twat

Women Bloggers Seeking Validation and Financial Recompense in the Blogosphere

written by Belguim-based Zoe McCarthy was also reproduced in book form. There are now so many of these blog-to-book publications, also known as blooks, that a prize, the Blooker Prize, has been established. While none of the respondents to this survey had been approached by publishers yet, one admitted: “I also started blogging a young adult novel I am writing, to create interest in it, and hoping that by some chance an editor will happen across it and offer to publish it!” Another reported: I have aspirations to write a book about the food industry and I believe that writing the blog is a tool to (1) exercise my writing muscles and developing a voice; (2) distinguishing or creating a unique voice; (3) offer me opportunities for credibility and to be viewed as a subject matter expert. In 2006 Julie and Julia, a blook chronicling a woman’s attempt to cook all the recipes in Julia Child’s classic 1961 cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a tiny New York apartment kitchen, beat Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call-Girl to win the first Blooker award. However, it was Belle de Jour that went on to be serialized on British television the following year. Research into the motivations of bloggers has previously focused on intangible rewards. However, financial motivations for blogging were found on both sides of the Atlantic. The business press has already declared that blogs have the potential to be effective marketing and communication tools for small businesses. In 2005, both Time and Business Week ran special issues devoted to blogging while Fortune put blogs as number one in its “10 Tech Trends to Watch for.” In 2008, would-be bloggers can buy books entitled Start Your Own Blogging Business and ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income. So far though, there has been limited academic investigation assessing the financial rewards of blogging, in particular for the lone blogger rather than large

corporations. Hill (2005) investigated the attitudes and experiences of small business bloggers using blogs as a marketing and communication tool in his MBA dissertation. However, this was a smallscale research project surveying only 15 bloggers and focused solely on the marketing possibilities of blogging rather than direct income generation through advertising sales or other opportunities. Overall, Hill’s findings suggested that blogs were used for relationship building with the business’s clients rather than direct sales. Only one respondent was making any money through the sale of advertising and most found that the main constraint that acted upon their use of the blog was lack of time. The situation seems to have changed since, with more bloggers at least expecting to raise a small amount of money from hosting advertising on their blogs, and many others hoping that their blogging will lead to greater things.

FUTURE TRENDS At present, the blogosphere continues to expand, although it must be noted that a high proportion of blogs are abandoned. Sifry (2005) estimated 45% in August 2005. Huffaker (2004) likewise found that 43% of teenage bloggers had abandoned blogs. As Henning (2003) puts it, “the majority of blogs started are dissolving into static, abandoned web pages”. Some are never used, but are created as tests or as automatic features on social networking sites (Henning, 2005a). While much of the early research into blogging focused on the North American experience, the expansion of the blogosphere into Asia and Europe is already providing new areas of research. In April 2007, Dave Sifry of Technorati reported that Japanese had now overtaken English as the most popular language for blog posts – 37% of posts tracked by Technorati were now in Japanese with Englishlanguage posts falling from 39% the previous year to 36%. He also reported that Farsi had joined the top ten most frequently used languages in

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the blogosphere, pointing to a growth in blogging in the Middle East (Sifry, 2007). Such an internationalization of the blogosphere offers new opportunities for researchers throughout the world and may well suggest new and different motivations for blogging dependent on different cultures and different international situations. Financial motivations for blogging appear to be a new and growing trend in the blogosphere demanding further investigation. It is also suggested that the rise of the “blook” and a reliance on advertising income, will repay further investigation, possibly from researchers in publishing and book studies. With the success of blooks, such as Julie and Julia and the dramatization of Belle de Jour, the book industry is developing a growing interest in cherry picking the most popular or innovative blogs – which after all come with their own established readership and marketing channels. The publication of books aimed at would-be ‘probloggers’, aiming to get rich from their blogging, also suggests that blogging is beginning to be perceived by some as an opportunity for those who need or wish to work from their own home, which of course includes many women.

CONCLUSION Women who blog do so for a variety of reasons, some of which have been documented by researchers. Such reasons might include: a need to publish their creative writing; to keep a diary; to communicate with family and friends across distances or to vent their feelings and emotions about particular problems or events in their lives. However, the important overall factor in all of these reasons is that they do this publicly. All the blogs studied were publicly accessible on the Internet and made even more available to the general reader through joining a blog-tracking directory. These women did not just want to write down their thoughts and feelings; they wanted the validation of their opinions which only comes from being read by

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others and receiving feedback. They could have chosen to write a diary or even to keep their blog private, accessible only by password by a chosen few. Instead, they chose to publish their lives and experiences to the world and welcomed comments, feedback and even the occasional criticism. In addition, a growing financial motivation can be identified. Such a motivation is not restricted to one sex, but does seem to be particularly appealing to women bloggers looking for a way to earn income from their home. In recent years, publicity about publication deals for blogs has also tended to focus on women bloggers. Such a financial motivation deserves further investigation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author wishes to acknowledge funding support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

NOTE Permission for quotation was gained from all bloggers mentioned in this chapter. The permission was given on condition of anonymity; therefore, no sources are given for direct quotations.

REFERENCES Abold, R. (2006, April). 1000 little election campaigns: Utilisation and acceptance of Weblogs in the run-up to the German general election 2005. Paper presented at the 2006 ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Nicosia, Cyprus. Auty, C. (2005). UK elected representatives and their Weblogs: First impressions. Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives, 57(4), 338–355.

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Blood, R. (2000). Weblogs: A history and perspective. Retrieved March 8, 2006, from http://www. rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html Entrepeneur Press. (2007). Start your own blogging business. Irvine, CA: Entrepreneur Press. Garfunkel, J. (2005). Promoting women bloggers: A timeline of relevant discussions. Message posted to http://civilities.net/PromotingWomenBloggersTimeline Henning, J. (2003). The blogging iceberg. Message posted to http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/ iceberg.html Henning, J. (2005a). Nothing old can stay. Message posted to http://www.perseusdevelopment. com/blogsurvey/blog/051223agerange.html Herring, S. C., Kouper, I., Schiedt, L. A., & Wright, E. (2004). Women and children last: The discursive construction of Weblogs. In L. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the blogosphere: Rhetoric, community, and culture of Weblogs. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Retrieved March 7, 2006, from http:// blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/ Herring, S. C., & Paolillo, J. C. (2006). Gender and genre variation in Weblogs. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10(4), 439–459. doi:10.1111/j.14679841.2006.00287.x Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. (2004). Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of Weblogs. In Proceedings of the 37th Hawai’I International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-37). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press. Retrieved March 7, 2006, from http://www.blogninja.com/DDGDD04.doc Hill, J. (2005). The voice of the blog: The attitudes and experiences of small business bloggers using blogs as a marketing and communications tool. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Liverpool, England.

Hsi-Peng, L., & Kuo-Lun, H. (2007). Understanding intention to continuously share information on Weblogs. Internet Research, 17(4), 345–361. doi:10.1108/10662240710828030 Huffaker, D. (2004). Gender similarities and differences in online identity and language use among teenage bloggers. Unpublished master’s thesis, Georgetown University, USA. Kumar, R., Novak, J., Raghavan, P., & Tomkins, A. (2004). Structure and evolution of blogspace. Communications of the ACM, 47(12), 35–39. doi:10.1145/1035134.1035162 Lenhart, A., & Madden, M. (2005). Teen content creators and consumers. Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2 November 2005. Retrieved November 14, 2005, from http://www.pewinternet.org. pdfs/PIP_Teens_Content_Creation.pdf Miura, A., & Yamashita, K. (2007). Psychological and social influences on blog writing: An online survey of blog authors in Japan. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4). doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00381.x Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., & Gumbrecht, M. (2003). Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary? Retrieved March 7, 2006, from http://home.comcast. net/~diane.schiano/CSCW04.Blog.pdf Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., Gumbrecht, M., & Swartz, L. (2004). ‘I’m blogging this’: A closer look at why people blog. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved September 12, 2006, from http://www.ics.uci. edu/~jpd/classes/ics234cw04/nardi.pdf Nielsen Net Ratings. (2007). Young women now the most dominant group online. Retrieved January 8, 2008, from http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/

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Pedersen, S. (2006). Women users’ motivations for establishing and interacting with blogs (Web logs). International Journal of the Book, 3(2), 85–90. Pedersen, S. (2007a). Speaking the same language? Differences and similarities between U.S. and UK bloggers. The International Journal of the Book, 5(1), 33–40. Pedersen, S. (2007b). Now read this: Male and female bloggers’ recommendations for further reading. Paper presented at Beyond the Book: Contemporary Cultures of Reading conference, Birmingham, England. Pedersen, S., & Macafee, C. (2007). Gender differences in British blogging. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4). doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00382.x Pollard, D. (2003). Is the blogosphere sexist? Message posted to http://blogs.salon. com?0002007/2003/10/30.html Ratliff, C. (2004a). Whose voices get heard? Gender politics in the blogosphere. Message posted to http://culturecat.net/node/303 Ratliff, C. (2004b). *The* link portal on gender in the blogosphere. Message posted to http:// culturecat.net/node/637 Ratliff, C. (2006). WATW by the numbers. Message posted to http://culturecat.net/node/1030 Rowse, D., & Garrett, C. (2008). Problogger: Secrets for blogging your way to a six figure income. Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Schiano, D. J., Nardi, B. A., Gumbrecht, M., & Swartz, L. (2004, April). Blogging by the rest of us. Paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vienna, Austria. Retrieved June 3, 2004, from http://home.comcast. net/~diane.schiano/CHI04.Blog.pdf

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Sifry, D. (2007). The state of the live Web: April 2007. Retrieved July 7, 2008, from http://www. sifry.com/alerts/archives/000493.html Taylor, R. (2004, May 11). Is blog a masculine noun? The Guardian. Retrieved September 15, 2006, from http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1214393,00.html Thelwall, M. (2006, May). Bloggers during the London attacks: Top information sources and topics. Paper presented at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland. Retrieved May 5, 2006, from http://www. blogpulse.com/www2006-workshop/papers/ blogs-during-london-attacks.pdf Thelwall, M., Byrne, A., & Goody, M. (2007). Which types of news story attract bloggers? Information Research 12(4). Thelwall, M., & Stuart, D. (2007). RUOK? Blogging communication technologies during crises. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(2). doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00336.x Trammell, K. D., Tarkowski, A., Hofmokl, J., & Sapp, A. M. (2006). Rzeczpospolita blogów [Republic of Blog]: Examining Polish bloggers through content analysis. Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, 11(3). doi:10.1111/ j.1083-6101.2006.00032.x Tricas-García, F., & Merelo-Guervos, J. J. (2004, March). The Spanish-speaking blogosphere: Towards the powerlaw? Paper presented at the IADIS International Conference WWW/Web Based Communities, Lisbon, Portugal.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Blog: Derived from the term “weblog.” A website, usually maintained by an individual (although there are also group blogs) with brief, dated posts. The posts are chronologically ordered rather than

Women Bloggers Seeking Validation and Financial Recompense in the Blogosphere

by topic or argument. Usually contains links to other blogs and web pages with commentary. May also contain readers’ comments. Blogosphere: A collective term for blogs and networks of bloggers. Blogroll: A list of favorite blogs recommended by the blogger. Blook: A book published as a blog or a printed book derived from an original blog. Blooker Prize: A literary award for blooks,

sponsored by Lulu.com, a print-on-demand publisher. The first prize was awarded in 2006. Filter Blogs: Proto-typical blogs. Links driven blogs with editorial commentary. More focused on external events than a filter blog. Journal Blogs: In comparison to filter blogs, more of an online diary. Usually less reliant on links and readers’comments than filter blogs. More focused on the bloggers’ life than a filter blog.

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Chapter 26

Personal Blogging

Individual Differences and Motivations Rosanna E. Guadagno University of Alabama, USA Cassie A. Eno University of Alabama, USA Bradley M. Okdie University of Alabama, USA

ABSTRACT The present chapter examines current research of blogging practices; it focuses on the personal blog, a blog created and maintained by an individual and not used for financial or occupational gain. The authors maintain that individual difference factors, such as personality and gender, may contribute to differences in likelihood to blog, motivation to blog, and blog content. The authors argue that the same factors that allow for differentiation of individuals in more classic self-expressive communication modalities (e.g., journaling) may also delineate individuals in new modes of online communication and self-expression. However, these factors may manifest themselves differently over more contemporary methods of self-expression and communication. The authors conclude that bloggers and blog readership appear to be steadily growing, making this area of online self-expression increasingly deserving of scientific inquiry.

INTRODUCTION Current trends in online social interaction have led to an increase in personalization and a decrease in anonymity owing to both technological advances and changing social norms (for a review, see Bargh & McKenna, 2004; McKenna & Bargh, 2000). At the forefront of these changing trends are blogs (short for weblogs), which are personal websites updated DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch026

regularly by their creator where journal-like entries or “posts” appear in reverse chronological order (Herring, Scheidt, Wright, & Bonus, 2005b). Blog topics vary from personal information (e.g., a log of daily activities, information about friendships and relationships) to political opinion to celebrity gossip to high tech news and information. Blogs can be created with little technological savvy as many blogging websites are user-friendly and allow the blog creator to simply choose a template and begin creating posts. Blogs, such as the ones described

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previously, are said to reside in the blogosphere -- an online world of conversation among bloggers via heavily interconnected blogs (Herring et al., 2005a). While this is how the blogosphere was originally conceptualized, at the current time blogs are mostly independent of each other. Although it is possible to post links of other blogs (also known as a blogroll) on one’s blog, most conversation occurs through a dialogue between the blog creator and readers of a particular blog. That is, each time a creator posts an entry on his or her blog, readers view the entry and have the option to respond with a comment. Blog creators can respond with a reciprocal comment and these comments may impact the content of future entries within the individual blog. However, these conversations have little impact on the content or dialogue of other blogs. Although reports indicate that the first blog appeared online in 1997 (Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht, & Swartz, 2004b), the number of blogs available online has only started to increase dramatically in the past few years (Sifry, 2007). The same can be said for research on bloggers’ demographics, motivations, personality, and practices. The present chapter examines current research in blogging practices, focusing on a type of blog known as a personal blog, which is created and maintained by an individual and is not used for financial or occupational gain. Specifically, we will review demographics on blogging and then examine two aspects of blogging: how individual differences – such as personality and gender – affect blogging practices and what motivates individuals to create and maintain a blog.

BACKGROUND Research indicates that while blogging is becoming increasingly popular around the globe, many of the world’s bloggers reside in the United States (Herring et al., 2005b). Similarly, much of the research on blogging has also been conducted in

the United States. This research indicates that, in the United States, bloggers are younger, better educated, more urban, less likely to be a member of an ethnic minority group, and more likely to shop online compared to the general population of Internet users in the United States (Lenhart & Fox, 2006). Although some research indicates that the adoption rate of blogging in other countries is lower than that of the United States (Herring et al., 2005b; Trammell, Tarkowski, Hofmokl, & Sapp, 2006), other research indicates that Japanese is the most commonly used language for writing blogs and is used more by one percent more bloggers than English (Sifry, 2007). Despite this change, relatively little research has been conducted to examine blogging patterns across different countries; however, the research that is available suggests that blogging patterns are similar across countries. For example, research conducted in Britain shows a similar pattern to what has been found in the United States (Pedersen & Macafee, 2007). These results also suggest that research conducted on blogging in the United States should generalize to blogging in other western countries; however, these results should be interpreted with caution until more research is available. In terms of number of blogs online, statistics on blogging in the United States indicate that 8 million US citizens keep a blog and 57 million US citizens report reading blogs (Lenhart & Fox, 2006). More recent data that examined worldwide blogging trends indicate that across the globe, there are 70 million blogs (as of April, 2007), and that this number is increasing daily by 120,000 (Sifry, 2007). This suggests that there are currently well over 100 million blogs available worldwide. Of all blogs maintained, it is estimated that there are 1.5 million new entries or posts per day (Sifry, 2007). Thus, overall blogging is becoming an increasingly popular online activity, particularly in Englishspeaking and Japanese- speaking countries.

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INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN BLOGGING Although the use of blogging as online expression is a relatively understudied phenomenon, a large body of existing literature on the psychological aspects of Internet use may offer insight into the psychological motivations of blogging. Literature on the psychological aspects of Internet usage indicates that individual differences on the Big Five factors of personality are indicative of different types of Internet usage as well as motivations behind these different usage trends. For example, individuals who are low in extraversion (defined as being not very sociable) and high in neuroticism (defined as being high in nervousness and insecurity) believe that they are better able to express their real-selves in online communication compared to face-to-face contexts (Amchai-Hamburger, Wainapel, & Fox, 2002). Hamburger and Ben-Artzi (2000) found support for the moderating effect of personality on Internet use; however, the results varied by gender. That is, women high in neuroticism and extraversion tended to use the Internet for social services (e.g., chatting, discussion groups, and people-finder services). However, men high in extraversion used the Internet for leisure services (e.g., websites with sexual content and random web surfing), while those high in neuroticism utilized the Internet for information services (e.g., searching for information needed for work or school projects). Similarly, loneliness has been found to mediate the relationship between neuroticism and Internet use for women, suggesting lonely women may be utilizing the Internet to assuage their loneliness (Amichai-Hamburger & Ben-Artzi, 2003). Thus, although there is a growing body of evidence on individual differences in Internet use (Amichai-Hamburger and Ben-Artzi, 2003; Hamburger & Ben-Artzi, 2000), little research has examined whether these findings generalize to this specific type of Internet activity: namely, blogging. To examine this gap in the literature,

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Guadagno, Okdie, and Eno (2008) investigated the relationship between gender, personality, and creating and maintaining a blog by using the Big Five factor model (McCrae & Costa, 1986) and gender to predict propensity to create and maintain a blog. The Big Five factor model of personality posits that individuals’ personalities may be broken down into five components: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness (McCrae & Costa, 1986). Neuroticism is positively correlated with emotional instability (anxious, insecure, and self-pitying) and negatively correlated with emotional stability (calm, security, and self-satisfying). Extraversion is positively correlated with being outgoing (sociable, fun-loving, and affectionate) and negatively correlated with being introverted (retiring, sober, and reserved). Openness is positively correlated with being imaginative, preferring variety, and being independent and negatively correlated with being down to earth, preferring routine, and a tendency to conform. Agreeableness is positively correlated with being soft-hearted, trusting, and helpful and negatively correlated with being ruthless, suspicious, and uncooperative. Finally, conscientiousness is positively correlated with being well-organized, careful, and self-disciplined, and negatively correlated with being disorganized, careless, and weak-willed. These five factors are considered to be temporally stable (Digman, 1989), independent of age, and not culturally determined (McCrae & Costa, 1997). To examine how these core dimensions predicted who would blog, Guadagno, Okdie, and Eno (2008) surveyed two samples of undergraduates – a group of advanced students in a classroom setting and a group on Introductory Psychology students in an online setting. The research examined how well participant’s gender and personality characteristics differentiated those who kept a blog from those who did not blog. Based on prior research findings (Hamburger & Ben-Artzi, 2000), the authors predicted that bloggers and non-bloggers, as well as males and females, would differ on some of

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the Big Five dimensions, particularly neuroticism. More specifically, highly neurotic women were expected to be more likely to maintain a blog than those low in neuroticism. Across two samples, researchers (Guadagno, Okdie, & Eno, 2008) asked participants to report their experiences with writing and reading blogs. Those who reported writing a blog also reported the following: number of blogs written, use of real name or screen name, and content of the blog written. Finally, participants provided demographic information and completed the Big Five Inventory-Short Form (Benet-Martinez & John, 1998). Twenty-five percent of participants in the first sample and 16 percent of participants in the second sample reported keeping a blog. Consistent with prior research (Lenhart & Fox, 2006), most blogs had a single author and contained information about personal experiences (e.g., about oneself, relationships, friends, families, daily experiences). When asked how they identified themselves, the majority of bloggers in these two samples reported using their real name as opposed to a screen name, thus making their blogs more identifiable. In terms of individual differences, results indicated that openness to new experience and neuroticism predicted blogging. Specifically, individuals high in openness to new experiences and individuals high in neuroticism were more likely to blog. Furthermore, after collapsing across the two samples, an examination of the data for gender differences indicated that neuroticism was a significant predictor of blogging for women, but not for men. These results are consistent with prior research on gender and personality differences in Internet usage (Amichai-Hamburger & Ben-Artzi, 2003), which also showed that women high in neuroticism had different Internet usage patterns than did men or women low in neuroticism. The results of the study (Guadagno, Okdie, & Eno, 2008) indicate that gender, openness to new experience, and neuroticism predict likelihood of maintaining a blog. Since blogging is a new form

of online self-expression, it stands to reason that creative individuals, such as those high in openness to new experience who are willing to try new things are more likely to blog. This also suggests that it may be the case that individuals who are high in openness to new experience are also likely to be the first to adopt new technology. Additionally, these results indicate that individuals high in neuroticism– characterized by anxiety, worry, emotional reactivity, and nervousness (John & Srivastava, 1999; McCrae & Costa, 1986) – may use blogging to assuage loneliness or in an effort to reach out and form social connections. These findings were also moderated by gender. Specifically, women who were high in neuroticism were more likely to maintain a blog than were women low in neuroticism while there was no difference in blogging rates for men based on their level of neuroticism. Finally, results also replicate prior findings supporting the notion that bloggers disclose identifying, personal information in their blogs (Herring et al., 2005b; Huffaker & Calvert, 2005; Viegas, 2005). Other research on gender differences in blogging practices is also consistent with the prior work on gender differences in general Internet use. More specifically, this research indicated that in Britain – as in the US – women use blogs as a social outlet while men use blogs as an informational or opinion outlet (Pedersen & Macafee, 2007). Although men and women are equally represented in the blogosphere (Lenhart & Fox, 2006; Pedersen & Macafee, 2007), the content of their blogs vary. For instance, in a comparison of blogs written by depressed men and women, Clarke and van Amerom (2008) found that men’s posts tended to be focused more on news whereas women’s posts tended to be focused more on relationships. Herring, Krouper, Scheidt, and Wright (2004) reported that women are more likely to maintain a personal blog than are men. Finally, Pedersen and Macafee (2007) reported that women bloggers were more interested in the social aspects of blogging, such as the knowledge that others

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would share their experiences, whereas men were more interested in expressing opinions and reporting information. Overall, the results of the research on individual differences, such as gender and personality, suggest that these factors have a tremendous impact on who blogs and what he or she blogs about.

MOTIVATIONS FOR BLOGGING As reviewed above, there are notable gender and personality differences in blogging behavior. Individual differences are predictive of who blogs and what they blog about, but what motivates people to create a blog? Ethnographic studies on motivations for blogging in US samples have revealed that people blog for a number of reasons. Blogs allow users to update others on their whereabouts and activities. Blogs enable users to express their opinions with the intention of influencing others. Moreover, they can be used to seek feedback and the opinions of others. Some bloggers use their blogs in the writing process, affording them the opportunity to think through their thoughts in a public forum. Finally, some bloggers use their blogs as an outlet for relieving emotional tension (Nardi, Schiano, & Gumbrecht, 2004a; Nardi et al. 2004b; Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht, & Swartz, 2004c). These results are similar to survey results from data collected in a Korean sample indicating that participants reported maintaining their blog because it was entertaining and facilitated selfexpression (Jung, Youn, & McClung, 2007). Other survey data indicate that certain motivations to blog predict blogging behavior. For instance, one such study revealed that the desire for self-expression predicts frequency of blogging indicating that individuals with a high desire for self-expression post to their blogs more frequently than those with a low desire for self-expression (Huang, Shen, Lin, & Chang, 2007). Additionally, Baker and Moore (2008) surveyed MySpace users and reported that individuals who intended to blog

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were higher in psychological distress, self-blame, venting, were less socially integrated, and less satisfied with the number of online and offline friendships they had. These results were interpreted as suggesting that another motivation for blogging may be to relieve psychological distress. Overall, the results on the research on motivations for blogging indicate that individuals report a wide variety of reasons for engaging in this form of online expression and that self-expression appears to be one such consistent motivation.

FUTURE TRENDS There are several future directions that research on personal blogs could take especially given the relative paucity of studies on the topic. In the future, we recommend that research on the motivations for blogging and characteristics of bloggers should examine the interaction of these two areas of research. Specifically, future research should aim to examine whether men and women or individuals who vary on certain personality dimensions, such as the Big Five (McCrae & Costa, 1997), also vary in terms of their motivations for creating and maintaining a blog. For instance, it may be that self-expression is a more important motivation for blogging for individuals high in neuroticism than for individuals low in neuroticism. Or, it may be that individuals high in neuroticism experience greater relief from psychological distress from blogging. Along these same lines, it may be that relative to those low in openness to new experience, bloggers who are high in openness to new experience may blog to form new social connections or to influence others. Additionally, women may blog more for self-expression and to assuage negative emotions while men may blog more to disseminate and obtain factual information or news. Moreover, research on personality and Internet use suggests that there are other personality characteristics (Amichai-Hamburger, 2002) that may moderate motivations for blog-

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ging. For example, need for closure (Kruglanski & Freund, 1983), locus of control (Rotter, 1966, 1982), and risk taking (Levenson, 1990) may be useful in further differentiating bloggers from nonbloggers. Given that this is a relatively new area of research on online behavior, much remains to be discovered. As the software for blogging becomes easier to use, more novice Internet users may begin to create and maintain blogs. This potential change in blogging trends may have an impact on the demographics and personality characteristics of bloggers as well as the motivations for creating a personal blog. Therefore, we recommend future research examine Internet usage as a potential moderator for these aspects of blogging. Also, given that the majority of the research reported in this chapter reports on blogging in Englishspeaking countries, there is a strong need for more cross-cultural research on blogging. Specifically, it would be interesting to examine whether blogging practices are similar in cultures that are dissimilar to the United States and other Western cultures. We may find that countries with more collectivist views will show less emphasis on self-expression than Western countries with more individualistic views leading to differences in motivations for keeping and maintaining blogs. Moreover, future research should also examine whether the results reported in this chapter generalize to other forms of online expression, which are similar to blogs. With the growth of social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and MySpace), most of which incorporate blogging capabilities in their networking platforms, there will likely be a further shift in the make-up of the blogging population. That is, there may be significant demographic and motivational differences between individuals who blog using stand-alone blogging platforms (e.g., Blogger, Wordpress, or Typepad) and individuals who blog using services offered as perks on social networking sites. Individuals using social networking sites to manage their blogs are likely to be younger and have more identifying

information available to their readers via their associated social networking profiles – a feature not typically associated with other stand-alone blogging software. In addition, individuals who blog using social networking sites are likely to feel as though their blog readership is smaller, more intimate, and more connected owing to the nature of using a social networking site as a blogging platform. In other words, there is greater likelihood that individual’s using social networking sites to create and maintain blogs may have a greater sense of privacy thus making them more likely to use identifying information as well as engage in discussions of a personal nature in their personal blogs. Thus, the above distinction between the use of stand-alone versus blogging software embedded in other contexts may be a small but necessary disparity that should be addressed in future research likely leading to fruitful scientific gains. Additionally, future research should examine how these blogs with less anonymity are utilized to see if the patterns discussed in this review hold true when the users are more easily identified by readers and also feel a greater sense of privacy as well as a more intimate readership of their blogs. Other forms of online expression should also be examined. One such example is twitter.com, a website that facilitates communication among friends and family by allowing individuals to communicate via short messages posted in reverse chronological order that all answer the question: “what are you doing?” and is designed to allow individuals create blog entries from other forms of digital technology, such as cell phones. Once again these posts are more identifiable and users are likely to create more concise entries, which presumably can be accessed from any location. Future research should examine how these dynamics change the function of blogs and motivation for blogging. Finally, future scholars should examine the interplay between blog authors and blog readers. Current research on blogging takes a uni-

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directional approach to examining blogs in which the blogger is disseminating content to the reader. However, this is not typically the case. Most blogs allow users to comment on blog content, which the blog author can then read and respond to. This interplay between blog users and blog readers creates a bi-directional dynamic relationship that may change individual’s future motivations for creating and maintaining blogs as well as affect future blog content. Thus, the consideration of the interaction between blog authors and their readers may necessitate a shift in our current conception of the blogosphere. That is, moving away from a static approach and towards a dynamic one. Overall, as an Internet activity, blogging differs in noteworthy ways from other types of Internet use and this warrants further examination. These differences may make conducting future psychological research on blogging particularly beneficial. For example, the literature reviewed suggests that individuals treat blogs as private journals while providing identifiable information. Guadagno and colleagues (2008) found that bloggers are writing mostly about personal issues and that the majority of bloggers are using their real names, as opposed to screen names, on their blogs. And, this tendency is further exacerbated when individuals know members of their audience (Qian & Scott, 2007). Bloggers’ propensity to employ their real names in their blogs raises questions about changing trends in privacy online. Future research should examine the psychological consequences of this self-disclosing behavior and examine perceived anonymity of bloggers to determine their level of awareness about their own self-disclosure.

CONCLUSION This chapter presents an overview of the most recent research on blogging, focusing primarily on individual differences in likelihood of maintaining a personal blog and motivations for blogging.

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Overall, research indicates that most individuals use blogs in much the same way as other online resources (such as chat rooms, websites, bulletin boards, etc.). For instance, women utilize mostly the social aspects of blogging, while men tend to use blogs for information gathering and opinion dissemination (Pedersen & Macafee, 2007). Also, the studies reviewed indicate that individual differences, such as personality and gender, can predict, to a certain degree, whether individuals are likely to utilize specific services of the Internet (Hamburger & Ben-Artzi, 2000) and maintain a blog (Guadagno, Okdie, & Eno, 2008). Finally, the literature on motivations for blogging indicates that self-expression is one of the reasons why individuals blog but that there are other reasons as well (Nardi, Schiano, & Gumbrecht, 2004a; Nardi, et al. 2004b; Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht, & Swartz, 2004c; Huang, Shen, Lin, & Chang, 2007; Jung, Youn, & McClung, 2007). More generally, the research literature analyzed in this chapter suggests that individual differences may play a greater role than once thought in forms of online self-expression. More specifically, individual difference factors, such as personality and gender, may contribute to differences in likelihood to blog, motivation to blog, and blog content. It may be the case that the same factors that allow for differentiation of individuals in more classic self-expressive communication modalities (e.g., journaling) may also delineate individuals in new modes of online communication and selfexpression. However, these factors may manifest themselves differently over more contemporary methods of self-expression and communication. In the end, bloggers and blog readership appear to be steadily growing, making this area of online self-expression increasingly deserving of scientific study and inquiry.

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REFERENCES Amichai-Hamburger, Y. (2002). Internet and personality. Computers in Human Behavior, 18, 1–10. doi:10.1016/S0747-5632(01)00034-6 Amichai-Hamburger, Y., & Ben-Artzi, E. (2003). Loneliness and Internet use. Computers in Human Behavior, 19, 71–80. doi:10.1016/S07475632(02)00014-6 Amichai-Hamburger, Y., Wainapel, G., & Fox, S. (2002). On the Internet no one knows I’m an introvert: Extroversion, neuroticism, and Internet interaction. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 5, 125–128. doi:10.1089/109493102753770507 Baker, J. R., & Moore, S. M. (2008). Distress, coping, and blogging: Comparing new Myspace users by their intention to blog. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 11, 81–85. doi:10.1089/cpb.2007.9930 Bargh, J., & McKenna, K. (2004). The Internet and social life. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 573–590. doi:10.1146/annurev. psych.55.090902.141922 Benet-Martinez, V., & John, O. P. (1998). Los cinco grandes across cultures and ethnic groups: Multitrait multimethod analyses of the big five in Spanish and English. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 729–750. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.75.3.729 Clarke, J., & van Amerom, G. (2008). A comparison of blogs by depresssed men and women. Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 29, 243–264. doi:10.1080/01612840701869403 Digman, J. M. (1989). Five robust trait dimensions: Development, stability, and utility. Journal of Personality, 57, 195–214. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1989.tb00480.x Guadagno, R. E., Okdie, B. M., & Eno, C. (2008). Why do people blog? Personality predictors of blogging. Computers in Human Behavior, 24, 1993–2004. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2007.09.001

Hamburger, Y. A., & Ben-Artzi, E. (2000). Relationship between extraversion and neuroticism and the different uses of the Internet. Computers in Human Behavior, 16, 441–449. doi:10.1016/ S0747-5632(00)00017-0 Herring, S. C., Kouper, I., Paolillo, J. C., Scheidt, L. A., Tyworth, M., Welsch, P., et al. (2005a). Conversations in the blogosphere: An analysis ‘from the bottom up.’ In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2005. HICSS’05 (pp. 1-11). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. Herring, S. C., Krouper, I., Scheidt, L. A., & Wright, E. L. (2004). Women and children last: The discursive construction of Weblogs. In L. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the blogosphere: Rhetoric, community, and culture of Weblogs. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Retrieved July 30, 2008 from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/ women_and_children.html Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Wright, E., & Bonus, S. (2005b). Weblogs as bridging genre. Information Technology & People, 18(2), 142–171. doi:10.1108/09593840510601513 Huang, C. Y., Shen, Y. Z., Lin, H. X., & Chang, S. H. (2007). Bloggers’ motivations and behaviors: A model. Journal of Advertising Research, 47, 472–484. doi:10.2501/S0021849907070493 Huffaker, D. A., & Calvert, S. L. (2005). Gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10(2). Retrieved December 9, 2006, from http://jcmc. indianca.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The big five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (2nd ed.) (pp. 102-138). New York: Guilford.

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Jung, T., Youn, H., & McClung, S. (2007). Motivations and self-presentation strategies on Korean-based ‘Cyworld’ Weblog format personal homepages. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 10, 24–31. doi:10.1089/cpb.2006.9996 Kruglanski, A. W., & Freund, T. (1983). The freezing and unfreezing of lay-inferences: Effects on impressional primacy, ethnic stereotyping, and numerical anchoring. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 448–468. doi:10.1016/00221031(83)90022-7 Lenhart, A., & Fox, S. (2006). Bloggers: A portrait of the Internet’s new storytellers. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved December 9, 2006, from http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/ PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%20 2006.pdf Levenson, M. R. (1990). Risk taking and personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 1073–1080. doi:10.1037/00223514.58.6.1073 McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. Jr. (1986). Clinical assessment can benefit from recent advances in personality psychology. The American Psychologist, 41, 1001–1003. doi:10.1037/0003066X.41.9.1001 McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1997). Personality trait structure as a human universal. The American Psychologist, 52, 509–516. doi:10.1037/0003066X.52.5.509 McKenna, K. Y. A., & Bargh, J. A. (2000). Plan 9 from cyberspace: The implications of the Internet for personality and social psychology. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4, 57–75. doi:10.1207/S15327957PSPR0401_6 Nardi, B., Schiano, D., & Gumbrecht, M. (2004a). Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary? In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM Press.

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Nardi, B., Schiano, D., Gumbrecht, M., & Swartz, L. (2004c, December). Why we blog. Communications of the ACM,, 41–46. doi:10.1145/1035134.1035163 Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., Gumbrecht, M., & Swartz, L. (2004b). “I’m blogging this”: A closer look at why people blog. Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Irvine. Pedersen, S., & Macafee, C. (2007). Gender differences in British blogging. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12, 1472–1492. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00382.x Qian, H., & Scott, C. R. (2007). Anonymity and self-disclosure on Weblogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12, 1428–1451. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00380.x Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs, 80 (Whole No. 609). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Rotter, J. B. (1982). The development and application of social learning theory. New York: Praeger. Sifry, D. (2007). The state of the live Web, April 2007. Retrieved July 30, 2008, from http://technorati.com/weblog/2007/04/328.html Trammell, K. D., Tarkowski, A., Hofmokl, J., & Sapp, A. M. (2006). Rzeczpospolita blogow [Republic of blog]: Examining Polish bloggers through content analysis. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11, 702–722. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00032.x Viegas, F. B. (2005). Bloggers’ expectations of privacy and accountability: An initial survey. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(3). Retrieved December 9, 2006, from http:// jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/viegas.html

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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Agreeableness: A personality trait on the Big Five personality inventory; individuals characterized as high on this trait tend to be soft-hearted, trusting, and helpful while individuals characterized as low on this trait tend to be ruthless, suspicious, and uncooperative. Big Five Factor Model: An inventory of personality traits comprised of five dimensions: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Blog: A regularly updated personal website which includes journal-like entries that appear in reverse chronological order. Blogosphere: An online world of conversation among bloggers via interconnected blogs using mechanisms such as blogrolls. Conscientiousness: A personality trait on the Big Five personality inventory; individuals characterized as high on this trait tend to be wellorganized, careful, and self-disciplined while individuals characterized as low on this trait tend to be disorganized, careless, and weak willed. Extraversion: A personality trait on the Big Five personality inventory; individuals characterized as high on this trait tend to be sociable, fun-loving, and affectionate while individuals

characterized as low on this trait tend to be retiring, sober, and reserved. Gender: The state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones). Individual Differences: The aspects of people’s personalities that make them fundamentally different from others (e.g., neuroticism, openness, extraversion, conscientiousness and agreeableness). Neuroticism: A personality trait on the Big Five personality inventory; individuals characterized as high on this trait tend to be emotionally unstable, anxious, insecure, and self-pitying while individuals characterized as low on this trait tend to be emotionally stable, calm, secure, and selfsatisfied. Openness to New Experience: A personality trait on the Big Five personality inventory; individuals characterized as high on this trait tend to be imaginative, independent, and prefer variety while individuals characterized as low on this trait tend to be down to earth, conforming, and prefer routine. Personality: A pattern of relatively enduring distinctive thoughts, emotions and behaviors that characterize the way an individual interacts with his or her environment.

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Chapter 27

Audience Replies to Character Blogs as Parasocial Relationships James D. Robinson University of Dayton, USA Robert R. Agne Auburn University, USA

ABSTRACT News anchors, talk show hosts, and soap opera characters often become objects of parasocial affection because of the nature of these program genres. This chapter explores the concept of parasocial interaction by focusing on audience replies to blog posts made on behalf of a TV character, Jessica Buchanan of ABC Television Network’s One Life to Live show. The authors employ communication accommodation theory to illuminate the concept and to identify specific communicative behaviors that occur during parasocial interaction. The chapter presents evidence of parasocial interaction within the blog replies and audience accommodation to the blog posts. Analysis suggests that parasocial interaction is the mediated manifestation of the relationship dimension inherent in television messages and used by audience members in much the same way it is used during face-to-face interaction.

INTRODUCTION It is estimated that in the U. S. 12 million adults “blog” or keep online journals and 57 million adults or 39% of all adult Internet users report reading blogs (Lenhart & Fox, 2006). A worldwide total of 175,000 new blogs are created every day, and the web search engine Technorati (2008) reports tracking 112.8 million blogs worldwide. Blogs are used as a vehicle for providing commentary to the DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch027

public. The critical differences in blogs and diaries are the opportunities for reaching a mass audience and the opportunity for that mass audience to respond to the commentary found within the blog. Because of the interactive nature of the blogs and blogging software, readers are able to add comments, links, pictures, video, or any other media format to the blog for the edification and entertainment of other denizens of the Internet. Popular television characters - such as, Dwight Schrute (The Office), Joe the Bartender (Grey’s Anatomy), and Jessica Buchanan (One Life to

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Live) - have blogs that allow audience members’ additional insight into the character’s identity and additional information about the story or plotline. These blogs are different from the blogs maintained by actors since they are written from the perspective of a fictional character. More importantly these character blogs allow audience members the perception that they can interact with the character – even though this interaction is parasocial. While audience members have always had some opportunity to interact, or more often, parasocially interact with characters through fan mail, the messages they send have not been readily available to scholars for study. Blog messages are more plentiful and easier to access, and provide communication scholars an invitation for studying parasocial interaction in depth. In this chapter we first address what is known about parasocial relationships between the audience and TV characters. We then introduce communication accommodation theory as a framework for identifying specific communicative behaviors that are likely to occur during parasocial interaction. An analysis of a TV character blog determines whether parasocial behaviors occur in blog replies and whether there is evidence of audiences accommodating the communicative behavior of the character. Finally we offer some suggestions for future research and future trends in this line of research.

BACKGROUND Parasocial Interaction The term parasocial interaction was used by Horton and Wohl (1956) to explain feelings of closeness audience members feel toward television characters. This closeness is believed to arise when TV characters behave in ways that resemble faceto-face interaction. This feeling of intimacy can be enhanced by production characteristics, such as the selection of shots and the format of the program. Bell (1991) suggests audience members may also

feel as if they are engaged in an interaction when the characters seem to be adapting their behavior to the anticipated reaction of the audience. An example may help illustrate this notion. Imagine a scene where a talk show host is performing a monologue. On a small scale, a pseudo-interaction sequence might look something like this: TV Host: Tells a bad joke. Audience: Groans, boos, or merely does not laugh. TV Host: Does a double take and makes a face. In this example the audience members may feel as if the character told them the joke and then responded to their reaction. (Note that this is not a real interaction and the audience is aware of that.) Such interaction may seem more dynamic than a simple monologue because the character appears to be reacting to the audience. Audience members are limited in their ability to reply or interact with their favorite TV characters. The audience member may “reply” by making commentary or talking back to the TV, laughing, or nodding their heads in agreement. Rather than sending fan mail, viewers may imitate face-to-face interaction. Again it is critical to acknowledge that the audience members understand that they are not actually interacting with the character. In a sense, the audience member is also acting like he or she is interacting with the character. More often, however, the audience member will do nothing more than think about the character’s message and generate a reply. These parasocial interactions only occur in the minds of audience members but are nonetheless similar in some ways to actual interactions. Since these faux interactions occur largely in the mind of the audience member, their responses to the character’s messages can be viewed as cognitive. Greenwald (1968) recognized that people are often influenced more by their thoughts or cognitive responses to a message than by the message itself. More importantly audience members often recall their cognitive responses

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more accurately than they can remember the actual messages. These cognitive responses, then, may be considered as the cognitive enactment of parasocial interaction. Audience replies to the blog posts of a TV character can be viewed as cognitive responses. In the cognitive response literature, the thought listing procedure is used by researchers to ascertain the thoughts of study participants. Applying this procedure researchers ask respondents to write down each individual thought that they go through while they are listening to a message (see Cacioppo, von Hippel, & Ernst, 1997 for an excellent overview of the technique). Audience replies to character blogs are similar to the thought listing procedure in that the replies identify the thoughts or issues of importance to them in response to the program and/or the character’s blog postings. It is not unreasonable to expect that audience members in a close parasocial relationship will respond differently from an audience member who is less involved with the character. Research investigating factors that increase the likelihood of parasocial interaction suggests audience members are more likely to report that they are in a parasocial relationship with a character when: •

•

•

A program presents a character in ways that resemble face-to-face interaction (Meyrowitz, 1986; Nordlund, 1978; Rubin, Perse, & Powell, 1985); The character engages in a conversational style of speaking and provides the audience an opportunity to respond (Rubin, Perse, & Powell, 1985); and Viewer involvement in a program is high (Rubin & Perse, 1987). Parasocial interaction is also more likely to occur with media personae that appear frequently on television (Levy, 1979).

Audience members are more likely to initiate face-to-face contact with characters when they

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report high levels of parasocial interaction (Gans, 1977; Horton & Wohl, 1956; McGuire & LeRoy, 1977). Talk show hosts, soap opera and TV shows characters, and news anchors have been most often examined as objects of parasocial affection because of the nature of those program genres. Meyrowitz (1994) investigated the impact of losing parasocial relationships on audience members by examining audience reactions to the deaths of celebrities, such as John Lennon and Elvis Presley. He found that such a loss is not unlike the loss of a close friend and characterized these relationships as being very warm and caring. Cohen (2004) and others have examined the impact of characters being lost to show cancellations or cast restructuring and found a correlation between levels of parasocial interaction and expected breakup distress. This is consistent with Koenig and Lessan (1985) who found that viewers reported feeling closer to a favorite TV personality than to mere acquaintances (but not as close as a good friend). Audience members report feeling sorry for characters, missing characters, looking forward to seeing characters, seeking out information about the characters, and desiring to meet them in person (Rubin, Perse, & Powell, 1985). While researchers have long suggested parasocial relationships can serve as a substitute for interpersonal relationships, the research has generally not supported this claim (Finn & Gorr, 1988; Rubin Perse, & Powell, 1985). Rather, there is little reason to believe that parasocial interaction can be predicted by social deficits, such as chronic loneliness (Ashe & McCutcheon, 2001; Perse & Rubin, 1989; Rubin, Perse, & Powell, 1985), neuroticism (Tsao, 1996), and low self-esteem (Tsao, 1996; Turner, 1993). In fact, people who have difficulty developing interpersonal relationships also often have trouble developing parasocial relationships (Cohen, 2004). These scholars have begun to suggest that parasocial relationships provide company for audience members (Isotalus, 1995) and are complementary to interpersonal

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relationships (Kanazawa, 2002, Perse & Rubin, 1990; Taso, 1996). Given the increasing acceptance among researchers that parasocial relationships should be examined in much the same way that interpersonal relationships are studied, it may behoove scholars to employ communication accommodation theory in their efforts. Horton and Wohl (1956) suggest as much: “The more a performer seems to adjust his performance to the supposed response of the audience, the more the audience tends to make the response anticipated.” Furthermore, the “simulacrum of conversational give and take may be called para-social interaction” (p. 215). Bell (1991) concurs and identifies accommodation theory as an excellent candidate for navigating the nexus between mass and interpersonal communication. They argue that audience perceptions of character accommodation – as manifest by the appearance of characters’ adjusting their communicative performance to expected audience responses – should increase the likelihood of parasocial interaction.

Communication Accommodation Theory Communication accommodation theory (Giles, 1973; Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991) is an explanation of why people modify their communicative behavior to match the communicative behavior of others during face-to-face interaction. The theory is an extension of social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Tajfel, 1982) and suggests people behave in ways that will result in being seen as socially desirable. Proponents of social identity theory believe our conceptions of self are based on the social status ascribed to our membership groups. So from the perspective of social identity theory, an individual’s social status is determined by social status attributed by themselves and others to their social groups. Similarly, when an individual is evaluating the social status of someone else, the social status

of their group memberships plays a large role in determining that social calculus. Who we are is determined, in part, by the social groups that include and exclude us as members. Accommodation theory suggests that when we interact with socially desirable others we adapt our communicative behavior to more closely approximate their behavior. Through this process of imitation or convergence, we are trying to ingratiate ourselves to be socially desirable and be viewed by others as being a member of that socially desirable group. We hope that through accommodation, the high status individual will like us and invite us into his or her social group. Strategically speaking we adopt the behavior of the socially desirable individual to reduce the communicative differences between us. On the most basic level, this adaptation of communicative style and content may be little more than imitating the behavior and language of the individual we are trying to accommodate so that we are accepted and liked. Of course, more skilled social interlocutors are able to converge using far less obvious and far more sophisticated techniques. Borrowing a phrase, adopting the cadence or speech patterns of the other, employing similar literary references, or even adopting the same metaphorical world view are all ways of converging with a conversational partner. When we find ourselves interacting with someone less socially desirable, we maintain or increase communicative differences between us. In fact we behave in ways that signal to all that we are not like the person we are currently interacting. Behaving in ways that maintain our differences is called divergence; it is a strategy we use to maintain or increase the social distance between us. Giles, Coupland, and Coupland (1991) suggest that sometimes people accommodate or adjust their linguistic and their nonverbal behavior in face-to-face conversations as a conscious strategy to gain approval from or to influence the other communicant. At other times we accommodate

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without being consciously aware of our behavior change. Whether the convergence is mindful or not, a growing body of research suggests people are influenced by people who accommodate or imitate their language (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991; van Baaren, Holland, Steenaert, & van Knippenberg, 2003) or their gestures (Chartrand & Baragh, 1999; Mauer & Tindall, 1983). Research into the accommodation process has identified a number of behaviors including: being attentive (Ng, Liu, Weatherall, & Loong, 1997), offering compliments (Williams & Giles, 1996), head nodding, facial affect and smiling (Hale & Burgoon, 1984), pause lengths (Giles et al., 1987), posture (Condon & Ogston, 1967), self disclosure (Ehrlich & Graeven, 1971; Henwood, Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1993; Giles & Harwood, 1997), speech rate (Street, 1983), speech volume (Ryan, Hummert, & Boich, 1995), being supportive, (Ng et al., 1997), utterance length (Matarazzo et al., 1968; Giles et al., 1987), vocabulary (Giles, Mulac, Bradac, & Johnson, 1987), and vocal intensity (Natale, 1975; Welkowitz, Feldstein, Finkelstein, & Aylesworth, 1972). While it could be argued that all audience members’ responses to character blogs are parasocial interactions, other motivations, uses, or gratifications may also account for this behavior. If parasocial interaction is indeed motivated identification with or affinity toward the character, it is reasonable to expect audience replies to blog posts to prominently feature accommodation behavior. Accepting the premise that parasocial interaction should be studied in much the same way that interpersonal interaction should be studied, audience members should enact convergence behaviors when they reply to character blogs. In an effort to test these ideas, character blogs and the replies to those blog posts were examined. Since the previous research suggests daytime serials have been one of the most widely researched program genres within the parasocial interaction literature and because the nature of “soap operas” encourage the development of

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parasocial relationships, the subsequent analyses focus on audience replies to the blog posts of Jessica Buchanan. Jessica Buchanan has been a character on the daytime program One Life to Live since its beginning. Taking place in Llanview – a fictitious suburb of Philadelphia, One Life to Live was created by Agnes Nixon and premiered on ABC in July 1968. Jessica Buchanan suffers a multiple personality disorder. Jess’s second and quite distinct personality is Tess.

AN ANALYSIS OF AUDIENCE BLOG REPLIES All of the blog posts penned by the character Jessica Buchanan between October 15, 2007 and January 11, 2008 were analyzed. Jessica made 20 entries to her blog during that time and a total of 56 audience members responded by sending 117 replies. A content analysis of the blog posts and the audience replies yields several interesting findings. None of the blogging was done by Jessica’s other personality Tess. In two instances an audience member asked Jessica about the reappearance of Tess – most often in response to problems that Tess would remedy through violence. The typical blog post by Jessica was 75 words long – not including a heading and a date. These posts focus on her feelings about what has been happening within the plotline of the program. Jessica makes no mention of subplots or other characters unless they directly affect her somehow. In a sense, Jessica writes in her blog as if it were a journal or a diary that is being shared with the audience. There is no acknowledgement of the audience in her blog posts nor are there ever replies to questions or comments made by audience members. Examination of audience replies to the blog posts indicates great disparity in their communicative behavior. Of the 56 individuals posting replies, only 9 wrote more than one time to Jessica. That is to say 83.9% of the replies were written by people who only wrote one message to Jes-

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sica over the three month period. Four of those 9 audience members wrote between 2 and 4 messages to Jessica and the remaining five audience members replied to blog posts 9 or more times during the period. This disparity is both statistically significant and theoretically significant since it provides evidence that even among fans of the show motivated enough to reply to a blog post, there is a great deal of variation in the amount of character contact audience members desire. In fact only one of the 117 blog replies contains a request for actual interaction. The fan wrote: “email me – it’s the address above.” That same fan also wrote the only blog replies indicating they had actually seen the character on the street. On these two different occasions the audience member wrote: “I saw you on Friday and you looked great – cool shirt,” “I saw you today and you looked pretty cool,” and “I just wanted to tell you that. Ok?” This particular fan replied to blog posts on 9 different occasions and repeatedly tells Jessica, “I’m your biggest fan.” This last comment still brings to mind John Hinkley’s last words to John Lennon even 28 years after the fact. Audience members desiring contact are clearly interested in contact with Jessica and not the other audience members. Only three blog replies ask other audience members for information about a character or situation occurring on the soap. All three of these messages oriented toward other fans were written by individuals who only replied to one blog post during the entire period. Additionally, these requests for information from other fans only yielded one reply during the entire three month period. This seems to reduce the viability of the interactional starvation explanation for audience behavior. The audience comments suggest clear evidence of parasocial interaction. Those audience members replying frequently tend to reply in much the same way they would reply to a friend via e-mail or a letter. In addition, the audience members making multiple posts to the blog often offer sympathy (e.g., “I hope you…” “I think you’re better off…,”

and “Good for you Jess …”) or advice (e.g., “you should …,” “you’re better off if you …,” and “I think you can …”). It is also quite common for audience members to ask questions of Jessica – as though they were literally interacting (e.g., “Is Tess gone for good?” “What is the matter with Sarah lately?” “Why don’t you just tell the family the truth?” “Is Vicki gonna be found in Paris, Texas?”). Audience members also use the “xoxo” convention to extend hugs and kisses to the character in their e-mail. Thus there does appear to be some evidence that some, if not many, audience members are behaving in ways that are consistent with parasocial interaction. From the perspective of accommodation theory, fans should enact convergence behaviors or adopt behaviors consistent with Jessica’s behavior if they perceive a character to be highly socially desirable. Analysis of the blog replies provides evidence of characters engaging in accommodation behaviors in their replies to Jessica’s blog posts. For example, there is evidence that offering compliments constitutes convergence behavior (Williams & Giles, 1996) and can be found in the audience replies (e.g., “You pretending to be Jess is a great idea …,” “I love you guys …,” “Dressing her up as Jared was a stroke of genius…,” “Of course you’re fiercely protective of your twin and everyone else you love. That’s one of your best qualities…,” “You go girl …,” “Applauds Jessica...,” “You are a neat family …”). Self disclosure is another communicative behavior that has been associated with convergence and again can be found, although much less frequently, in the audience replies (Ehrlich & Graeven, 1971; Henwood, Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1993; Giles & Harwood, 1997). Responses that illustrate this say: for example, “Get a dog, I have two dogs…,” “I would miss him too …,” “I was heartbroken when you chose to be with Nash – I actually cried,” and “I seen a lot of snakes since I been (Sic) dating….” Other more common convergence behaviors found in audience replies include being attentive

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(Ng et al., 1997) and supportive (Ng et al., 1997). In nearly every blog reply, there is clearly some evidence of audience members expressing support for Jessica. This support includes informational support, such as telling Jessica things that are going on in the program as well as being empathetic and providing her emotional support. Examples of informational support include: “You might want to get that dizziness checked out …,” “There might be a slight chance you are pregnant…,” “I see romance between Antonio and the lady cop anyway …,” and “Please don’t let Dorian get Charlie, Vicki found him first and she deserves him a lot more than you know.” Examples of empathy and the provision of emotional social support are also very common in audience replies to Jessica: “You are right. You’ve been through hell & back. I can understand why you would be afraid to marry again. But Nash is not Antonio or Tico…,” “If I was in your shoes, I would miss him too,” “Jessica you’re doing the right thing for you, Bree and Nash …,” “Don’t feel guilty for hurting Antonio. Eventually he will understand that things are better this way. It wasn’t fair to you or Antonio living the lie of your marriage when you were in love with Nash. You were dying and you had to tell Antonio the truth once and for all. Eventually, he will move on and he can be happy with Jamie and whoever comes into his love life next…. Enjoy your new life and take it easy. Just because you’ve been released from the hospital doesn’t mean you’re invincible.” Other examples of convergence, including the borrowing of vocabulary from another person in conversation, can be found in the language used by audience members. For example, in one blog entry, Jessica refers to Jared Banks as a “snake.” In two of the nine replies to that post, the fans described Jared as being a snake and a third reply suggested Jessica throw Jared out on his “reptilian ass.” Obviously this type of language convergence is quite difficult to code unless the vocabulary is idiosyncratic, but it is clear from going through

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all of the blog replies that there is a great deal of mirroring of language and style in blog replies. We suggest parasocial interaction can be studied by examining the audience replies to character blogs. Certainly the analysis of blog posts is not the only way to study parasocial interaction, but it represents a relatively unobtrusive way for researchers to gain insight. In addition, communication accommodation theory appears to be useful for identifying specific behaviors that demonstrate convergence and divergence. Examining parasocial relationships in much the same way interpersonal relationships are studied should yield important insights into the potential uses and effects of the mass media. Perhaps more importantly, the use of accommodation theory may also help us better understand the differences and similarities between interpersonal and mass communication.

FUTURE TRENDS In the future, researchers will examine more closely convergence and divergence behaviors that occur in parasocial relationships. A growing body of research on the notion of parasocial breakups (e.g., the consequences of shows being taken off the air or characters being written out of shows) will undoubtedly help in this endeavor (Cohen, 2004). New studies that use attachment theory (Bowlby, 1973) may also shed some light on the ways audience members become involved in parasocial relationships. Borrowing from attachment theory, once again, points to the increased use of research on interpersonal communication and interpersonal relationships to understand parasocial interaction. It makes sense that the reasons children form attachments to their parents and that adults form attachments to other adults should also apply to the reasons they form attachments to mediated characters. Future researchers will undoubtedly begin focusing their efforts on explaining the commu-

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nicative processes that occur during parasocial interaction. We suggest the interactional view (Watzlawick, Beavin & Jackson, 1967) as a starting point for such efforts. This theoretical structure may identify the underlying mechanism for parasocial relationships as well as a mechanism for explaining how individuals can use the same media content and characters to fulfill their needs. The key axiom applicable here is that messages have both a content and relationship dimension. The content component is the message or the words within a message while the relationship component tells communicants how the content/ message should be interpreted. How the message should be interpreted is based on a number of factors – the most important being the nature of the relationship between the communicants. The relationship between communicants is believed to be the single most important contextual factor and can obviously alter the meaning of message content. If the interactional perspective is adapted to mediated communication, audience members establish relationships with all TV characters so that they can contextualize the messages they receive from television. Certainly not all relationships are particularly close – just as most of our interpersonal contact is not particularly intimate. Thus parasocial relationships are an example of close relationships between audience members and characters. These relationships are interesting because close relationships have idiosyncratic relational rules or rules that are specific to a particular relationship. That audience members’ can develop relationships – albeit parasocial relationships – with characters allows audience members to shape a message to better use the media for gratification. Future research also needs to compare the communicative behavior of fans writing to TV characters with those replying to blogs written actors. The teen actress Kristen Aldersen who plays Starr Manning on One Life to Live also has a blog. Kristen writes her blog not in character but instead as herself (a high school aged actress).

Audience members behave quite differently when replying to her blog, just as they behave differently to other TV characters (e.g., Kendall Hart-Slater of All My Children and Dr. Robin Scorpio of General Hospital). The ultimate value of such research may be the explication and clarification of the parasocial interaction concept. It seems less useful if it is a loss of touch with reality as it has been written about in the past. If parasocial interaction is more akin to being highly involved and a key determinant in the way audiences contextualize mediated messages, then this should become clear under careful scrutiny.

CONCLUSION A life-long fan of General Hospital, Mary Ann Gayonski (personal communication, September 13, 2008) summed up audience perceptions of parasocial interaction accurately when she said, “I feel like I know them.” “If I saw a character on the street I would want to talk with them about what is happening on the show.” “I don’t know that much about the actor, but I do know the character.” “It really is like knowing someone – it’s not the same as knowing someone – but it is like knowing someone.” “Lots of time I know what a character is going to do before they do it.” “They are not really friends but they do seem like friends sometimes.” This testimony reveals that audience members would treat characters as if they were friends or acquaintances – even though they recognize them for what they are in most cases – characters on a fictional program. As friends and acquaintances, audience members are likely to accommodate or converge given the affect they feel toward the character when given a chance to interact. If audience members feel that characters are “like friends,” they are likely to treat them as if they are friends – just as dog owners may treat their pets as if they have language skills they do not possess. Like using

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heuristics in the evaluation of information, these behavioral heuristics occur because it is easier to behave toward characters as if they were actually people. With the addition of an audience of other fans able to view character blog posts and replies to blog posts, it is again reasonable to expect some effort at accommodation to demonstrate their similarity with the character as well as some divergence behaviors to indicate to others that they indeed recognize the characters are not real. If audience members are behaving toward the other audience members, we would expect more divergence and less convergence to occur. This preliminary research certainly does not support that hypothesis. Very little audience-to-audience interaction can be observed within these blog posts and replies. Audience members appear to be writing to the characters with little regard for others “eavesdropping” into their conversation.

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Giles, H., & Harwood, J. (1997). Managing intergroup communication: Lifespan issues and consequences. In S. Eliasson & E. H. Jahr (Eds.), Language and its ecology: Essays in memory of Einar Haugen (pp. 105-130). New York: Elsevier/ North Holland.

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Matarazzo, J. D., Weins, A. N., Matarazzo, R. G., & Saslow, G. (1968). Speech and silence behavior in clinical psychotherapy and its laboratory correlates. In J. Schlier, H. Hunt, J. D. Matarazzo, & C. Savage (Eds.), Research in psychotherapy, Vol. 3 (pp. 347-394). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Mauer, R. E., & Tindall, J. H. (1983). Effects of postural congruence on client’s perceptions of counselor empathy. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 30, 158–163. doi:10.1037/00220167.30.2.158 McGuire, B., & LeRoy, D. J. (1977). Audience mail: Letters to the broadcaster. The Journal of Communication, 27(3), 79–85. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1977.tb02129.x Meyrowitz, J. (1986). Television and interpersonal behavior: Codes of perception and response. In G. Gumpert & R. Cathcart (Eds.), Inter/media: Interpersonal communication in a media world (pp. 253-272). New York: Oxford University Press. Natale, M. (1975). Convergence of mean vocal intensity in dyadic communications as a function of social desirability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 790–804. doi:10.1037/00223514.32.5.790 Ng, S. H., Liu, J. H., Weatherall, A., & Loong, C. S. F. (1997). Younger adults, communication experiences and contact with elders and peers. Human Communication Research, 24, 82–108. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.1997.tb00588.x 311

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Rubin, A. M., Perse, E. M., & Powell, R. A. (1985). Loneliness, parasocial interaction and local television news viewing. Human Communication Research, 12(2), 155–180. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.1985.tb00071.x Ryan, E. B., Hummert, M. L., & Boich, L. H. (1995). Communication predicaments of aging: Patronizing behavior toward older adults. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 13, 144–166. doi:10.1177/0261927X95141008 Shepard, C. A., Giles, H., & Le Poire, B. A. (2001). Communication accommodation theory. In W. P. Robinson & H. Giles, The new handbook of language and social psychology (pp. 33-56). Bristol, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Street, R. L., Jr. (1983). Noncontent speech convergence in adult – child interactions. In R. N. Bostrom (Ed.), Communication yearbook (Vol. 7, pp. 369-395). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Tajfel, H. (Ed.). (1982). Social identity and intergroup relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33-47). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Technorati. (2008). About us. Retrieved June 29, 2008, from http://technorati.com/about

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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Accommodation: The modifications in communicative behavior made by individuals during interaction. Accommodation may include changes to verbal, vocal and non-verbal behaviors. The process of accommodation may occur as an intentional communicative strategy or may occur without the conscious awareness of the individual; it is motivated by the desire to be liked. Accommodation can be manifest as convergence (adopting the communicative behavior of another) or divergence (behaving stylistically different from another to maintain our differences).

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Cognitive Response: Thoughts that occur while we are listening to someone talk are called cognitive responses. Cognitive response is not a synonym for decoding a message. “Decoding” refers to a completely separate process. In decoding, sound or visual stimuli are translated back into language. Once we have decoded the message, our idiosyncratic responses or thoughts to those messages are described as our cognitive responses. If we are very interested in the topic, our cognitive responses may be message relevant. Message relevant responses focus on counter-arguments or additional evidence supporting a particular position. If we are not interested in the topic, our cognitive responses may not be particularly message relevant (e.g., “I “I need to get gas on my way home”). In short, our cognitive responses are the things we think of while listening to the messages of others. Cognitive responses occur while reading, watching television, listening to the radio, or surfing the Internet. Communication Accommodation Theory: Proposed by Howard Giles, professor of communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to explain the adaptations people make in their communicative behavior during conversation. The theory assumes people adapt their communicative behaviors and message content in an effort to be perceived favorably by high social status individuals. When interacting with individuals of low social status, we are motivated to maintain our distance or be perceived as being different from the low status individuals. This theory is based on many of the same tenets as social identity theory. Convergence: When an individual imitates or adopts the communicative behaviors of another in conversation, we say they are converging or becoming more like the other communicatively. For example a person may accommodate the communicative behavior of another by talking louder or adopting an accent (vocal accommodation), by appropriating the language of another in conversation (verbal accommodation), or by

imitating kinesic or facial behaviors (nonverbal accommodation). These adaptations are efforts by a communicant to be viewed favorably by the high social status other during conversation. Divergence: When we communicate with someone we perceive to be socially unattractive, we diverge or behave in such a way that we will be viewed as being different from that person. Motivated by the desire to be seen as socially desirable, in the presence of an undesirable communicative partner, we fail to accommodate and actually behave in ways that will distance us from another. For example, if someone uses coarse language or slang, we might diverge by employing formal or more precise language. If they talk in a loud voice, we might talk in a quiet voice; and, if they wave their hands, we might maintain a more still communicative style. Parasocial Interaction: The term parasocial interaction is often used as a synonym for parasocial relationship. When the two terms are differentiated, parasocial interaction is used to describe the specific audience and/or character behaviors. One character winking at an audience and another giving a soliloquy are examples of parasocial interaction. Similarly audience members talking to their TV or generating verbal replies that go unexpressed are examples of parasocial action too. It is generally believed that the way a show is designed and shot contributes to the likelihood of audience members engaging in parasocial interaction and/or establishing parasocial relationships. Parasocial Relationship: The term parasocial relationship was first coined by Horton & Wohl (1956) to describe the pseudo-friendships that occur between audience members and TV characters and other media personae. The notion of relationship is used here to describe faux interpersonal relationships that typically share some commonalities with actual interpersonal relationships. For example, an audience member can feel affect toward a character, “know” or understand the character, or relate to a character as

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if the character was an actual acquaintance. These relationships can represent little more than the liking of a character; they can also extend into the realm of delusion. In such extreme cases, audience members may actually believe they have a relationship with the character. The term is often used to identify the similarities between interpersonal relationships and mediated relationships. Thought Listing Procedure: A social psychological procedure for cognitive response evaluation technique used by researchers to gather the cognitive responses of individuals. After exposing subjects to a message, the researcher asks subjects to list the thoughts that ran through their heads during message presentation. Each thought or cognitive response can then be examined to see whether respondent thoughts are consistent or inconsistent with the message and ultimately how effective a particular message may be.

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Web Logging or Blogging: Blogs are online diaries or journals used by their authors as vehicles for providing commentary. They are updated on a regular basis and tend to focus on the personal experiences of the author. The critical differences in blogs and diaries are the opportunities for reaching a mass audience and the opportunity for that mass audience to respond to the commentary found within the blog. Because of the interactive nature of the blogs and blogging, software readers are able to add comments, links, pictures, video, or any other media format to the blog for the edification and entertainment of other denizens of the Internet. Blogging, then, is the act of updating a blog or an online diary.

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Chapter 28

Situating Social Identity through Language Convergence in Online Groups Scott L. Crabill Oakland University, USA

ABSTRACT According to social identity theory, individuals create and maintain their social identity through group membership. During face-to-face interactions within a group, people assess various verbal and nonverbal cues to influence the perceptions of themselves by others. However, in the context of online communication these cues are not as readily available. A screen name can be viewed as part of an individual’s “social identity creation”: a message that members of online discussion boards interpret and react to while trying to situate themselves within the group. This chapter explores how language convergence can function as a cue that facilitates situating social identity within online in-groups. Results of a content analysis of 400 screen names suggest that the screen names of discussion board members serve as an organizing variable for participants to situate themselves socially within the context of online interaction.

INTRODUCTION In spite of original visions for the Internet, it has moved beyond the constraints of impersonal and task-oriented interactions. Scholarly research has acknowledged a trend in increasing interpersonal elements within computer-mediated communication (e.g., Pena-Shaff, Martin, & Gay, 2001; Spears, Lea, Corneliussen, Postmes, & Haar, 2002; Tanis & Postmes, 2003; Walther & Burgoon, 1992; Walther, DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch028

1992, 1993, 1994, 1996; Walther, Anderson, & Park, 1994; Walther & Tidwell, 1995). Within face-toface interactions, individuals rely upon nonverbal “cues” and interpersonal rules to guide interaction. However, computer-mediated communication (CMC) does not allow for immediate or visual assessment often relied upon to reduce uncertainty and form impressions in face-to-face settings. Yet, according to Walther and Tidwell (1995), “CMC is not bereft of the cues needed to make varied social judgments” (p. 372). The researchers contend that previous approaches limited the scope of cues to

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Situating Social Identity through Language Convergence in Online Groups

body language and tonality, failing to recognize cues that are inherent within CMC. Giles and Coupland (1991) define language convergence as a “strategy whereby individuals adapt to each other’s communicative behaviours in terms of a wide range of linguistic/prosodic/non-vocal features including speech rate, pausal phenomena and utterance length, phonological variants, smiling, gaze and so on” (p. 63). The present study explored how language convergence can function as a cue within computer-mediated communication that facilitates creating and situating social identity within online in-groups.

BACKGROUND The Internet is a truly powerful technology that enables numerous opportunities for identity construction. It allows us to think about our identity, and if desired, change ourselves to who we want to be (Chandler, 1998) and construct images of ourselves through various types of self disclosure. Research has argued that the Internet technology is limited to impersonal and task-oriented interactions. Referring to a “cues-filtered out model”, Kiesler, Siegel, and McGuire (1984) state: “In traditional forms of communication, head nods, smiles, eye contact, distance, tone of voice, and other nonverbal behavior give speakers and listeners information they can use to regulate, modify, and control exchanges” (p. 1125). Such a “reduced cues” perspective suggests that CMC lacks nonverbal cues necessary to substantiate interpersonal communication amongst CMC interactants (Connolly, Jessup, & Valacich, 1990; Hiltz, 1975, 1981; Hiltz, Johnson, & Agle, 1978; Hiltz, Johnson, & Turoff, 1986; Hiltz, Turoff, Johnson, 1989). Within this perspective, CMC is viewed as somewhat inadequate, with the capacity to harm and to keep people from “real” relationships (Thurlow, Lengel, & Tomic, 2004). This stands in contrast to the optimistic claims that the Internet can foster new relationships across social and

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geographical boundaries and create friendships and communities rooted in common interest and concerns (Thurlow et. al., 2004). Reactions to the “reduced cues” perspective lead to a diverse body of research exploring interpersonal relationships created, maintained, and utilized in cyberspace (Soukup, 2000). This research attempts to identify the social dimensions of interactions mediated through computers (Amaral & Monteiro, 2002; Braithwaite, Waldron, & Finn, 1999; Douglas & McGarty, 2001; Kleinman, 2000; Muramatsu & Ackerman, 1998; Pena-Shaff, Martin, & Gay, 2001; Ramirez, Walther, Burgoon, & Sunnafrank, 2002; Spears, Lea, Corneliussen, Postmes, & Haar, 2002; Tanis & Postmes, 2003; Tidwell & Walther, 2002; Walther & Burgoon, 1992; Walther, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996; Walther, Anderson, & Park, 1994; Walther & Tidwell, 1995). As such, it is apparent that communication on the Internet has moved beyond the constraints of impersonal and task-oriented interactions into interpersonal interactions. The cues by which individuals are assessed within CMC may vary. Zhou, Burgoon, Twitchell, Qin, and Nunamaker (2004), contend that we evaluate language choices and make attributions about another’s social status, background and education. Despite the surmounting research within this trend, there is a lack of known socially contextual cues within CMC interactions (Tanis & Postmes, 2003). According to Spears et. al. (2002), the exact nature of the interpersonal implications of CMC is still under debate and not well understood.

Situating Social Identity Our identity is in continuous flux from the time we are cognizant of social realities throughout the remainder of our lives (Hall, 1990). According to social identity theory it is these social realities that shape and form our social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). It is through our membership into various social groups that we discover and experiment with social identities in the hope of

Situating Social Identity through Language Convergence in Online Groups

creating an image of ourselves that is acceptable to the social realities we are invested in (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Furthermore, it is assumed that we will strive to remain a member of a group and seek membership to new groups if the group of interest has some degree of positive influence on our social identity (Tajfel, 1978b). Research on impression management has concluded that a large portion of this process is conscious; individuals rely upon context to determine how they will represent themselves (Andrews & Kacmar, 2001; Berzonsky & Adams, 1999; Yoder, 2000). Within the context of CMC, Walther (1993) concluded that in a zero-history group experimental setting, “CMC users formed increasingly developed impressions over time, presumably from the decoding of text-based cues” (Walther, 1993, p. 393). Hence it is conceivable that individuals interpret text-based cues (such as a screen name) as a means of evaluating individuals within an interpersonal framework, enough so that they can make decisions/judgments about interactants. Minority status groups, such as white supremacists groups, tend to have higher in-group identification (Brown, 2000). People who have a high identification with the group tend to see both the in-group and the out-group as more homogenous than people who have a low identification with the group (Brown, 2000). Thus, the feeling of belonging to a group places one in a social category that defines who one is in terms of the defining characteristics of the category (Hogg, Terry, & White, 1995). As such, social identities have self-evaluative consequences (Hogg, 1996); since “white supremacists” views their ideology as superior, they will take the necessary steps to maintain that perception. In accordance with this tenet of social identity theory, any display or action that will tie group, in this case “white supremacists”, to their cause will result in greater identification with that group (Tajfel, 1978a). In short, individuals will know the intra-group communication thereby tying them to that social

identity. Subsequently, people who feel that they are “white supremacists” will exhibit the characteristics of “white supremacists”; they will strive to situate themselves as “white supremacist” and will know and utilize language patterns and symbols that pertain to the group. The current study explores the possibility that the construction of a pseudonym utilized as the screen name within a white supremacist discussion board can serve as a means of identifying with the group. In addition, an individual screen name can function as a marker of identity and this marker is germane to white supremacist group membership. There are a vast number of cyber communities that rely mostly upon CMC as a means of maintaining contact with one another and recruiting new members (Thurlow et. al., 2004). Among them, white supremacist groups have recognized the value of CMC as a means of substantiating and maintaining communities; in fact, CMC has become their primary means of surviving and expanding during the last decade (e.g., Bostdorff, 2004; Burris, Smith, & Strahm, 2000; Duffy, 2003; Preston, 2003). According to the Anti-Defamation League (2001): “The high-tech revolution that has altered our domestic, educational, and workplace routines and habits has brought the same informational and communications opportunities to the organized hate movement” (p. 2). As a result, the number of hate groups operating in the United States is steadily on the rise. Various watchdog organizations have noted a 78% increase in the number of hate groups and group chapters involved in racially prejudiced behavior between 2000 and 2006 (Media Awareness Network, 2000; Southern Poverty Law Center, 2008). According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) there are currently between 450-500 “hard core” hate sites and as many as 1,500 – 1,750 hates sites that are potentially problematic on the Internet. The discourse of white supremacy is abundant and easily accessible; in fact, white supremacy has had a long history in America and has maintained its ideologies throughout the course of this

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nation’s history (Blee, K. 2002; Ezekiel, R. S., 1996; Daniels, J., 1997; Dobratz & Shanks-Meile, 1997; Quarles, 1999). The Internet has availed white supremacists the ability to reach a much more focused audience than their predecessors ever imagined (Anti-Defamation League, 2001). Discussion boards have become an important tool for establishing and maintaining group identity and thus are a primary source for white supremacist discourse (e.g. Bostdorff, 2004; Burris, et. al., 2000; Duffy, 2003; Preston, 2003). In essence, these discussion boards function as a community resource center that allows those interested to gather information about local events or discuss ideas with those of similar dispositions. This has become just one of many ways that white supremacist group’s commune and share their identities with others for the purpose of grouping themselves. Hence, the Internet has provided a social space in which white supremacists have an opportunity to create a social identity within the context of CMC.

(2006), screen names perceived as selected and designed by their users offer more information related to situating social identity (and greater predictability) to others. The potential for screen names to vary, while not infinite, is substantial. With the ability to combine any number, letter, or symbol, the emergence of uniformity within a discussion board membership list would suggest convergence within their creation. Furthermore, a type of structure functions in their construction. Hence, the creation of a screen name is a process of self-identification, a message that members of online groups interpret and react to within their discussions. The current study aimed to explore whether screen names can serve as an organizing variable within participants’ attempts to situate themselves socially in the context of discussion boards. Consequently, it was hypothesized that: H1: Screen names of an online white supremacist discussion board will contain cues to the social identity of the group.

Method A STUDY OF SOCIAL IDENTITY AND LANGUAGE CONVERGENCE IN ONLINE GROUPS An underlying assumption exists regarding the nonverbal cues exchanged and gathered in faceto-face settings which suggests that individuals treat most nonverbal behavior as intentional and designed to communicate information to others (for example, Allen & Atkinson, 1981; Buck & Van Lear, 2002; Manusov & Rodriguez, 1989; Richmond & McCroskey, 2004). In mediated contexts individuals may assume that the usernames utilized in cyberspace contain purposeful clues as to the personality or identity of the sender, which is a unique identifier since screen names cannot be duplicated within a specific discussion forum. Therefore, an individual’s perceptions of volition should influence the impact that username has on perceptions. According to Heisler and Crabill

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The flow for a typical content analysis was adapted from Nuendorf (2002) and used to guide data collection and analysis. Due to the nature of the study and the data, percentage frequencies of the variables were reported. The initial form of analysis of the data was to determine and report the frequency of the coded variables. Once the frequencies were determined, mean scores of each variable were compared using independent sample t tests with significance at p<.05.

Group Selection To address the research hypothesis of the study, it was deemed necessary to compare the group of interest to a similar group. It was important that the researcher identified an online white supremacist group and control group that utilized a discussion board as the primary means of interacting. The

Situating Social Identity through Language Convergence in Online Groups

lack of available demographic information poses a methodological complication that required the use of a purposive sample. Review of the literature of white supremacist discourse revealed a prominent theme of music (see Crabill, 2006). Therefore, the researcher selected the website of a prominent white supremacist recording label, “Resistance Records”, which is dedicated to the production and promotion of white supremacist music. Selecting a comparison group was done systematically by searching the Internet for music genres similar to that produced by “Resistance Records.” The researcher identified another record label, “Plan-it-X Records”, which produced a similar genre of music and maintained a comparable website design and membership. The missions of the two groups are comparable as well; both sites are interested in motivating others to take action against an oppositional entity and as such motivate others to act as social agents for change in our society. In addition, the groups maintained sufficient membership for adequate sampling.

each member made within the discussion forum. Thus, the final data set consisted of a total of 400 screen names.

Content Classification The coding categories were inductively derived from the review of the literature and pretested in a pilot study for intercoder agreement. With the goal of finding categories pertinent to white power identity in particular, a discussion thread “What inspired your screen name?” from a prominent white supremacist website, Stormfront.org, was used for the pilot analysis. The researcher created a coding structure and a code book with supplemental content by reading 575 replies posted for the discussion thread (Crabill & Smith, 2005). The resulting codes are described below. •

Sample A member list of screen names was collected from each discussion board. Since screen names are unique identifiers for members of each discussion board within the forum, it is not be possible for duplicate names to occur. However, it was possible, but not likely, that a screen name would be duplicated between the discussion boards, as the same person could belong to both groups and use the same screen name for each. Had such phenomena occurred, the screen names would have been removed from the data set. There were a total of 2,127 screen names identified from “Plan-it-X Records” and 8,045 from “Resistance Records.” To ensure that coding of screen names included members who were most invested in the respective groups’ social identity, posting statistics garnered from the websites were relied upon to identify the top 200 posters from each list. Screen names were rank-ordered based upon the number of posts

•

•

•

Anti-Other included any slanderous reference to nonwhite ethnicities. This included the presence of specific references to a white supremacist organization, band, slogan, or expression commonly used by white supremacist. Ethnicity included any reference to a specific race, ethnicity, or nationality. Derogatory references about other ethnicities are not included in this category and should be coded in the “Anti-Other” category. Personal Name was defined to include names that use a formal personal name as the screen name. Other included any screen name that was not coded in the other categories.

Coding The researcher and a trained assistant coded all the data. The second coder was provided with an in-depth description of each category along with examples taken from site content. Coders were to classify each screen name using the code book and a coding sheet. Each screen name was coded

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Table 1. Inter-Rater Reliabilities Percent Agreement Category

Overall

Resistance Records

Plan-it-X Records

Ethnicity

69.76%

68.29%

100%

Anti-Other

89.29%

91.25%

50%

Personal Name

86.36%

73.08%

91.57%

Other

87.11%

79.73%

91.67%

individually and placed in one of the four categories. To establish reliability of coding, Holsti’s method of calculating the percent of agreement was used. According to Neuendorf (2002), this method is recommended when two raters assign codes to the same units. Reliability coefficients were calculated for each of the categories (see Table 1), ranging from 69.76% to 89.29%.

white supremacist group would manifest in the codes for ethnic references and Anti-Other declarations within the construction of screen names. In addition, it was anticipated that the control group would have greater frequency of the coding categories for personal name and other content not included in the code book. Results of the independent sample t test revealed a significant difference in the coding of screen names between the white supremacist group and the control group. There was statically significant difference of the categories Ethnicity (t=-8.308, df=798, p<.05) and Anti-Other (t=14.653, df=798, p<.05) within the white supremacist group’s screen names compared to the control group. While, there was statistically significant difference of the categories Personal Name (t=9.851, df=798, p<.05) and Other (t=7.093, df=798, p<.05) within the control group compared to the white supremacist. These results support the research hypothesis as the white supremacist screen names were constructed with distinct cues that reflect the social identity of the group.

Study Results As anticipated, the categories of Ethnicity and Anti-Other had the greatest frequency within the screen names of the white supremacist group, while the categories Personal Name and Other had the greatest frequency in the control group. Frequency distribution of the data and the means is reported in Table 2. Two-tailed independent sample t tests were conducted using SPSS. The level of significance was set at p<.05 prior to analysis. Some variables were significant beyond this confidence interval. It was anticipated that the social identity of the

Table 2. Frequencies and means for coding categories Overall Category

Resistance Records

Plan-it-X Records

Coder 1

Coder 2

Mean

Coder 1

Coder 2

Mean

Coder 1

Coder 2

Mean

Ethnicity

34

39

36.5

32

37

34.5*

2

2

2

Anti-Other

79

80

79.5

77

76

76.5*

2

4

3

Personal Name

101

104

102.5

23

23

23

79

81

80*

Other

186

177

181.5

69

64

66.5

117

113

115*

Note: *Indicates statistical significance.

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It was anticipated that the analysis of the screen names of two comparable groups would be beneficial in understanding the process of constructing social identity within an online white supremacist group. Results of the analysis suggest that the screen names of discussion board members do provide information about the social identity of group membership. The majority (55%) of screen names of the white supremacist group were coded as having content inclusive of the Anti-Other and Ethnicity codes, while only 2.5% of the screen names of the control group were coded in these categories. These findings are particularly relevant and useful in understanding how social identity is constructed online through the creation and use of online screen names.

DISCUSSION The potential of screen names to vary is substantial, which makes it challenging to create a comprehensive coding structure that captures the full extent of possible content under investigation. However, it was anticipated that the screen names of the white supremacist group would include content that was specific to an argot that reflected group membership of white supremacist groups. Therefore, categories were created that would encompass content included within the specific argot of the white supremacist group, which were Ethnicity and Anti-Other. It was not surprising to find that the screen names of the control group had very marginal frequencies for these categories. Instead, it was anticipated that the control group would exhibit statistically significant frequencies for the categories Personal Name and Other. Thus 97.5% of the screen names for the control group were coded in these categories. There was no reason to assume that the control group would include the argot specific to white supremacists within the creation of their screen names. Overall, the findings revealed interesting patterns in the white supremacist screen names that

reflected group membership. The results suggest that the white supremacists rely upon maintaining a systematic group code, which is similar to the use of colors and symbols by street gang members to indicate membership. With the ability to combine any number, letter, or symbol, the emergence of a distinct pattern for the white supremacists screen names suggests convergence within the creation of screen names and furthermore a type of structure functions in their construction. In particular, the pairing of numbers and letters was a common feature of the screen names for the white supremacist group.

FUTURE TRENDS The proliferation of the Internet has created an explosion in the variety of reasons people are taking the journey into cyberspace. Current trends by Internet service providers to offer affordable pricing have made the cyberspace available to even the most casual of computer users. Hence, the Internet has seen unprecedented growth and continues to emerge as a dominant form of mediated communication: for example, by 2008 the Internet penetration in the U.S. has reached 72.5% of the population (Internet World Stats, 2008). Internet discussion forums, online interest groups, and online identities are increasingly becoming ubiquitous. It is of vital importance for researchers engaged in an emerging interdisciplinary field of studies of online behavior to follow these new developments to provide an accurate scholarly analysis of the potential societal implications.

CONCLUSION It can be concluded that the creation of a particular screen name in an online setting is part of a complex process of social self-identification, selfcategorization, and enhancement. A screen name is a message that members of online discussion

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boards communicate, interpret and react to while trying to situate themselves within the social identity of the group. Consistent with social identity theory assumptions, screen names converged within variables that were relevant to the social identity of the white supremacists. The findings of the present study are consistent with the research by Heisler and Crabill (2006) which investigated a similar phenomenon within perceptions of e-mail usernames: the ability for participants to choose their e-mail name had implications upon the impressions that participants developed about the username. Participants acknowledged that creating e-mail usernames, opposed to assigned names, provided an opportunity to reveal information about themselves. Within the context of the current study, all screen names were created by the participants and therefore, participants had the opportunity to convey information which situated them as members of the white supremacist group by relying upon an argot specific to the group’s social identity. In this regard, it seems that screen names serve as an organizing variable for participants to situate themselves socially in the context of discussion boards. It is apparent that CMC contexts do offer enough information about members to influence mediated perceptions, although it should be noted that the accuracy of such information is reliant solely upon the volitions of participants.

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Southern Poverty Law Center. (2008). Intelligence project: Active U.S. hate groups in 2006. Retrieved January 29, 2008, from http://www.splcenter.org/ intel/map/hate.jsp Spears, R., Lea, M., Corneliussen, R. A., Postmes, T., & Haar, W. T. (2002). Computer-mediated communication as a channel for social resistance: The strategic side of SIDE. Small Group Research, 33(5), 555–574. doi:10.1177/104649602237170 Stormfront.org. (2005). Welcome to the Stormfront discussion board! Retrieved December 16, 2005, from http://www.stormfront.org/forum/ showthread. php?t=4359 Tajfel, H. (1978a). The structure of our views about society. In H. Tajfel & C. Fraser (Eds.), Introducing social psychology: An analysis of individual reaction and response (pp. 302-329). UK: Penguin Books. Tajfel, H. (1978b). Social categorization, social identity, and social comparison. In H. Tajfel (Ed.) Differentiation between social groups: Studies in the social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 61-76). New York: Academic Press. Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory of intergroup behavior. In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (2nd ed.) (pp. 7-24). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Tanis, M., & Postmes, T. (2003). Social cues and impression formation in CMC. The Journal of Communication, 53(4), 676–693. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2003.tb02917.x

Walther, J. B. (1992). Interpersonal effects in computer-mediated interaction: A relational perspective. Communication Research, 19(1), 52–90. doi:10.1177/009365092019001003 Walther, J. B. (1993). Impression development in computer-mediated interaction. Western Journal of Communication, 57, 381–398. Walther, J. B. (1994). Anticipated ongoing interaction versus channel effects on relational communication in computer-mediated interaction. Human Communication Research, 20(4), 473–501. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.1994.tb00332.x Walther, J. B. (1996). Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal, and hyper personal interaction. Communication Research, 23(1), 3–43. doi:10.1177/009365096023001001 Walther, J. B., Anderson, J. F., & Park, D. W. (1994). Interpersonal effects in computer-mediated interaction. Communication Research, 21(4), 460–487. doi:10.1177/009365094021004002 Walther, J. B., & Burgoon, J. K. (1991). Relational communication in computer-mediated interaction. Human Communication Research, 19(1), 50–88. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.1992.tb00295.x Walther, J. B., & Tidwell, L. C. (1995). Nonverbal cues in computer-mediated communication, and the effect of chronemics on relational communication. Journal of Organizational Computing, 5(4), 355–378.

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Yoder, A. E. (2000). Barriers to ego identity status formation: A contextual qualification of Marcia’s identity status paradigm. Journal of Adolescence, 23, 95–106. doi:10.1006/jado.1999.0298 Zhou, L., Burgoon, J. K., Twitchell, D. P., Qin, T., & Nunamaker, J. F. Jr. (2004). A comparison of classification methods for predicting deception in computer-mediated communication. Journal of Management Information Systems, 20(4), 139–165.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC): Any form of human interaction across networked computers. Although the term has traditionally referred to those communications that occur via computer-mediated formats (i.e.,

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instant messages, e-mails, chat rooms), it has also been applied to other forms of text-based interactions. Reduced Cues: The “reduced cues” perspective suggests that CMC lacks nonverbal cues necessary to substantiate interpersonal communication amongst interactants. Screen Name: A pseudonym constructed for the use of participation in an online discussion group or chat. Social Identity Theory: A theory originally conceived and formulated by Henri Tajfel, a British social psychologist, in his early research of social perception. White Supremacy: Broadly generalized, the term “white supremacy” can refer to a number of ideologies. The term itself is often used as a blanket label to identify individuals with perceived prejudiced or racial bias toward minorities.

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Chapter 29

Online Relationships and the Realm of Romantic Possibilities Aaron Ben-Ze’ev University of Haifa, Israel

ABSTRACT Human life concerns not only—or even mainly—the present, but rather, and to a significant extent, the realm of imagined possibilities that include cyberspace. The fundamental human capacity to imagine the possible not only reveals reality, but often disregards it as well. Although the realm of potential romantic possibilities is promising, it is also risky. To guide our path through this unknown territory, humans have created boundaries that eliminate the options that seem immoral or dangerous. Internetbased social interaction technologies have considerably increased the boundaries of the realm of the romantically possible and its accessibility. Hence, the challenge of coping with this realm has become central to modern life and has far reaching implications for human relationships. This chapter theorizes the role of technology in creating potential possibilities for romantic relationships and focuses on the imagination, interactivity, reciprocity, and anonymity of cyberspace.

INTRODUCTION A major function of imagination is to help us understand our environment and prepare ourselves for future situations. We can overcome present difficulties by imagining possible desirable circumstances; in this manner we may also become aware of the shortcomings of certain possible imagined scenarios and the greater or lesser likelihood of their materialDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch029

izing. It is difficult to act without considering the infinite possibilities—what may be and what might have been. The imaginative capacity forces us to be concerned not only with the present circumstances, but also with past and future circumstances. Indeed, people think about the future more than about the past or the present. Many potential events are more pleasurable to imagine than to experience (Gilbert, 2007: 17-18; Roese & Olson, 1995). Imagination facilitates our flight from one such set of circumstances to another. The constant play between the

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Online Relationships and the Realm of Romantic Possibilities

actual and the potential can generate profound emotional dissonance. The “road not taken” is as significant as the one we ultimately choose. Social interaction technologies enable us to miss fewer roads. The realm of possibilities considerably increases the importance of including a comparison in our quest to make a choice. When making decisions in the present, we constantly compare the present to possible alternatives. The act of comparison that underlies the emotional significance attributed to an event encompasses a mental construction of an alternative situation. The more available the alternative, that is, the closer the imagined alternative is to being realized, the more intense the emotion (Kahneman & Miller, 1986; BenZe’ev, 2000: 21-23). The Internet has extended our notions of what we might consider possible. Cyberspace is the land of unlimited possibilities. Although we can be emotionally rich in no time, we can suffer many painful experiences and never reach the “Promised Land.” The notion of the availability of alternatives may explain many seemingly puzzling situations, such as people who remain in unfulfilling marriages or jobs. Although their satisfaction from the present situation is low, people perceive other possible alternatives to be even worse (Baron et al., 1992:3). The other direction is found as well. People leave reasonable existing situations for unknown risky ones; By comparison, the evaluation of possible alternatives often supersedes those of existing positions. Since the realm of romantic possibilities so overwhelms us with tempting alternatives, we are not able to reasonably consider alternatives to the status quo. We tend to bow to the lure of immediate and ever-changing possibilities while neglecting the more stable aspects of the present and the long-term future.

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BACKGROUND The great advantage of modern technology is its ability to present many tempting possible romantic options. We have become slaves to such romantic options—the Internet, business trips, and cell phones all facilitate various romantic and sexual possibilities. The chains of potential possibilities prevent us from enjoying or even being comfortable with the present. We tend to get used to the chains of the present, as we really have no other choice. It is much harder to cope with the chains of the possible, since this realm, bounded only by our imagination, is extremely exciting and can prevent us from being happy with our present lot. The present may make us somewhat sad, but the realm of the possible makes us restless and continually disappointed. Coping with the mixed blessing of the possible requires us to establish a normative order of priority in the form of ideals and boundaries. As we establish a set of normative priorities, we often find ourselves giving up an ideal or violating a certain boundary. Romantic love in modern society is rife with the difficulties associated with fulfilling ideals and maintaining boundaries. To decrease the violation of boundaries, we may want to make our normative boundaries more flexible; in turn, this may weaken the safeguards against further violation. Take, for example, cyberspace where the romantic and sexual boundaries are much more flexible than in offline circumstances. This flexibility did not reduce the number of offline violations of boundaries but rather increased it. Romantic and sexual cheating increased with the expanded use of the Internet (Orr, 2004). Many married people testify that they set certain boundaries for their online activity, yet quickly violate them as they want to upgrade their online affair. The absence in cyberspace of external constraints and the ability to overcome personal limitations by using the imagination make cyberlove similar to infatuation, both of which approximate idealized love. It seems that

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in online relationships, people perceive only the smile; they deliberately overlook any constraints, which is what makes this affair so exciting. However, once they decide to upgrade their online romantic relationship into an offline one, they face the limitations that were previously ignored. Such an upgrade is, therefore, often doomed to fail (Ben-Ze’ev, 2004). A major romantic possibility that social interaction technologies facilitate is that of having multiple romantic relationships. The average user of the Internet today may have more (online) lovers than any of the famous lovers in human history. The significant implications of online dating have not begun to be realized.

ROMANTIC SEDUCTIVENESS ON THE NET The increased lure of the Net has to do with increasing romantic possibilities, which have become increasingly more accessible and feasible. The major features responsible for the great romantic seductiveness of cyberspace, which are in my view imagination, interactivity, availability, and anonymity, are indeed related to having more accessible and tempting possibilities (Ben-Ze’ev, 2004). Imagination, which plays a major role in cyberspace, makes this space seductive since it can free us from the limits imposed by our bodies and by our contexts. Imagination has hardly any practical constraints, and it enables one to depict oneself and the other in a most positive and seductive light—much better than in reality. Online imagination can also complete, in an exciting manner, details upon which our online companions might remain vague. Imagination can, therefore, entertain our wildest fantasies. The imaginary nature of cyberspace makes it easier to idealize the other; and idealization is an essential element in romantic love. Interactivity is what distinguishes cyberspace

from other imaginative realities. In cyberspace people are not merely imagining themselves to be with an attractive person, they are actually interacting with such a person. Indeed, the reported actions are sexually more daring and exciting. The interactivity of cyberspace fosters a crucial aspect of romantic relationships: namely, reciprocity. Mutual attraction is the most highly valued characteristic in a potential mate—this is true for both sexes (Buss, 1994: 44). People like to hear that they are desired. It is easier to express reciprocity in cyberspace, as it requires fewer resources or real actions, and self-disclosure is greater. Cyberspace is an alternative, available environment providing easy access to many available and desired options. It is easy and not costly to reach desired partners and easy to perform desired actions. It is easier to find romantic partners in cyberspace than at bars, shopping malls, or supermarkets. Cyberspace is also highly available in the sense that it is highly accessible. Connections to cyberspace are everywhere—home, work, hotels, and even cafes—and logging in is simple and inexpensive. Millions of people are eagerly waiting for you on the Net every moment of the day. They are available and it is easy to find them. The great availability is associated with frequent novel changes, and this makes cyberspace more dynamic, unstable, and exciting. The anonymity associated with cyberspace reduces the risks of online activities. Such anonymity decreases vulnerability and the weight of social norms, and hence makes people feel safer and freer to act according to their desires. In offline circumstances, the fear of harmful consequences is one of the major obstacles to conducting many romantic affairs and to significant self-disclosure in those that are conducted. Because of the greater sense of security, self-disclosure is also more prevalent in cyberspace—this in turn increases intimacy and, accordingly, the seductiveness of online relationships is further enhanced. The above features of cyberspace increase the lure of the Net and make people feel more excited,

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comfortable, free, and safe while engaging in an online romantic affair. It has been claimed that cyberspace enables one to have more sex, better sex, and different sex. Since many moral and practical constraints are lifted in the Net, people can more easily make sexual contacts when and with whom they want. Cybersex can be more intense, relaxed, and satisfactory—it may also be conducted with people who are not available for offline sexual activities (Doering, 2002; Levine, 1998). Cyberspace provides an easy and desired alternative to the difficult circumstances of real life. When attempts are made to transfer this alternative to offline affairs, some of its advantages may disappear. In addition to the considerable advantages of going deeper into the realm of the possible in online relationships, there are also substantial hazards in doing so (Whitty, 2008). The four factors that enhance the lure of the Net—that is, imagination, interactivity, availability, and anonymity—are associated with risk. Imagination may lead to blurring the distinction between reality and fantasy. Interactivity is associated not merely with greater excitement but also with actual dangers when the possible is realized. Great availability of a variety of options may result in mental stress associated with a “saturated self” that is unable to make practical choices (Copher et al., 2002). Anonymity makes it much easier to practice deception (Ben-Ze’ev, 2004). In light of the great seductiveness of cyberspace and the ease of becoming involved in online affairs people are easily carried away and underestimate the risks of surfing the Net. Moreover, cyberspace does not merely satisfy needs, but creates novel needs that often cannot be met. Thus, the apparent ease of finding true and everlasting love in cyberspace creates the need to have such “perfect” love. Of course, that is far from simple to achieve. Cybering is similar, in a few significant senses, to taking drugs. Both provide easy access to possible pleasure, which is often based upon virtual realities. In both cases, the tempting results can make

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people dangerously addicted to the method; people want more and more, but satisfaction is limited and becomes more costly to achieve. An unfulfilled craving for drugs and cybering can cause great distress. Whereas drugs artificially stimulate pleasure centers in the brain, online conversations artificially stimulate pleasure centers in the mind. Artificial stimulation may appear to be easy and cheap; however, the price can be dear in terms of our overall performance and, in particular, in terms of the price that those close to us in our offline lives might have to pay. Moreover, as with drugs, getting “high” online might require more and more doses of imagination—which in turn can further increase the gap between actual reality and cyberspace (Ben-Ze’ev, 2004). The “highs” of the possible can turn into deep “downs” of reality. Such risks are evident not only in cyberspace but also in other realms of possibilities.

COPING WITH INCREASED ROMANTIC POSSIBILITIES Modern times are difficult for lovers—perhaps more so than in most previous eras. There are two major reasons for this: on the negative side, there are hardly any constraints preventing leaving the current romantic framework; on the positive side, there are many tempting accessible alternatives to the current romantic relationship (Ben-Ze’ev & Goussinsky, 2008). The romantic realm of reduced constraints and greater options lasts longer today. Compared with the past, people today live longer and have a greater capacity to materialize these alternatives at an older age. The invention of Viagra enables men to extend the period of their lives when they are sexually active, and it has been claimed that older women reach orgasm more often than do younger ones (Prioleau, 2003: 85). The introduction of the Internet enabled people to be aware and involved from a much younger age in this romantic realm of reduced constraints and greater options. In light of the absence of

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clear romantic boundaries and the abundance of accessible romantic alternatives and their long duration, love in modern times becomes a rather fluid concept and, accordingly, romantic bonds tend to be frailer than in the past. The awareness of romantic possibilities has become much more relevant in our romantic life (Bauman, 2003; Kayser, 1993). The restless nature of modern romantic life, which is due to the vast expansion of romantic possibilities open to us, is further exacerbated by the widespread participation of young people in cyberaffairs and cybersex. Such greater sexual flexibility will further augment the flexible nature of their future romantic bonds. As a young woman remarks about cybersex: “My generation was the first to have computers in school. I do not have such moral dilemmas about online communication, nor do I question it. It just is.” (Ben-Ze’ev, 2004). Empirical findings suggest that if a person has a previous history of multiple sex partners, the likelihood of him or her having a secondary sex partner during a current relationship greatly increases (Forste & Tanfer, 1996). It seems likely, therefore, that many of the youngsters who conduct several online affairs at the same time will continue doing it in the future. It will, therefore, be increasingly difficult to fulfill the romantic ideal of satisfying all one’s emotional needs in a single relationship throughout one’s lifetime. Couples will have to bring new experiences into their lives, together and apart, and further develop their friendships with others so as to cope better with the stability-change conflict. If marriage is to survive, it cannot be an isolated, static island in our current dynamic environment. Marriage must also become a dynamic form that is able to handle a greater number of meaningful relationships and that is not expected to satisfy all the needs of the participants. Social interaction technologies have provided people nowadays with greater freedom of choice. More than at any other time in human history, we can choose where we wish to live, what we want

to do, and with whom we want to do it (Gilbert, 2007: 259). Moreover, our freedom to choose our beloved has now become potentially not just a one-off choice, but rather an ongoing experience. Lovers do not simply choose a beloved and then rest passively for the rest of their lives; they are in a fluid state, which requires constant effort and deliberation. Freedom, thus, has its own cost, and excessive freedom can increase people’s uncertainty, insecurity, dissatisfaction, and depression. Therefore, having a greater choice can be a mixed blessing. As Barry Schwartz shows, too much freedom from constraints is a bad thing, as unconstrained freedom leads to paralysis and becomes a kind of self-defeating tyranny. He further argues that due to the multiplicity of choices available at all times and on all fronts, people no longer know how to be satisfied with “just good enough.” They always seek perfection. Such freedom, which increases the realm of the possible, also undermines the notion of deep commitment and social belonging to groups and institutions (Schwartz, 2000). The considerable increase, provided by modern technologies, in the freedom to choose romantic options raises the question of the way to cope with it. A prevailing traditional manner is to build fences around the possible in a way which will prevent any access – a “closed borders” policy. An opposite approach would be that of “open borders” in which no negative barrier exists and the perceived positive quality of the given option is the only criterion for choosing it. We can distinguish in this regard negative and positive manners. Promoting a certain option and considering it to be unique constitutes a positive manner; preventing the access to a certain option and making others exclusive constitutes a negative manner. It seems that a reasonable choice will be that in which both manners are involved. In light of the huge amount of tempting possibilities, trying each one will be an endless, frustrating experience. The search for optimal options should be guided by ideals and bound-

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aries which fit our evaluative structure. In this regard, I would like to introduce two distinctions: that between promoting and preventing behavior and that between unique and exclusive options. Although I will argue that romantic life should involve both promoting and preventing behavior and having both unique and exclusive features, I will claim that the weight of the positive manners should be increased. Tory Higgins distinguishes between promotion-focused behavior, which is concerned with strong ideals related to attaining accomplishments or fulfilling hopes, and prevention-focused behavior, which is concerned with strong “oughts” related to protection, safety, and responsibility. This distinction highlights the difference between nurture-related and security-related behavior. In the prevention mode, interactions between people occur only when something is going wrong—when some oughts are violated (Higgins, 1997). The promotion mode focuses on nurturing ongoing, positive behavior, which develops one’s potential, whereas the preventing mode focuses on obviating one’s potential negative behavior, such as adultery. Fostering learning and encouraging caring are examples of a promoting mode of behavior; controlling the places to which someone can go and prohibiting extramarital sex are examples of the preventing mode. Romantic relationships involve both ideals and boundaries, and so they require both types of activities. We need to promote various aspects of our loving experiences. At the same time we need to preclude other aspects. The exercise of affective bonds always involves balancing nurturing and controlling. Similarly, we should increase the weight of the positive attitude that perceives the other person as unique, rather than the negative attitude of keeping her exclusively to ourselves. Being exclusive is characterized in negative terms that establish rigid boundaries and entails: “not permitting,” “restricting,” “not dividing or sharing with others,” “excluding some or most, as from membership or participation.” Being unique is characterized

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in positive terms that establish distinctiveness: “being one of a kind,” “different from others in a way that makes somebody or something special and worthy of note.” If my beloved considers me unique, it is plausible that certain activities, but not all, remain exclusive to us. It is also possible that I am unique to my beloved in the sense that there is no other person with whom she is involved in so many intimate activities, but this does not mean that there must be activities that are restricted to me alone (Ben-Ze’ev & Goussinsky, 2008). The greater role of the possible in the romantic realm casts further doubts on the importance of rigid exclusivity, which is typical of the economy of scarcity (Illouz, 2007: 90). The preference for uniqueness over exclusivity is clear in online dating sites where people are asked to give a detailed description of their own uniqueness as well as what sort of people they like to date. Moreover, the technology enables choice in a way that was previously unknown. This requires a deep look inward at the uniqueness of one’s self. Social interaction technologies enable people to choose their future partner according to very specific features. When one writes, for example, that he wants to find a vegetarian Jewish woman who is interested in wild animals in Africa, he does not necessarily assume that this woman will be the most suitable sexual partner, his most intimate friend, or the one best suited to help him develop his intellectual capacities. The same tendency to focus on specific features can be seen in the search for the best sexual partner, which is sometimes conducted by describing the precise length of his sexual organ. It is obvious, that the desired person being described is not meant to assume the roles of friendly and intellectual companionship. The search for the optimal partner also requires the establishment of certain value fences. Such a need is evident in matchmaking websites. Although every minute of the day millions of people are waiting for you to engage with them in a romantic or sexual adventure, you cannot examine every one of them. You should adopt certain value

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criteria that will prevent you from being in touch with those who are probably unsuitable for you. This is actually the main challenge of these dating sites—to improve the initial selection process in a way that enhances the prospects of a good match. The greatly increased access to the realm of the possible requires evaluative guidelines for choosing the right option. This raises the need to formulate negative criteria that can protect the person from selecting harmful options.

FUTURE TRENDS Cyberspace currently attracts many types of people who, on the whole, have positive emotional experiences while surfing. It is likely that, in the future, a greater variety of people will enjoy such experiences. However, the greater emotional excitement provided by the Net will also increase negative emotions. Accordingly, the Net will elicit a greater variety of contrasting emotional responses. Cyberspace has a profound impact upon our emotional experiences. For one thing, it increases intense emotional experiences. So far, we have not observed the generation of new kinds of emotions, but this possibility should not be ruled out. It should be noted that the development of new types of emotions and the increase in the complexity of existing emotions have characterized our evolution from non-human animals to humans; nevertheless, in this evolutionary process none of the animal emotions ever completely disappeared. It is not clear yet whether online relationships will generate such significant changes in our emotional life (Ben-Ze’ev, 2004). The Internet has dramatically changed the romantic domain; this process will accelerate in the future. Such changes will inevitably modify present social forms such as marriage and cohabitation, and current romantic practices relating to courtship, casual sex, committed romantic relationships, and romantic exclusivity. We can expect further relaxation of social and moral norms; this process

should not be considered a threat, as it is not online changes that endanger romantic relationships, but our inability to adapt. The relaxation of such norms will be particularly evident in matters pertaining to romantic exclusivity. It will be difficult to avoid the vast amount of available tempting alternatives entirely. The notion of “betrayal” will become less common in connection with romantic affairs, and the use of more neutral terms, such as “parallel relationships” will be more common (Ben-Ze’ev & Goussinsky, 2008). The chaotic and dynamic nature of cyberspace will never replace the more stable nature of actualspace, as we cannot live in complete chaos: like other types of meaning, emotional meaning presupposes some kind of stable background against which meaning is generated. Nevertheless, the romantic realm will become more dynamic and it will be more difficult to achieve the emotional advantages of a stable romantic framework. The test of the Internet will be whether it can complement ordinary romantic activities, just as the telephone complements ordinary social activities, or whether it will merely replace them with less valuable activities, as the television frequently does (Ben-Ze’ev, 2004).

CONCLUSION Internet-based social interaction technologies and other developments in modern society significantly increase the realm of the possible in general and romantic possibilities in particular. The realm of the possible has become less and less imaginary and more and more real. Socalled “virtual relationships” can be extremely real psychologically. Accordingly, involvement in such relationships carries considerable risks. Nevertheless, they also offer many positive aspects, and their popularity indicates that people are increasingly finding them attractive options. Online romantic relationships may become more and more dominant; however, for most of us they

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will never replace offline relationships, but merely supplement them. This will require substantive normative changes, mainly with regard to the issue of romantic exclusivity. The way in which we cope with this huge increase in the realm of romantic possibilities may threaten the existence of prevailing norms and institutions (such as the norm of exclusivity and the institution of marriage); it may be done in a negative manner (for instance, by trying to prevent access to this realm), in a positive manner (for instance, by promoting certain options in it), or through negative and positive attitudes. In light of the growing increase in number, quality, accessibility, and feasibility of romantic possibilities, it will be unwise to use merely negative responses. Giving more weight to the promotion of unique positive options, while still building some kind of limited fences in certain areas is likely to be more beneficial. Freedom constrained by ideals and boundaries may in fact be easier to bear and less dangerous than unconstrained freedom. The fact that the realm of romantic possibilities is constantly increasing, and hence “love is all around”, does not mean that love can overcome all difficulties; however, it may indicate that genuine love can be found somewhere, and one should not give up the search for it. Love maybe around the corner for everyone, but not every corner is the proper one. Modern society has provided the possibility of finding love at all ages and in so many places. It seems that this process will continue while the communication technologies of providing convenient circumstances for love evolve. Finding love becomes easier, and it becomes harder for people to escape from love. The typical excuses of blaming external circumstances on not seizing love opportunities are behind the times.

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REFERENCES Baron, R. S., Kerr, N. L., & Miller, N. (1992). Group process, group decision, group action. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Bauman, Z. (2003). Liquid love: On the frailty of human bonds. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Ben-Ze’ev, A. (2000). The subtlety of emotions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ben-Ze’ev, A. (2004). Love online: Emotions on the Internet. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Ben-Ze’ev, A., & Goussinsky, R. (2008). In the name of love: Romantic ideology and its victims. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Buss, D. (1994). The evolution of desire: Strategies of human mating. New York: Basic Books. Copher, J. I., Kanfer, A. G., & Walker, M. B. (2002). Everyday communication patterns of heavy and light email users. In B. Wellman & C. Haythornthwaite, (Eds.), The Internet in everyday life (pp. 263-290). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Doering, N. (2002). Studying online love and cyber romance. In B. Batinic, U. D. Reips, & M. Bosnjak (Eds.), Online social sciences (pp. 333356). Seattle, WA: Hogrefe & Huber. Forste, R., & Tanfer, K. (1996). Sexual exclusivity among dating, cohabiting, and married women. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 58, 33–47. doi:10.2307/353375 Gilbert, D. (2007). Stumbling on happiness. New York: Vintage. Higgins, E. T. (1997). Beyond pleasure and pain. The American Psychologist, 52, 1280–1300. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.52.12.1280

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Kahneman, D., & Miller, D. T. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review, 93, 136–153. doi:10.1037/0033295X.93.2.136 Kayser, K. (1993). When love dies: The process of marital disaffection. New York: Guilford. Levine, D. (1998). The joy of cybersex: A guide for creative lovers. New York: Ballantine Books. Orr, A. (2004). Meeting, mating, and cheating: Sex, love and the new world of online dating. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Reuters. Prioleau, B. (2003). Seductress: Women who ravished the world and their lost art of love. New York: Viking. Roese, N. J., & Olson, J. M. (Eds.). (1995). What might have been: The social psychology of counterfactual thinking. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schwartz, B. (2000). Self-determination: The tyranny of freedom. The American Psychologist, 55, 79–88. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.79

Whitty, M. T. (2008). Liberating or debilitating? An examination of romantic relationships, sexual relationships and friendships on the Net. Computers in Human Behavior, 24, 1837–1850. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2008.02.009

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Cyberaffair: A romantic affair consisting mainly of computer-mediated communication. Cybering: Cybersex is sometimes colloquially called “cybering.” Cyberlove: A romantic relationship consisting mainly of computer-mediated communication. Cybersex: A social interaction between at least two people who are exchanging real-time digital messages to become sexually aroused. Matchmaking Websites: Websites that attempt to romantically match two people for an offline or online relationship. Online Dating: Dating which is mainly conducted online. Romantic Boundaries: Prevailing norms which limit romantic behavior. Virtual Relationships: Relationships conducted in cyberspace.

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The Virtual Social Continuum Expressed Interaction and Community Formation in MMORPGs Alan Rea Western Michigan University, USA

ABSTRACT From the interactive textual worlds of MUDs and MuSHes to the visually rich, textured three-dimensional realms of MMORPGs, participants move from loose to strong associations forming social networks via structured guidelines and interaction patterns. These virtual world inhabitants create communication conduits, collaborate to attain goals and solve problems, or entertain themselves. In this chapter, the author uses Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, one of the most successful MMORPGs to date, to chart the various associations ranging from casual conversations to groups and guilds in which role specialization is critical to close-knit community success. The author argues that using rewards for accepted behavior creates a socialization continuum that stimulates players to interact with one another.

INTRODUCTION From the interactive textual worlds of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and Multi-User Shared Hallucinations (MuSHes) to the visually rich, textured three-dimensional realms of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing games (MMORPGs), participants move from loose to strong associations forming social networks via structured guidelines and interaction patterns. These virtual world inhabitants create communication conduits, collaborate to attain DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch030

goals and solve problems, or simply have fun. After tracing the history of MMORPG development and ludological research, the author examines the various interaction techniques (e.g., passerby buffs) and tools (questing parties, crafting exchanges, etc.) players use to create their social networks within virtual worlds. The study demonstrates the importance of a socialization continuum to a virtual world’s success: the more each player practices accepted behavior and displays valued traits, the stronger the virtual community becomes. The author finds that the level of interaction and benefits gleaned from community formation equal

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The Virtual Social Continuum Expressed

the expected levels of networking and interactions. In other words, the more impetus for collaboration and community, the more virtual world participants desire to form intricate social networks, thereby gleaning more benefits from the virtual world itself. Ultimately, the author argues that the combination of social interaction, collaborative tasks, shared resource tools, and reputation building create one of the most compelling media for entertainment and for collaborative work within the ever increasing virtual shared spaces of our digital world.

BACKGROUND MMORPG Roots Researchers date video games from the advent of Russell’s Spacewar in 1961 (Kent, 2001, p. 19) and the first commercial arcade hit, Computer Space in 1971 (Kent, 2001, p. 33), a remake of the original Spacewar. Analyses focus on the development of arcade and console markets into the early 2000s (Kent, 2001) because video games were traditionally played on screens, e.g., television (Baer, 2001). However, interactive text adventures designed for computers, such as Colossal Cave Adventure, inspired pioneers (Hafner & Lyon, 1996, pp. 207-208) to develop Adventure (Robinett, 2008) for the Atari 2600. It was one of the most popular titles for the console system even though it was among the first. Most of the original interactive text games are from the Role Playing Games (RPG) genre, which contains the Dungeon and Dragon (D&D) sub-genre beginning with the tabletop RPG in 1974 (Birnbaum, 2004). Players take on the role of an adventurer (warrior, wizard, thief, etc.) embarking on never-ending quests to slay dragons, help others, and gain experience. The most successful RPGs today, such as Oblivion (Bethesda Softworks, 2008), use this approach. Except for tabletop D&D games, players did not interact in early RPGs. Even in the interactive

Colossal Cave Adventure, the player explored the game alone. However, in the 1970s programmers created multi-player computer games incorporating human interaction. In 1978, Roy Tribshaw created the first Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) (Antell, 1991). Eventually it became popular among CompuServe users under the title, British Legends (Toth, 2005). Its players were able to compete in battles and perform quests. MUDs appeared on computer networks and though the content varied from science fiction to war to simple adventure, many shared a common feature: online communication tools, such as “bulletin boards, [e]mail, [and] chat” (Antell, 1991). MUDs evolved through many permutations, but select events increased MUD popularity. In 1989, Jim Aspnes released TinyMUD which focused on collaborative problem solving and user teams rather than combat and adventure (Bartle, 2008). Moreover TinyMUD ran on UNIX systems, so more people had access. TinyMUD diversified MUDs and more acronyms appeared. MuSHes began to connate MUDs with a strong social and collaborative focus. From these grew the academic MOO (MUD Object-Oriented) now used for collaborative instruction (Holmevik & Haynes, 2000). Eventually the graphics of the video game combined with the RPG questing of MUDs and the social nature of MuSHes. In 1991 America Online (AOL) released the first MMORPG. In Neverwinter Nights (BioWare, 2008), AOL subscribers could form groups, talk via textual chat boxes, and share various adventures in real-time. With the growth of the Internet in the mid 1990s, the user base of MMORPGs and MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games)—a game not focusing on RPG play—grew exponentially. By 1997 games such as Ultima Online (Electronic Arts, 2008b) had proven MMORPGs’ popularity. Today’s successful MMORPGs, such as Star Wars Galaxies (Sony, 2008) and World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2008a), assure that more MMORPGs will be on the way.

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Studies of Video Games Scholars have only recently begun focusing on studying screen-based games despite their nearly three decades of popularity. Largely film and media scholars examined concepts of space, time, narrative, and other traditional cinematic techniques (Wolf, 2001). Academic journals, such as Game Studies (Game Studies, 2001), followed. Researchers discussed aspects of immersion (McMahon, 2003) and interaction (Perron, 2003) in various game narratives and characters. Humanities scholars approached video games mainly within the context of identity formation (Rehak, 2003), culture (Lahti, 2003) and gender (Consalvo, 2003). Ludology, the study of “games in general, and video games in particular” (Frasca, 2003, p. 222), is now an established interdisciplinary field of research in which scholars study video game genres: for example, adventure, combat, racing, shooting, sports, and card games (Wolf, 2001). This chapter focuses on MMORPGs and the social elements of gaming.

Studies of MMORPGs In contemporary ludological research we find traditional approaches, including narrative (Leuski & Lavrenko 2006; Tychsen, 2006), identity formation (Golder & Donath, 2004), and immersion and presence (Takatalo, Häkkinen, Komulainen, Särkelä, & Nyman, 2006). However, scholars from other disciplines also take part. Some examine how game architecture affects player interaction (McGregor, 2006). Economists study MMORPG virtual economies (Guo & Barnes, 2007) and legal scholars look to solve real-world challenges, such as digital rights management (DRM) issues (Landau, Stratulate, & Twilleager, 2006). Still, the general public exposure to MMORPGs is limited and negative. Current media focus on the assumption that video games cause violent behavior (Smith, 2005). Some researchers reveal,

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and refute, this stereotype. Scholars examine the psychological aspects of gaming and the games themselves. One such study, Project Massive (Seay 2008), considers how gamers self-regulate their behavior and attempts to determine what leads to addictive behavior (Seay & Kraut, 2007). Other studies observe what makes a hardcore gamer—a person who spends an inordinate amount of time playing video games (Fritsch, Voigt, & Schiller, 2006)—which can lead to addiction. Other psychological studies explore how gaming affects real-world relationships (Shklovski, Kraut, & Cummings, 2006), self, personal space (Wilcox, Allison, Elfassy, & Grelik, 2006), and even views of death (Klastrup, 2006). Scholars also study how to utilize MMORPGs in educational environments: developing education games (Dickey, 2006), employing them in the classroom (Garzotto, 2007), or tailoring them to purposes such as second language acquisition (Burke, Nguyen, Sun, Evenson, Kim, Wright, Ahmed, & Patel, 2005). Most of these studies stress the usefulness of the collaborative environment to help students learn new skill sets (Frank, Sanbou, & Terashima, 2006), such as working in teams and modeling effective problem-solving behaviors. Of course, MMORPGs are most effective when players immerse themselves in the virtual world. Technology-focused studies search for methods to create better player experiences and adventures (Joslin, Brown, & Drennan, 2007), voice communication (Wadley, Gibbs, & Benda, 2005), quality of service in networks (Oliveira & Henderson, 2003), and better distribution of server loads (Kabus & Buchmann, 2007). Technical approaches consider how better networks improve communal playing experience (Chen & Lei, 2006) and protect players’ accounts from misuse (Chen & Hong, 2007).

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Focus on the Social Aspect of MMORPGs

SOCIALIZATION CONTINUUM IN MMORPGS

However, most MMORPG studies target the social nature of the virtual environments. Scholars note the importance of social interaction for learning (SCRG, 2005) and involvement (Takatalo et al., 2006) as well as skill acquisition (Frank, et al., 2006) that can be transferred to real world experiences. Games allow players to experience human interaction on various levels (Goulder & Donath, 2004). Players can either participate in an established community (Lee & LaRose, 2007; LaRose, Shaw, & Wirth, 2006) to create something larger than game developers intended (Cypher & Richardson, 2006) or perhaps learn to thwart its conventions (Foo & Koivisto, 2004) as they work to establish a specific reputation (Jensen, Davis, & Farnham, 2002) within communities. The creation, building, maintenance, and sometimes dissolution of social networks and communities are some of the strongest themes in MMORPG research studies. Scholars examine how players form, and then work, within virtual MMORPG communities (Chen & Duh, 2007; SCRG, 2005; Ducheneaut & Moore, 2004), both within the world’s confines as well as creating external support resources, such as web boards and gaming Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) (Sherlock, 2007). Group formation and utilization is also key to forming the levels of community within MMORPGs (Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, & Moore, 2007; Sherlock, 2007; Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, & Moore, 2006) because the social component tends to keep players in the game both in single sessions and over time. Of course, the sense of presence within the games (Nardi & Harris, 2006; Papargyris & Poulymenakou, 2005; Jensen, et al., 2002) attracts and keeps players as participants in their virtual communities. Unlike any other gaming genre, MMORPGs combine the lure of social relationships with the thrill of conquering objectives, and offer an outlet for creative self-expression that makes them alluring to many categories of gamers (Yee, 2005).

To best understand the type of player who is attracted, and then remains, in MMORPGs, we must examine what motivates gamers. Bartle (2004), in Designing Virtual Worlds, puts forth four player types: achievers, explorers, killers, and socializers (p. 130). Most game genres focus on one type of player. For example, The Sims (Electronic Arts, 2008a) with its neighborhoods and communities attracts “socializers.” Adventure games attract “explorers.” Puzzle games (that keep high-scores or have distinct objectives) attract “achievers.” And, first-person shooters, such as Doom (Id Software, 2008), attract “killers.” However, Bartle notes that a truly successful virtual world allows all four types to live in equilibrium. No type can outnumber the other, and opportunities for game play must exist in abundance for each without impinging on the other (Bartle, 2004, p. 139). Moreover, the virtual world must allow the player to evolve: “the classic path is killer to explorer to achiever to socializer” (Bartle, 2004, p. 140). Bartle places the player types within a “Player Interest Graph” (Bartle, 2004, p. 136) summarized as: • • • •

“Killers” have fun acting on other players. “Explorers” have fun interacting with the virtual world. “Achievers” have fun acting on the virtual world. “Socializers” have fun interacting with other players.

Just as real worlds contain diverse individuals, MMORPGs, as virtual shared persistent worlds, must incorporate all four types to be successful. To do so, there must be opportunities for all player types regardless of their evolution. To understand how a MMORPG can do this effectively, we will examine one of the most successful MMORPG to date, World of Warcraft (henceforth WoW) (Bliz-

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zard Entertainment, 2008a). In doing so, we will chart a socialization continuum that demonstrates how an MMORPG can accommodate all play styles and help a player evolve into a functioning member of a virtual community.

Interaction Opportunities In January 2008, WoW hit a milestone subscription base of more than 10 million players in less than four years (Blizzard Entertainment, 2008b) and continues to expand—more quests, environments, PVP opportunities, etc.—to satisfy each player interest style. WoW is the largest MMORPG to date and shows no signs of succumbing to player attrition via excessive churn (the rate at which players leave a virtual community). Game experts often argue that a low churn rate is a particularly important measurement of virtual community success: “the greater the level of community, the lower the churn” (Bartle, 2004, p. 142). The continued growth of WoW signals success in creating a virtual world that can sustain all player types. It does so through a social continuum that provides attractive opportunities for newbies (players just joining the game) to veterans as they move from “killer” to “socializer” modes. Researchers have noted the significance of social and communal aspects in WoW (Yee, 2006) as players participate in a “community of practice” (Papargyris & Poulymenakou, 2005) that allows them to form relationships and meanings through interaction. However, one must ask how players with diverse foci can participate together in a virtual world. Before a new player creates an avatar, their character or representation in the virtual world, they must choose a type of interaction: PVP (Player versus Player), PVE (Player versus Environment), RP (Role Playing), or RPPVP (Role Playing Player versus Player). The player’s selection may indicate their interest type. “Killers” and “socializers” need interaction and gravitate toward PVP or RPPVP whereas achievers and explorers prefer acting on the world (PVE or RP).

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When a new player enters the “starting area” an NPC (non-player character) greets him and assigns him a task. The interaction motivates the player to find NPCs with exclamation marks over their heads, indicating they have a task. Conversely, NPCs with question marks indicate a task is complete. Players learn to seek these NPCs to gain experience and rewards. Achiever types will complete as many quests as possible. WoW developers provide many NPCs toward this goal. Soon players find their text chat channels filled with helpful (and non-helpful) questions and answers concerning quest objectives, jokes, and other chatter. The player senses others within the same area. It is this social presence that scholars compare to reading a book in a busy coffee shop (Ducheneaut, et al., 2006, p. 414). NPCs and their tasks guide new players to a major city, such as Ogrimmar (Horde) or Ironforge (Alliance), where social presence is amplified and reinforced. The population mimics urban life as conversations scroll across chat screens, vendors (both NPC and player) advertise wares, and players socialize. New players are overwhelmed, but ultimately adapt. They complete quests with others, form small groups to take on monsters, join guilds, and learn skills. Before long a new player may be walking around Ogrimmar trading her enchants (e.g., a form of skill augmentation). How then does a player become a full-fledged guild member participating in complex dungeons where teamwork is essential? She learns within a WoW framework designed to facilitate this process.

Player Socialization Progression For players’ interest to evolve, they must adjust to the cooperative nature of the virtual world. For example, a passing priest may buff another player to increase health points (“passerby buff”) or a higher level player may help a struggling lower level kill a monster for a quest (Nardi & Harris, 2006). Although incidents of ganking—killing an unsuspecting player—do occur, they are expected

The Virtual Social Continuum Expressed

(Foo & Koivisto, 2004) on PVP or RPPVP servers where players interact more often (whether they want to or not). Perhaps more “killers” (people who might gank) and “socializers” (people who would protect one another) populate PVP or RPPVP servers. Players soon learn to form casual groups to complete quests and instance groups to take on dungeons. Game design encourages players to adopt specific group roles and look for complementary members for questing. One player tanks (holds off monsters), one heals, and another provides DPS (damage per second) to complete the mission. This division of labor forms smaller communities of practice (Papargyris & Poulymenakou, 2005) which eventually allow the player to participate in larger communities that benefit from role specialization, such as guilds. Ultimately, guilds enable skilled healers to group with those best at tanking or DPSing to progress far into the game. These specialized roles most resemble the Gemeinschaft communities of 19th century Europe in which individuals accepted role constraints (e.g., blacksmith versus baker) because they benefitted the community as a whole (Nardi & Harris, 2006, p. 155). However, if the virtual world allowed only for distinct roles within the confines of questing, it would not satisfy player types (such as the “socializer”) for long. “Killers” might adapt as they could DPS monsters or take part in PVP battles. WoW Arenas and Battle Grounds are readily available for PVP combat. Explorers could find new world adventures within other groups or perhaps find hidden areas in the game (e.g., Easter Eggs). Achievers would benefit from grouping because of armor and weapon rewards from quests and dungeons. What adds to the social aspect of WoW is the spectacle. “Spectacle” is either watching a performance or taking part in one (Nardi & Harris, 2006, p. 156). At any time, players can joke, sing, or perform stunts. Although some scholars discount that spectacle contributes to the social aspects of

virtual worlds (Ducheneaut & Moore, 2004), most agree it adds to the social presence necessary to create community and promote interaction (Chen & Duh, 2007; Lee & LaRose, 2007; Papargyris & Poulymenakou, 2005). However, this doesn’t explain why most long-term MMORPG players develop “socializer” interests and take part in guilds or organized events. Even players who remain “killers,” “explorers,” and “achievers” must socialize to be successful. The answer lies in the socialization continuum embedded in most MMORPGs, but especially in WoW.

Socialization Continuum Expressed If we combine the interaction opportunities with player socialization progression, we can map player interest types and their evolution. As players move into complex areas of the game, they benefit from interacting with “socializers” and learning how to form guilds and ultimately, tightknit Gemeinschaft communities (Nardi & Harris, 2006). For example, “socializers” will usually buff another player to give them extra skills. Soon, “killers,” “explorers,” and “achievers” learn to do the same. Players learn that in order to combat larger monsters (“killers”), discover areas of the virtual world (“explorers”), or collect armor or weapons (“achievers”), they must form specialized groups to accomplish their goals. “Socializers” thrive in this environment and work to organize these mutually beneficial groups. Before long all players gravitate to permanent groups (e.g., guilds) so that others can help them reach their fullest potential. As a result, player types move toward “socializers” on the continuum, see Table 1. WoW attracts the attention of gamers because all interest types can find a plethora of activities. Moreover, WoW requires players to adopt different player interest styles. Most long-standing players become either a hybrid “socializer” or are complete “socializers.” Achiever/socializer types benefit from missions where socialization and rewards are plentiful, and explorer/socializer types

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experience the vast virtual world content while participating in guild chat. Killer/achiever types

can benefit from intense PVP and arena competition; however, they must socialize if they are

Table 1. Socialization continuum Lesser Social Interaction Explanation

Potential Player Interest Types

Passerby Buff

Interaction Opportunity

Occurs when an unknown player (priest, paladin, druid, mage) casts a spell that increases a skill of another. Players expect the recipient to return a buff if their class offers one.

Killer: Will not give or return a buff. Explorer: May return a buff. Achiever: Will return a buff since buffs benefit them. Socializer: Gives buffs and encourage others to as well.

Spectacle

Impromptu occurrences such as players dancing on mailboxes in their underwear, character marriages, etc.

Killer: Will either watch or interfere with the spectacle. Explorer: Will watch in passing. Achiever: Will not watch as there is no game benefit. Socializer: Will participate and organize.

Casual Groups

Grouping with a few others (facilitated by the game) to conquer an impossible task alone.

Killer: Will group if necessary to complete a task. Explorer: Will group if necessary to venture into a new area. Achiever: Will only group if he cannot complete individually. Socializer: Will group and look for groups as well.

Trade Groups

Brief interactions in which players expect goods and services (enchants, armor, etc.) for gold.

Killer: May sell or buy items for a profit. Explorer: Will buy items from Auction House instead. Achiever: Will buy items if not available elsewhere. Socializer: Will buy items, advertise wares, and establish trading partners.

Impromptu Events

Players organize raids on opposing factions, and offer quick runs through dungeons to help lower level players.

Killer: Will participate to kill opposing players. Explorer: Will not participate. Achiever: Will not participate. Socializer: Will offer dungeon runs to lower-level friends. May go on opposing faction raids with no intent of killing, but to enjoy the camaraderie.

Instance Groups

Five players work together to complete a dungeon. These groups require specific roles (tank, healer, DPS). Players expect to share rewards.

Killer: Will participate to advance in level. Will not run multiple groups of same instance. Explorer: Will participate to explore new instances. Achiever: Will participate to complete quests and acquire better weapons and armor. Socializer: Will continuously run instances and repeat instances to help groups and meet new people.

PVP Groups

Random groups of 10-20 players created from those waiting in queues. These groups battle against the opposing battleground (BG) faction (other players).

Killer: Will spend most time in PVP. Explorer: Does not participate in PVP beyond seeing the BGs once. Achiever: Participates only if status or armor/weapon purchases enabled by PVP rank are a goal. Socializer: Will participate to meet other people or help guild mates, but not their main focus.

PVP Groups (Organized)

Groups organized by players to work together for success against the opposing faction in a BG.

Killer: Will participate, but does not favor organized. Explorer: Will not participate. Achiever: Favors organized PVP groups for increased chance at victory. Socializer: Will occasionally participate with friends and guild mates.

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Table 1. continued Lesser Social Interaction Explanation

Potential Player Interest Types

World Organized Events

Interaction Opportunity

Organized by game developers to open locked game content.

Killer: Will not participate. Explorer: Will participate for chance to see new content. Achiever: Will participate to obtain status (e.g., most items collected). Socializer: Will participate with guild or friends if group thinks it is important.

Guilds

Player organized groups working together to advance in the game, as well as establish a network of associations for quests, trades, etc. A well-organized guild can provide everything a player needs.

Killer: Will reluctantly join. Explorer: Will join for ease of seeing new content. Achiever: Will join to find trusted groups to excel together at tasks. Socializer: Joins quickly and remains with guild mates.

Arena Teams

Groups of two to five specializing in gladiatorial combat against other teams. Game mechanics reward teams that advance.

Killer: Will join to fight other players. Explorer: Will not join. Achiever: Will join to acquire ranks and weapons. Socializer: Will join for fun without expectation to excel.

Raid Groups

Specialized groups of 10, 25, or 40 who tackle the most advanced content of the game. Specialization and teamwork is critical. Rewards are the best quality.

Killer: Will not participate. Explorer: Will participate for a short time to experience content. Achiever: Will continually participate to acquire weapons and armor. Socializer: Will continually participate to spend time with guild mates.

Greater Social Interaction

not content with a PUG (pick-up group) PVP. Of course, “socializers” benefit the most from WoW and other MMORPGs because they can always find opportunities to interact. This gravitation toward the socializer type or hybrid socializer type underscores current research on the importance of the MMORPG guild (Ducheneaut, et al., 2007) for ultimate virtual world success.

FUTURE TRENDS The success of WoW and its ability to accommodate all player interest types has not gone unnoticed in the growing video game market. With combined video game industry sales over $12.5 billion in 2006 (Associated Press, 2007) more game development companies will enter the MMORPG market. New titles, such as Warhammer Online (Electronic Arts, 2008c), will attract a player base from its existing strategy games (much as WoW did with Warcraft). Expansions to titles, such as

Guild Wars (NCSoft, 2008b), will continue to grow their five million player base. Newer games may move away from the D&D theme, yet the emphasis on the socialization aspect of MMORPGs will remain. These MMOGs, such as City of Heroes (NCSoft, 2008a), which stress good versus evil conflict and quests, continue to grow. MMOGs focusing on coordinated battle, such as Tabula Rasa (Garriott, 2008), also will draw a large subscription base. Virtual worlds that offer more socialization than MMORPGs, such as The Sims (Electronic Arts, 2008a) and Second Life (Linden Labs, 2008), will expand. Corporate use of Second Life for virtual demonstrations, as well as sales, will grow (Brandon, 2007; LaPlante, 2007). As more companies use virtual worlds, scholars must research how to use these technologies effectively to encourage consumer use. Also expect more all-encompassing virtual worlds to take hold. Combining the benefits of MMOs and their communication tools, pervasive

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games will carry quests and tasks into the real world (Natkin & Yen, 2006). Players will use social interaction technologies to compete, form groups, and complete quests in the real world. The lines between fantasy and reality will blur as people become characters in real life interactions: knights may soon rescue damsels at the convenience store, and hidden NPCs will dole out quests via GPS-enabled mobile phones (Mottola, Murphy, & Picco, 2006).

CONCLUSION In a little more than 30 years, technology has advanced from straight textual interfaces, to images and motion, to immersive 3D realms. With the increase in visualization, computing power, and pervasive high-speed networks, people are using technologies that come very close to the Star Trek Holodeck (Hutchinson, 2007). With collaborative action among groups and guilds, MMORPGs bring immersion in a virtual world to a new level. Through a complex socialization process, individuals move from “killer” to “socializer” (or hybrid socializer type) to participate in communities of practice where specialization is crucial to the overall health of the Gemeinschaft-like guilds. The possibilities for MMORPGs, MMOs, pervasive worlds, and other technologies that rely on social interaction for success are immense. Perhaps the virtual reality once thought to exist only in science fiction is now upon us. No longer do games end when a person logs out; the community continues to exist and prosper beyond the virtual realm.

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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Dungeons & Dragons (D&D): A tabletop game in which players create and role play warriors, priests, thieves, and wizards using a variety of fantasy characters, such as elves, dwarves. Players group together and go on quests, as well as battle dragons and monsters. Gemeinschaft: Small 19th-century European village communities where each person performed a specific role to benefit others (e.g., baker, black-

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smith, etc.) and was willing to operate within social constraints for the good of the community. Guild: Communities of MMORPG players who share resources, bond together, and provide a strong social component to the game. Many games offer tools to allow guild mates to share resources and communicate with one another. Ludology: The study of play and games, in particular, video games. Ludology encompasses a variety of approaches to game research, including cultural, economic, postmodern, and sociological. Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG): This game type connects thousands of players (usually via the Internet) within a persistent virtual world. This term can connote all massive multiplayer games, but game experts use it specifically to describe MMO games that do not contain a role playing component. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG): Usually based on a Dungeons and Dragons theme, these games allow players to create avatars using races and classes similar to the tabletop D&D game. Players join guilds, go on quests, and compete in PVP combat. In recent years, the success of Everquest and World of Warcraft has increased people’s exposure to these games. Multi-User Dungeon (MUD): MUDs are the first multi-user textual environment. The term derives from the Dungeons and Dragons approach to the textual worlds. Players view textual descriptions of the environment and move and interact by typing commands.

Multi-User Shared Hallucination (MuSH): MuSHes refer to the more social MUD implementations. Less emphasis is put on completing quests and fighting monsters. Instead, players work together to solve problems in a collaborative fashion. Persistent World: Except for technical issues and maintenance, the virtual world is continuously available and populated with players. When a player logs off, the virtual world environment continues to function unlike many video games which depend on a player’s interaction. Most MMOGs and MMORPGs are persistent virtual worlds. Role Playing Game (RPG): Video games in which players create customized avatars within virtual environments or worlds. Players expect to adopt the persona of the created avatar and function within the virtual world as such. Socialization Continuum: The player’s progression through various character types. MMORPGs encourage players to act in an increasingly social manner to advance in the game. Virtual World: A complete online representation of a physical realm where players’ avatars populate virtual worlds, as well as virtual world characters. Virtual worlds can mimic environments we are familiar with, or populate worlds with completely different inhabitants and rules of nature (e.g., people can fly). Most MMORPGs are complete virtual worlds.

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Section 3

Issues, Viewpoints, and Perspectives

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Chapter 31

Legal Issues Associated with Emerging Social Interaction Technologies Robert D. Sprague University of Wyoming, USA

ABSTRACT This chapter focuses on legal issues that may arise from the increasing use of social interaction technologies: prospective employers searching the Internet to discover information from candidates’ blogs, personal web pages, or social networking profiles; employees being fired because of blog comments; a still-evolving federal law granting online service providers sweeping immunity from liability for userpublished content; and attempts to apply the federal computer crime law to conduct on social networking sites. The U.S. legal system has been slow to adapt to the rapid proliferation of social interaction technologies. This paradox of rapid technological change and slow legal development can sometimes cause unfairness and uncertainty. Until the U.S. legal system begins to adapt to the growing use of these technologies, there will be no change.

INTRODUCTION This chapter focuses on legal issues that may arise from the increasing use of two specific types of social interaction technologies: blogs and social networking sites. These two Web 2.0 applications are emphasized due to a particular paradox: while there has been tremendous growth of blogs and social networking sites during the first part of the twenty-first century, rules of law develop slowly. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch031

Within this gap, laws regulating online conduct are continuing to evolve, leaving the exact status of certain activities in limbo.

BACKGROUND The promise of the Internet as an information sharing platform (Leiner et al., 2003) has been fulfilled to a large extent in the twenty-first century by the emergence of Weblogs or blogs and social networking sites. Blogs, which originated as online diaries

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in which authors published information of interest for themselves and their few readers, usually in reverse chronological order, now number over 70 million (Sifry, 2007), covering just about every conceivable topic. Blogs are interactive because they link to other content on the Internet and many have the capability for readers to post their own comments, creating the possibility for ongoing dialog. Social networking sites allow individuals to create online profiles (also referred to as pages) providing information about themselves and their interests, create lists of users (often referred to as friends) with whom they wish to share information, and to view information published within the network by their friends (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). The two most popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace, together boast nearly 100 million users (Stone, 2007). As blogs and the use of social networking sites have proliferated, so too have potential legal problems. Prospective employers are reviewing job applicants’ social networking profiles to glean information not contained in résumés. Employees have been fired as a result of their personal blogs. Online services, including social networking sites, have been sued based on content provided by users. Criminal conduct has been partially extended to violating the terms of service required to join interactive sites. These situations present challenges to a legal system which historically has been slow to adapt to new technologies. As a result, many of these legal issues remain unsettled.

LEGAL ISSUES BROUGHT TO LIGHT BY EMERGING SOCIAL INTERACTION TECHNOLOGIES Googling Job Applicants Many employers wish to know more about job applicants than what can be discerned from a résumé and interview—and for good reason. Surveys have indicated that nearly half of job

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applicants mislead employers about their work history and education (How to ferret out instances of résumé padding and fraud, 2006). Employers also seek to find individuals who will work and perform well within the organization (Piotrowski & Armstrong, 2006). Employers are compelled to investigate the backgrounds of prospective employees because of the negligent hiring doctrine, which will impose liability on an employer when it “places an unfit person in an employment situation that entails an unreasonable risk of harm to others” (Lienhard, 1996, p. 389). Negligent hiring occurs when, prior to the time the employee is actually hired, the employer knew or should have known of the employee’s unfitness. Liability is focused on the adequacy of the employer’s pre-employment investigation into the employee’s background (Ponticas v. K.M.S. Invs., 1983). But employers’ ability to investigate applicants is hindered by the reluctance of former employers to provide letters of reference in fear of defamation suits from former employees (Finkin, 2000). Traditional pre-screening techniques are also restricted by various laws. For example, an employer may not ask questions which would allow the employer to screen applicants based on a protected class (race, color, national origin, religion, or gender) under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has issued a number of guidelines on what employers can and cannot ask in an employment interview to help ensure that employers do not discriminate on the basis of religion (29 C.F.R. § 1605.3), national origin (29 C.F.R. § 1606.6), or sex (29 C.F.R. § 1604.7). Prospective employers are finding that with a quick search on Google, they can discover a substantial amount of additional information from a candidate’s blog, personal web page, or social networking profile. Unfortunately for the candidate, some of that information may be embarrassing, or even frightening—eliminating the candidate from further consideration (Finder,

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2006). More problematic, there is no control over how a prospective employer may use the Internet to discover additional information about candidates, allowing the employer to potentially base a hiring decision on information that would otherwise be prohibited from disclosure in a job interview or questionnaire. Since most of the information a prospective employer may glean from an applicant’s blog or social networking profile is published by the applicant himself or herself, there is no right to privacy that could protect the applicant. United States privacy laws presume there is no privacy interest in information one exposes to the public (Prosser, 1960). As one court has stated, it is “… obvious that a claim to privacy is unavailable to someone who places information on an indisputably, public medium, such as the Internet, without taking any measures to protect the information” (United States v. Gines-Perez, 2002, p. 225). A person must assume, therefore, that any information he or she publishes on the Internet can and will be used by prospective employers when considering that person for an employment opportunity.

Fired for Blogging The law also favors employers when employees have been fired based on content published in personal blogs. What, in the past, may have been simple “water cooler” griping easily becomes publicly-available criticisms when an employee complains about work on a blog, leading to dismissals even when the employee is publishing anonymously. There have been a number of instances in which employees have been dismissed because of blog comments about work after their true identity had been revealed to their supervisors (Blachman, 2005; Gutman, 2003; Joyce, 2005). Most employees in the United States are “atwill” (Sprang, 1994), meaning either the employer or employee may terminate the employment relationship at any time, with or without cause. Taken

to its extreme, the employment-at-will doctrine means that employers can dismiss employees for arbitrary or irrational reasons: “because of office politics, nepotism, preference for left-handedness, astrological sign, or their choice of favorite sports team” (Bird, 2004, p. 551). However, over time, exceptions to the employment-at-will doctrine have evolved. Even if an employee is at-will, he or she cannot be fired if doing so would violate public policy. Traditionally, violations of public policy have prevented at-will employees from being fired after they refused to break a law on behalf of their employer, insisted on exercising a legal right (such as voting), or exposed the employer’s illegal behavior to the pubic (e.g., whistle blowing) (Sprague, 2007). As part of this public policy exception, some courts have found that employers cannot fire employees based on information obtained through an invasion of the employees’ privacy (Pagnattaro, 2004). But, as discussed above, since the information used to fire an employee comes from a blog published by the employee himself or herself, there would be no right to privacy in that information. A number of states have adopted laws which prevent employers from considering certain offsite, off-duty conduct in employment decisions, such as the use of tobacco or other lawful products (Pagnattaro, 2004). Six states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and North Dakota) restrict employers from considering off-site, off-duty conduct with minimal restrictions. These laws have been applied in only very limited circumstances, usually relating to romances between employees (Pagnattaro, 2004). However, in one case, a court upheld the dismissal of an employee who had written a letter which was published in the local newspaper complaining about management practices, concluding that the employee was wrongfully taking public a private employment dispute (Marsh v. Delta Air Lines, Inc., 1997). These laws also require that for the conduct in question to be protected, it must have no

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relationship to the employer’s business. Therefore, if the employee’s blog contains entries discussing his or her workplace, then the employee’s off-duty conduct does relate to the employer’s business, and would therefore not be protected. Title II of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, known as the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”) makes it illegal to access stored electronic communications without authorization. The SCA can protect an employee’s blog if access to the blog is restricted only to authorized users. For example, a pilot (Robert Konop) employed by Hawaiian Airlines maintained a website that contained commentary critical of the airline’s management practices (Konop v. Hawaiian Airlines, Inc., 2002). Konop’s website required users to have an assigned username and password to access the site, and Konop maintained a list of authorized users, which consisted primarily of other Hawaiian Airline employees. A Hawaiian Airlines senior manager (a vice president who did not have authorized access to the website) used other pilots’ usernames and passwords (with their permission) to access the website. Because the manager had used other authorized users’accounts, with their permission, to access the website, it would appear the manager had not violated the SCA. However, the court concluded the manager did violate the SCA, but only because the accounts used by the manager had never been actually used by the authorized users—therefore, under a strict reading of the statute, the manager did not have the permission of an authorized “user.” Konop v. Hawaiian Airlines, Inc. (2002) demonstrates that unauthorized access to a restricted website can be a violation of federal law. Of course, in a profession which values blogging, a person’s blog may lead directly to his or her being hired, rather than fired (Hammock, 2005). Most employees, though, may be jeopardizing their employment status, with no legal recourse available, if they choose to include in their blog any references to the workplace.

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Liability for Online Content Online service providers are granted sweeping immunity from liability for user-published content on their sites. This immunity is derived from § 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA”), which provides two types of immunity: (1) that a provider or user of an interactive computer service will not be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider; and (2) websites that make good-faith attempts to screen objectionable material will also be immune from liability for the content of that material. In essence, the CDA provides immunity to Internet publishers of third-party content. The case of Zeran v. Am. Online (1997) exemplifies the application of § 230 immunity. Kenneth Zeran was the victim of an anonymous prank in which someone published on America Online (“AOL”) a fake advertisement for shirts containing offensive content, instructing users to contact Zeran for purchase. Zeran then received numerous derogatory and obscene phone calls, including death threats. When AOL did not immediately remove the advertisement, Zeran sued AOL for delay in removing the advertisement and failure to publish a retraction. In essence, according to the court, Zeran sought to hold AOL liable for defamatory speech initiated by a third party (Zeran v. Am. Online, 1997). In refusing to hold AOL liable, the Zeran v. Am. Online (1997) court noted that the purpose of § 230 immunity under the CDA was “…to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services …” (p. 330). With the vast amount of information published online by third parties, it would be impossible for interactive computer service providers to screen each message posted by users, and “[t]he specter of tort liability in an area of such prolific speech would have an obvious chilling effect” (Zeran v. Am. Online, 1997, p. 331).

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Section 230 immunity is not absolute. As noted above, it protects Internet publishers from liability only for content provided by third parties. The immunity does not apply if the online publisher originates the content. For example, when the online auction site eBay was sued based on its claim, “Bidding on eBay Live Auctions is very safe[,]” a court refused to grant eBay § 230 immunity (Mazur v. eBay, Inc., 2008). If eBay’s claim that its Live Auctions were safe was a material misrepresentation, then the CDA would not “... immunize eBay for its own fraudulent misconduct” (Mazur v. eBay, Inc., 2008, p. *28). One concern is whether the publisher can make any editorial modifications and still preserve § 230 immunity. This issue was addressed in the case of Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC (2008). Roommates.com is an online roommate matching service. Before individuals can use the Roommates.com service, they must create profiles, which require disclosures as to sex, sexual orientation, and whether children would be brought into a household. Californiabased fair housing councils sued Roommates. com, alleging its business violated the federal Fair Housing Act and California housing discrimination laws. The court refused to grant Roommates. com CDA immunity because it both elicited the allegedly illegal content and made “aggressive” use of it in conducting its business (Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates. com, LLC, 2008, p. 1172). “Roommate[s.com] does not merely provide a framework that could be utilized for proper or improper purposes; rather, Roommate[s.com]’s work in developing the discriminatory questions, discriminatory answers and discriminatory search mechanism is directly related to the alleged illegality of the site” (Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC, 2008, p. 1172). In other words, Roommates.com was directly involved with developing and enforcing a system that subjected users to allegedly discriminatory housing practices.

What is not settled is the degree of involvement required for an information content provider to lose immunity. The Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC (2008) court did state that an editor’s minor changes to the spelling, grammar and length of third-party content would not remove CDA immunity. However, “if the editor publishes material that he does not believe was tendered to him for posting online, then he is the one making the affirmative decision to publish, and so he contributes materially to its allegedly unlawful dissemination[,]…” and would thus be “deemed a developer and not entitled to CDA immunity” (Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC, 2008, p. 1171). Ultimately, the question may be whether the “the website did absolutely nothing to encourage the posting of defamatory content…” (Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC, 2008, p. 1171). Shortly before the Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC (2008) case was decided, a different federal court followed this latter approach. In Chi. Lawyers’ Comm. for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc. v. Craigslist, Inc. (2008), Craigslist, an online classified advertising service, was sued because of the discriminatory content of some of the real estate rental advertisements it published (e.g., ads proclaiming “NO MINORITIES”) (p. 668). The Chi. Lawyers’ Comm. for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc. v. Craigslist, Inc. (2008) court granted Craigslist § 230 immunity because it did not “cause” any discriminatory statements to be made (p. 671). Section 230 immunity was specifically applied to a social networking site in Doe v. MySpace Inc. (2007). The mother of a thirteen-year-old female MySpace user sued MySpace for negligence after a nineteen-year-old male MySpace user befriended the girl and ultimately sexually assaulted her. Unlike Zeran v. Am. Online (1997), in which immunity was granted based on AOL’s status as a publisher, the mother in Doe v. MySpace Inc. (2007) claimed MySpace was not subject to im-

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munity because its negligence was based on its failure to take reasonable safety measures to keep young children off of its site, and not based on MySpace’s “editorial acts” (p. 849). The court rejected this argument, noting it was the exchange of personal information through MySpace that led to the two individuals meeting (which ultimately led to the assault). The court reasoned that if MySpace had never published their communications, the victim and the perpetrator would never have met. As a result, the court concluded that the mother’s claims against MySpace were directed toward “… its publishing, editorial, and/or [message] screening capacities[,]” for which MySpace is immune under § 230 of the CDA (Doe v. MySpace Inc., 2007, p. 849). While an individual who publishes defamatory information on a social networking site can be held individually liable (Zeran v. Am. Online, 1997), one cannot conclude absolutely that as long as the complaint focuses on communications published on a website, the service provider itself will be immune from liability. While minor editing changes will not necessarily remove § 230 immunity, the courts have indicated that originating content (Mazur v. eBay, Inc., 2008), materially contributing to the creation of content or publishing material not originally intended for publication (Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates. com, LLC, 2008) can transform a website from merely a publisher to a developer of content.

Computer Crime One trend that has developed with social media sites is cyberbullying, which has been defined as “an aggressive, intentional act carried out by a group or individual, using electronic forms of contact, repeatedly and over time against a victim who cannot easily defend him or herself” (Smith, Mahdavi, Carvalho, Tippett, 2005, p. 6). What has caught the attention of legislators and educators are suicides of young people who were reportedly the victims of cyberbullying (Norton,

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2007; Steinhauer, 2008). Legislators and educators also say that cyberbullying has gone unchecked for years, with few laws or policies addressing it (Norton, 2007). One notorious incident has caught the attention of not only the public but also legislators. In 2006, Lori Drew, a 48-year-old Missouri woman, created a MySpace account and posed as a teenage boy, Josh. Through this fictitious persona, Drew began corresponding with Megan Meier, a 13-year-old neighbor. Drew reportedly created the “Josh” profile to find out what Megan was saying online about her (Drew’s) teenage daughter (Parents want jail time for MySpace hoax Mom, 2007). Initially, “Josh” showed a romantic interest in Megan, but after a few weeks, the tone changed with “Josh” telling Megan at one point “the world would be a better place” without her (Steinhauer, 2008). Shortly thereafter, Megan Meier committed suicide. As abhorrent as Drew’s actions may have been, the question quickly arose as to whether she had committed a crime. Missouri, where both Drew and Meier lived, has a criminal harassment law prohibiting statements made to frighten or intimidate someone or to cause emotional distress. However, at the time of Drew’s conduct, the law only applied to statements made in writing or via telephone (Offenses Against the Person: Harassment, 2008). The Missouri attorney general believed online statements were not covered by the statute (Steinhauer, 2008). Federal prosecutors believe Drew did, in fact, commit a crime. In 2008 they filed a federal felony indictment against Drew, accusing her of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”). In particular, prosecutors allege that by creating the “Josh” profile and communicating with Megan Meier, Drew violated the CFAA by intentionally accessing a computer (the MySpace servers) without authorization and in excess of authorized access, and obtained information from that computer to further tortious acts, namely, intentional infliction of emotional distress on Megan Meier (United States v. Drew, 2008).

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If the language of the indictment sounds a bit odd, it is because of the language within the CFAA. When the CFAA was first enacted in 1984, no one envisioned the facts surrounding the United States v. Drew (2008) case. Initially, the scope of the CFAA was narrow, focusing on unauthorized access to certain governmental or financial computers (Andreano, 1999). The CFAA has been amended a number of times to address an expanding array of computer-related activities. Currently, the CFAA contains criminal and civil penalties for various forms of unauthorized access to computer systems: (1) intentionally accessing a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access to obtain information from a computer; (2) knowingly and with intent to defraud, accessing a computer without authorization, or exceeding authorized access, and obtaining anything of value, which can include the use of the computer accessed; (3) knowingly causing the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causing damage without authorization, to a computer; (4) intentionally accessing a computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causing damage; or (5) intentionally accessing a computer without authorization with the intent to defraud, and trafficking in any password or similar information through which a computer may be accessed without authorization (Credentials Plus, LLC v. Calderone, 2002). Typical violations of the CFAA have involved: the introduction of an “Internet worm” that shut down computers across the country (United States v. Morris, 1991); taking customer login information from one website and using it to access another website (Creative Computing v. Getloaded.com LLC, 2004); and using computer programs to infiltrate hundreds of computers and steal encrypted data and passwords (United States v. Phillips, 2007). But within the CFAA, the terms “access” and “authorization” are not defined, so it is left to the courts to determine what constitutes “unauthorized access” or “exceeding authorized access.”

One approach used by the courts has been to determine whether a user’s access to a computer has gone beyond the norms of intended use. For example, introducing a computer program into a computer network that is designed to exploit weaknesses within the network is an unauthorized access because it was not in any way related to the network’s intended function (United States v. Morris, 1991). Courts have also found unauthorized access arising from a breach of contract. For example, in EF Cultural Travel BV v. Explorica, Inc. (2001), a court found that a former vice president of EF Cultural Travel BV (“EF”) had used information that was subject to a confidentiality agreement between the vice president and EF to obtain pricing information from EF’s website. The court concluded the vice president’s use of the information breached the confidentiality agreement, constituting unauthorized access to EF’s computers in violation of the CFAA. Following EF Cultural Travel BV v. Explorica, Inc. (2001), courts have held that violations of computer service terms of use agreements can constitute unauthorized access. For example, courts have found unauthorized access in violation of the CFAA in the following situations: accessing the WHOIS database by automated software to collect website registration information to use for mass marketing purposes was access with a means and purpose in violation of the end use agreement (Register.com, Inc. v. Verio, Inc., 2000); using an AOL account to harvest e-mail addresses and then send bulk e-mails (“spam”) to AOL members violated AOL’s Terms of Service (Am. Online v. LGCM, Inc., 1998); and sending spam from Hotmail accounts in violation of the Terms of Service agreement (Hotmail Corp. v. Van Money Pie Inc., 1998). Courts have also taken a rather expansive view of “access,” holding that it is merely the ability to “make use of something” (Am. Online v. Nat’l Health Care Disc., Inc., 2000, p. 1373). For example, when someone sends an e-mail message from his or her own computer, and the

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message then is transmitted through a number of other computers until it reaches its destination, the sender is making use of all of those computers, and is therefore “accessing” them (Am. Online v. Nat’l Health Care Disc., Inc., 2000). Based on these previous applications of the CFAA, one can discern the logic in the federal indictment of Lori Drew. She was accused of violating the MySpace Terms of Service by creating a fictitious profile, which therefore established her unauthorized access of MySpace computers. Commentators have referred to the United States v. Drew (2008) indictment as the “first of its kind” (Steinhauer, 2008), as well as “dangerously flawed” and “scary” (Zetter, 2008). In some corners of the blogosphere there is concern that merely pretending to be someone else on the Internet can lead to a federal felony indictment (User charged with felony for using fake name on MySpace, 2008). One blogger has expressed concern that government enforcement agencies are misreading and misusing website user agreements: “Most websites like MySpace include contractual restrictions like the ones at issue simply to preserve their ability to kick off troublesome users at their discretion—not to put every non-conforming user at risk of looking down the barrel of an FBI agent’s .45” (Goldman, 2008). But one must keep in mind that unauthorized access alone is not enough to violate the CFAA. The unauthorized access must be also accompanied by access to or theft of information, fraud, extortion, damage to computers by malicious software, trafficking in passwords, or the commission of a crime or tortious conduct. In the United States v. Drew (2008) indictment, the government alleges Lori Drew accessed MySpace computers without authorization, by creating a MySpace account under a fictitious name, and then used that unauthorized access to obtain information from Megan Meier, another MySpace user, to then “torment, harass, humiliate, and embarrass” her, which constituted the tort of intentional infliction of emotional duress (p. 6). As such, merely

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creating a fictitious Internet persona—assuming it violates a service’s terms of use agreement—will not violate the CFAA without further nefarious or illegal conduct committed as a result of the unauthorized access. Since the Drew/Meier incident, Missouri has amended its harassment statute to eliminate the requirement that the harassment must occur by writing or telephone, which means it could apply to cyberbullying (Missouri Senate Bills Nos. 818 & 795, 2008). Several states are also considering cyberbullying legislation (State action on cyberbullying, 2008), as is Congress (Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, 2008). Should cyberbullying laws proliferate, it will eliminate the need to use the CFAA for purposes arguably beyond its original intent.

FUTURE TRENDS As social interaction technologies become more ingrained in American society, the U.S. legal system will have to adjust. Traditional notions of employment, privacy, publishing responsibilities and liabilities, and computer crime will have to catch up with the use of new technologies. In the near term, the only safe prediction is that employees, current and prospective, will have to censor what they publish online about themselves to avoid either being fired or eliminated from consideration for a job. In the meantime, unless Congress amends § 230 of the Communications Decency Act, online service providers, such as MySpace, will enjoy near complete immunity from liability for content published by users on their sites. But, for MySpace as well as other websites, it is only “near complete” immunity, somewhere between minor editing and doing absolutely nothing to encourage wrongful content. And without legislation specifically written to address cyberbullying, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act may continue to be applied to online activities beyond the original intent of the Act.

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CONCLUSION The U.S. legal system has been slow to adapt to the rapid proliferation of social interaction technologies. Consequently, employees are being fired as a result of blogging; employers are searching the Internet to learn as much as possible about job candidates—possibly too much; interactive websites enjoy substantial immunity from liability for content published by users on their sites; and the notion of computer crime has been extended to violating website terms of use agreements. As this chapter has discussed, these consequences, which arise from the paradox of rapid technological change and slow legal development, can sometimes cause unfairness and uncertainty. Until the U.S. legal system begins to adapt to the growing use of these technologies, the status quo will remain for the foreseeable future.

REFERENCES Am. Online v. LGCM, Inc., 46 F. Supp. 2d 444 (E.D. Virginia 1998). Am. Online v. Nat’l Health Care Disc., Inc., 121 F. Supp. 2d 1255 (N.D. Iowa 2000). Andreano, F. P. (1999). The evolution of federal computer crime policy: The ad hoc approach to an ever-changing problem. American Journal of Criminal Law, 27, 81–103. Bird, R. C. (2004). Rethinking wrongful discharge: A continuum approach. University of Cincinnati Law Review, 73, 517–579. Blachman, J. (2005, August 31). Job posting. New York Times, p. A19. Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). Retrieved July 10, 2008, from http://jcmc. indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Chi. Lawyers’ Comm. for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc. v. Craigslist, Inc., 519 F.3d 666 (7th Cir. 2008). Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230 (2008). Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030 (2008). Creative Computing v. Getloaded.com LLC, 386 F.3d 930 (9th Cir. 2004). Credentials Plus, LLC v. Calderone, 230 F. Supp. 2d 890 (N.D. Indiana 2002). Doe v. MySpace Inc., 474 F. Supp. 2d 843 (W.D. Texas 2007), aff’d 528 F.3d 413 (5th Cir. 2008). EF Cultural Travel BV v. Explorica, Inc., 274 F.3d 577 (1st Cir. 2001). Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510-22, 2701-11 (2008). Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC, 521 F.3d 1157 (9th Cir. 2008). Finder, A. (2006, June 11). When a risqué online persona undermines a chance for a job. New York Times, p. 1. Finkin, M. W. (2000). From anonymity to transparence: Screening the workforce in the information age. Columbia Business Law Review, 2000, 403–451. Goldman, E. (2008, May 23). Lori Drew prosecuted for CFAA violations—some comments, and a practice pointer. Message posted to http:// blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2008/05/lori_ drew_prose.htm Gutman, P. S. (2003). Say what?: Blogging and employment law in conflict. Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, 27, 145–186.

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Hammock, R. (2005, August 29). Hired because of his blog. Message posted to http://www.rexblog. com/2005/08/29/14586 Hotmail Corp. v. Van Money Pie Inc., No. C9820064 JW, 1998 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 10729 (N.D. California April 16, 1998). How to ferret out instances of résumé padding and fraud. (2006). Compensation and Benefits for Law Offices, 06-0, p. 1. Joyce, A. (2005, February 11). Free expression can be costly when bloggers bad-mouth jobs. Washington Post, p. A1. Konop v. Hawaiian Airlines, Inc., 302 F.3d 868 (9th Cir. 2002), cert. denied, 537 U.S. 1193 (2003). Leiner, B. M., Cerf, V. G., Clark, D. D., Kahn, R. E., Kleinrock, L., Lynch, D. C., et al. (2003). A brief history of the Internet. Internet Society. Retrieved July 10, 2008, from http://www.isoc. org/internet/history/brief.shtml Lienhard, R. (1996). Negligent retention of employees: An expanding doctrine. Defense Counsel Journal, 63, 389–395. Marsh v. Delta Air Lines, Inc., 952 F.Supp. 1458 (D. Colorado 1997). Mazur v. eBay, Inc., No. C 07-03967, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 16561 (N.D. California March 3, 2008). Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, H.R. 6123, 110th Cong. (2008). Missouri Senate Bills Nos. 818 & 795. (2008). Norton, J. M. (2007, February 23). Some states pushing for laws to curb online bullying. Retrieved July 10, 2008, from http://www.law.com/jsp/ article.jsp?id=1172138587392 Offenses Against the Person: Harassment. Missouri Annotated Statutes, § 565.090 (2008).

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Pagnattaro, M. A. (2004). What do you do when you are not at work?: Limiting the use of off-duty conduct as the basis for adverse employment decisions. University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business and Employment Law, 6, 625–684. Parents want jail time for MySpace hoax mom. (2007, November 29). Retrieved July 10, 2008, from http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/ story?id=3929774 Piotrowski, C., & Armstrong, T. (2006). Current recruitment and selection practices: A national survey of Fortune 1000 firms. North American Journal of Psychology, 8(3), 489–496. Ponticas v. K.M.S. Invs., 331 N.W.2d 907 (Minn. 1983). Prosser, W. L. (1960). Privacy. California Law Review, 48, 383–423. doi:10.2307/3478805 Register.com, Inc. v. Verio, Inc., 126 F. Supp. 2d 238 (S.D. N.Y. 2000), aff’d, 356 F.3d 393 (2d Cir. 2004). Restatement (Second) of Torts. (1965). § 291. Restatement (Second) of Torts. (1965). § 46. Restatement (Second) of Torts. (1977). § 623A. Sifry, D. (2007, April 5). The state of the live Web, April 2007. Retrieved July 10, 2008, from http:// www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000493.html Smith, P., Mahdavi, J., Carvalho, M., & Tippett, N. (2005). An investigation into cyberbullying, its forms, awareness and impact, and the relationship between age and gender in cyberbullying. Unit for School and Family Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Retrieved July 10, 2008, from http://www.anti-bullyingalliance. org.uk/downloads/pdf/cyberbullyingreportfinal230106_000.pdf

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Sprague, R. (2007). Fired for blogging: Are there legal protections for employees who blog? University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business and Employment Law, 9, 355–387. Sprang, K. A. (1994). Beware the toothless tiger: A critique of the Model Employment Termination Act. The American University Law Review, 43, 849–924. State action on cyber-bullying. (2008, February 6). USA Today. Retrieved July 10, 2008, from http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-0206-cyber-bullying-list_N.htm Steinhauer, J. (2008, May 16). Missouri woman accused of driving girl to suicide is indicted in California. New York Times, p. A15. Stone, B. (2007, May 25). Facebook goes off the campus. New York Times, p. C1. Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 27012711 (2008). Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a) (2008). United States v. Drew, Indictment, No. 08-cr00582 (C.D. California May 15, 2008). United States v. Gines-Perez, 214 F. Supp. 2d 205 (D. P.R. 2002). United States v. Morris, 928 F.2d 504 (2d Cir. 1991). United States v. Phillips, 477 F.3d 215 (5th Cir. 2007), cert. denied, 128 S. Ct. 119. User charged with felony for using fake name on MySpace. (2008, July 7). Retrieved July 10, 2008, from http://yro.slashdot.org/article. pl?no_d2=1&sid=08/07/07/1824228 Zeran v. Am. Online, Inc., 129 F.3d 327 (4th Cir. 1997).

Zetter, K. (2008, May 15). Experts say MySpace suicide indictment sets ‘scary’ legal precedent. Retrieved July 10, 2008, from http://blog.wired. com/27bstroke6/2008/05/myspace-indictm.html

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Blog: A personal diary published on the Internet, with entries appearing in reverse chronological order. Defamation: A published false statement harmful to the interests of another (Restatement, 1977, § 623A). Defamation is a tort (a civil wrong) for which the victim may bring a lawsuit against the defamer to recover damages suffered as a result of the defamatory comments. Employment-at-Will Doctrine: Legal doctrine applied to employment relationships of indeterminate length, allowing either the employer or employee to terminate the relationship at any time, with or without cause. Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress: Outrageous or extreme conduct which results in severe emotional distress. It does not apply to mere insults, indignities, threats, or annoyances (Restatement, 1965, § 46). However, as discussed in this chapter, tormenting or harassing an individual to the extent she commits suicide would constitute the requisite level of emotional distress. Interactive Computer Service: A term defined by the Communications Decency Act, meaning any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service. Negligence: An act which a reasonable person would recognize as involving risk of harm to another (Restatement, 1965, § 291). Negligence is a tort (a civil wrong) for which the victim may bring a lawsuit against the negligent party to recover damages suffered as a result of the negligent conduct.

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Negligent Hiring Doctrine: Legal doctrine holding an employer liable for harm caused to third parties by an employee, assuming the employer would not have placed the employee in a situation in which the third party was harmed had the employer, prior to hiring the employee, adequately investigated the employee’s background. Social Networking Site: Internet-based service which allows individuals to create on-

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line profiles and share information with other users. Popular examples include Facebook and MySpace. Tortious Conduct: Causing harm to an innocent third party. The victim of tortious conduct seeks money damages through a private (civil) lawsuit brought against the tortfeasor.

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Chapter 32

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act How ISPs and Users are Legally Exempted from Offensive Materials Joshua Azriel Kennesaw State University, USA

ABSTRACT As a federal law, the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) criminalizes any offensive content posted on a computer server that is operated by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The law exempts ISPs and other “users” from any liability for the illegal content that is posted by third parties as long as they make a “good faith” effort to restrict the information. Plaintiffs, who claim to be victims of offensive messages and sued ISPs, consistently lost their court cases. District and appellate courts have upheld Section 230’s provisions and Congress’s authority to regulate in this area of online communication. The CDA applies to many forms of Internet communication: for example, websites, chat rooms, discussion forums, wikis, and blogs. This chapter reviews the law, examines how federal and state courts have interpreted the CDA regarding ISPs, describes under what conditions an ISP can be held responsible for illegal content, analyzes the “user” portion of the law, and presents the legal dangers of providing immunity for “users” who post illegal content online.

INTRODUCTION In 1996 the U.S. Congress passed into law the Communications Decency Act (CDA) as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The overall goal of the CDA was to encourage the growth of the Internet with minimal federal government restrictions. Section 230 of the law criminalizes any DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch032

offensive content that is posted on an “interactive computer service” (Communications Decency Act U.S.C 47§230 2008). Offensive material includes information that is “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected…” (Section 230 (c)(2). While trying to protect victims of offensive materials, Congress also added a provision to Section 230 that immunizes a “provider” or “user” of an

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Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

interactive computer service from being defined as a publisher or speaker of the offensive material in question if a third party posted the content. Providers and users are exempt from liability provided they make a “good faith effort” to restrict any offensive content on their Internet servers. Congress defined information content provider as any person or entity that is responsible “whole or in part” for creating and developing online information. The law applies to the existing and emerging forms of online communication including Social Interaction Technologies (SIT). Since the law’s inception, victims of offensive material have unsuccessfully attempted to hold Internet Service Providers (ISPs) responsible for communication sent by third party users. The courts have upheld Section 230’s provisions and Congress’s intent to exempt ISPs and other “users” from any liability. The victims have had little, if any, recourse after the courts’ decisions. This chapter will explain what motivated Congress to pass Section 230 of the CDA into law. It will review several notable court cases at the federal and state levels where victims of online defamation have attempted to hold ISPs and “users” liable for the illegal content. The courts have been consistent in interpreting the law according to Congress’s original intent, and as a result, plaintiffs have not been successful in their lawsuits against ISPs. The chapter will also point out under what circumstances an ISP may be considered an information content provider and not simply a publisher of information. It will conclude by pointing out possible future trends in how Section 230 impacts ISPs. The chapter will also show the dangers that lurk in cyberspace for users of social interaction technologies, especially minors.

BACKGROUND Social interaction technologies allow people from all walks of life and across vast geographic

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distances to communicate with one another. They operate at both the business and personal levels and reflect both the personal one on one interaction and impersonal communication. They can include sites related to a narrow interest about a specific theme (Magid & Collier, 2006). The advantages of SIT include democratizing the Internet so that anyone literally anywhere in the world with a computer and Internet connection can take part in some aspect of global communication and collaboration whether in a professional or personal capacity. The downside to SIT is the danger of individuals using these communication platforms to harm others with content that may be defamatory, lewd, obscene, and invade one’s privacy. Both adults and minors can be harmed. In an online environment, stalking, cyber-bullying, defaming, and scamming often spreads through SIT. The online world can be just as dangerous as the physical world. While Congress passed the CDA in 1996 to keep regulation of the Internet to a minimum so that the medium could “promote the continued development” and the “availability of educational and informational resources,” lawmakers still wanted to protect victims from online offensive materials. One of the main motivations for Congress to pass this legislation as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the decision by the New York Supreme Court in Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy Servicess Co (1995). In Stratton Oakmont the Court held Prodigy Services liable for defamatory material that was posted on its “Money Talk” electronic bulletin board. Defamation defined by law as harming the reputation of an individual by making a false statement to a third party (Garner, 2000, p. 341). The Court ruled that as the publisher of the bulletin board Prodigy was responsible for all content and had to censor any offensive content. In drafting the law, Congress specifically referred to exempting publishers for any liability for offensive materials written by third party authors. Congress worried that holding publishers liable for content they did

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

not author placed the long-term development of the Internet in danger. Congress’s other main motivation was to encourage the growth of the Internet. It viewed the online communications medium as a forum for “true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity.” Congress wanted the Internet to evolve with minimal federal regulations and to be used for political, educational, cultural, and entertainment sources of information. In drafting the legislation, Congress defined the Internet as “the international computer network of both Federal and non-Federal interoperable packet switched data networks.” Interactive computer service refers to any information service, system, or access software provider that “provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server.” (§ 230 (f)(2) It can also include a system that provides Internet access in libraries and educational institutions including secondary and post secondary facilities. The definitions that Congress provided in the law are important because of the wide range of people who use ISPs to communicate. The ability to “cyber target” victims online with offensive messages is a common practice. According to D. Myers (2006), websites and email are often the communication venues used to cyber target a victim. Myers argued that the CDA has a double standard on offensive materials. For example, an online newspaper would not be considered a publisher of a defamatory article, but the same company would be liable for the printed version of the article. The law exempts the publisher from the online version of the defamatory content while a paper-based version of the same product is not immune from liability. In the case of online forums such as Wikipedia, K. Myers (2006) noted that the online encyclopedia would be immune from liability under the CDA. If, for example, defamatory information was posted about someone on a wiki, Myers emphasized,an

online site such as Wikipedia is immune for three reasons. As defined by the CDA, Wikipedia is an “interactive computer service” and a “publisher”: any information would be created by a third unknown party, not Wikipedia. As a repository of information, an online encyclopedia may be exempt from prosecution under the law. The ability to post anonymous messages includes sending dangerous cyber codes that can harm other computers. Lichtman and Posner (2006) stated that ISPs should be held accountable when their customers use their service to harm other computers with viruses. They said that ISPs should, at a minimum, work with law enforcement to catch online predators. Children are the SIT users often cited as heavily at risk for the dangers that lurk in social networking websites. Aftab (2006) recommends that with social networks, such as MySpace.com and Facebook.com, minors should post their content using passwords only to those sites where only friends and family can access the information. Since social networking sites such as MySpace. com allow users to let “friends” access their content, Aftab recommends that minors know who these “friends” really are. Children have to think carefully before posting any content for others to see, because individuals such as a college admissions officer, employer, or family member could gain access to the site.

FEDERAL AND STATE COURTS UPHOLD SECTION 230 OF CDA Federal courts have consistently upheld Congress’s authority to grant immunity from liability to ISPs and other users when illegal, offensive content is posted. While the CDA may exempt ISPs and other users as publishers of offensive content, the law allows for the prosecution of the actual individual who posted the materials. Yet, in the present era of e-mail, chat rooms, blogs, wikis, and other SIT, it is often difficult to discern

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someone’s real identity. New technology allows users to easily mask their identity. While this is a challenge for law enforcement and the victims of the offensive content, federal and state courts have, nonetheless, exempted ISPs from prosecution. Zittrain (2006) explained that the significant number of consumers using ISPs enjoy a large amount of power and freedom to post information to a global audience. The ability and desire to communicate with another individual anywhere on the planet includes the danger of sending offensive materials that violate the CDA. Zittrain emphasized that the Internet has made it easy for unknown people to post offensive messages and not be caught. The first landmark case that tested the constitutionality of the CDA was Zeran v. AOL (1997). In Zeran, Kenneth Zeran sued America Online (AOL) because it did not quickly remove messages from one of its bulletin boards that instructed its readers to contact Zeran to purchase “naughty” t-shirts about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Zeran contacted AOL requesting the message be removed. He received a deluge of angry telephone calls – including death threats – often at the rate of one call every two minutes. AOL did not comply with Zeran’s request to remove the message. Zeran sued the ISP as both the publisher and distributor of the message. A federal district court ruled that the CDA exempted ISPs such as AOL from any responsibility pertaining to the defamatory and threatening telephone messages (p. 329). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the lower court’s ruling. It said that Section 230 of the CDA barred the court from deciding any claims that placed AOL in the publisher’s role (p. 330). The appeals court ruled that Congress enacted Section 230 to “maintain the robust nature of Internet communication…” (p. 330). The court informed Zeran, however, that while AOL was immune from prosecution, if he ever discovered the real identity of the perpetrators of the message, then he could proceed with another lawsuit against them.

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The Zeran ruling directly impacted future court cases where victims of offensive messages attempted to sue ISPs. In Blumenthal v. Drudge (1998), Sidney Blumenthal, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, sued AOL and the Drudge Report for defamatory statements alleging that Blumenthal had a record of spousal abuse. The information was posted by Matt Drudge, the editor of the the Drudge Report.. Drudge and AOL had a written contract where the Drudge Report was available to all AOL members. As part of the contract, AOL had the authority to remove any content the company believed violated its standard of service. Drudge removed the story about Blumenthal’s alleged spousal abuse the day after it was posted, but Blumenthal initiated a lawsuit against Drudge and AOL. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia exonerated AOL from the lawsuit. It said that the Section 230 of the CDA automatically exempted AOL from liability (p. 46). While Drudge had a contract with AOL, editorial control of the content remained with Drudge. In its decision, the court referred to the Zeran decision. The only legal recourse available to Blumenthal was a direct lawsuit against Drudge. In its decision the court noted that had the same information appeared in a newspaper or magazine then, AOL, as publisher would have been liable for any defamatory content. While Zeran and Blumenthal both exempted ISPs as publishers of defamatory content, in John Doe v. GTE Corporation (2003), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit exempted an ISP for hosting an obscene website. In John Doe, Franco Productions maintained an online site through GTE where customers could purchase videos of athletes undressing in their locker rooms. GTE, as a “web host,” provided the server space for the site, “youngstuds.com,” where the hidden camera videos were sold (p. 657). GTE did not create the website or distribute the video tapes. In exempting GTE from any liability, the appeals court compared GTE, as an ISP, to a telephone company. The court said that GTE’s relationship

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

with Franco Productions was simply providing the “inputs” (servers space, bandwidth, and technical assistance) for the company (p. 661). While the court said that GTE could have investigated the illegal activities of Franco Productions, it was under no legal obligation to do so (p. 661). The Good Samaritan rule in Section 230 does not require ISPs to investigate the operations of its clients; instead, the law encourages them to do so (p. 661). The important result of this case was that the law also applied to the physical backbone of the Internet. The appeals court interpreted Section 230 as applying to the infrastructure that supplies online communication. In a court case concerning the liability of online companies for offensive materials, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in April 2008 upheld the immunity of an online dating company, Matchmaker.com. In Carafano v. Metrosplash Inc. (2003), the court rejected a claim by actress Christianne Carafano that Matchmaker.com was responsible for an online profile about her that contained sexually explicit and defamatory information. A third unknown party had created a profile on the website in Carfano’s name that included her home address and telephone number. The actress began receiving sexually explicit calls. Carafano sued Matchmaker.com for invasion of privacy, appropriation of identity, defamation, and negligence. The federal appeals court upheld the decision by the lower district court that Matchmaker.com was not liable under Section 230 for the fraudulent posting on its website. Since the website did not function as an “information content provider” as defined by Section 230, the court said the company was immune from prosecution (p. 1124). Matchmaker.com did not assist its users in choosing from a menu of items when creating a profile. Carafano was not able to prove that the online matchmaking service acted with actual malice. The court said that Matchmaker.com’s role is similar to that of a company that rates customer responses and then groups the answers into categories (p. 1124). Citing

previous cases such as the 1997 Zeran decision, the appeals court reaffirmed Congress’s intent that Section 230 grants immunity to information service providers such as Matchmaker.com. As a website that serves as a virtual meeting location for singles, Metrosplash’s operators were not liable for the lewd messages directed toward Carafano. They were exempted from responsibility the same way that an in-person dating service would be exonerated in a similar scenario. While the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Matchmaker.com, in a similar case, the same court decided that an online sevice provider was not immune under Section 230. Roommate.com is an online company that matches potential roomates. In Fair Housing Councilof San Fernando Valley v. Roommate. com (2008) the appeals court – en banc – had to determine if Roommate.com was potentially liable under Section 230 for violating any housing discriminatory laws. Subscribers to the website fill out an online questionaire that creats a profile. This profile is available to the company’s customers who are seeking roommates. A series of questions were a part of the online profile. According to the court, the questions related to gender and sexual orienation preferences could violate federal housing discrimination laws. While the court did not rule on that specific issue, it did declare that roommates.com was not exempt from prosecution as a publisher of online materials. The court noted that a website operator can be both a service provider and an information content provider (p. 3453). If it is responsible whole or in-part for creating the content, it may be liable as an information content provider for any information that vioilates the law (p. 3453). The court noted that Roommate.com ran into legal trouble when it gave the customers an option to answer questions related to gender and sexual orientation when setting up a profile. For example, by forcing individuals to choose acceptable roommates who are straight, gay, or

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lesbian, Roommate.com becomes a content provider under the law (p. 3461). Users are forced to pick among the answers, therefore, the company has a content function. The site’s search function is, thereforce, designed to steer users based on a potentially discriminatory function (p. 3461). The court noted that this online function differs from other search engines, such as Google or MSN, because their databases do not give a user specific choices to select. Rather, users maintain the ability to write their own terms. As a result of Roommate.com’s online matching operation, the company violates a portion of Section 230 that does not grant immunity from anyone who assists in the whole or partial creation or development of illegal material (p. 3462). While the selection menus are a part of the site’s function, part of roomate.com’s profile allows users to write in a comment section any other pertinent information in their search for a roommate. The Ninth Circuit noted that the comment portion of the website is immune from prosecution under the law. Since a user can write any message and is not steered toward choosing from a list of answers, then roommate.com does not have an editorial role and is not liable for any illegal content written by a third party. The court pointed out the differences in the Roommate.com decision versus its Carafano ruling. In Carafano, an unknown individual used Matchmaker.com to post sexually harassing and stalking messages to Christianne Carafano. The site itself did not play a role by providing a drop down list of answers that could have been used (p. 3468). The perpetrator was the sole party who wrote the messages. Had Matchmaker.com provided any data that would have helped the perpetrator, then it might not have been immune under Section 230 (p. 3468). If Matchmaker. com sorted the dating profiles and assisted the stalker, then it could have been liable under the law (p. 3469). With its decision in Roommates.com, the Ninth Circuit has opened a door that shows under what

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circumstances an ISP is no longer immune from prosecution when it violates a law. If the ISP in any way assists an individual in creating or posting illegal content online then it can be held just as responsible as the individual. The consequences of this ruling may be that ISPs will have to review how they collect information and take a closer examination of the content generated by their users. The decisions by the courts in Zeran, Blumenthal, GTE, Carafano, and Roomates.com parallel the legal test created by Judge Helen Berrigan in Smith v. Intercosmos Media Group (2002). In a case about domain names used as a platform to defame a company, Judge Berrigan said that Section 230 is comprised of a three-part test to determine if an ISP is immune from liability (p. 11). First, the court must determine if the defendant qualifies as an ISP. Second, the court must find whether or not the defendant is the source of the alleged defamatory statements. Third, if the claim against defendants treats them as a “publisher” of the alleged defamatory statements, then they are not responsible for the offensive content. The most important part of this test is the first part, whether or not the defendant qualifies as an ISP. Since Section 230 immunizes a provider of an interactive service, it is important to remember that Congress defined “interactive computer service” as any information service, system, or access software provider that provides computer access to users of a computer server. A recent decision by the California Supreme Court sheds light on the issue of “user” liability under Section 230. Most court decisions involve the responsibility of ISPs for offensive content, but in Barrett v. Rosenthal (2006) the California high court had to determine whether individuals who post offensive material written by others are liable. In Barrett, the court reversed a decision by the lower court of appeal that defendant Ilena Rosenthal defamed Doctors Stephen Barrett and Timothy Polevoy. Rosenthal had posted a copy of an article written by an unknown third party

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

to a news group. She had received the article from co-defendant Tim Bolen. The article accused one of the doctors of stalking a Canadian radio producer and labeled the other doctor as “arrogant” and “emotionally disturbed” (p. 40). Since Rosenthal had received the article from someone else and then posted it to a newsgroup, under Section 230 she was considered a “user” of an interactive computer service. Doctors Barrett and Polevoy argued that Rosenthal was an “active user” of the content (p. 58). She had posted the article knowing it could be defamatory. The doctors said that her actions reflected intent to damage their medical reputation. The court ruled that Section 230 did not distinguish between active and passive “users” (p. 58). The Justices said they could only make a decision based on the current wording of the law. As a result, the court exempted Rosenthal from any responsibility for the defamatory material she posted on the group’s website (p. 62). The Barrett decision was the first that encompassed “users,” a partial provision of Section 230. Previous decisions by other courts involved companies that were considered ISPs, and, therefore, not responsible for the actions of third parties. The California Supreme Court’s Barrett ruling opened the door to exempting individuals who post offensive content online they receive from others. Section 230 of the CDA punishes the authors (known or unknown) of offensive content, not the ISPs who provide the server platform, nor the users who use a computer server and forward postings to others. Culpability only lies with the originator of the materials in question.

goal was to promote the Internet as a communications medium. It wanted the Internet to flourish in several areas including political discourse, cultural development, intellectual development, and entertainment. Yet despite the agreement amongst the courts that ISPs are not liable for any illegal content, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit of Appeals noted in Roommate.com, that if a website plays even a partial role in generating content, it can be held accountable for its actions. If other courts follow the Ninth Circuit’s lead, companies who run any online service that matches up users in a social, business, or political context may need to reconsider how they build their profile databases. These databases could include SIT. One unknown danger in exempting ISPs from any responsibility is the “user” portion of the law. As shown in the Barrett decision, “users” are individuals who under the law can forward and post information on websites, blogs, and wikis whether or not the information contains offensive material that may be lewd, obscene, or defamatory. “Users” do not author the materials. As seen in these cases, the law treats different communication platforms equally. A future trend to watch is how other courts besides the California Supreme Court will determine the responsibility of “users” who post or forward offensive content written by a third party. As long as Section 230 continues exempting “users,” there is a greater likelihood that more offensive content will find its way onto the Internet.

CONCLUSION FUTURE TRENDS The series of decisions from Zeran to Barrett reflect the fact that federal and state courts have supported Congress’s decision to exempt ISPs and users from any responsibility for offensive materials posted through their services. Congress’s

The proliferation of SIT has allowed global society to interact regardless of any geographic distance (Zittrain 2006). An increased social interaction on the Internet carries the danger of proliferation of offensive material. Dangers such as online defamation, cyber-bullying, stalking, and harassment mandate increased vigilance by users. Section 230

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of the CDA makes it a crime for anyone to post offensive content online. Yet, in exempting ISPs and other “users” from any responsibility for this material, it has become a challenge for victims to find the party responsible because the Internet allows individuals to mask their real identity. Federal and state courts have interpreted Section 230 to mean that ISPs who act as “publishers” and individuals who are “users” are exempt from prosecution for any illegal materials posted on their servers. The decisions from the 1997 Zeran v. America Online to the 2006 Barrett v. Rosenthal cases reflect this jurisprudence. While ISPs are encouraged under the Good Samaritan provision of the CDA to help victims of offensive materials find the perpetrators, they are under no legal obligation. As a result, the victim is often without any legal recourse. If an information content provider contributes content in any fashion, then it could be accountable under Section 230. The law only applies to online sources that do not create content but simply publish it. Section 230 of the CDA promotes the continued growth of the Internet as a communications medium but does not, for example, aid the victims of cyber-bullying or stalking. As SIT continue to expand in use, the dangers lurking in cybespace will grow as well.

REFERENCES Aftab, P. (2006). Parry Aftab’s guide to keeping your kids safe online. Retrieved February 4, 2008, from http://www.wiredsafety.org/resources/pdf/ socialnetworktips.pdf Barrett v. Rosenthal, 40 Cal. 4th 33 (2006). Blumenthal v. Drudge, 992 F. Supp. 44 (1998). Carafano v. Metrosplash.com, Inc. 339 F. 3d 1119 (2003). Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230(a)-(f) (2008).

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Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC, 521 F.3d 1157 (9th Cir. 2008). Garner, B. A. (Ed.). (2000). Black’s law dictionary (7th ed.). St. Paul, MN: West Group. John Doe v. GTE Corporation and Genuity Inc., 347 F.3d 655 (7th Cir. 2003). Lichtman, D., & Posner, E. (2006). Holding Internet service providers accountable. Supreme Court Economic Review, 14, 221–259. Magid, L., & Collier, A. (2007). MySpace unraveled: A parent’s guide to teen social networking. Berkely, CA: Peachpit Press. Myers, D. (2006). Defamation and the quiescent anarchy of the Internet: A case of cyber targeting. Penn State Law Review, 110, 667–686. Myers, K. (2006). Wikimmunity: Fitting the Communications Decency Act to Wikipedia. Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, 20, 163–203. Smith v. Intercosmos Media Group, Inc. Et al., Civ. 02-1964 Section “C” LEXIS 24251 (U.S. Dist. December 17, 2002). Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy Services Co. 1995 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 229 (N. Y. Sup. Ct. May 24, 1995). Telecommunications Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-104, 110 Stat. 56 (1996). Twenge, J. (2006). Generation me. New York: Free Press. Zeran v. America Online, 129 F.3d 327 (4th Cir. 1997). Zittrain, J. (2006). A history of online gatekeeping. Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, 19, 253–298.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Actual Malice: The deliberate intent to commit an injury against someone. Appropriation of Identity: An invasion of privacy where a third party takes the name and likeness of another for commercial gain or to commit some other harm. Cyber Targeting: Using one of the Internet’s communication platforms (such as e-mail or a chat room) for illegal, offensive communication (such as a threat, or blackmail) to sexually harass an individual. Defamation: Harming the reputation of an individual by making a false statement to a third party. Good Samaritan Rule: A provision of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that encourages Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to voluntarily helps its customers by providing technology (such as filters) to restrict access to the availability of online materials that are obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, harassing, or excessively

violent. ISPs are bound to notify their customers of parental protections that are commercially available that will help them limit access of harmful materials to minors. Information Content Provider: Any entity, such as an indvidual, company, or non-profit organization, that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service. Interactive Computer Service: Any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access to a computer server, including services that provide access to the Internet. Jurisprudence: Previous court precedents considered as a whole. Liability: Being legally obligated or accountable for an action or decision. Negligence: Any conduct that falls below an established legal standard that already exists to protect others from harm.

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Chapter 33

Blogs and Forums in a Presidential Election Process in Turkey Güliz Uluç Ege University, Turkey Mehmet Yilmaz Ege University, Turkey Umit Isikdag IT Consultant, Ankara, Turkey

ABSTRACT Internet forums and weblogs have been institutionalized as an integral part of the political communication system. Political candidates, interest groups, and other political actors increasingly employ the Internet as a communication tool. Weblogs and online discussion forums are recognized as new democratic meeting places. This chapter investigates the role of political blogs and forums in the 2007 presidential election in Turkey and focuses on the interaction between political actors and the citizens. The content of 270 top-rated blogs and 15 discussion forums posted between April and September of 2007 was analyzed. The findings indicate that blogs and forums function as enablers of political dialogue and facilitate political participation and civic interaction. The conclusion is drawn that blogs and forums have emerged as innovative modes of political communication in Turkey resulting in a broad interchange of diverse political opinions in the political arena.

INTRODUCTION In recent years, the Internet has been increasingly utilized by political candidates, interest groups, and other political communication actors as a medium for facilitating political communication and DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch033

dialogue. Web forums and the blogosphere have been viewed as an extension of the political arena. At a time when political deliberation becomes extremely partisan, people may be tempted to ignore arguments that are at odds with their views. Thus, they risk becoming insulated in information “echo chambers.” In contrast, citizens with access to the Internet tend to be more aware than non-Internet

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Blogs and Forums in a Presidential Election Process in Turkey

users of all sides of the argument (Horrigan, Garrett, & Resnick, 2004). The study of political communication in cyberspace is regarded as a novel research area at the intersection of communication and technology. Political communication is characterized by the rivalry between various political actors and competing political messages, where access to information resources is a critical factor of success. Today, political communication and technology are becoming permanently interlaced, as Web 2.0 brings an enormous capacity to create interactive spaces for political communication activities. This chapter reports the findings of a research project which focused on the role of political blogs and Internet forums in the 2007 presidential election in Turkey. The purpose of this study was to determine whether blogs and online discussion forums facilitated the political communication process and functioned as enablers of the interaction between political actors and citizens. The research was carried out in four stages. Before the project started, a comprehensive review of existing research on the role of the Internet in political communication was completed. During the first stage of the study, the level of interactivity in blogs and online forums was determined. The second stage examined how blogs and forums were used for communicating political ideas and for interacting via entries and comments. The third stage of the project involved a content analysis of entries and comments that appeared on blogs and discussion forums during the election process. In the final stage, the researchers performed an analysis of the most commonly used terms or keywords on the subject.

BACKGROUND As the Internet continues to expand, thousands of new blogs appear every hour. As of December 2008, Technorati1 has indexed 133 million blogs since 2002. Internet forums are expanding

in numbers and popularity; for example, in the United States nearly 30% of Internet users read or contribute to them (Li & Bernoff, 2008, p. 42). Parallel to these developments, the level of interest in the political process has also grown. Specifically, many citizens go online to obtain political information and engage in interactions with others. The number of political actors and political information seekers who integrate online discussion forums and blogs into their political activity and daily lives has steadily increased. Almost every political candidate today maintains a vigorous online presence. Blogs and Internet forums are seen as democratic meeting places, akin to a virtual agora. This perception has resulted in a number of conceptualizations, including “the virtual public sphere” (Sassi, 2001, p. 89; Keane, 2001, p. 70), “electronic commons” (Blumler & Coleman, 2001; Abramson et al., 1988), and “electronic Athens” (Mulgan & Adonis, 1994 p.2).

Blogs Relatively new to the political campaigns, the words blog, blogger, blogging, and blogosphere are quickly becoming the part of a common political lexicon. Blogs (short for weblogs) are defined as online journals or diaries where information is electronically posted, frequently updated, and presented in reverse chronological order (Blood, 2005; Bowman & Willis, 2003; Keren, 2004; Welch, 2003). These electronic journals are similar to paper based versions but have the added dimension of allowing response from readers. Blogs can be regarded as a tool for opinion formation since they are said to influence agenda setting and framing processes (Drezner & Farrell, 2004). Blogging emerged in 1999 when Californiabased Pyra Labs created Blogger, a blog publishing system. This user-friendly software that permits information to be frequently updated and provides templates for user ease started a blogging revolution (Lawson-Borders & Kirk, 2005). In December 2003, the Editor & Publisher website declared

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blogs to be “the most hyped online development” (Chin, 2003). According to Drezner and Farrell, the public’s interest in blogs has remained high, and blogs “appear to be a staple of political commentary, legal analysis, celebrity gossip, and high school angst” (2008, p. 1). As to Lawson-Borders and Kirk (2005), the blogosphere is the ever-expanding universe of blogs and bloggers who link to news sites and each other (p. 548). A blogger can be viewed as the omnipresent and omniscient diarist. Bloggers are seen as the “fifth power” that increasingly occupies the control function of the mass media, contrasting established news sources with a more personal, direct, and often location-specific style of reporting (p. 505). Originating as personal diaries, blogs have evolved into online commons where people throughout the world can read and comment on other people’s opinions about the news, learn about events that might be underreported by other media outlets, or simply gossip about current events. As they have grown, some of the blogs have turned into powerful political forces in their own right, forcing politicians and the media pundits to monitor them, occasionally interact with them, and respond to them. This has created a particular subset of politically savvy, motivated partisans who have been able to connect with each other in ways they never have before (Pirch, 2007, p. 2). Political blogs have become influential in that they provide information sources that are openly and habitually disclosed (Woodly, 2008, p. 116). Media and communication scholarship has brought to light several dimensions of the blogosphere and offered helpful insight into understanding the role of blogs as a communication channel (Lawson-Borders & Kirk, 2005, pp. 551-555): •

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Investigation of blogs as personal diaries. The Internet empowers users to develop communication communities through multiple channels: such as, chat rooms, support groups, electronic mailing lists, personal

•

•

web pages, and blogs. The electronic posting of blogs provides an opportunity for people to share their thoughts and experiences on the Internet (Deuze, 2003). Analysis of blogs as organizing tools. The blog-speech is important for organizing groups since blog-speech is short and emotive. Thus, blogs are often seen as motivational tools and participatory outlets. Examination of blogs as a form of civic and participatory journalism (Lawson-Borders & Kirk, 2005). Blogs are viewed as a new form of participatory media that bypasses traditional gatekeepers and allows more individuals into the public discourse.

Focusing on the political realm, GordonMurnane (2006) proposed to classify political blogs into different categories: national political blogs (blogs with a national audience), national committee blogs (blogs of party bureaucracies), incumbent blogs, candidate/challenger blogs, local blogs, community blogs, and individual blogs: Some provide a watchdog and fact-checking role, making sure that facts cited are correct and quotations accurate. Others engage in heated and passionate commentary, analysis, and opinion about issues, events, and news. Yet others provide a current awareness function by linking to other blogs and news sources on political topics covered by both mainstream media and citizen journalists. Many local political blogs build grassroots awareness and inspire local activism on issues relevant to a specific community by focusing on issues and candidates at the local, state, and national levels. These local political blogs can build a voice for candidates running for state and national office. (p. 49). Although the proposed classification is far from being all encompassing, and a consensus has yet to be reached upon the method for evaluating the multiple functions of political blogs, it shows

Blogs and Forums in a Presidential Election Process in Turkey

how deeply blogs have been entrenched in the political arena.

Internet Forums An Internet forum is a web application for holding interactive discussions and posting user generated content. Technically, an online discussion forum is an asynchronous electronic bulletin board for communication and collaboration, where participants can post and respond to messages on the Internet (Mazzolini & Maddison, 2003, p. 237). Internet forums are also commonly referred to as: discussion groups, discussion forums, message boards, discussion boards, e-bulletin boards, or simply forums. The terms forum and board may refer to the entire community or to a specific sub-forum dealing with a distinct topic. Messages within these sub-forums are then displayed either in chronological order or as threaded discussions. Online forums seem to create the conditions for vast deliberative chambers and provide the kind of forum (or space) which makes possible the forms of conversation (or discourse) required by a deliberative democracy (Wright & Street, 2007, p. 851). Both blogs and web forums create a new space and structure, and open new opportunities in the realm of informal political processes and social movement organization: •

• •

As a tool to organize social movement at a national and, above all, trans-national level. As a tool to mobilize online as well as offline. As a tool to enable the mediation of interactive discussion/debate and thereby potentially contribute to an emerging transnational public sphere (Curran, 1994, p. 27).

For example, Hindman, Tsioutsiouliklis, and Johnson (2003) analyzed some of the main topics

in the political blogosphere, including the issues of abortion, gun control, and death penalty. In another effort, Cross and Butts (2005) studied the response of political blogs to polling data and election campaign events. Welsch (2005) categorized online neighbourhood networks of the popular liberal blog of “Atrios” and a popular conservative blog of “Instapundit.” Although Internet forums and blogs share a great many features, there are unique differences between them (Holzschlag, 2008). First of all, forums intend to be public – they represent places in which people come specifically to interact with groups of people sharing similar interests. Typically, forum software offers many of the features similar to those of blogs but requires advanced customization. On the server-side, an authorization system along with other means of keeping the forum secure is the basic feature of most Internet forum packages. Security of blogging software often relies on how various servers are configured and whether any additional security must be customized to the individual scenario. Another technical difference is that with most electronic forums one can create an unlimited number of discussion groups, but blog hosting services may limit the number of blogs one can create. From the member profile pages to private messaging, users have a lot more to do on forums than they might do on a blog. Probably, a distinction between forums and blogs is that the forums and their comments can be accessed linearly or in a threaded way -- but this option is rarely found in blogs. While web forums can be considered as advanced electronic message boards, blogs can be described as posts to websites presented in reverse chronological order (Coates, 2003). In both blogs and forums, one can read a news item, leave a comment related to that item or topic, and comment on other comments. A forum has a highly structured and categorized tree-like architecture. A blog is also structured; in fact, it is even more centric. However, the primary focus of a blog is

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content presentation. The purpose of a forum is to facilitate commentary and interaction among users.

ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL BLOGS AND FORUMS IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION The Presidential Election Process in Turkey Since the birth of the republic in 1923, the Turkish presidency has been viewed as the bulwark of the nation’s secularism and laicism. The 11th presidential election in 2007 became one of the most controversial and debated in the nation’s history. Between April and August 2007, the country witnessed a confrontation between the secularists and followers of the Islamist movement in parliament, in courts, and in the streets. The tensions flared when the governing center-right Justice and Development Party (AKP) nominated Abdullah Gül, a politician who was involved with political Islam in the past, as a presidential candidate. AKP was founded in 2001 by a group of moderate members of the Islamist movement; it quickly turned into a major player in Turkish politics both on the national and provincial levels. The opposing center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) accused AKP and its leader, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan, of intensions to undermine the secular state in Turkey. As a result, the CHP boycotted the elections. Subsequently, a major political conflict emerged as the public could not determine whether the AKP candidate would act as an impartial president if elected. In addition, a close political relationship between Gül and Erdoğan at that time was also regarded as a matter of concern by the opposition. Prior to the constitutional referendum of October 2007, members of the Turkish parliament elected the president in several rounds by secret ballot. Parliamentary law specified a qualified (two-third) majority or 367 votes for the president to be legiti-

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mately elected. If the aim cannot be achieved during the first two rounds, two additional votes have to follow. After failing to reach consensus and elect a president, the parliament has to be dissolved and an early general election to be held. In the first phases of the presidential election in April 2007, the AKP parliamentary majority proceeded with the vote without meeting the quorum criterion since the opposition boycotted the election. Before the election went into the final stage, the CHP appealed to the Constitutional Court of Turkey requesting to nullify the voting results and arguing that a parliamentary quorum of 367 members was necessary to start the election process. The Constitutional Court recognized the appeal and ordered the election to be suspended. Because the deadlock could not have been overcome within the existing structure of parliament, an early parliamentary election was held in July 2007. As a result, the Justice and Development Party increased its majority in parliament from 34% to 47%. The presidential election process was re-initiated in August 2007. After the Nationalist Movement Party helped AKP to meet the quorum criterion, Abdullah Gül was elected the 11th President of the Republic of Turkey. In October 2007, the constitutional charter of the republic was amended and the election of the President of the Republic of Turkey by popular vote was introduced.

Study Methodology As noted earlier, the present study examined the role of forums and blogs in facilitating political communication and interaction during the 2007 presidential election in Turkey. The content of 270 top-rated blogs and 15 forums posted between April and August of 2007 was analyzed. The popularity rankings of blogs and forums were determined by the Alexa® Internet Rating System (2008).2 Barber (1998) emphasized a legitimating function of interactivity in political communication, stating: “There can be no strong democratic

Blogs and Forums in a Presidential Election Process in Turkey

Figure 1. Interactivity (Blog vs. Forums)

Figure 2. Interactivity (Average number of entries/ comments in Blogs vs. Forums)

most commonly used keywords. legitimacy without ongoing talk” (p. 174). In line with this notion, the present study first aimed to determine: (a) whether there was a difference in the levels of interaction provided by blogs and forums, and (b) which of these two mediums enabled greater interactivity. Interactivity was measured as the ratio of comments to entries. An entry was categorized as the top news item or a post on a specific subject that initiated a discussion. Comments were classified as discussion items clustered around a particular entry or main topic. The purpose of the second phase was to explore whether blogs and forums could act as catalysts of the political communication process. In this phase, an analysis was carried out to evaluate how a popular discussion in the political environment or arena influences the content in blog and forums. The ratio of comments to entries on the subject (namely, the presidential election process) to the overall number of issues discussed was determined during the next phase of the analysis. To understand how accurately blogs and forums reflected the public opinion during the debate, a content analysis was carried out during the third phase. This analysis determined the distribution of entries and comments, in support of and in opposition to the presidential candidate. The final stage of the research included a keyword analysis. The keyword analysis focused on identifying the

Study Results In the first stage, analysis was carried out to determine the level of interactivity in blogs and forums. Although the number of analyzed forums (n = 15) was 18 times smaller than the number of blogs (n = 270), the number of entries and comments in forums appeared as 10 to 15 times higher (see Figure 1). The average number of entries per blog and forum is shown in Figure 2. It should be emphasized that the average number of entries vs. comments is significantly higher in forums than in blogs. In addition, because the number of pages in a typical forum is also higher than in a blog, the average number of entries per forum or blog cannot be used as a basis for further analysis. On the other hand, the comment-to-entry ratio (CER) can be employed to assess the degree of interactivity in forums and blogs. The CER value can be found for each of these communication tools using the following formula: The comment-to-entry ratio (CER) was found as follows: 0.73 for blogs and 1.05 for forums. This demonstrates that in the context of this research, forums can be regarded as more interactive environments within the political communication process. This can be explained by the difference in

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Figure 3. Percentage of political entries vs. other entries in blogs

Figure 5. Distribution of entries vs. comments in blogs

Figure 4. Percentage of political entries vs. other entries in forums

the overall structure of blogs and the high amount of information contained in every blog entry. The second stage of the analysis determined the ratio of overall political entries to the entries on the main subject (i.e., the presidential election) in both blogs and forums. As shown in Figures 3 and 4, the distribution of forums entries was significantly higher than blogs entries. The findings of the second stage of the analysis indicate that forum participants were more focused on the main political debate in the country or the political arena than bloggers. The results also illustrate that the issues discussed in forums and blogs were diverse. Neither forum members nor contributors to blogs stayed focused on a single political debate, even when the topic of the debate was a highly discussed political issue. The third stage of the research included a content analysis that concentrated on the examination

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of entries and comments that appeared in selected blogs and forums during the election. Figures 5 and 6 depict the results of this analysis. The results showed that the number of blog entries and comments in support of the presidential candidate was smaller than the number of dissident entries. In forums, there was a balance between the entries supporting and opposing the candidate. Another conclusion that can be derived from the analysis is that the percentage of neutral entries and comments was higher in blogs than in forums. This demonstrates that bloggers and blog readers tended to express more balanced views than members of forum discussions. This can be partiality related to the overall structure of blogs and the way they present information.

Figure 6. Distribution of entries vs. comments in forums

Blogs and Forums in a Presidential Election Process in Turkey

Figure 7. Number of entries and comments in blogs (April-August 2007)

Figure 8. Number of entries vs. comments in forums (April-August 2007)

Figure 7 reveals the number of entries and comments in blogs related to the subject during the period between April and August 2007. An increase in the number of entries and comments was observed in April; the increase corresponds to the initiation of the presidential election process. The number of entries and comments decreased after the presidential election was suspended in May and remained low during the general parliamentary election process in June and July. The number of entries and comments increased abruptly with the re-initiation of the presidential election process in August 2007. Supplementary analyses conducted during this stage showed that in the blogosphere, the content was greatly influenced by the mainstream media and most of the entries related primarily to the main subject (i.e., the debated issue). There might also be a directly proportional relationship between the topics presented in the mainstream media and blog entries. Further research is needed to test this relationship. Figure 8 summarizes the number of entries vs. comments in forums during the April-August 2007 period. There has been a noticeable increase in the number of comments in favor of the candidate in May 2007, just after the Constitutional Court suspended the presidential election. The number of dissident comments also increased at the same time, but they were the comments written in reaction to the comments in favor. Similar to blogs,

a sudden increase in the number of entries and comments was observed with the re-initiation of the presidential elections in August 2007. The results demonstrate that in online forums the public reaction to a political phenomenon can be monitored more closely. The final stage of the analysis revealed the most commonly used terms or keywords: secularity concern, regime is in danger, edict of the public, and democratic requirements.

FUTURE TRENDS Political blogs, forums, and other forms of social interaction technologies can serve as a means of facilitating civil society. While political blogs and forums are unlikely to be directly linked to the level of democracy in society, they may play a vital role by providing information, fostering the debate, and allowing citizens to organize and bring about political change through a collective action. In the foreseeable future, users of political blogs and forums are likely to achieve a reasonable level in constructive commitment and respectful listening. The proliferation of blogs and Internet discussion forums may lead to a growing rational deliberation enabled by instrumental rationality and interactivity of the emerging social interaction technologies. Consistent with the trend of globalization, the nature of the political discourse is likely to

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become more open. Political blogs and forums will continue to extend public communication by effectively removing the boundaries between people, places, and ideas: • • •

Improve understanding between diverse cultures and political views Strengthen insight and respect in arguments Support the development of self-regulation and good online behavior in cyberspace

In addition, forums and blogs will be actively used by citizens in a local political environment. Overall, blogs and forums would act as key mechanisms for facilitating new ways of communicating in the political arena by enabling the exchange of rich multimedia content and by creating and mining multidimensional political information.

CONCLUSION The present chapter investigated the role of online blogs and discussion forums in enabling political communication during the 2007 presidential election in Turkey. The findings indicate that blogs and forums have emerged as innovative tools of political communication resulting in an increasing interchange of diverse political opinions between information seekers and information providers in the political arena. Although forums appear to be more interactionfriendly than blogs, the results of the present study demonstrate that both online environments support the interaction of political actors and citizens. Another finding indicates that the content of the majority of entries and comments on both platforms can considerably deviate from the main topic of the debate. Considered as communication tools, forums have an advantage of being able to focus on a single political topic, while blogs maintain a more diverse and broad coverage of the political events. Another

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finding emphasizes that the blogosphere is more prone to borrowing the themes and ideas from the mainstream media than discussion forums. The results of the study demonstrate that as a form of political debate, forums reflect the immediate reaction of the public; yet, blogs provide a more nuanced picture of public deliberations. Finally, the study concludes that both forums and blogs can accurately reflect political life; however, further research is needed to support and generalize these findings. In the foreseeable future, they can act as online platforms for facilitating political participation and interaction.

REFERENCES Abramson, J. B., Arterton, F. C., & Orren, G. R. (1988). The electronic commonwealth: The impact of new media technologies on democratic politics. New York: Basic Books. Albrecht, S., Lübcke, M., & Hartig-Perschke, R. (2007). Weblog campaigning in the German Bundestag election 2005. Social Science Computer Review, 25(4), 504–520. doi:10.1177/0894439307305628 Alexa Internet rating system. (2008). Retrieved February 25, 2008, from http://www.alexa.com Barber, B. (1998). A passion for democracy: American essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blumler, J. G., & Coleman, S. (2001). Realising democracy online: A civic commons in cyberspace. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. Chaffee, S. H. (1975). Political communication. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Chin, B. (2003, December 31). Our year of the blog. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p. 31. Retrieved February 25, 2008, from http://blog.seattlepi. nwsource.com /buzz/archives/001194.html

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CNN.com. (2007). Turkey’s ruling party claims win. Retrieved January 16, 2008, from http:// edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/07/22/ turkey.elections/index.html

Holzschlag, M. (2008). Forums vs. bogs: A feature show-down. Retrieved March 5, 2008, from http://www.informit.com/articles/article. aspx?p=377075

Coates, T. (2003). Discussion and citation in the blogosphere. Retrieved March 5, 2008, from http:// www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/05/discussion_and_ citation_in_the_blogosphere

Horrigan, J., Garrett, K., & Resnick, P. (2004). The Internet and democratic debate (Pew Internet and American Life Project Report). Retrieved November 16, 2006, from http://www.pewinternet. org/pdfs/PIP_Political_ Info_Report.pdf

Cross, R., & Butts, C. (2005, February). Blogging for votes: An examination of the interaction between Weblogs and the electoral process. Paper presented at the 25th International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, Redondo Beach, CA. Retrieved September 14, 2007, from http://www. allacademic.com/meta/p34174_index.html Curran, J. (1994). Rethinking the media as a public sphere. In P. Dahlgren & C. Sparks (Eds.), Communication and citizenship: Journalism and the public sphere (pp. 27-57). London: Routledge. Drezner, D. W., & Farrell, H. (2004). The power and politics of blogs. Retrieved January 17, 2008, from http://www.danieldrezner.com/research/ blogpaperfinal.pdf Drezner, D. W., & Farrell, H. (2008). Blogs, politics and power: A special issue of Public Choice (Introduction). Public Choice, 134, 1–13. doi:10.1007/s11127-007-9206-5 Gordon-Murnane, L. (2006, October). Politics and tech tools - blogs, aggregators, and tracking tools. Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals. Retrieved January 17, 2008, from http://www. infotoday.com/searcher/oct06/Gordon-Murnane. shtml#9 Hindman, M., Tsioutsiouliklis, K., & Johnson, J. A. (2003). Googlearchy: How a few heavily-linked sites dominate politics on the Web. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL. Retrieved February 5, 2008, from http://www.cs.princeton. edu/~kt/mpsa03.pdf

Keane, J. (2001). Structural transformations of the public sphere. In K. L. Hacker & J. van Dijk (Eds.), Digital democracy: Issues of theory and practice (pp. 70-89). London: Sage. Lawson-Borders, G., & Kirk, R. (2005). Blogs in campaign communication. The American Behavioral Scientist, 49(4), 548–559. doi:10.1177/0002764205279425 Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2008). Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press. Mazzolini, M., & Maddison, S. (2003). Sage, guide or ghost? The effect of instructor intervention on student participation in online discussion forums. Computers & Education, 40(3), 237–253. doi:10.1016/S0360-1315(02)00129-X Mulgan, G., & Adonis, A. (1994). Back to Greece: The scope for direct democracy. Demos Quarterly, 3, 2–9. Pirch, K. (2007). Bloggers at the gates, Ned Lamont, blogs, and the rise of insurgent candidates. Social Science Computer Review, 20(10), 2. Rall, D. N. (2004). Exploring the breadth of disciplinary backgrounds in Internet scholars participating in AoIR meetings, 2000-2003. In Proceedings of the AoIR 5.0. Retrieved October 1, 2007, from http://gsb.haifa.ac.il/~sheizaf/ AOIR5/399.html

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Sassi, S. (2001). The transformation of the public sphere? In B. Axford & R. Huggins (Eds.), New media and politics (pp. 89-108). London: Sage. Silver, D. (2004). Internet/cyberculture/digital culture/new media/fill-in-the-blank studies. New Media & Society, 6(1), 55–64. doi:10.1177/1461444804039915 Welsch., P. (2005, February). Revolutionary vanguard or echo chamber? Political blogs and the mainstream media. Paper presented at the 25th International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, Redondo Beach, CA. Retrieved September 14, 2007, from http://www.blogninja.com/sunbelt05. pete.ppt Woodly, D. (2008). New competencies in democratic communication? Blogs, agenda setting and political participation. Public Choice, 2008, 116–134. Wright, S., & Street, J. (2007). Democracy, deliberation and design: The case of online discussion forums. New Media & Society, 9(5), 849–869. doi:10.1177/1461444807081230

Blog Entry: A news item or a post to a blog on a specific subject. Blogosphere: A global online network of blogs, people, and ideas. Comments: Discussion items clustered around a particular blog entry or main topic. Comment-to-Entry Ratio (CER): A metric, proposed by the authors, for measuring interactivity in blogs and forums (CER = Average number of comments per blog /Average number of entries per forum). Forum: An open (online) discussion platform accessible through a web browser. Forums sites are usually designed/constructed in the form of a bulletin board. Political Communication: An intersection of communication and political practices.

ENDNOTES 1

2

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Weblog or Blog: An online, personal diary in which the information is presented in reverse chronological order.

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See http://technorati.com/blogging/stateof-the-blogosphere/, accessed December 1, 2008. See http://www.alexa.com, accessed February 25, 2008.

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Chapter 34

Wiki Journalism Joseph E. Burns Southeastern Louisiana University, USA

ABSTRACT Wiki journalism is a format of participatory journalism in which citizens are encouraged to add to, or modify, a Wiki-based news story. Although the process is relatively new and the mainstream media still seem wary to accept the concept, the public has begun to recognize the potential of Wiki journalism as a form of reporting. Wiki journalism has claimed success in the primary coverage of large news stories (for example, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007) and in being the first source to provide images, sound, and first-hand accounts. The technology is already in place for citizenbased journalism to become a true new branch of media. However, critics of Wiki journalism point out that this type of journalism is often based more on opinion than fact. Another concern is that when it comes to journalistic ethics and the law, participatory media do not function under the same set of rules as the traditional media. The author maintains that the future of Wiki journalism depends on whether or not this novel news format can stand on its own.

INTRODUCTION Wiki journalism is a form of participatory journalism in which online space is created that allows users to post and edit information about a specific story or opinion topic, the later known as a “wikitorial” (Strupp, 2005). As of late, the term has become more encompassing and is often used along side a DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch034

wider array of citizen-based journalism, or “Cit-Jo,” formats, including “crowdsourcing” (Tsai, 2007) and public insight journalism (Skoler, 2005). Each concept has a common format, relying on the public to report, and possibly edit, the news that a source provides (Fernando, 2008). Wiki and citizen journalism is currently in practice at multiple levels of public input. This would include local media asking “stringers” to report local sports scores as well as Gannett Newspaper

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Corporation “crowdsourcing” to gather more input for a story yet still editing in-house. It also includes websites allowing full Wiki capabilities so that all reporting and editing be done by the citizen journalists (Howe, 2006). The process is relatively new and the mainstream media still seem wary to fully accept the concept of relying wholly on citizen journalists. Those that have embraced Wiki and other types of participatory journalism point to successes through larger news events from 2005 through 2007 that were covered using cell phone cameras, blogs, and Wiki sites long before the traditional media were able to create a single feed. To understand Wiki journalism, one must first understand the concept of Wiki.

BACKGROUND A “Wiki” is a website that allows visitors to modify the content of web pages in real time under a set of parameters set by the site’s moderator. A Wiki is both a website and a database for keeping track of all versions of the site as modified by the users. Depending on the parameters set up by the website moderator, the Wiki allows users the ability to add, delete, modify, or change in any way the content of the web page. The Wiki was conceptualized and created in 1994 by Ward Cunningham (Richardson, 2005). The term “Wiki” came from a trip Cunningham took to Hawaii. Upon arriving at the Honolulu International Airport, Cunningham was told to take the WikiWiki shuttle. The name is Hawaiian vernacular for a fast shuttle. Cunningham liked the word and applied it to a database format that he was working on. Cunningham later suggested he used “WikiWiki” as a substitute for “QuickWeb,” the term he was applying to the database at the time (Cunningham, 2003). The first Wiki, then termed the “WikiWikiWeb,” shortened later to “WikiWeb,” and then to just “Wiki,” was posted to the c2.com server

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on March 25, 1995. It was based on a Macintosh application HyperCard. The HyperCard idea of seeing computer programming as a series of index cards stacked upon one another, each able to be changed or altered individually without affecting the other, was integrated with the World Wide Web’s Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and created the Wiki format we generally know today (Cunningham, 2007). The format allowed for each “card” to be a new alteration to the web page and to the database kept by the server. Wikis were first adopted by businesses as collaboration software to allow a large number of people to work on a single idea in real time. The Wiki allowed for a single space where people separated geographically could all give input into a single database on to a common format. What’s more, the basic idea of a Wiki is to create a database that could be altered, on the fly rather than having to get into the HTML code and re-render and repost. Furthermore, the Wiki format utilized the existing HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and there was no need to switch from a database format to a web display (Chawner & Lewis, 2006). At the time, that was revolutionary. Depending on how the moderator of the Wiki sets the parameters, users can edit, add or subtract information, remain anonymous or have to login to use the system. Wiki even allows for searching of the system by what are known as “bots” to look for foul language or other known unwanted material. The main selling point of Wiki was that anyone with access could add to or edit what was on the screen on the fly. The method was faster than what was used before, and the display was equal to a web page (Blake, 2001). Although the Wiki format was popular with many businesses, most Internet users first became familiar with the term through the online encyclopedia—Wikipedia. Started in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is a true Wiki drawing its content solely through its users who need to be registered to contribute and edit content. The site attracts, by its own count, over

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650 million visitors yearly, publishes in over 250 languages and can display more than 10 million topic pages (Wikipedia, 2008a). The site is set up so that users cannot delete content, only add to it. The HyperCard system is well represented as users are allowed to link to multiple versions of each article through the links at the bottom of each page. If a user feels that the current page content is incorrect, she may link backwards in the page’s versions through the page’s database (Wikipedia, 2008b). The first Wiki journalism site is more difficult to pinpoint as many websites and blogs were operating in the participatory journalism format before the Wiki concept became known. South Korea’s OhMyNews.com started by Oh Yeon Ho on February 22, 2000 is arguably the first (Min, 2005). The online newspaper’s motto is, “Every Citizen is a Reporter.” With a staff of close to 47,000 contributors, it seems the motto has come to fruition. The site is still in operation at OhMyNews.com garnering between one and 1.5 million visitors per day (Grossman, 2006). In 2007, the site began a school of its own spending $400,000 to upgrade an elementary school to South Korea’s first school for online journalism (OhMyNews, 2007).

WIKI JOURNALISM: CURRENT USE Shayne Bowman and Chris Wills (2005) stated that Wiki journalism is the second wave of Internet journalism software. The first wave, websites and blogs, are termed the “Me” wave of sites dedicated to what one person or group thinks about a topic. Wiki sites are the “We” wave creating a single space where multiple people come together. Wiki journalism and citizen journalism have notable success stories. In 2005, Broadcasting & Cable, the industry trade magazine, condemned the misspellings and use of horrific photos of the July 2005 London terrorist bombings by citizen journalists in a 2005 editorial but admitted that

personal angles of the story were given that no journalist could capture. However, the first pictures of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina including the inside of the Superdome and the submerged school busses appeared on blogs and Wikinews. org long before the mainstream media (Block & Rockwell, 2007). The Gabriel Group, a human rights activist organization started by singer Peter Gabriel, uses Wiki-based journalism venues including OhMyNews.com and others because it takes Wiki sites only seconds to report to an attentive audience (Johnston, 2006). The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, St. Petersburg, Florida put together a page linking to numerous Wiki and other citizen-journalism based websites during and after the Virginia Tech shooting of 2007 for users to gather information and see almost live coverage (Walters, 2007). Wikinews.org posted pictures and arrest records of the Jena Six members that appeared nowhere in the local or national media. The Atlantic Monthly (Staff, 2008) stated the Wikinews story may have been the most balanced of all. Finally, in a validation from a traditional media publication, Editor & Publisher, a journal covering the North American newspaper industry, in the 35th Annual Directory of Journalism Awards established a category that gave an award for advances in “participatory journalism” (Editor & Publisher, 2006). Traditional media are looking to citizen journalism to gather information. CNN.com has created an outlet for citizen journalists titled “iReport.” Photo sharing services such as Flikr. com have become sources of photos for traditional media. YouTube.com has become a source for video. Blog search engines such as Google Blog Search and Blogger.com allow traditional media to find people who are writing about stories and gain sources (Thelwall & Stuart, 2007). iReporter.org was created to guide and educate both the citizen journalist and the traditional media that is hoping to rely on them (Marshall, 2005). Good (2006) writes of a new journalism model where citizen

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journalists break a story inside the blogosphere and bring it to the local media’s attention. In the Wiki model the flow of information in the same pattern goes from public to media rather than from media to public. Even large media conglomerates are beginning to look to citizen journalism to gather more information for stories using a form of data gathering termed crowdsourcing (Tsai, 2007). “Crowdsourcing,” a term coined by Wired Magazine’s Jeff Howe in 2006, means to open the reporting of a story to a public but to keep editorial control in house (Whitford, 2008). The concept is being adopted by Gannett Company which has directed USA Today and 90 of its newspapers to begin crowdsourcing selected stories (Howe, 2006). Weinstein (2008) writes of successful crowdsourcing and Wiki experiments on The Tallahassee Democrat’s website. There is also an ambitious project on the web, titled “Assignment Zero,” where topics are “assigned” and citizen journalists crowdsource the information assigned by site’s editor. A story is then edited and posted (Ho, 2007). The first editions were being released in late 2007.

The Downside of Wiki Journalism While those who support Wiki journalism can point to successes there are certainly concerns and outright failures as well. Michael Skoler (2005) states that public insight journalism (PIJ), his term for all citizen–based journalism, is good only for increasing a reporter’s lists of sources. Skoler believes that citizen-based journalism is too much opinion and not enough fact. Dominguez (2006) backs up his concern about PIJ content. Her research suggests that the majority of those participating in Wiki journalism are not writing stories first hand but are rather getting their facts and rewriting from sources already posted on the Internet. In his book Online News, Alan Stuart (2006) praises Wiki participants for creating voluminous

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information but chides them for having large gaps in coverage missing parts of a story a trained journalist would cover. Some also question whether traditional media are interested in partnering with the citizen journalist because of a true belief in the movement or because the information they provide is free (Dotinga, 2005). Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, states that the overriding concept of a Wiki is that it self-edits. There should be enough eyes that when a contributor posts incorrect information or cyber-graffiti the group would correct it (The Economist, 2006). However, when the group that attends to a Wiki-based story is not knowledgeable enough to edit out what is posted, poor information is passed on as fact. Worse yet, when the people who want to post cyber-graffiti heavily outweigh those who want to post correct information, the Wiki succumbs to what is termed as “Jerk Swarm” (Palser, 2006). In early June of 2005 Michael Kinsley, the editorial and opinion editor at the Los Angeles Times, decided to look to new Wiki technologies to involve the audience. He attempted the first Wiki-based editorial (Shepard, 2005). On Friday, June 17, 2005, the Los Angeles Times posted the editorial “War and Consequences” on the Iraq war and asked readers to ”Wiki” it (Editorial, 2005). At the bottom of the page there was an invitation that said, “Click here to Wiki this morning’s editorial about Iraq.” The site was kept open for almost 48 hours allowing over 500 edits before the experiment was considered a failure and frozen early on Sunday morning (Gahran, 2005; Staff, 2005; Strupp, 2005). Jeff Jarvis, a blogger and advocate for citizen journalism suggested that wikitorials could work but that the Iraq war was simply too explosive a topic (Heinemann, 2005). Many reasons were given why the first wikitorial experiment may have gone wrong when other Wiki experiments have had such success. LAObserved, an online commentary site in Los Angeles suggested that the Wiki works best when hard facts are involved. When applied to opinion,

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Wiki becomes an open forum for a predictable shouting match between opposing sides that escalates into chaos (Sourcewatch, 2005). However, other commentators believed that the Los Angeles Times might have made their biggest error before even posting the wikitorial. The Times allowed readers to post anonymously (Niles, 2006). Had users been required to register, the Los Angeles Times would have had some degree of control over the process. The anonymity of posts is not the only concern for future wikitorial sites; it is also a legal issue.

A Question of Responsibility In terms of citizen and participatory journalism, the wikitorial example above has brought a new concern to bear—libel (Ardia, 2007a). Who would be responsible for statements posted on a Wiki site especially if the statements are anonymous? David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Center for Citizen Media, suggests that the Wiki site cannot be held responsible for what a citizen journalist posts because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). It states that “[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider” (Ardia, 2007b). Taken at face value, this would imply that whether the user of the site posted false statements anonymously or as a registered user, those that are providing or monitoring the site cannot be held responsible for what is posted. Traditional media outlets are asking that online media be held to the same standards since they seek to achieve the same level of respect. Ripley (2007) suggests that under the CDA online media are allowed to operate under a double standard. Anonymous posts and posts that may libel another person can go on under a moderator’s care with no responsibility for what is posted. A Vermont

newspaper TheRutland Herald (2007) claims that the CDA creates two classes of speech, one for traditional media and one, which is more free and open, for online media.

FUTURE TRENDS Still, the downsides are not stopping Wiki journalism and the various levels of citizen-based journalism from taking a foothold. Numerous online newspapers are using a Drupal powered version of Wiki. Wikinews.org is still strong having celebrated publishing their 10,000th article in 2007 (Wikinews, 2007) and adding another 2,500 in the next year. Mainstream media outlets such as the London Telegraph are considering adopting a Wiki (Richmond, 2007; Online Journalism Blog, 2007). The main concern for the future of Wiki and other forms of citizen journalism is whether this news format can stand on its own. Wikinews has a decent chance of surviving into the future being a project of the Wikimedia Foundation (Schiff, 2006). At the same time, OhMyNews.com is precariously operating at a loss and has yet to expand into other markets (Ihlwan, 2006). To make a profit, these sites would need to create a form of revenue, most likely through banner advertisements or selling subscriptions which may not sit well with the citizen journalists that provide the content on which they rely. One of the underpinnings of citizen journalism is its independence and once a profit motive is brought to bear, that independence may be compromised in many reader’s minds. If Wiki journalism cannot support itself, then it’s possible that it may align with a traditional media outlet. As stated above, this is already in play at many levels from simple stringing to crowdsourcing to full Wiki editorial control. The question then becomes how much control does the citizen journalist have? Will the traditional media outlet allow the citizen journalism to remain

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the format, or will the citizen journalism simply become a more reliable source? If it becomes the later, the citizen journalists may not be so inclined to continue their participation in the process. How the traditional media aligns itself with citizen journalists will depend also on the quality of what is given back. The Los Angeles Times will certainly be more wary than another newspaper that has had good luck with crowdsourcing or offering full Wiki control to create a successful story. After all of the opinions have been written, the future will depend on one relationship: that of the audience that attends to the media be it citizendriven or traditional. As long as an audience feels that what is being given to them is truthful and correct, it will most likely continue to attend to the media outlet. The audience may even begin to use the differing media in such a way as to play to that media’s strengths. For example, an audience may attend to a Wiki site for breaking news for immediate images and personal stories but then turn to traditional media after a short time once the traditional media is on the scene, or the audience may stay with the Wiki site depending on the quality of the coverage given. It may also only take just one “Jerk Swarm” or one instance of a libeled statement to move an audience off of citizen-driven journalism and back to the traditional media. Jimmy Wales, director of the Wikimedia Foundation, agrees that the relationship between the citizen journalist and the audience is fragile and is asking that citizen journalists rely on the fundamentals of good journalism (Hof & Sager, 2004). Participatory journalism has the ability to compete, challenge, or align with the traditional media. It may do all three. The future will depend mainly on the financial aspects and decisions the audience makes about the content that participatory journalism provides.

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CONCLUSION In his piece, “Wiki Journalism: Are wikis the new blogs?” Bradshaw (2007) writes that Wiki journalism will only flourish if given the same time and care as traditional journalism. Deuze (2006) asks the question if Wiki journalists are actually journalists or just feeders for the traditional media. Both authors suggest that at this time there are no solid conclusions to how or where citizen journalism fits, in any form, into the overall world of journalism. Certainly Wikis serve an audience, but are they serving a large enough audience past those that are the contributors themselves? Stringers, crowdsourcing, and news media using images and cell phone video means that citizens are part of the journalistic process; but can those contributors be called journalists? The answer is up to those who are citizen journalists. As suggested above, there are both great success stories and great failures as there are to be expected in any emerging media. The audience is certainly there and when an exceptionally large story hits, people want the story immediately. The traditional news media cannot hope to do the job as quickly as a mobilized mass of citizens with cellular phones and computers. The future for citizen-based journalism is as bright and as bold as those who will actually do it. Finally, there are some that view Wiki and citizen journalism as not being journalism at all. Calling one’s self a journalist and then circumventing any responsibility for possible harm caused by anonymous posts is not acceptable under any code of journalistic ethics. Wiki journalism and other participatory journalism formats that are vying for respect will not achieve it completely until they are willing to work under the same rules of conduct the traditional media are under. The technology is already in place for citizen-based journalism to become a true new branch of media. It’s up to those who practice the craft whether to provide something the audience will want to at-

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tend to or want to use the technology, the cover of anonymity, and the protection of the CDA and disclaimers to allow literally anything to pass through and simply call it “news.” That said major newspaper chains, websites, and media outlets seem to be warming to the idea of incorporating a citizen journalism base in their reporting. It has been said that a reporter cannot be everywhere at all times. Maybe the public can.

REFERENCES Ardia, D. (2007a). 2008 Libel lawsuit filed against iBrattleboro founders Grotke & LePage. Retrieved February 4, 2008, from http://www.citmedialaw. org/blog/2007/libel-lawsuit-filed-against-ibrattleboro-founders-grotke-lepage Ardia, D. (2007b). Libel lawsuit filed against iBrattleboro. Retrieved February 4, 2008, from http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2007/11/libel-lawsuit-filed-against-ib.html Blake, J. (2001). WikiWikiWeb. Computerworld, 35(5), 66. Block, W., & Rockwell, L. H. (2007). Katrina and the future of New Orleans. Telos, 139, 170–185. Bowman, S., & Wills, C. (2005). The future is here but do media companies see it? Nieman Reports, 59(4), 6–10. Bradshaw, P. (2007). Wiki journalism. Are Wikis the new blogs? Retrieved January 24, 2008, from http://onlinejournalismblog.files.wordpress. com/2007/09/wiki_journalism.pdf Broadcasting & Cable. (2005, August). 22). A world of journalists. Broadcasting & Cable, 135(34), 26.

Chawner, B., & Lewis, P. H. (2006). WikiWikiWebs: New ways to communicate in a Web environment. Information Technology & Libraries, 4(3), 33–43. Cunningham, W. (2003). Correspondence on the etymology of Wiki. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://c2.com/doc/etymology.html Cunningham, W. (2007). Wiki Wiki hyper card. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://c2.com/cgi/ wiki?WikiWikiHyperCard Deuze, M. (2006). Managing media convergence: Path-ways to journalistic cooperation/convergent journalism: The fundamentals of multimedia reporting. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 61(3), 330–333. Dominguez, E. (2006). Wiki journalism. Retrieved January 24, 2008, from http://www.lavanguardia. es/lv24h/20060914/51283227918.html Dotinga, R. (2005, June 20). Write the news yourself. Christian Science Monitor (Boston, Mass.), 97(144), 11–12. Editor & Publisher. (2006). 35th Annual directory of journalism awards. Editor & Publisher, 139(12), 1J–52J. Editorial. (2005, June 17). War and consequences. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://www.latimes. com/news/opinion/la-ed-iraq17jun17,1,7202093. story Fernando, A. (2008). Citizen-powered journalism fills a void. Communication World, 25(1), 8–9. Gahran, A. (2005). Almost immediately, LA Times pulls Wikitorials. Retrieved January 24, 2008, from http://www.poynter.org/column. asp?id=31&aid=84074 Good, K. (2006). The rise of the citizen journalist. Feliciter, 52, 69–71.

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Grossman, L. (2006). Kim Hye won. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,1570733,00.html Heinemann, A. (2005). The buzz. Advertising Age, 76(26), 46. Ho, M. (2007). Assignment Zero first take. Retrieved January 24, 2008, from http://www. wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/05/assignment_zero_citizendium Hof, R., & Sager, I. (2004, December 27). All the news you see fit to write. Business Week, 3914, 13. Howe, J. (2006). Gannett to crowdsource news. Retrieved January 24, 2008, from http://www.wired. com/software/webservices/news/2006/11/72067 Ihlwan, M. (2006). OhmyNews’oh my biz problem. Retrieved February 6, 2008, from http://www. businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/nov2006/ gb20061101_539412.htm Johnston, M. (2006, October 30). Seeing is believing. Forbes, 178, 123–124. Marshall, J. (2005). Citizen journalism continues to surge. Quill, 93(8), 14–16. Min, J. K. (2005). Journalism as a conversation. Nieman Reports, 59(4), 17–19. Niles, R. (2005, June 16). And why not a Wiki?: Blogosphere lights up over ‘wikitorials.’ Retrieved June 18, 2008 from http://www.ojr.org/ ojr/stories/050616niles OhMyNews. (2007). OhmyNews citizen journalism school opens. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/ article_view.asp?code=2552215&menu=c1040 0&no=381061&rel_no=1 Online Journalism Blog. (2007). Are Wikis the new blogs? Message posted to http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2007/02/09/are-wikis-the-new-blogs

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Palser, B. (2006). Coping with jerk swarms. American Journalism Review, 28(2), 70. Richardson, W. (2005). What’s a Wiki? MultiMedia & Internet @ Schools, 12(6) 17-20. Richmond, S. (2007). Wiki wild west. Retrieved February 4, 2008, from http://blogs.telegraph. co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/january07/ wikiwikiwild.htm Ripley, P. (2007). Bloggers bash ‘old media’ take on libel suit. Retrieved February 4, 2008, from http://www.7dvt.com/2007/bloggers-bash-oldmedia-take-libel-suit# Rutland Herald. (2007, December 3). Freedom of speech online. Retrieved February 4, 2008, from http://rutlandherald.com/ apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071203/OPINION/71202003/1018/OPINION Schiff, S. (2006, July 31). Know it all. New Yorker (New York, N.Y.), 82, 36–43. Shepard, A. C. (2005, June 13). Upheaval on Los Angeles Times editorial pages. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/ business/media/13lat.html?ex=1276315200&e n=797829988791d603&ei=5088&partner=rssn yt&emc=rss Skoler, M. (2005). Fear, loathing and the promise of public insight journalism. Nieman Reports, 59(4), 20–22. Sourcewatch. (2005). Citizen journalism/The Los Angeles Times wikitorial. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://www.sourcewatch.org/index. php?title=Citizen_journalism/The_Los_Angeles_Times_Wikitorial Staff. (2005). Quicky Wiki. Communications of the ACM, 48(9), 9. Staff. (2008). The truth about Jena. Atlantic Monthly, 301, 98-105.

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Strupp, J. (2005). ‘L.A. Times’ pulls plug on ‘wikitorial.’ . Editor & Publisher, 138(7), 16. Stuart, A. (2006). Online news: Journalism and the Internet. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press. The Economist. (2006, April 22). The Wiki principle. Economist, 379, 14–15. Thelwall, M., & Stuart, D. (2007). RUOK? Blogging communication technologies during crises. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(2), 189–214. doi:10.1111/j.10836101.2007.00336.x Tsai, J. (2007). Power to the people. CRM Magazine, 11(12), 28–33. Walters, P. (2007). Breaking news: Coverage of the Va. Tech shootings. Retrieved January 24, 2008, from http://www.poynter.org/column. asp?id=101&aid=121499 Weinstein, A. (2008). Stop the press releases. Mother Jones, 33(1), 71–73. Whitford, D. (2008). Hired guns on the cheap. Retrieved February 6, 2008, from http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2007/03/01/8402019/index.htm Wikinews. (2007, September). English Wikinews publishes 10000th article. Retrieved February 3, 2008, from http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/English_Wikinews_publishes_10000th_article Wikipedia. (2008a). Statistics. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Special:Statistics.

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): A form of programming specifications maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that allows a single line of code to affect an entire website or web page. Citizen-Based Journalism or Cit-Jo: A term that covers a wide range of concepts where citizens have taken it upon themselves to cover and report a story through writing, photojournalism, videojournalism, blogging, or a combination of each. Crowdsourcing: In citizen-based journalism, crowdsourcing is a practice of asking citizens to cover a story and submit their reports, photos, and/or video for editing. The established news source then uses the submitted stories as source material to create a final story. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): A programming language used to format pages that are read and displayed by web browsers. “Jerk Swarm”: A term to describe an attack on a Wiki site by an overwhelming number of users who wish to post cyber-graffiti, cursing, and generally offensive material undercutting the purpose of the Wiki. Libel: An intentional defamation in a fixed format, primarily the written word. Wiki: A user-centered Internet format that allows those with access to add, subtract, or edit content. A Wiki site looks like a web page and edits as a word processing document. Wikitorial: A wikitorial is an editorial in a Wiki space.

Wikipedia. (2008b). Wikipedia: Ten things you may not know about Wikipedia. Retrieved June 18, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Wikipedia:Ten_things_you_may_not_know_ about_Wikipedia

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Chapter 35

Public Intimacy and the New Face (Book) of Surveillance The Role of Social Media in Shaping Contemporary Dataveillance Lemi Baruh Kadir Has University, Turkey Levent Soysal Kadir Has University, Turkey

ABSTRACT In recent years, social media have become an important avenue for self-expression. At the same time, the ease with which individuals disclose their private information has added to an already heated debate about the privacy implications of interactive media. This chapter investigates the relationship between disclosure of personal information in social media and two related trends: the increasing value of subjective or private experience as a social currency and the evolving nature of automated dataveillance. The authors argue that the results of the extended ability of individuals to negotiate their identity through social media are contradictory. The information revealed to communicate the complexity of one’s identity becomes an extensive source of data about individuals, thereby contributing to the functioning of a new regime of surveillance.

INTRODUCTION Since their first inception in 1997 (with SixDegrees. com), social network sites - such as Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, and MySpace - allowed users to create online profiles about themselves and connect with other users. Starting with MySpace, user profiles on social network sites were no longer limited by preset categories determined by the network

owners (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Today, the types of information that users can post on their social network accounts are virtually limitless. A few examples include: age, educational status, favorite music bands, movies or books, current mood, a detailed list of daily activities performed, relationship status, likes and dislikes, and hobbies. According to Liu (2007), an important consequence of this characteristic of social media is that social network sites have become very suitable ven-

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch035

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ues for self-expression and identity formation. By enabling users to list their own interests, hobbies, social preferences, among other forms of information, social network sites empower individuals to go beyond the traditional tokens of identity, such as profession and social class, to engage in what he calls “taste statements” (p. 253) and more freely communicate oneself to others. And according to Evans, Gosling, and Carroll (2008), what individuals have to say about themselves in social media does not fall on deaf ears: a person who views the online profile of another person usually forms impressions that are congruent with the profile owners. However, the same feature that enables individuals to freely communicate their identity to their social networks also leaves traces of data in unprecedented detail. As such, the main purpose of this chapter is to discuss these two related trends and their implications for intimacy, social relations, privacy and identity in contemporary societies. Following a brief overview of social media, the chapter begins by arguing that increased transparency is one of the defining characteristic of the new individual in contemporary societies. Next, the chapter focuses on how social media, in a world of transparency, enable individuals to communicate their multiple identities to others. In the final sections, the chapter focuses on the privacy implications of this heightened transparency by discussing the characteristics of a regime of surveillance that increasingly relies on an automated collection, collation and interpretation of the data individuals reveal and by summarizing the role that social media play in this regime of surveillance.

BACKGROUND According to Barnes (2006), social media is an all-encompassing term that describes loosely organized online applications through which individuals can create personas and communicate

with each other. Especially since 2003, social network sites (such as MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, and LinkedIn) have become extremely popular. For example, in 2007, Facebook had close to 100 million and MySpace had more than 100 million unique visitors (Comscore.com, 2007). Weblogs or blogs are another form of widely used social media. By the end of 2007, there were an estimated 67 million blogs worldwide (Rappaport, 2007). This rising popularity of social media, within which individuals reveal minute details of their lives, is closely related to the transformation of society’s expectations about what constitutes an acceptable form of information. Noting this transformation in individuals’ expectations about the type of truth that the media should make available, several commentators suggest that an important characteristic of current culture is the elevation of individualism around mid-1960s and the subsequent rise of the subjective and intimate experience of individuals as the guarantor of truth (Cavender, 2004; Corner, 2002). Commenting on this transformation, social theorist Beck (1994) points out that there has been a shift in individuals’ relationship with institutions. Accordingly, whereas in early modernity, meaning and identity were grounded on somewhat loyal reliance on institutions and structures, starting with late 20th century, the locus of meaning shifted to the individual. The self became the primary agent of meaning. Within this context, by aiding the circulation of the intimate, social media are quickly becoming a platform for self-expression and creation of meaning. However, the audiences for these attempts at self-expression via intimate disclosure are usually not limited to a few friends or potential friends. As such, the ease with which users reveal their personal information, while using social media, has triggered a heated debate over the privacy implications of social media in general and social network sites in particular (Solove, 2007; Viegas, 2005). Researchers have focused on a number of issues including: social media users’

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ability to limit who has access to identification information (Lange 2007); corporate snooping and intrusion (for marketing and employee recruitment) (Maher, 2007; Solove, 2007); data security and use of publicly accessible personal information for fraud (Gross & Acquisti, 2005; Jagatic, Johnson, Jakobsson, & Menezer. 2007); and protection of underage users’ privacy (Barnes 2006; George 2006). Despite their invaluable contribution to current debates regarding privacy in social media, most of the current studies in this area adopt a piecemeal approach. Within this approach, different privacy threats are considered in isolation from each other and from the greater framework of surveillance as an increasingly data-intensive risk management tool for institutions (government and private). Gary Marx (2004) argues that this newer form of surveillance has several important characteristics such as being continuous, automated, more intensive and extensive (because every individual is subjected to his/her data being collected in a data collection phase), invisible (as is the case when data about individuals is collected and subsequently disseminated to dispersed databases) and involuntary (partly as a result of this invisible nature of data intensive surveillance). The typical end-result that institutions seek from this process is to utilize the data to draw inferences about their identities and sort them into common types of so-called “unique” categories (Gandy, 1993; Lyon, 2001). Then, what could be ahead for individuals is a conflict between the personas and identities that they communicate in social media and the identity that they have been ascribed to as a result of this automated surveillance (also called datavaillence). The remainder of this chapter explores the relationship between disclosure of personal information in social media and two related trends: the increasing value of subjective/ private experience as a social currency and the evolving nature of automated dataveillance.

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PUBLIC INTIMACIES AND THE NEW SURVEILLANCE Formations of the New Individual Since the 1980s, the imaginary timeline of change, which can also be traced back to the anticonservative upheavals of the 1960s in almost every facet of life, the individual has increasingly come to the center stage of social, economic, and technological order. Her rights have been significantly expanded, in particular with impetus generated by the hegemonic discourses of human rights (Benhabib, 2002; Turner, 1986; Soysal Y., 1994). The new individual, so to speak: (a) has rights to her identity and culture (in other words, she possesses identities as a member of a categorically cultured collectivity that is differentiated by gender, sexual preference, disability, ethnicity, religion or spirituality); (b) is extensively involved in financial and security markets as a rational actor (she is entrusted with security of her own self, family, and future under terms dictated by the market); and, (c) achieves intimacy in public (she lives her sociality and establishes her intimate relations primarily in public stages, enabled by institutionalized public discourses). She is at the center of multiple, and ever increasing, life spaces that enact synthetically modular lives. In the globalizing world the new individual asserts herself, the lines that so preciously divide the time renowned cultural, social, and political categories into inside and outside, private and public are rapidly fading away under the duress of massive economies of circulation, imitation, and sociability. As sociability is amplified and externalized, and public and private become indistinguishable, intimacy (social, cultural, or personal) becomes displaced and public (Soysal L., 2007). While intimacy as conventionally understood requires an inward movement toward the private sites of self, family, home, marriage, culture, and nation (Berlant, 1997, 1998; Herzfeld 1997), public intimacy suggests an outward move to locate

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the formations of intimacy. In public intimacy, the emphasis is on the shared discursive spaces of public engagement, rather than the shared, inviting spaces of the cultural or personal kind (Soysal L., 1999; Berlant, 1997, 1998; Wilson, 2004). Public discourses and expressions, even in their most formalized discursive modes, constitute and conjure intimate connections. They provide a vocabulary to engage and question prescribed techniques and “institutions of intimacy” (Berlant, 1997, 1998) as in romance, dating, and marriage, while suggestively constructing intimate attachments between persons. Furthermore, in today’s world, the “close association, privileged knowledge, deep knowing and understanding” (Jamieson, 1998) anticipated by proper definitions of intimacy are incomplete and temporary. When the engagement ends, the setting and conditions for organized intimacy simply cease to exist. Individuals leave behind their provisional partners in intimacy with whom they shared stories and sociality. A corresponding transformation can be observed in how individuals live and enact sociality—in that sociality today is increasingly exogenous. Contemporary metropolitan spaces have become locations for year-round festivity. What’s true for mega cities such as London, Paris, New York is true for most metropolitan centers. Festivals of all sorts and sizes mark the topography of culture in cities. City becomes unthinkable without its festivals—its impressive and expressive façade. Even cities not so famous for its carnivals, such as Istanbul and Berlin, are now year-round stages for spectacles—film, music, theater festivals, street parades, international sports meets, as well as commercial fairs, IGO and NGO meetings, state summits, and professional conferences. The moment one of them ends, another is given start (Soysal L., 2005). Add to this the fact that individuals spend more time and money on extra-home entertainment as epitomized by the proliferation of eating-out, fitness activities, shopping, and travel.

Said differently, as the sociality of the spectacular and extra-home entertainment—or the hold of what is anthropologically known as expressive culture—amplifies, the exogenous encircles the individual and the interior dissolves in the lives lived, enacted outside. Under circumstances of globalization, not only social lives increasingly happen outside the privacy of homes, offices, and selves. Gradually, but surely, sociality takes place in virtual worlds. In other words, intimacies are being carried into virtual worlds where privacy proper is not operational. The new individual now lives, works, and shops in transparent interiors of buildings with glass facades (for example, Berlin’s parliament with its transparent dome, Richard Meier apartments in New York). In fact, as Sternberg (2001) notes, the new individual now is occupied in a phantasmagoric workplace and is responsible to create a suitable persona to present her “iconographic capabilities” (p. 11). In other words, the labor of the new individual is a labor of self-presentation. Strangely enough, this labor of self-presentation, which used to be the domain of celebrities such as movie or rock stars, is now a full-time labor for many individuals, who, for example, wear their emotions on their t-shirts or sweatpants that read Milf in Training, Jerk Magnet, Your Boyfriend Wants Me, or Juicy. In the digital realm, live webcam feeds through which individuals broadcast what transpired in their bedroom can be considered as an example to the trickling down of the act of self-presentation. And nowadays, the new individual has Facebooks, MySpaces, YouTube—the proliferated virtual worlds of sociality—where she not only displays but also actualizes intimacies in public. First, thanks to the modular structure of social media sites, e.g., Facebook or MySpace, the new individual can now determine what components of her own modular identity to display and prioritize (Donath & Boyd, 2004; Liu, 2007, Lampe, Ellison, & Steinfeld, 2007; Marwick, 2005). For example, she can choose to display information about her

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music taste at the top of the page whereas another might choose to share her travel experiences and the places she visited. Second, specialized social network sites allow the individuals to compartmentalize their personas by displaying information they see fit for different contexts. For social shopping, she can use VogueShopTV and go to StyleHive, FashionWalker. From the convenience of her cell phone, she can announce the course of her new love affair by minute to anyone who listens—actually to anyone who has Twitter, the “quick blogging” tool. If she is interested in networking to find new employment opportunities, she creates an account in LinkedIn to share her professional background. And let us not forget second lives and socialities she may enact in Second Life and its clones. Friends can even be determined via DNA matching by a visit to a socialnetworking website (https://www.23andme.com) to be unveiled by a new personal genomics start-up in Silicon Valley (Soysal L., 2007). In this respect, what users of social media do by creating their online personas is to engage in what can be called “introversive publicity.” In social psychology, individuals with introversive personality are characterized as retiring people who value introspective thinking and intimate relationships (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975). The act of subjective expression on social media (introversive publicity), despite its public nature, is introspective. It requires careful consideration of how each modular component of one’s identity works in coherence with each other. As such, the resulting persona is as intimate as it is public. It is as coherent as it is modular. However, the public presentation of the virtual modular self is not solely a self-publicity project. Rather, it is a crucial component of how individuals develop and negotiate their own identity. As Simmel (1922/1964) pointed out with respect to rational group memberships, each component added to this modular identity helps establish a unique identity. This is the world of amplified sociality, virtual intimacy, and actual simulacra we inhabit. And in

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this brave new world, as Google prophesizes in its newest slogan, “Social Will Be Everywhere” and intimacies that matter will be public (Soysal L., 2007).

Social Media: Reclaiming the Right to Privacy What are the privacy implications of public intimacies on social media? Being able to create online profiles and communicate one’s own identity in a manner that one prefers may be considered as exercising one’s privacy rights. This perspective reflects a long-standing socio-legal understanding that defines privacy as one’s ability to have control over when, how and to what extent information about them is known by others (Bing, 1972; Fried, 1984; Wacks, 1989; Weintraub, 1997). As such, by publicizing information about their subjective experiences and everyday lives, users may be exercising their privacy right to disseminate information about themselves. Recently, several commentators suggested that individuals’ voluntary submission to the gaze of other people (as is the case when Internet, users leave their Webcam turned on throughout the day) is not only an exercise of privacy rights but also an act of counter-surveillance (Dholakia & Zwick, 2001; Koskela, 2004). Accordingly, in an environment of extensive surveillance, self-disclosure is seen as the only viable way for individuals to actively participate in the creation of images about themselves (Groombridge, 2002). The real situation of Hasan Elahi is a perfect illustration of this perspective. After being mistakenly put on the U.S. government terrorist watch list, Mr. Elahi decided that the best way to be free from government intrusion would be to document and publish online every single detail of his daily affairs. Today, Mr. Elahi’s blog, sometimes visited by U.S. law enforcement officers, contains a slew of details including scanned images of the receipts of every transaction he enters and regularly updated GPS location images of his whereabouts.

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The key to being left alone, Mr. Elahi says, is to give away one’s privacy (Thompson, 2007). Regarding such a conceptualization of privacy, Gavison (1980) argues that although knowing disclosure of information can be construed as an exercise of privacy rights, it is nevertheless a loss of control over information because after the act of disclosure, individuals will have little control in the subsequent dissemination of the information. The popular media frequently covers such mishaps. For example, recently Kansas University decided to penalize students after finding out that the photographs they uploaded on Facebook contained evidence that they violated an alcohol policy of the University (Acquisti & Gross, 2006). Similarly, Microsoft officials admit that they frequently peruse Facebook profiles of job candidates (Solove, 2007). However, as the remainder of this chapter will discuss, these incidents of corporate/ institutional snooping may be the tip of the iceberg with respect to the problematic of privacy as control over personal information.

Uncertainty and Risk Externalization in the New Surveillance Since Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), Bentham’s panopticon—an architectural design that would allow the constant monitoring of prisoners from a central tower— has captured the imagination of many scholars studying contemporary surveillance. In perhaps one of the most influential studies of surveillance in the information age, Gandy (1993) used the panopticon metaphor to characterize the continuous surveillance of everyday transactions and sorting of populations into “consuming types” as a form of rationalization (in the Weberian sense) of inequality—through computers, which are for all practical purposes rationality incarnate. An important characteristic of the new surveillance is that it relies on a machine based, automated collection of personal information. Even the most innocuous transactions leave data trail

that can be stored for later analysis (Gandy, 2002; Marx, 2004). To some extent, the development of interactive media (e.g., the Internet, digital cable), which allow for a two-way flow of information between the content provider and the consumer, has added to the impetus for continuous tracking of individuals’ behavior and creating profiles that can be used to categorize them into homogenous segments (Baruh, 2004; Turow, 2005b). Within this context, social media and social network sites add to what is already a very large pool of data about individuals. Private information that individuals voluntarily reveal in social media about their hobbies, favorite pastimes, music preferences, close friends and even changes in their mood can be used further to refine their profiles and categorize them into groups. An important problem concerning the vast amount of information that institutions collect about individuals is to interpret the ensuing data. Just as with the collection phase, a process known as “data mining” increasingly allows the use of algorithms for automatic detection of patterns that can be used to predict future behavior and risk (Gandy, 2002; Zarsky, 2002, 2004). That the data collection and interpretation process is automated has important consequences in terms the uncertainty that surround individuals’ interaction with contemporary surveillance. Clearly, uncertainty was an important component of the disciplining function of the panopticon. Whereas guards can observe prisoners at any time, prisoners have no way of knowing when they are being observed. The concept “chilling effect of surveillance” underlines an important consequence of this uncertainty regarding when one is being monitored. Accordingly, an individual will be less likely to express her controversial opinions in public if she suspected that any behavior she engages in can be recorded (Marx, 1988), or vice versa, individuals may reveal opinions, at times abundantly, as if it should matter to their listeners. The prospect of fully automated analyses of data about individuals may introduce additional

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uncertainties. As Gary Marx (2004) argues, the new surveillance does not target suspected individuals. It is carried out superficially, with an intention to closely investigate later. As such, surveillance systems that rely on automated data mining are akin to a fishing expedition that starts by comparing each data-point to the population base. This comparison, done without human interpretation or prior hypotheses about what constitutes risk, has the potential to signal any deviation as risk, which could then invite further scrutiny (Andrejevic, 2007). A related component of such uncertainty regarding what constitutes the automated risk categorization is the violation of the contextual integrity of information. As noted by several theorists, an important function of privacy in a world where information about us is abundant is to protect individuals from being (mis)identified out of context (Nissenbaum, 1998; Rosen, 2000). As we suggested before, the self is a modular and perennially evolving entity. This notion is perhaps best reflected in Erving Goffman’s (1959) conceptualization of selfhood, which is comprised of multiple roles we play and masks we wear. Each snapshot of the multi-modular self in a different context will provide factually correct information about that context. However, in automated data mining, rather than interpreting each photograph as an independent unit, the analysis is based on creating a collage without paying attention to the contextual background. A collage created from hundreds of independent snapshots of the same person will probably not contain factually incorrect information. Each bit of data is actually about the subject. However, depending on how the independent photographs are rearranged, the person may look overweight, underweight or right on scale. The point that we seek to make with this discussion is not that the inferences made through automated data mining will always be factually inaccurate. Rather, this process largely diminishes individuals’ ability to determine (and find ways to

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challenge) inferences that are made about them. This is partly due to an informational asymmetry between individuals and surveillant institutions. The concept of privacy, which supposedly protects individuals from undue attention, when combined with intellectual property rights, provides institutions with a high level of protection from external oversight regarding the accuracy of data, how the data are used, and whether the data are properly protected (either from individuals or from agencies representing individuals). Noting this trend, Andrejevic (2007) argues that privacy is now the keyword for increased surveillance with “diminished oversight and accountability” (p. 7).

FUTURE TRENDS Considered from the perspective provided above, the new surveillance (if fully utilized) will be more Kafkaesque than Orwellian (Lyon, 2001; Solove, 2001). In Kafka’s The Trial (1937) the main character, Joseph K. is subjected to a long judicial process without ever knowing what he was accused of. In The Trial Joseph K.’s circumstances are particularly illustrative of two characteristics of the new surveillance this chapter discusses. First, the subject will not know when she is being surveilled, who uses the data, who wants the information, and what or who distinguishes acceptable behavior from risky behavior (Baruh, 2007; Solove, 2007). Second, the digital revolution (along with enhanced storage capacity) makes it increasingly difficult for our society to forget and move on, making it almost impossible for individuals to have a second chance (Solove, 2007): “We are losing control…because if what we do is represented digitally, it can appear anywhere, and at any time in the future. We no longer control access to anything we disclose” (Grudin, 2001, p. 11). Third, data mining rationalizes surveillance by removing humans from the interpretation process. The dehumanization of the analyses is important

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because it removes the so-called human bias from the interpretation process. As such, when combined with the fact that contemporary data mining relies on quantification of information (a seemingly dispassionate and objective method of interpreting the social world), this dehumanization projects an aura of objectivity, consequently making it even more difficult to challenge its premise (and the findings it provides). In the end, data targets lose whatever control they used to have over the management of their multiple identities. Many scholars would argue that rather than being a loss of control over one’s identity, what happens is increased accountability, which in turn reduces social costs associated with individuals’ tendency to misrepresent themselves to others (Posner, 1978). However, it is very difficult to argue that just because individuals may occasionally misrepresent themselves, the inferences that institutions make about individuals should gain such an absolute credence over individuals’ self-representations (Baruh, 2007).

CONCLUSION The rise of social media coincides with shifting norms about what constitutes an acceptable form of private information in contemporary societies. Namely, an important characteristic of contemporary popular culture is the elevation of individualism (especially since the 1960’s) and the subsequent rise of the subjective experience of the individual as an acceptable form of truth. Within this context, social media have become the loci of virtual public intimacies within which individuals communicate their multifaceted identities through their virtual personas. Perhaps, then, virtual public intimacies can even be considered as enabling individuals to actively practice their privacy rights by giving them an opportunity to communicate the complexity of their identity. However, the paradoxical consequence of this ability to make active deci-

sions regarding one’s own immediate privacy through public intimacy is that the subjective information revealed in social media becomes the most extensive source of data about individuals, thereby contributing to the functioning of a new regime of surveillance. This new regime of surveillance is characterized by an expansion in the uncertainty that surrounds the criteria surveillance systems utilize to distinguish between prospects and threats. Each component of our modular online identity can be a potential factor that leads to discrimination. And in the end, the individual is left assigned to a category that may not only ignore the complexity of her modular identity but also is virtually (and practically) impossible to challenge because of its automated nature and consequent aura of objectivity.

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Beck, U. (1994). The reinvention of politics: Towards a theory of reflexive modernization. In U. Beck, A. Giddens, & S. Lash (Eds.), Reflexive modernization: Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order (pp. 1-55). Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

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Berlant, L. (1997). The queen of America goes to Washington City: Essays on sex and citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, L. (1998). Intimacy: A special issue. Critical Inquiry, 24, 281–288. doi:10.1086/448875 Bing, J. (1972). Data banks and society. Oslo, Norway: Universeitetsforlaget. Boyd, D. M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230. doi:10.1111/j.10836101.2007.00393.x Cavender, G. (2004). In search of community on reality TV: America’s Most Wanted and Survivor. In S. Holmes & D. Jermyn (Eds.), Understanding reality television (pp. 154-173). New York: Routledge. Corner, J. (2002). Performing the real: Documentary diversion. Television & New Media, 3(3), 255–269. doi:10.1177/152747640200300302 Dholakia, N., & Zwick, D. (2001). Privacy and consumer agency in the information age: Between prying profilers and preening Webcams. Journal of Research for Consumers, 1(1). Donath, J., & Boyd, D. M. (2004). Public displays of connection. BT Technology Journal, 22(4), 71–82. doi:10.1023/B:BTTJ.0000047585.06264. cc

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Gross, R., & Acquisti, A. (2005). Information revelation and privacy in online social networks (the Facebook case). Paper presented at the Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES) Conference, Alexandria, VA. Grudin, J. (2001). Desituating action: Digital representation of context. Human-Computer Interaction, 16(2), 269–286. doi:10.1207/ S15327051HCI16234_10 Herzfeld, M. (1997). Cultural intimacy: Social poetics in the nation-state. New York: Routledge. Jagatic, T. N., Johnson, N. A., Jakobsson, M., & Menezer, F. (2007). Social phishing. Communications of the ACM, 50(10), 94–100. doi:10.1145/1290958.1290968 Jamieson, L. (1998). Intimacy: Personal relationships in modern societies. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Kafka, F. (1937). The trial. New York: A.A. Knopf. Koskela, H. (2004). Webcams, TV shows and mobile phones: Empowering exhibitionism. Surveillance & Society, 2(2/3), 200–215. Lampe, C., Ellison, N., & Steinfeld, C. (2007). A familiar Face(book): Profile elements as signals in an online social network. Paper presented at the Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference, New York. Lange, P. D. (2007). Publicly private and privately public: Social networking on YouTube. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 361– 380. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00400.x Liu, H. (2007). Social network profiles as taste performances. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 252–275. doi:10.1111/ j.1083-6101.2007.00395.x

Lyon, D. (2001). Surveillance society: Monitoring everyday life. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Maher, M. (2007). You’ve got messages: Modem technology recruiting through text-messaging and the intrusiveness of Facebook. Texas Review of Entertainment & Sports Law, 8, 125–150. Marwick, A. (2005). ‘I’m a lot more interesting than a Friendster profile’: Identity presentation, authenticity, and power in social networking services. Paper presented at the Association of Online Internet Researchers Conference, Chicago, IL. Marx, G. T. (2004). What’s new about the ‘new surveillance’? Classifying for change and continuity. Knowledge Technology and Policy, 17(1), 18–37. doi:10.1007/BF02687074 Nissenbaum, H. (1998). Protecting privacy in an information age: The problem of privacy in public. Law and Philosophy, 17, 559–596. Posner, R. (1978). An economic theory of privacy. Regulation, 2, 17–30. Rappaport, S. D. (2007). Lessons from online practice: New advertising models. Advertising Research, 47(2), 135–141. doi:10.2501/ S0021849907070158 Rosen, J. (2000). The unwanted gaze: The destruction of privacy in America. New York: Random House. Simmel, G. (1922/1964). Conflict and the web of group-affiliations. New York: The Free Press. Solove, D. J. (2001). Privacy and power: Computer databases and metaphors for information privacy. Stanford Law Review, 53, 1393–1462. doi:10.2307/1229546 Solove, D. J. (2007). The future of reputation: Gossip, rumor, and privacy on the Internet. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Soysal, L. (1999). Projects of culture: An ethnographic episode in the life of migrant youth in Berlin. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Soysal, L. (2005). Karneval als spektakel. Plaedoyer fuer eine aktualisierte perspektive. In M. Knecht & L. Soysal (Eds.), Plausibe vielfalt. Wie der karneval der kulturen denkt, lernt und kultur schaft. Berlin, Germany: Panama Verlag. Soysal, L. (2007). Intimate engagements of the public kind. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC. Soysal, Y. N. (1994). Limits of citizenship: Migrants and postnational membership in Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Wacks, R. (1989). Personal information: Privacy and the law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Weintraub, J. (1997). The theory and politics of the public/private distinction. In J. Weintraub & K. Kumar (Eds.), Public and private in thought and practice (pp. 1-42). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, A. (2004). The intimate economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, tycoons, and Avon ladies in the global city. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Zarsky, T. Z. (2002). ‘Mine your own business!’: Making the case for the implications of the data mining of personal in the forum of public opinion. Yale Journal of Law and Technology, 5, 1–54.

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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

Top global Web properties. (2008). Retrieved February 19, 2008, from http://www.comscore. com/press/data.asp Turner, B. (1986). Personhood and citizenship. Theory, Culture & Society, 3, 1–16. doi:10.1177/0263276486003001002 Turow, J. (2005b). Niche envy: Marketing discrimination in the digital age. Boston, MA: The MIT Press. Viégas, F. B. (2005). Bloggers’ expectation of privacy and accountability: An initial survey. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(3). Retrieved December 15, 2007, from http:// jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/viegas.html

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Contextual Integrity: Nissenbaum (1998) developed the concept of privacy as contextual integrity to propose a normative framework that evaluates the flow of information about individuals. Accordingly, given the multifaceted nature of individuals’ identities, contextual integrity is violated when the informational norms associated with a specific social relationship are breached. Data Mining: Data mining refers to a technologically driven process of using algorithms to analyze data from multiple perspectives and extract meaningful patterns that can be used to predict future behavior. Dataveillance: The concept of dataveillance refers to the application of information technologies to monitor individuals’ activities by investigating the data trail they leave through their activities.

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Interactive Media: Interactive media is an umbrella term describing communication media that allow the two-way flow of information between content users and producers. Public Intimacy: Public intimacy suggests an outward move to locate personal matters in the public domain. The emphasis is on the shared discursive spaces of public engagement, rather than inviting spaces of the cultural or personal kind. In other words, public discourses and expressions, even in their most formalized discursive modes,

constitute and conjure intimate connections. Social Media: The concept of social media refers to online applications and platforms through which individuals can create and distribute content and communicate with each other. Social Network Sites: Social network sites are web-based systems that enable end-users to create online profiles, form virtual networks or associations with other users, and view other individuals’ profiles.

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Chapter 36

Emerging Online Democracy The Dynamics of Formal and Informal Control in Digitally Mediated Social Structures Todd Kelshaw Montclair State University, USA Christine A. Lemesianou Montclair State University, USA

ABSTRACT The emergence and development of Web 2.0 has enabled new modes of social interaction that are potentially democratic, both within and across digitally mediated venues. Web-based interaction offers unlimited opportunities for organizing across geographic, demographic, and contextual boundaries, with ramifications in professional networking, political action, friendships, romances, learning, recreation, and entertainment. The authors conceptualize the democratization of Web-based social structures, defining online democracy as an imperfect balance of formal and informal modes of discursive control. The wrangling between formal and informal modes of discursive control ensures perpetual dynamism and innovation; the wrangling also offers the promise that diverse voices are not only welcome but also potentially responsive and responsible. The conclusion advocated is the importance of paying attention to these tendencies since they demonstrate that the Web’s proclivities for decentralization and pluralism do not necessarily lead to relativistic and nihilistic hypertextuality but to potentially novel forms of shared social control.

INTRODUCTION With the advent of web-based social interaction technologies, new opportunities have arisen for user control and interactivity. These opportunities range widely in their relational complexities, spanDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch036

ning information gathering and opinion sharing, the formation of interpersonal relationships and online communities, and the development and maintenance of sophisticated organizational and global networks. Across these varied modes of interactivity, control of the technology, the media, and the communicative content is becoming increasingly decentralized and populistic. It is necessary, therefore, to address

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what is commonly called the “democratization” of the web. Democracy, as conceived here, is not characterized by wholly unregulated chaos, despite the relativistic potential of hypertextual communication. Whereas interactivity in digitally mediated venues may range in quality from “anything goes” anarchy to rigid authoritarianism, this chapter addresses the emergence of democratic moderation, in which online participants “concertively” regulate their communication. Here we identify some past research and thoughts on the Internet’s democratic qualities;1 describe and illustrate online contexts as potentially democratic social structures that experience interplay between formal and informal communicative forces; and anticipate future trends of theory, empirical research, and practice.

BACKGROUND The introduction of a new generation of social interaction technologies opens a possibility of the transformation of structural and social reality (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967; Ong, 1982). Since its emergence, the Internet1 has been approached, theoretically and empirically, as a momentous and consequential social, cultural, economic, and political force (DiMaggio, Hargittai, Neuman, & Robinson, 2001; Wilson & Peterson, 2002). Some have theorized that the Internet might drastically transform the self, interaction, and social order and serve as a catalyst for social justice, empowering individuals to find spaces within which their voices may count (Negroponte, 1995). Others have cautioned that the Internet constrains and disempowers individuals within structured routines and cultural norms. They have argued that in the new virtual world some would emerge as winners (e.g., transnational corporations and interests) and others as losers (Beniger, 1996). Castells (1996), for instance, proposed that the Internet would follow the commercial path of its media

predecessors and predicted a web “populated by two essentially distinct populations, the interacting and the interacted” (p. 371): the first group exemplifying the web’s fragmentation potential and, the second, its reproduction of traditional media’s massification patterns; and both groups reflecting the divide between the information rich and poor. Studies on the Internet’s potential to rearrange social, cultural, economic, and political life have focused on such issues as access to open information flows across national and global systems (Bimber, 2000; Norris, 2001; Schiller, 1995), identity construction (Cutler, 1996; Morse, 1998; Turkle, 1995), community formation and mobilization (Foster, 1997; Rheingold, 1993; Zappen, Gurak, & Doheny-Farina, 1997), and civic and political participation and deliberation (Putnam, 2000). The potential of the Internet to promote civic engagement and political democracy have also gained attention (e.g., Agre, 2002), especially since the 1990s when United States’ congressional, state, and presidential candidates began deploying campaign websites (Hurwiz, 1999). The increased opportunities for interactivity among citizenries through blogs, chat rooms, and Internet forums are now being investigated (e.g., Best & Krueger, 2005; Dahlgreen, 2000; Endres & Warnick, 2004) as are the perceived public risks posed by such online participation (Andrejevic, 2006; Best, Krueger, & Ladewig, 2007). While some suggest that the Internet has the potential to mobilize “netizens” in new ways and to support democratic processes (Carpini, 2000; Deuze, 2006; Min, 2007), at times lending authorial voice to marginalized constituents and concerns, there is also increased support for the polarization of the public and the unfulfilled potential of deliberative democracy (Noveck, 2000; Selnow, 1998; Streck, 1998; White, 1997; Wilhelm, 2000). Still others point out that online deliberative democracy can be actualized, but its impact is greatly diminished when positioned within a dominant commercialized and individualized culture (Dahlberg, 2001).

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On a more micro-analytic level, various studies have explored language, communication practices, and social interaction and relations on the Internet (e.g., Crystal, 2001). These inquiries address the emergence and negotiation of “netiquette” rules that socialize online participants, as well as more subtle self-imposed or community-imposed levels of informal control that undermine the Internet’s democratic potential. McLaughlin, Osborne, & Smith (1995) identified early misconduct on Usenet that included misuse of technology, bandwidth waste, factual errors, inappropriate violation of language guidelines, newsgroup-specific conventions, and ethical codes. The extent to which the Internet liberates or simply reproduces patterns of expression and participation, in relation to gender, race, and sexual politics, continues to interest participants, observers, and researchers (Bromseth, 2001; Dibbell, 1993; Herring, 1996; Herring & Paolillo, 2006; Kendall, 2000; Lessig, 1999; Miller, 1995; Stivale, 1997) as do the Internet’s descriptive and prescriptive rules and various interactive forms, where behaviors range from disruption and hostility (e.g., flaming) to disciplinary control and normalization (Dutton, 1996; Lee, 2005; Phillips, 1996; Thompsen, 1996). Much of the research has examined online contexts such as MUDs, MOOs, and Usenet communities that are now being replaced in prominence by new Internet venues. Janack (2006) studied how participants of Blog for America—a feature of the 2000 U. S. presidential candidate Howard Dean’s campaign website—discursively disciplined themselves. That study echoes this chapter’s focus: While new social media feature pluralistic participation, interactivity, and ungrounded hypertextuality, they operate within both formally structured and emergent frameworks of values, practices, and expectations that significantly reaffirm and rewrite authority and control. In Janack’s study, for instance, blog participants behaved as gatekeepers, a role traditionally enacted by campaign staffers, to silence Dean’s critics through various

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rhetorical strategies (e.g., ignoring or minimizing critical comments, ad hominem attacks). If Internet-enabled discourse may be described in Bakhtin’s (1984) language as “carnivalesque,” we can see how it potentially brings people together as equals to revel in liberation from exogenous constraints (legal, governmental, religious, and so on) and social stratifications. At once, though, it is necessary to recognize that the carnival, no matter how liberating, is a social order nonetheless. Its playfulness, unpredictability, populism, and multi-voicedness are inevitably bounded and regulated. This moderation is a hallmark of online democracy, and an important potential characteristic of web-based interaction.

ONlINe DemOCRACy’S mODeS Of SOCIAl CONTROl Online communication occurs within and across diverse contexts and forms, ranging from relatively simple information posts to highly sophisticated social and political commentary. Accordingly, discursive qualities vary greatly throughout the web. Some utterances are noisily and chaotically ungrounded whereas others are kept orderly by the moderator’s iron fists. Of interest is what happens somewhere between these extremes, when administrative and lay users participate together to negotiate and maintain their shared social orders. To understand such potentially democratic qualities, it is necessary to define online democracy and to address how it may be enacted. This section begins with the general idea that all online interaction is governed by tensional interplay between formal and informal modes of control. Then we define online democracy as a particular mode of dialectical tension, and illustrate this dynamic— and the general potential for online democracy in Internet-mediated venues—by exploring some actual online interaction.

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Online Social Structures and Democracy Any social structure is continuously rebuilt through participants’ communication (Giddens, 1984). This applies not only to face-to-face and other traditional social contexts but also to emerging venues that are digitally mediated, such as online forums, discussion boards, blogs, wikis, and social networking sites. These online settings may be thought of as both nouns and verbs; they are as much solid frameworks of norms as they are fluid interactions among people. In Giddens’ terms, such simultaneously solid and fluid structures comprise socially made rules (implicit and explicit formulas for action) and resources (participants’ commoditized abilities, knowledge, designated roles, etc.) that at once permit and limit interaction. The constant “reinscription” of rules and resources occurs not just within a given social structure as a demarcated and unitary body but also across overlapping structures that may mediate and contradict each other. One way to understand this complex nature of social structures is to address how they are enabled and constrained by a dialectical interplay of social forces—what Bakhtin (1981) characterizes as “centripetal” and “centrifugal.” Centripetal forces are authoritative, stabilizing, decisive, and preserving of traditions. Directives, punishments, and behaviors that concretize stratified roles are instances of centripetally leaning talk. Conversely, centrifugal forces are insurgent, destabilizing, equivocally open-ended, and change-minded. Questions, evasions, and behaviors that challenge authority are centrifugally leaning. When examining online interaction, each discrete utterance (e.g., a blog post) manifests a quality that is roughly mappable along the centripetal—centrifugal continuum. Directives and pronouncements, for instance, tug the discourse centripetally whereas questions and invitations for response pull things centrifugally. In looking at a communicative context’s utterances in

aggregate, it is possible to recognize a particular meta-dynamic, the cumulative tugging of which defines the social structure’s general character. How imbalanced are its forces? How do they tend? If a given online setting experiences a preponderance of explicit rules, web forum moderatorenforced censorship, gate-keeping, and other centripetally-leaning discourses, the social structure tends toward autocracy or authoritarianism as an organizational form. Its social order is maintained by verbal and nonverbal talk that enforces centralized control while stifling insurgence. Leaders are typically designated and recognizable as established roles, and control mechanisms tend to be formally explicit and enforceable as codified rules. At the other end of the sliding scale—the centrifugal one—a given online venue with few (or no) explicit regulations, disciplinary procedures, and plenty of cacophonous interaction leans toward anomie or anarchy as the basis of social (dis)order. Discursive struggles occur through decentralization of authority and destabilization of public order. Leadership is emergent and fluid, and social norms—which are likely implicit—are negotiated among participants rather than imposed from atop or outside of the social structure.

Online Democracy Whereas social forms such as anarchy and autocracy inhabit the continuum’s two dialectical extremes, online democracy hovers (however imprecisely) near the middle. Online democracy may be defined as the quasi-counterbalance of normalizing and destabilizing discursive forces; a subtle and messy negotiation of control in which centripetal and centrifugal pushes and pulls moreor-less even out. The “more-or-less” characteristic of this equilibrium reflects the general idea that social structures, which are constantly remade in participants’ interaction, are always dynamic and never static. For this discussion of online venues—which are potentially democratic but

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certainly not always—this definition is important. Given the seemingly pluralistic decentralization of discourse in web-based settings, the Internet appears to come to life as a noisy “marketplace of ideas” (Mill, 1956); a panoply of public “sphericules” (Gitlin, 1998) in which interaction is most easily described as ungrounded. The risk of these characterizations is that they may overemphasize centrifugal forces while denying or trivializing the emergence and functions of social control. Control within and among online social structures is ubiquitous, and it comes in two generally different modes that are dialectically engaged. The first mode is what Spitzer (1982) describes as “formal,” embodying centripetal qualities with their hierarchical stratification. The second, “informal” mode advances centrifugal qualities that disrupt hierarchical structures in socially emergent ways. As formal and informal modes of control interact within a democratic social system, discourses that “seem to weaken hierarchies of power may actually establish new channels through which those hierarchies can be strengthened, extended, and made more responsive to the complexities of modern social administration” (Spitzer, 1982, pp. 187-188). Accordingly, in addressing the democratization of online social spheres, it would be a mistake to highlight a presumed absence of discursive control. Instead it is important to acknowledge how control functions, both formally and informally.

formal Control in Online Democracy Democratic online venues are, in part, maintained by formal discursive control. There are many common instances of formal control in contemporary Internet life. Registration forms that are created and processed by centralized (usually institutional) website managers, for instance, require prospective users to provide their names, contact information, and other identifiers to gain access to the venue. Often, registrants are required to accept explicit terms and conditions. The con-

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tents of posts are filtered, either by moderators or automatically. Rules for conduct are stated, as are enforcement mechanisms, which range from message flagging to censorship to banishment. In short, formal control is usually obvious to participants, manifesting in “power-down” policies and actions that demand and enforce respect while constraining behavior.

Informal Control in Online Democracy In roughly equal measure, informal control mechanisms also fulfill important functions in webbased democracies. Unlike formal control, which maintains social order authoritatively, informal enactments of control are essentially disruptive. They may directly undermine explicit authority, as do acts of spamming, flaming, hacking, and impersonation. They may also rewrite, reframe, or appropriate the online venue’s content and norms to shift power away from the institution or privileged users. Informal control may be recognized in tagging and other XML-enabled tools that users apply to customize and order online content according to their own preferences. But this disruption is not as chaotic, unregulated, and destructive as one might assume. If formal control is “top-down” then informal control is “bottom-up,” manifesting what Foucault (1995) addresses in terms of a “panopticon”—an invisible mode of omniscience. Fostered online by the blurring of private and public identities within contexts that are rife with mutual voyeurism, panoptic omniscience compels participants to discipline not only each other, but also themselves. Barker (1999) describes the effect in organizational settings as “concertive control,” through which team members in a “supervisorless culture” develop communicative patterns such as “informal hierarchies, particular power relationships, and team norms” (p. 13). In this negotiation there is both disruption and discipline—as well as the (re) construction of order. So informal control may be

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understood as emergent and participant-centered co-regulation.

The DyNAmICS Of fORmAl AND INfORmAl CONTROl IN ONlINe DemOCRACy: A CASe Of JUICyCAmpUS.COm One specific case that offers an insightful view of how formal and informal kinds of control play out on the Internet is JuicyCampus.com, a website that aims to enable “online anonymous free speech on college campuses” (JuicyCampus. com, About Us). The website claims to provide a forum “where college students discuss the topics that interest them most, and in the manner that they deem most appropriate” (JuicyCampus.com, About Us) and promotes itself as the “world’s premier college gossip site” that attracts “nearly one million unique visitors per month, while serving 500 campuses across the country” (JuicyCampus. com, Official Blog Announcements). Critics view the website as a gossip mill and compare it to “a dorm bathroom wall writ large, one that anyone with Internet access can read from and post to” (Morgan, 2008). However controversial it may occur to an outside observer, JuicyCampus.com represents a growing number of unmoderated online forums that promise anonymity to the users. The provision of general communicative guidelines coupled with the absence of gatekeeping and censorship-minded monitoring results in rich meta-discussions among participants about what kinds and styles of talk are appropriate. In the course of this site’s interaction and metainteraction, an illustration emerges of the carnival that is web-based democracy.

The Web as a Borderless System of Social Structures JuicyCampus.com was founded in 2007 by Matt Ivester, a Duke University graduate who character-

ized the site as an attempt to cultivate “gossip 2.0” (cited in Morgan, 2008). The site does not require participants to register, and posts are anonymous. The site has spread to 500 college campuses in the U.S. and has been the center of a number of controversies with regard to its function and nature of participation. For the purposes of this analysis we focus on one of the most discussed JuicyCampus.com’s threads, The Yale Women’s Center is Genius, which as of March 2008 had generated 153 responses. The Internet’s borderlessness and carnivalesque qualities become apparent when one traces the emergence of this forum: a group of Yale students, members of the Zeta Psi fraternity, posed in front of the Yale Women’s Center holding a sign reading, “We love Yale sluts” (Abrahamson, 2008). The photograph was uploaded on Facebook.com on January 16, 2008 and came to the attention of the Yale Women’s Center members and the university community. On January 21 the Center declared an intention to pursue legal action (Abrahamson, 2008). On the same day, a blog posting appeared on IvyGateblog.com (O’Connor, 2008) that generated 216 responses from January 21 to February 28. On February 29 the forum’s thread, entitled The Yale Women’s Center is Genius, was posted on JuicyCampus.com with entries followed by the authors until March 16. The list of responses that have emerged or directed attention to this case is not meant to be exhaustive but rather an indication of the dynamic and hypertextual way in which discourse unfolds. The discursive positions and moves of participation in all these social networks simultaneously invoke, reflect, co-opt, and control the Internet’s carnivalesque potential and offer a macro-analytic glimpse of the centripetal and centrifugal forces that are generally at work in public online interaction. Participants’ posts on JuicyCampus. com exemplify the range of potential discursive positions from which democratic talk can unfurl— with appeals to legal issues and ramifications, celebrations of freedom of expression and feminist

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ideology, references to sexual and gender politics, concerns about advertising and the economies of cyberspace, and, of course, frequent mention of netiquette rules and what constitutes appropriate discourse. It is to this exploration of the formal and informal enactments of control that we now turn.

enactments of formal Control JuicyCampus.com’s official policies straddle the legal and contextual. The site has an official policy outlining terms and conditions of use, an intellectual property policy, and a privacy policy. Although the site’s Privacy & Tracking Policy page claims, “we do not track any information that can be used by us to identify you” (JuicyCampus.com, Privacy & Tracking Policy), the site managers have assisted police in identifying individuals who have made explicit threats (see, for example, Morgan, 2008). The site also has frequent announcements by the site managers that contextualize much of the more formal legal language, at times in contradictory ways. For example, the site outlines specific Terms & Conditions with regard to user conduct that also address defamation. However, on the Frequently Asked Questions page the site creators note: “Facts can be untrue. Opinions can be stupid, or ignorant, or mean-spirited, but they can’t be untrue. And we believe everyone is entitled to their opinion” (JuicyCampus.com, Frequently Asked Questions). Site managers’ specific announcements have tackled the issue of defamation (December 9, 2007; December 11, 2007); anonymity (December 9, 2007); use of real names of people being discussed (January 29, 2008); copyrighted material; the posting of contact information; spamming; and what constitutes “juicy,” which the site founder says is not hate (February 29, 2008). What is notable in reviewing these announcements is the celebration of the carnival—the recognition that online democracy’s nature and form are contested and emergent. What is even more

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noteworthy is that it is the institution that enacts this celebration of carnival. As JuicyCampus. com (Official Blog Announcements, February 29, 2008) states, “Ultimately, JuicyCampus is created by our users, and we ask that you please take this responsibility seriously.” So, at once the site managers are doing two things: advancing and maintaining formal control by inviting and permitting emergent and user-controlled discourse (invitation and permission being particular modes of control); and delimiting discourse in a way that protects themselves legally while defining the parameters of “juiciness.”

enactments of Informal Control Anonymous users enact emergent and decentralized control in various ways throughout JuicyCampus.com’s The Yale Women’s Center is Genius discussion. Most basically, informal control is typified in users’ ability to initiate discussion threads and reply without fear of monitoring, filtering, censorship, or expulsion. The important point about this is that, whereas users are liberated from formal oversight, they are subject to one another’s responses. This cultivates a mode of discipline that emerges among participants, akin to Foucault’s (1995) “panopticon” and Barker’s (1999) “concertive control.” Participants exercise discipline on issues ranging from who can participate, how they may appropriately do so, and why. Informal enactments of control are manifest in various strategies such as name-calling, threats, irony, caution, silencing, confrontation, and othering, among others (see Table 1): Disciplining potentially defamatory talk (relating mostly to the Women’s Center coordinator), participants argue from various positions that engender much more than just the legal perspective witnessed at the formal level of administrative control of the site (see Table 2): Here we see the carnival’s explosively disruptive potential as competing languages and perspectives struggle to frame the legitimacy of

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Table 1. Types of informal control Participation issue

Strategy

Illustration of informal control

Who?

Name-calling

you a * get off the site. “impartial observer?” NEWSFLASH: everyone here is * invested. stop slowing the dialogue down. (3/4/08)

What?

Threat

the author of the other thread – “someone needs to * chase o-m till she cries” and the post on this thread of the same name - should be found, shamed, and lethally injected. how dare you speak of her? (2/29/08)

Where?

Caution

as a fan of the women’s center: can we not talk about their strategies online, let alone on this site? FOR BLARINGLY OBVIOUS REASONS. (3/6/08)

When?

Irony

i just hate feminists and wrongly assumed it was safe to post at 5 a.m. because I wrongly assumed that they would be asleep. but now i see my mistake: they didn’t have any sex so they couldn’t fall asleep. (3/4/08)

Why?

Othering

i just wanted to express my opinion. I am not like any of you crazies. (3/4/08)

participation. We also see the attempts to control, rein in, redirect, and reframe the discussion’s boundaries. The tension between formal (centripetal) and informal (centrifugal) modes of control is evident throughout the JuicyCampus.com site and the Yale Women’s Center forum thread, and point to web-based democracy’s inherent messiness. In these matters, there will be no “resolution.” And, in these matters, as one participant observes, the carnival comes to life meta-discursively: “i love that the most discussed thread on juicycampus is about the women’s center’s attempt to destroy juicycampus” (3/4/08).

fUTURe TReNDS As the Internet has emerged in popular use and evolved into Web 2.0, it has become less a medium for the sheer expression and transference of information and more a setting for relationshipmaking. Web-based interaction offers unlimited opportunities for organizing across geographic, demographic, and contextual boundaries, with ramifications for professional networking, political action, friendships, romances, education, recreation, healthcare, and so on. One example of real but previously unforeseeable use of online

Table 2. Illustrations of informal control What counts as defamation?

Illustration of informal control

Moral perspective

The * making these nasty comments about people should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves! (2/29/08)

Democratic perspective

these big anonymous sites make everybody forget that the people we are talking about are not public property, that their lives are not performed for our benefit, that the warriors are people too. * is as good a person as she is a warrior. let’s make sure we remember that. (2/29/08)

Relational Perspective

WHYARE ALL YOU PEOPLE SICKOS???? SHE IS MY * SISTER. I HAVE HELPED HER FIND TEDDY BEARS THAT SHE HAS LOST FOR YEARS. SHE IS * AWESOME. (3/2/08)

Public Domain Perspective

i am totally in awe of * and i became a feminist since arriving at yale because of two talks i went to at the women’s center that she moderated... but she is a celebrity here. you shouldn’t nipe at kids for talking about her because she is a public person, like a politician. we do have some right to talk about her as a person in a way that we dont have a right to talk about other people. (3/2/08)

Legal Perspective

dude, why are you mouthing off about girls on this thread? ITS LIKE SUICIDE. dumb *. everyone knows that they are planning to sue the site. EVERYONE knows that they have lawyers cuz of the frat stuff. EVERYONE knows that your * will get subpeonaed and EVERYONE will know who you are. (3/5/08)

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interaction is Naughtie Auties, a resource center in the Second Life virtual venue where those with autism spectrum disorders can practice social interaction (Saidi, 2008). Theorists, researchers, and practitioners of web-based communication will increasingly have opportunities to engage these new relationship structures’ discursive negotiations of control, and to recognize democracy when it occurs and assess its functions and sociologic consequences. Internet scholars and users will also have increasing opportunities to consider how technological populism contributes to open and democratic discourse. It is noteworthy that means for producing and distributing visual, literary, musical, etc. creations are increasingly accessible. The result is that “authorship,” broadly understood, is becoming less elite and more decentralized. It is now quite easy for amateurs to self-produce and distribute their art, ideas, and home videos, and to redefine “celebrity” in populistic terms via so-called “first-person media.” As well, through Web 2.0-based technologies, lay people may co-opt, remix, and redistribute canonic pieces of art in ways that redefine authorship and ownership, problematizing notions of intellectual property. This wrangling between formal control mechanisms (e.g., copyright law) and insurgent, populistic inter-activities has everything to do with democracy, and will, in the future, be an important locus of concern. Generally, the emergent democratization of online discourse is important to study and reflect upon since its social practices both influence and are influenced by life beyond “virtual” space. Democracy as a social order and even as a moral ideal is a historical phenomenon that has yet to be fully realized. It may be enacted in daily life, however imperfectly, throughout many contexts, spanning family, labor, education, entertainment, community, politics, etc. In a sense, participants in online venues that enable democratic interaction have opportunities to learn how to “do” democracy in effective and satisfying ways.

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There are particular procedures (e.g., deliberative decision making), responsibilities (e.g., shared leadership), and expectations of decorum (e.g., mutual respect, even in light of disagreement) that support effective democratic organizing. How democracy is practiced in online environment has great consequence for many dimensions of 21st century life, including citizenship (national, global, corporate, etc.), community building, resource management, innovation, and so on. In short, the Internet’s new opportunities for experiencing and practicing democracy both reflect and contribute to the emerging democratization of broader social life.

CONClUSION The authors have approached online interaction as potentially democratic. The discussion’s emphasis has not been upon democratic political interaction per se, but upon communicative practices of online democracy as they may be enacted in (and across) a wide range of online settings, such as blogs, wikis, and social networks. The definition of online democracy that we advance—a subtle and messy negotiation of control in which centripetal and centrifugal pushes and pulls more-or-less even out—is important for understanding how online contexts, potentially, are neither strictly controlled by their institutional creators/managers nor entirely disrupted by their “mobs” of users. This imperfect balance between formal and informal modes of discursive control ensures perpetual dynamism and innovation, as well as the promise that diverse voices are not only welcome but also potentially responsive and responsible. Our intentions have been to recognize that, first, as in “real” life, so-called “virtual” interactions and relationships may take various organizational forms that range from anarchy to absolute control; and, second, that the Internet provides some new opportunities that are democratic in quality. It is important to pay attention to these opportunities

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since they demonstrate that the web’s proclivities for decentralization and pluralism do not necessarily lead to relativistic and nihilistic hypertextuality but to potentially novel forms of shared social control. When formal and informal regulatory forces temper each other, there are consequences for the kinds of relationships and communities that interactants may forge. As participants in online venues increasingly engage in online democratic social structures, they may learn to relate on both substantive and meta-discursive levels in order to negotiate mutually recognized rules and resources. Such practice might have great consequence for broader social systems, and for the character of democracy throughout 21st century life.

Beniger, J. R. (1996). Who shall control cyberspace? In L. Strate, R. Jacobson, & S. B. Gibson (Eds.), Communication and cyberspace (pp. 4958). Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

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Lee, H. (2005). Behavioral strategies for dealing with flaming in an online forum. The Sociological Quarterly, 46, 385–403. doi:10.1111/j.15338525.2005.00017.x Lessig, L. (1999). Code and other laws of cyberspace. New York: Basic Books. McLaughlin, M. L., Osborne, K. K., & Smith, C. B. (1995). Standards of conduct on Usenet. In S. G. Jones (Ed.), Cybersociety: Computer-mediated communication and community (pp. 90-111). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The medium is the massage. New York: Random House. Mill, J. S. (1956). On liberty. New York: Liberal Arts Press. Miller, L. (1995). Women and children first: Gender and the settling of the electronic frontier. In J. Brook & I. A. Boal (Eds.), Resisting the virtual life: The culture and politics of information (pp. 49-57). San Francisco: City Lights. Min, S. J. (2007). Online vs. face-to-face deliberation: Effects on civic engagement. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4). doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00377.x Morgan, R. (2008, March 16). A crash course in online gossip. The New York Times, p. ST7. Morse, M. (1998). Virtualities: Television, media art, and cyberculture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. New York: Vintage Books. Norris, P. (2001). Digital divide? Civic engagement, information poverty and the Internet in democratic societies. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Noveck, B. S. (2000). Paradoxical partners: Electronic communication and electronic democracy. In P. Ferdinand (Ed.), The Internet, democracy, and democratization (pp. 18-35). London: Frank Cass. O’Connor, M. (2008, January 21). Zeta Psi pledges “Love Yale sluts,” Women’s Center pledges to sue. Messages posted to http://www.ivygateblog. com/2008/01/zeta-psi-pledges-love-yale-slutswomens-center-pledges-to-sue/ Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy. London: Methuen Press. Phillips, D. J. (1996). Defending the boundaries: Identifying and countering threats in a Usenet newsgroup. The Information Society, 12, 39–62. doi:10.1080/019722496129693 Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rheingold, H. (1993). Virtual communities. New York: Addison-Wesley. Saidi, N. (2008, March 28). iReport: ‘Naught Auties’ battle autism with virtual interaction. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2008/ HEALTH/conditions/03/28/sl.autism.irpt Schiller, H. I. (1995). The global information highway: Project for an ungovernable world. In J. Brook & I. A. Boal (Eds.), Resisting the virtual life: The culture and politics of information (pp. 17-33). San Francisco: City Lights. Selnow, G. W. (1998). Electronic whistle stops: The impact of the Internet on American politics. Westport, CT: Praeger. Spitzer, S. (1982). The dialectics of formal and informal control. In R. L. Abel (Ed.), The politics of informal justice. New York: Academic Press.

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understandings of self and community. Formal Discursive Control: Communicative currents within a social structure that are institutionally centralizing, and which impose and enforce regulations in a “top-down” manner that is typically explicit (e.g., codes of conduct). Formal control is manifested in what Bakhtin (1981) terms “centripetal” forces, which are authoritative, stabilizing, decisive, and preserving of traditions. Informal Discursive Control: Communicative currents within a social structure that disrupt institutional authority and enable the negotiation of emergent norms in a “bottom-up” manner that is often implicit and subtle. Informal control is manifested in what Bakhtin (1981) terms “centrifugal” forces, which are insurgent, destabilizing, equivocally open-ended, and change-minded. Online Democracy: The quasi-counterbalance of normalizing and destabilizing discursive forces; a subtle and messy negotiation of control in which centripetal and centrifugal pushes and pulls moreor-less even out. Social Structure: A relational system that is both constrained and enabled by norms (beliefs, values, rules, and roles) that are made and remade in participants’ interaction. Social structure is partly stable and partly dynamic; at once a thing and a process.

eNDNOTe 1

Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Carnival: A concept developed by Bakhtin (1984) that illustrates how people come together as a collective of equals and interact in a way that defies exogenous sociologic divisions. In the experience of carnival, there is an air of playfulness and multi-voicedness that invigorates participants’

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We use the Internet here to reference mostly the various examples of mediated networks including the World Wide Web and electronic mail, social and interactive spaces such as weblogs and wikis, and sharing media such as podcasts and social bookmarking tools rather than the technological infrastructure itself.

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Chapter 37

Squeak Etoys

Interactive and Collaborative Learning Environments Christos J. Bouras University of Patras, Greece Vassilis Poulopoulos University of Patras, Greece Vassilis Tsogkas University of Patras, Greece

ABSTRACT Squeak Etoys is a free software program and media-rich authoring system with a user-friendly visual interface. The software is designed to help six to twelve year-old children learn through interaction and collaboration; it comes preinstalled on XO laptop computers distributed by the One Laptop Per Child Foundation. The goal of the One Laptop Per Child initiative is to create novel educational opportunities for the world’s children by providing each child with a book-size, light and portable computer for personal use at school and at home. This chapter elaborates on the educational dimensions of the XO laptop and the Etoys environment developed to empower teachers and students with the capacity for creative learning, exploration, interaction, and collaboration. The authors focus on how the hardware and software capabilities of XO laptops can be utilized to allow children to interact, work together on projects, and engage in computer simulations and games while learning mathematics, physics, chemistry, and geometry.

INTRODUCTION Squeak Etoys is a free and open source media-rich authoring system with a user-friendly visual interface which comes preinstalled on One Laptop Per Child XO computers. The One Laptop Per Child DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch037

(OLPC) project1 is a revolutionary blueprint for children’s personal computer use created to bring an efficient and functional educational technological tool to nearly every child between six and twelve years old, throughout the world. The OLPC initiative is especially important to students in developing countries due to the fact that “most of the nearly two billion children in the developing world are

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inadequately educated or receive no education at all. One in three does not complete the fifth grade.”2 Founded in 2005, One Laptop Per Child Foundation3 is a non-profit organization which brings forward innovative ideas on the use of personal computers by children and promotes widespread realization and assimilation of computer technologies. The goal of the OLPC Foundation is to create novel educational opportunities for the world’s children by providing each child in developing countries with a book-size, light and portable computer for personal use at school and at home. As the outcome of the OLPC program, the XO laptop is a low-cost, low power, Internet ready, multifunctional laptop computer. It is equipped with built-in speakers and microphone, video and still camera, and comes with preinstalled open source Linux operating system and free software for various activities: such as, reading, writing, drawing, painting, recording, music editing, web browsing, and basic computer programming. In case of limited availability of electrical energy, an XO laptop can be charged with alternate power sources. The XO laptop is safe to carry in a backpack and has sturdy hardware design with a waterproof keyboard. XO can withstand heat, humidity, and accidents that are ordinary in everyday lives of children; moreover, the computer has five-year life expectancy. In addition to a built-in standard WiFi capability, every XO computer can function as a wireless router creating a decentralized, self-configuring mesh network of interconnected computers within range. It allows children to collaborate and share activities in the classroom, and interact and communicate with classmates from home. As OLPC is an ongoing project, the XO-2, an improved model with less power consumption, is planned for production in 2010.4 The OLPC project was initiated by Nicholas Negroponte, professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; it quickly expanded to include a wide range of dedicated people from academia,

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industry, and the open source community. Due to their efforts according to The New York Times, nearly 600,000 XO laptops have been ordered since 2007 to be distributed to children in more then 30 developing countries (Lohr, 2008). The idea of an affordable notebook computer specifically designed for children’s use was long thought to be an unlikely scenario. Four decades ago at the early days of computer technology most computing machines were the size of a room and almost no one would dream that they would ever be suitable for children to use. However, the adaptation of the Logo programming language5 for children in Seymour Papert’s experimental work at MIT demonstrated the educational potential of the constructivist ideas and computers in children’s education (Brand, 1987; Negroponte, 1995). A dialect of high-level programming language LISP, Logo was developed in 1967 by a group of computer scientists including Papert. With its facility for symbolic manipulation Logo was specifically designed for children’s educational use. Initially, it was applied for teaching mathematics in schools. In 1970 Papert initiated the MIT Logo Group to investigate the impact of computers on children’s learning by making programming a part of their education. Stressing the importance of children’s early introduction to the emerging world of computers and computing, Papert (1980) noted in his seminal book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate. Because it can take on a thousand forms and can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes. This book is the result of my own attempts over the past decade to turn computers into instruments flexible enough so that many children can each create for themselves something like what the gears were for me. (p. viii) The ideas of Papert were shared by Alan Kay, “the father of personal computers” (Negroponte,

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1995, p. 134) who created Smalltalk, a forerunner of open source object-oriented programming language and development environment Squeak.6 After learning about Papert’s experimental work with children in the area of computer programming, Kay (1972; Kay & Goldberg, 2003) created a model of a personal computing device for children, which resembled what we today call a laptop or tablet computer. The DynaBook not only became the prototype of a contemporary notebook, but can also be seen as a precursor of the XO laptop and idea of mobile learning. From the beginning, Kay planned to use DynaBook to make Papert’s vision true: using computers for fostering children’s creativitive learning in a computer-enhanced educational environment: We feel that a child is a “verb” rather than a “noun”, an actor rather than an object; … he is trying to acquire a model of his surrounding environment in order to deal with it; his theories are “practical” notions of how to get from idea A to idea B rather then “consistent” branches of formal logic, etc. We would like to hook into his current modes of thought in order to influence him rather then just trying to replace his model with one of our own. (1972, p. 1). In the same line of thinking, Negroponte (1995) noted, in Being Digital, that instead of talking about “learning-disabled children,” we need to start thinking about “teaching-disabled environments” (p. 198). He claimed that, “modern computer simulation techniques allow the creation of microworlds in which children can playfully explore very sophisticated principles” (p. 197) and where “learning by doing became the rule rather then the exception” (p. 199). Additionally, Negroponte (1995) emphasized that students in developing countries were as much computer and programming savvy as their counterparts from affluent American suburbs granted they had access to computers. The combined thinking and efforts of computer technology visionaries and educators, such as Ne-

groponte, Papert, and Kay, as well as recent technological breakthroughs and scientific advances, have lead to the OLPC program. XO laptops have some truly unique characteristics, among them: (a) very low energy consumption; XO consumes ten times less energy then a regular notebook; (b) rotating display with a tablet option and a highresolution screen with two display modes: a regular full-color, and a black-and-white suitable for the outdoors; (c) mesh networking capability; (d) open source and free software; and (e) an emphasis on activity-sharing and collaboration. In this chapter, we elaborate on the educational dimensions of the XO laptop and the Squeak Etoys system as a means to empower both instructors and students with the capacity for creative learning, exploration, interaction, and collaboration based on the principles of constructivist learning.

BACKGROUND Squeak software7 is an open source implementation of the Smalltalk programming language (Kay, 2005). The Squeak programming environment with its direct manipulation interface provides a simple framework for the development and debugging of educational applications by running a portable cross-platform code. It offers a flexible tool for various educational programming projects. Among the practical characteristics of Squeak, one can find its modern user interface, the object-oriented, open source and expandable Smalltalk core, Unicode support, and Etoys (Guzdial, 2000; Guzdial & Rose, 2002. The Etoys program was originally designed by Kay in 1997 and developed collaboratively by a programming team (Barr, 2008). Inspired by Logo programming language and implemented in Squeak, Etoys8 provides a sophisticated media-rich authoring environment where children can construct on-screen interactive simulations using simple kits that teach objectoriented computer programming. The Squeak

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environment has a scripted object capability that runs on many platforms and supports numerous kinds of objects created by end-users. It includes features such as text, sound, images, 2D and 3D graphics, videos, simulations, presentations, and web integration capabilities (Kay, 2005). Since Etoys fully integrates the XO laptop capacity of screen sharing, many forms of real-time collaboration, mentoring, and instruction can be planned and implemented. The aforementioned characteristics make Etoys a good choice for collaborative education and learning (Allen-Conn, Kay, & Rose, 2003). The Etoys authoring environment integrates various ways of scripting. From the beginning, students can easily outline their sketches and learn how to write scripts to bring them to life. Programming in Etoys is visual, object-oriented, and is based on the drag & drop function. The desired functions -- copy, pick color, move, resize, rotate, and debug -- are only a few among the available options that can be applied to a range of objects (Kay, 2003, 2007). Its built-in particle system is scripted using the same conventions as employed for larger objects (Kay, 2005). This allows for an exploration of dynamic processes and creating simple computer simulations. Thus, Etoys is more than an unsophisticated visual programming environment, for it constitutes a potent programming-learning tool. Finally, Etoys “is multilingual, runs on more than 20 platforms bit-identically, and has been successfully used in USA, Europe, South America, Japan, Korea, India, Nepal, and elsewhere” (Kay, n.d.).

eTOyS: A COllABORATIve eNvIRONmeNT Of The OlpC XO Interactive potential of Collaborative learning environments In the recent decade, educational technology has expanded into the area of development of computer-based interactive multimedia learning

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environments (Jonassen, 2004). At the same time, the field of education has been receptive to the constructivist philosophy of learning (Beck & Kosnik, 2006; Duffy & Jonassen, 1992; Hannafin, 1992; Rieber, 1996) as researchers and educational practitioners seek innovative ways to exploit the hidden potential of computer-based learning environments (Holstein & Gubrium, 2008). The ideas of the augmented use of computers in education, shared computer-based learning environments, and the integration of object-oriented programming languages into the learning process are theoretically grounded in constructionism. The theory of constructionism, which is believed to be the driving force behind the OLPC program, was explicated by Papert (1980, 1986). Papert argued that children should have an opportunity to use computers both for learning and for enhancing their creativity. Constructionism is a philosophy of education which maintains that children learn by doing, exploring and discovering instead of being given prepackaged information (Papert, 1986). The theory suggests that learners are likely to generate new ideas when they are actively engaged in the making of some type of external artifact which they can reflect upon and share with others (Harel & Papert, 1991; Papert, 1993). One of the central ideas in Papert’s theoretical framework is that children learn more effectively in a collaborative process by receiving feedback from peers (1986). Thus, constructionism explicates the creation of knowledge in the context of building personally meaningful artifacts (Kafai & Resnick, 1996).

educational Simulations, Games, and Activity Sharing It has been established in the theory of instruction that educational simulations and games can be combined to create an engaging learning environment (Rieber, 1996). Children’s play activities are purposeful actions to which they dedicate great effort and commitment. Despite the encouraging

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findings of research of educational play and its role in the motivation of learning (Lytle, 2003), the dividing line between formal instruction and activities based on play remains mainly intact. Rieber (1996) wrote that the word “play” continues to raise misconceptions. While formalized instruction is well thought-of, educational play is not. One misunderstanding is that play is extraneous to learning, which is unfortunate because play can serve as an essential intermediary between subject matter and a student’s motivation to learn. As Rieber emphasized, “given the range of open-ended explorable environments that can be constructed with computers, time has come to revisit the almost alarmingly simple, yet powerful construct of play and to legitimize play’s role in the field of instructional technology” (p. 44). The XO computer-based activity sharing falls into two basic categories. The first category deals with the tools that are offered through Sugar, the XO laptop graphical user interface. The second deals with the built-in mesh networking capabilities of the XO laptop. The Sugar platform allows children to tap into the XO sharing and collaboration features, while the mesh network enables the XO computers form a self-configuring wireless node network where every laptop acts as an access point and a router. The activity-sharing functionality of XO computers takes advantage of the XMPP9 technology as well as the Telepathy interface.10 Much of the protocol uses Jabber11 communication primitives, extending them when necessary. The Telepathy interface abstracts the details of the underlying protocol for the activities. When sharing of an activity is initiated, every user is assigned a name and a color icon. Information between users is transferred though a tube or a data channel using Telepathy primitives for the sending and receiving of data. The information can be sent either to one student or to a group of students. Tubes can carry reliable byte streams or unreliable datagrams by analogy to TCP or UDP. When a channel is open to a group, different semantics may be deemed

more appropriate since a shared stream is not coherent. It is up to the connection manager to decide how tubes are implemented. When a student desires to join an activity, the presence service of the Sugar graphical user interface informs the user of the following: the name, type and color of the activity; the Telepathy channel that carries the activity; the default activity chat channel; and, the tube negotiation channel. When a new user joins, the Sugar activity module communicates with the Telepathy backend to create a full list of participants. As a result, an application or a program created by a student can be shared and tested by anyone who is able to reach to the specific user through a mesh network. The connected users are able to interact and access the application or program, test it or play with it, change it, and make it more complex. Thus, the development environment of Squeak Etoys coupled with XO built-in activity sharing features becomes a learning community of students and teachers who collaborate in an educational activity or play. Given the mesh networking capabilities of XO computers, Etoys can act not only as a medium for collaboration and communication between students, but also induce a learning environment in which groups of students construct their own activities based on provided examples and templates.

etoys educational Activities The main goal of our Etoys content development team is to provide a format for creating collaborative environments for students and teachers. The most representative Etoys activities and interactive exercises that we have created include: a numerical crossword (mathematics), a visual representation of the correlation between pressure and temperature (physics), chemistry Tetris (chemistry), measuring the area of geometrical shapes (geometry), and solving a second-degree mathematical equation. With examples delineated below we demonstrate that the creation of simple

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Figure 1. Numeric crossword

and effective educational simulations that can be shared by students is possible.

Activity 1: Mathematics The first activity was created as a game for students to help them learn the basic numerical operations of integers; it can be extended by students to create multiple and varied crosswords on the skeleton program that we developed. The user is provided with the crossword shown in Figure 1, consisting of numbers, operations and empty spaces. The student must fill all of the empty spaces with the correct numbers to solve horizontal and vertical equations. By utilizing this crossword game, students can improve their math skills while teacher can test their weaknesses on specific operations. It is important to note that the application can be enhanced further to support such operations as subtraction and division of fractions and decimals.

Activity 2: Physics The second example, demonstrated in Figure 2, illustrates the correlation between temperature and pressure that can be observed on the molecular

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level in an enclosed space. Physics is a subject that frequently requires laboratory experiments so if a particular school setting cannot offer such an opportunity, experiments can be replaced with computer simulations. XO laptop and Etoys thus provide the environment of a virtual laboratory. This example shows the movement of molecules within an enclosed space following pressure or temperature changes. Such virtual experiments can form the foundation of virtual school laboratories of the future.

Activity 3: Chemistry The third activity that we created is chemistry Tetris (see Figure 3). While chemical elements appear on the screen, students must decide if each element is a liquid, or gas and direct them accordingly. In this example, students are able to learn the basics of chemistry playing a Tetris-like game. This educational game can be enhanced further, as the teacher is able to assess the level of student learning while children self-evaluate their knowledge during the game.

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Figure 2. Pressure and temperature simulation

Activity 4: Geometry

fUTURe TReNDS

The fourth example of Etoys implementation was aimed at helping students learn how to measure the area of basic geometrical figures such as triangles, squares, or circles. After observing a demonstration by the teacher of how one can measure the area of a basic geometrical shape, the students then proceed with their own experimenting and practicing. Because XO computers and Etoys can form a collaborative environment through mesh networking, the teacher can assign specific tasks to the children and check their knowledge and understanding of geometry, and more specifically, on how to measure the area of the basic shapes.

As early as 1970 Papert proposed “using computers as engines that children would teach and thus learn by teaching” (Negroponte, 1995, p. 199). One Laptop Per Child project can create a starting point for a truly global educational community of teachers and students creatively applying computer technology. One should realize that the teacher’s role would not be nullified in the future, but rather enhanced with modern educational technology and innovative instructional ideas. The XO laptop hardware and software capabilities to create a community of learners and motivate students can generate innovative changes within school curricula and ultimately influence the way children are taught in the future. The future of the idea to incorporate programming into a school curriculum is tied with the acknowledgment of the collaborative nature of learning, and the need for combined efforts of students and teachers in adopting and embracing the new computer technologies. Our content development team intends to continue to pursue the opportunities provided by computer-based learning environments in the context of national curriculum in Greece. It is important to note that

Activity 5: Mathematics The fifth activity involved the solution of a mathematical expression of second degree by converting temperature measurements from Celsius to Fahrenheit temperature scale. This example proposes two basic approaches: (a) the teacher is recommended to show through a presentation how a mathematical problem is solved; and (b) the students can learn how to apply the conversion tool while trying to find a correct answer.

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Figure 3. Chemistry Tetris

by no means do we consider our work complete. Our efforts are targeted to share the results with the community of educators and software developers and stimulate others to expand on our work. The Etoys educational activities that we developed can form the basis for a subsequent exploration of the educational possibilities of the Etoys environment. Overall, the Etoys platform has a potential to promote and enhance collaboration and communication in schools worldwide.

CONClUSION The belief in collaboration as a fundamental principle of successful learning underscores the commitment of our content development team to augment the use of computer-based learning environments such as Squeak Etoys. The multiple functionality offered by Squeak and the versatility of the Etoys environment encourage collaboration and interaction in the learning process. Etoys educational simulations and games can become effective learning tools for all potential users. The Etoys authoring system with its visual scripting capability can be used for creating collaborative learning environments in schools worldwide, and

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developing countries in the first place. The learning potential achieved through teaching object-oriented programming to young children can become an essential component of children’s education. Collaboration in this process is not limited to teachers and students but includes educational researchers, software and content developers, as well as the open source community. In this chapter, we have explicated how Etoys can be utilized by schools as a medium for learning, communication, and collaboration. We have emphasized how the hardware and software of the XO laptop can be employed to allow children to interact through activity sharing, work together on projects, and engage in computer simulations and games to learn mathematics, physics, chemistry, and geometry. The educational activities that our team has developed can be used as a format and a template for collaborative learning achieved through the common efforts of students, teachers and all users of XO computers. The OLPC XO computer provides students and teachers with new ways to collaborate, create, present, and distribute their learning projects. Since activity sharing is one of the most important capabilities offered through XO laptops, it should be fully utilized as a means for learning. Overall,

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XO laptops present an effective way for children to learn through interaction and exploration, and share new ideas, images, and materials with friends around the world. XO laptop computers can be viewed both as a window and a tool: a window into the world of knowledge, and a tool for social change through education. As the Internet is becoming a ubiquitous medium of communication, the One Laptop Per Child initiative brings the momentum needed to create a worldwide educational community to collaborate on the enhancement of computer technology and harnessing its creative potential for the betterment of society through education.

RefeReNCeS Allen-Conn, B. J., Kay, A., & Rose, K. (2003). Powerful ideas in the classroom: Using Squeak to enhance math and science learning. Glendale, CA: Viewpoints Research Institute. Barr, J. (2008, March 24). Exploring Etoys on the OLPC XO. Retrieved November 15, 2008, from http://www.linux.com/feature/130014 Beck, C., & Kosnik, C. M. (2006). Innovations in teacher education: A social constructivist approach. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Brand, S. (1987). The media lab: Inventing the future at MIT. New York: Viking. Duffy, T. M., & Jonassen, D. H. (Eds.). (1992). Constructivism and the technology of instruction: A conversation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Guzdial, M. (2000). Squeak: Object-oriented design with multimedia applications. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Guzdial, M. J., & Rose, K. (2002). Squeak: Open personal computing and multimedia. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Hannafin, M. J. (1992). Emerging technologies, ISD, and learning environments: Critical perspectives. Educational Technology Research and Development, 40(1), 49–63. doi:10.1007/ BF02296706 Harel, I., & Papert, S. (1991). Constructionism: Research reports and essays, 1985-1990. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (2008). Handbook of constructionist research. New York: Guilford Press. Jonassen, D. H. (Ed.). (2004). Handbook of research on educational communications and technology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Kafai, Y. B., & Resnick, M. (Eds.). (1996). Constructionism in practice: Designing, thinking, and learning in a digital world. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Kay, A. (2003). Background on how children learn (Research Note RN-2003-002) [Electronic version]. Glendale, CA: Viewpoints Research Institute. Retrieved November 15, 2008, from http://www.squeakland.org/content/articles/attach/how_children_learn.pdf Kay, A. (2005). Squeak eToys, children and learning [Electronic version] (Research Note RN2005-001). Glendale, CA: Viewpoints Research Institute. Retrieved February 5, 2008, from http:// www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2005001_learning.pdf Kay, A. (2007). Children learning by doing: Squeak Etoys on the OLPC XO [Electronic version] (Research Note RN-2007-006-a). Glendale, CA: Viewpoints Research Institute. Retrieved February 5, 2008, from http://www.vpri.org/pdf/ rn2007006a_olpc.pdf Kay, A. (n.d.). Squeak Etoys authoring & media [Electronic version]. Glendale, CA: Viewpoints Research Institute. Retrieved November 15, 2008, from http://www.squeakland.org/content/articles/ attach/etoys_n_authoring.pdf

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Kay, A., & Goldberg, A. (2003). Personal dynamic media. In N. Wardrip-Fruin & N. Montfort, The new media reader (pp. 391-404). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Reprinted from Computer, 10(3), 31-41, 1977, March). Retrieved November 15, 2008, from http://www.newmediareader.com/ book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf Kay, A. C. (1972). A personal computer for children of all ages. In Proceedings of the ACM National Conference, Boston, MA. Retrieved November 15, 2008, from http://www.mprove. de/diplom/gui/Kay72a.pdf Lohr, S. (2008, May 16). Microsoft joins effort for laptops for children. The New York Times. Retrieved November 15, 2008, from http://www. nytimes.com/2008/05/16/technology/16laptop. html?_r=1&ref=technology Lytle, D. E. (2003). Play and educational theory and practice. Westport, CT: Praeger. Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. New York: Basic Books. Papert, S. (1986). Constructionism: A new opportunity for elementary science education. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Laboratory, Epistemology and Learning Group. Papert, S. (1993). The children’s machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer. New York: Basic Books. Rieber, L. P. (1996). Seriously considering play: Designing interactive learning environments based on the blending of microworlds, simulations, and games. Educational Technology Research and Development, 44(2), 43–58. doi:10.1007/ BF02300540

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Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Etoys: A free software program and media-rich script-based authoring system with a user-friendly visual interface, which comes preinstalled on XO computers. Etoys runs on many platforms and supports numerous kinds of objects created by endusers. It is implemented in Squeak, and embraces features such as text, sound, images, 2D and 3D graphics, videos, simulations, presentations, as well as web integration capabilities. Logo: A programming language for children developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by a group of computer scientists in the 1960s. In 1970 Seymour Papert initiated the MIT Logo Group to investigate the impact of computers on children’s learning by making programming a part of their education. Mesh Network: A decentralized, node-type self-configuring wireless network of interconnected computers. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC): A non-profit organization and initiative aimed to create novel educational opportunities for the world’s children by providing each child with a book-size portable laptop computer for personal use at school and at home. Squeak: An open source implementation of the Smalltalk programming language. The Squeak development environment offers flexible tools for creating various educational projects. Sugar: A graphical user interface of the XO laptop computer specially designed to support activity sharing and collaborative learning. Telepathy Interface: The Telepathy interface provides a unified framework for various forms of real-time conversations including instant messaging, IRC, voice calls, and video calls. XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol): An open XML technology for real-time communication which powers a wide range of applications, including instant messaging, presence, media negotiation, collaboration, content syndication, and generalized XML routing.

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eNDNOTeS

7 8

1 2

3 4 5 6

http://laptop.org One Laptop Per Child, Mission. Retrieved February 5, 2008, from http://laptop.org/ vision/mission http://laptopfoundation.org http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N60/olpc.html http://el.media.mit.edu/Logo-foundation http://www.smalltalk.org

9

10

11

http://www.squeak.org http://www.squeakland.org XMPP Standards Foundation, http://www. xmpp.org/ Telepathy: Flexible Communications Framework, http://telepathy.freedesktop. org/wiki/ Jabber Software Foundation, http://www. jabber.org/

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Chapter 38

The Sun Earth Moon System

Connecting Science and Informal Learning Ronald Marsh John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Science, University of North Dakota, USA

ABSTRACT This chapter focuses on the issues pertaining to informal science learning through public outreach and the utilization of established and evolving web technologies. The Sun Earth Moon System (SEMs) is a website that integrates webcasting with Web 2.0 features to increase public awareness and interest in natural sciences as well as to dispel the stereotype that science is boring. The SEMs website provides live video webcasts of solar and lunar eclipses and planet transits streamed from various locations around the world as part of a Web-based public outreach program. The SEMs project aims to offer the general public a realistic experience and evoke the spirit of excitement felt by being a part of a global community witnessing rare astronomical events. The purpose of the chapter is to explore webcasting and design strategies, such as the incorporation of social media elements,that can assist in the development of a science-oriented educational website.

INTRODUCTION The scientific community has long been concerned with the gap between advances in natural sciences, particularly in physics and astronomy, and the level of public awareness and involvement (Baxter, 1989; Dunlop 1999; Sadler, 1987). As science continues to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, this disconnection is somewhat expected. However, if DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch038

after going through the education system young generations do not acquire knowledge of the basic scientific concepts, the knowledge gap will continue to widen. Contrary, if young people are equipped with the underlying scientific principles, it is easier for them to stay connected with the growth of scientific knowledge throughout their lives (Richardson & Wolfe, 2001). Therefore, scientists should not only focus on research but also on bridging the gap between science and public knowledge of science by means of informal science education (Falk,

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Donovan, & Woods, 2001; Hofstein & Rosenfeld, 1996; Hurd, 1997; Sonnert & Holton, 2002). The scientific community is currently looking for innovative ways of encouraging informal science learning (Rennie & Stocklmayer, 2003). Informal education (or learning) can be defined as “voluntary educational activities outside traditional educational context” (Wolfe, 2001, p. 92). Besides the setting, the term relates to “the process (without an instructor or self-directed), and the audience other than students” (Ucko & Ellenbogen, 2008, p. 241). Recognizing the power of informal learning, the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1984 created the Informal Science Education (ISE) program. According to NSF (2001): Informal learning is voluntary, self-directed, lifelong, and motivated mainly by intrinsic interests, curiosity, exploration, fantasy, task completion, and social interaction. Informal learning can be linear or non-linear and often is self-paced and visual- or object-oriented. It provides an experiential base and motivation for further activity and learning. NSF encourages “projects that develop and implement informal learning experiences designed to increase interest, engagement, and understanding of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by individuals of all ages and backgrounds, as well as projects that advance knowledge and practice of informal science education.”1 The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) in 1999 adopted a position statement with strong support for informal science education: “A growing body of research documents the power of informal learning experiences to spark curiosity and engage interest in the sciences during school years and throughout a lifetime.”2 Researchers (Wolfe, 2001) highlight the fact that the web is “well suited to drawing children into brief, voluntary, interactive learning experiences” (p. 93). Since learning is a cumulative process, both children and adults can benefit from a variety of educational opportunities available on

the Internet (Linn, Davis, & Bell, 2004), including webcasts. Webcasting refers to the delivery of audio and video content over the web (Miles, 1998). Ha and Ganahl (2007) point out that “there are many different applications of webcasting in both the nonprofit and the commercial sector” (p. 3-4) where the web is used as a delivery medium for informational, instructional, marketing, and entertainment purposes. This chapter focuses on the application of webcasting as a tool for informal science education and public outreach. At the University of North Dakota (UND), the Computer Science and Physics Departments have jointly developed a webcast-based outreach project called the “Sun Earth Moon Systems” (SEMs).3 The SEMs project aims to increase public interest in natural sciences and extraterrestrial mechanics and to dispel the widespread stereotype that science is boring by raising awareness about unique celestial events. The overall mission of the project is to “help the public take the first step towards understanding astronomy and celestial mechanics.”4 As an informal science learning environment, the SEMs website is organized around live video webcasts of solar and lunar eclipses, as well as planet transits. Scientists can determine beforehand from what geographical location these spectacular celestial events can be best observed. A UND scientific team5 travels to a pre-determined location, sets up equipment for a live webcast, and shares the event with SEMs visitors in real time. To date, the solar and lunar eclipses and planet transits, which are basically unknown to the general public, have been broadcasted from India, Panama, Spain, Turkey, French Guiana, Italy, China, and several locations within the United States.6 The purpose of the present chapter is to identify successful strategies for the implementation of a web-based public outreach project designed to promote public interest in natural sciences through the creation of an educational webcasting site.

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BACKGROUND The Sun Earth Moon system started in 2004 as a science-oriented outreach project. As an educational website, SEMs provides live webcasts of solar and lunar eclipses and planet transits as well as additional learning materials and links to web resources for anyone interested. Overall, the SEMs project strives to provide the public with the most authentic observational experiences that can be achieved with the existing video and web technology in an interactive and stimulating context. It has been emphasized that webcasting has the ability to supply end-users with experiences that are “sensory-filled, vivid and complete” (Ha & Ganahl, 2007, p. 3). Thus, webcasting technology is well positioned to evoke a spirit of excitement in becoming part of a global community witnessing unique and spectacular astronomical events. SEMs webcasts began on June 8, 2004 with a six-hour Venus transit broadcasted from Delhi, India. It was an extremely rare celestial event, the first since December 6, 1882 and only the seventh to be recorded.7 A Venus transit occurs when the planet passes between the Earth and the Sun. During the transit Venus can be observed moving across the Sun’s disk. The decision to travel to India was due to the fact that the entire transit event was visible at that location. The webcast was successful and generated 37,000 hits to the SEMs website during the six hours of streaming. It was well received according to e-mail feedback. The second webcast, a total lunar eclipse, was planned on October 28, 2004 to be delivered from Grand Forks, North Dakota. Unfortunately, the atmospheric conditions on the day of the eclipse were unsuitable for observation. Regardless, the SEMs website had over 159,000 hits in just two hours. The barrage of activity overloaded the server to the point that the server administrator was unable to login and place a warning that due to unsuitable weather conditions there would be no webcast. When the UND scientific team started the

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SEMs project, webcasting was still in its early development stage with the adoption rate of 7% (Lin, 2004, p. 157). At that time, streaming technology was highly dependent on bandwidth availability. Because of the infrequency of eclipses and transits and the sheer amount of bandwidth required to support webcasts, the unpredictability of the number of visitors to the website made the development of a model website taxing. One challenge was the large amount of hits expected to occur over a relatively short period of time, which can overwhelm finite network bandwidth capacities. Another challenge was broadcasting from remote locations with many logistical and technical obstacles; we had to send a single stream to a designated server and multicast that stream to a broad audience. After analyzing the initial experience we came to the conclusion that it was not enough to simply make a video stream available to the public. If such webcasts were to be continued in the future, it was necessary to develop a general strategy to address the technical challenges and the educational goals of the project. Such an approach proved to be successful. The SEMs website has generated nearly half a million hits in four years. During 2005-2008, the SEMs team was able to organize and provide webcasts of two total, one hybrid, three annular solar eclipses, and three total lunar eclipses from various places around the world.8 On November 8, 2006, a five-hour broadcast of the transit of Mercury, a unique astronomical event that averages only thirteen times in one hundred years,9 was made available from Grand Forks, North Dakota. This chapter explores the overall strategies and web design criteria that make an informal science learning website, such as SEMs, a successful endeavor. Emphasis is placed on the overall website design, webcasting strategy, and the integration of interactive social media components.

The Sun Earth Moon System

DevelOpmeNT Of A WeBCASTING SCIeNCe ORIeNTeD pUBlIC OUTReACh WeBSITe The development of the SEMs webcasting website was organized in several steps: defining the mission and identifying the target audience, determining the overall goals and the specific objectives of the project, and finally, selecting the most effective strategies for implementation. SEMs targets primarily young audiences, as well as anyone interested in astronomy. The goal of SEMs is to “use information technology and modern learning techniques to merge into the general knowledge base of the public the fundamental concepts of the Sun Earth Moon system (SEMs) and the associated physics.”10 According to the SEMs website, The objective of SEMs is to draw the public into the learning process by first sensationalizing the adventure of hunting down and webcasting eclipses. We also want to show how rare eclipses are and to show that science can be exciting and adventurous. Finally, we want to give the public the experience of seeing the event in real-time and in communicating with the rest of the world about it in real-time as well.11 Push vs. pull strategy. One of the initial challenges in designing SEMs was selecting a general webcasting strategy that would attract and reach the target audience. The “pull” strategy requires the receiver to initiate a message transfer by explicitly contacting the sender. A website using the “pull” model only allows users to retrieve information. In the “push” model, the sender knows the identity of the receiver in advance and pushes messages in an asynchronous manner to the receiver (Mack & Rayburn, 2006; Szuprowicz, 1998). For the purposes of creating the utmost, life-like experience of being part of a global community witnessing a rare astronomical event, the “pull” strategy was found to be most effective. In addition, the nature of the webcasts and network bandwidth has limited our ability to support the “push” model.

System components. The current SEMs webcasting system consists of the following components. A laptop computer is used to forward audio and video streams from remote sites to the four servers located at UND (Figure 1) using a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) connection. By using a combination of point-to-point and multicast webcast technologies (Follansbee, 2006; Mann, 2005), we have created a hierarchical webcasting system that allows us to serve many more viewers than would be possible with any single approach. We provide a multicast stream over Internet 2 primarily for university viewers and multiple point-to-point streams for home viewers via the SEMs site and mirror sites. At UND, two separate computers (Sems 1 and Sems 2) are utilized to support the chat room and website (as shown in Figure 2). These computers use the Linux operating system and run High Performance Internet Relay Chat (IRCD-Hybrid) as the chat room server and Apache as the web server. Two computers are used to serve video (Sems3 for the point-to-point feed and Sems4 for the multicast feed), running Windows XP and an open source VideoLan Client. Bandwidth. SEMs webcasts are popular; each averages around 40,000 hits from the worldwide audience. To reduce bandwidth requirements, we have arranged a mirroring scheme. To date, the SEMs webcasts have been mirrored by: Pennsylvania State University (the main campus at University Park and the Wilkes-Barre campus); High Performance Computing Research Department at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory; the Williston North Dakota School District in the United States; Universidad de Sonora in Mexico; and the University of Barcelona in Spain. We have also found that webcasting multiple video streams required more bandwidth than we frequently had available on hand at remote locations. We have since limited the webcast to a single video stream. To ease the heavy Internet traffic, during the webcasts SEMs visitors are automatically forwarded to the streaming video page.

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Figure 1. SEMs webcasting system components

Streaming media. Webcasters currently employ the following transmission methods: (1) live streaming, (2) on-demand, and (3) push: Each method provides a different format for a consumer to use the content service. Live

streaming most closely resembles the traditional terrestrial broadcast. ...Downloading on demand allows the user to download the media file to the user’s hard drive, so the user can store it and open it for later use. ...Users can retrieve at any moment

Figure 2. SEMs webcasting facility at the University of North Dakota

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the content on demand... Push is a technology that automatically delivers the content to the user’s internet reception devices through common computer applications... In push, users do not need to take the initiative in locating and consuming the content. (Ha & Ganahl, 2007, p. 15). Around the world, commercial webcasters employ multiple distribution methods: on-demand streaming (78%), live streaming (52%), ondemand downloading (42%). In contrast, push technology is used only by 7% of all webcasters (Ha & Ganahl, p. 34). There is no data on the prevalence of the transmission methods in educational and nonprofit sectors. Given the public outreach nature of the Sun Earth Moon system project, the SEMs team has continuously experimented with streaming media formats (Follansbee, 2006; Rayburn, 2007) and has redesigned the project website on several occasions to facilitate interactivity (Preece, Rogers, & Sharp, 2007). With its use of the latest video compression techniques and their applicability to live streaming video, the SEMs site has improved the quality of participant’s experience at the website. Early webcasts were streamed at 320 x 240 resolution; now we webcast full-color 640 x 480 resolution video. The SEMs site is freely available to anyone, and we strive to keep the bandwidth requirements low such that users can participate from home. Pop-up windows. The initial SEMs website integrated three pop-up windows and offered only a few menu options organized vertically on the left side. Also, the initial site was intended for use on an 800 x 600 pixels resolution screen. The use of multiple pop-ups (one for the chat room and two for the video streams) confused the participants as the pop-ups could cover each other or could appear behind the browser’s main page. The redesigned SEMs website eliminated the need in pop-up windows as it was optimized for 1024 x 768 pixels resolution screen and used frames. This reflected our capacity to webcast higher quality video stream. Instead of pop-ups, the new design

was based on frames. The inline frame (IFrame) HTML element was chosen so that the main page could be completely displayed at all times with variable length content displayed in the frame. However, if a user’s browser was not set to fullscreen mode, the user would inadvertently try to use the browser’s main scroll bar instead of the IFrame scroll bar to view the material. We also found that splitting the main screen into two and using two horizontal bars made it difficult to add new menu options and to organize the content. Online chat. To support social interaction (Porter, 2008; Preece, Rogers, & Sharp, 2007) and solicit feedback within an open environment of SEMs, the site integrates an online chat room. The integration of a chat room provides visitors with an opportunity to become engaged in discussions with UND scientists at the time of an event. The inclusion of a real-time discussion turned out to be very popular. Participants posted questions for the SEMs team and engaged in conversations with other viewers. We also found that answering participants’ questions posted on the chat room via an audio stream was very engaging and effective. The SEMs chat room is currently un-moderated and conversations unrelated to the webcasts do occur. Given the large number of visitors to the site and the short nature of the webcasts (three hours on average), it does not seem feasible to moderate chat room discussions. Weblog. The presence of the blog is another important factor for a website’s success. Originally, the project weblog consisted of postings of daily activities, trials and tribulations of fieldwork, links to local Internet-radio stations and webcams, and information about local cultures. The current site design allows readers to comment on the project blog. The commenting feature was implemented during the August 1, 2008 total solar eclipse webcast that was broadcasted from Xi’an, China. According to Du and Wagner (2006), factors that determine the success of a blog include content, the technology used to support the blog, and its social value. The content is the information (written or

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media) provided. The technology used to support the weblog should be interactive and should be able to present and organize content facilitating social interaction among bloggers (Richardson, 2006). Research has shown that users prefer blogs that are commented on by other visitors and that support social interaction (Shirky, 2003; Wagner & Bolloju, 2005). User interface. Regardless of the interface type (graphical or non-graphical), an effective website has to exhibit consistency in design and conform to the general WWW conventions. The design should include well-labeled, descriptive hyperlinks. Well-labeled hyperlinks allow users to orientate themselves and enable users to predict what the link-to content is (Morville & Rosenfeld, 2007). The (re)labeling of hyperlinks is an on-going and iterative process and is primarily limited to the educational component (driven by feedback from educators who visit the site). The design should also support navigation within the site and include navigation aids, such as navigation bars, menus, or internal search. Finally, the website structure is fundamental for effective navigation and can affect users’ overall experience (Morville & Rosenfeld). Since the SEMs website is of a “flat” design, a built-in search engine would be redundant to the functionality provided by the SEMs menu on the left side of the screen which contains links to the webcast page, the chat room, the blog, and related information. Graphics. In addition to a well-designed user interface, one might ask what type of graphics and images might be desired to support a scienceoriented educational website. The SEMs website uses as few graphics as possible, mainly to reduce download times. As we are conforming to the UND website template, our aesthetic treatment (Robins & Holmes, 2008) is limited. However, the SEMs homepage integrates an attractive Flash animation demonstrating a solar eclipse. Overall, the SEMs team has an ongoing program of iterative refinement for website design and development by using participant feedback and adherence to the World

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Table 1. A science-oriented educational website design: A checklist The website should be targeted towards specific audiences. The website should utilize an optimal webcasting strategy and file transmission method. The website should have a distributed architecture. The website should integrate social media. The website should support two-way communication with visitors. A weblog and a chat room are important factors of success. The website should include well-labeled hyperlinks. The website should contain navigation aids. The website design should use graphics sparingly. A website should exhibit consistency in design and be in conformance with W3C conventions.

Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications, guidelines, and standards. Table 1 summarizes our design experiences during the SEMs operation and proposes a blueprint of a science-oriented educational website that incorporates webcasting and social media features.

fUTURe TReNDS As a global medium that has a promising potential, webcasting is still plagued with a number of shortcomings: “incompatible file formats, varying streaming media technologies such as compression and decompression techniques (codecs), different media players for displaying audio and video files, and the variety of plug-in enhancements” (Ha & Ganahl, 2007, p. 5). Standardization and unification of webcasting components will undeniably help to realize the full potential of this emerging medium for informal learning and public outreach purposes. Webcasting technology continues to advance and becomes more user-oriented. Some webcasting sites enable viewers with control of the camera

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movements to integrate 3-D video streams in the webcasts. Other sites such as Mogulus12 are designed to allow anyone with a webcam and a broadband connection to broadcast live. We believe that these are the trends that will expand in the future. We also believe that as evolving web-based social interaction technologies mature, incorporating social media and user-generated content in science-oriented educational websites will proliferate. There is growing interest in conducting webcasts in virtual worlds, such as Second Life. Second Life Cable Network allows members of the virtual community to create broadcasts. Virtual world environments provide many features commonly associated with social media and a full-duplex video/computer-mediated setting. As high bandwidth networking expands its global coverage, full-duplex video becomes possible. Given the technological difficulties of supporting a many-to-many video stream and the growing privacy concerns, we do not expect to see a wide adoption of this trend in the near future. While there are several new trends in webcasting, there are also new developments in the use of the web for communicating science to public audiences. For example, to convey relevant, timely, and action-based health information, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has expanded its communication activities to include social media channels (MySpace, blogs, and mobile media). The goal of the Center is to reach new audiences, reinforce and personalize science related messages, and build the infrastructure for informal science education based on open information exchange.

CONClUSION The World Wide Web holds vast resources for informal science learning and communicating scientific information to the public. It has been acknowledged that the web is “a cognitive

technology that makes it possible to concretize scientific abstractions” and that it “is particularly well suited to promoting scientific reasoning and ‘the enjoyment of seeing and searching’ favored by Einstein” (Wolfe, 2001, p. 92). Recent technological advances and the emergence of web-based social interaction technologies allow the creation of media-rich learning environments that can bridge the gap between science and the public and encourage the spirit of discovery and exploration in young generations. Correctly shaped informal learning web-based environments, such as SEMs, can form a foundation for critical thinking and lifelong learning. As an example of an informal science learning web-based environment, SEMs stimulates cognitive skills and communicates to the public the significant idea of the complexity of the physical world. The success of SEMs testifies to the opportunities existing for educational outreach that can be realized even despite limited resources. In general, the educational impact of a web-based informal learning project is highly dependant on defining the mission and identifying the target audience, determining the overall goals and the specific objectives of the project, and selecting the most effective web design strategies for implementation.

RefeReNCeS Baxter, J. (1989). Children’s understanding of familiar astronomical events. International Journal of Science Education, 11, 502–513. doi:10.1080/0950069890110503 Du, H. S., & Wagner, C. (2006). Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 64(9), 789–798. doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2006.04.002 Dunlop, J. (2000). How children observe the universe. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 17, 194–206.

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Falk, J. H., Donovan, E., & Woods, R. (2001). Free-choice science education: How we learn science outside of school. New York: Teachers College Press.

National Science Foundation (NSF). (2001). Elementary, secondary, and informal education. Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www. nsf.gov/pubs/2001/nsf0160/nsf0160.txt

Follansbee, J. (2006). Hands-on guide to streaming media: An introduction to delivering on-demand media. Burlington, MA: Focal Press.

National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). (1999). Informal science education [position statement]. Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http:// www.nsta.org/about/positions/informal.aspx

Ha, L., & Ganahl, R. J. (Eds.). (2007). Webcasting worldwide: Business models of an emerging global medium. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hofstein, A., & Rosenfeld, S. (1996). Bridging the gap between formal and informal science learning. Studies in Science Education, 28, 87–112. doi:10.1080/03057269608560085 Hurd, P. D. (1997). Inventing science education for the new millennium. New York: Teachers College Press. Lin, C. A. (2004). Webcasting adoption: Technology fluidity, user innovativeness, and media substitution. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 48(3), 157–178. doi:10.1207/ s15506878jobem4803_6 Linn, M. C., Davis, E. A., & Bell, P. (2004). Internet environments for science education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mack, S., & Rayburn, D. (2006). Hands-on guide to Webcasting: Internet event and AV production. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Focal Press. Mann, J. (2005). When and how to use Webcasting. Stamford, CT: Gartner. Miles, P. (1998). Internet world guide to Webcasting. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Morville, P., & Rosenfeld, L. (2007). Information architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing large-scale Web sites. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

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Porter, J. (2008). Designing for the social Web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Preece, J., Rogers, I. R., & Sharp, H. (2007). Interaction design: Beyond human-computer interaction. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Son. Rayburn, D. (2007). Streaming and digital media: Understanding the business and technology. Burlington, MA: Focal Press. Rennie, L. J., & Stocklmayer, S. M. (2003). The communication of science and technology: Past, present and future agendas. International Journal of Science Education, 25(6), 759–773. doi:10.1080/09500690305020 Richardson, L. D., & Wolfe, M. (2001). Principles and practice of informal education: Learning through life. New York: Routledge. Robins, D., & Holmes, J. (2008). Aesthetics and credibility in Web site design. Information Processing & Management, 44(1), 386–399. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2007.02.003 Sadler, P. M. (1987). Misconceptions in astronomy. In J. Novak (Ed.), Misconceptions and educational strategies in science and mathematics (p. 422). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Shirky, C. (2003). Power laws, Weblogs, and inequality. Retrieved December 6, 2007, from http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

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Sonnert, G., & Holton, G. J. (2002). Ivory bridges: Connecting science and society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Szuprowicz, B. O. (1998). Webcasting and push technology strategies: Effective communications for intranets and extranets. Charleston, SC: Computer Technology Research Corp. Ucko, D. A., & Ellenbogen, K. M. (2008). Impact of technology on informal learning. In D. W. Sunal, E. Wright, & C. Sundberg (Eds.), The impact of the laboratory and technology on learning and teaching science K-16 (pp. 239-266). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Wagner, C., & Bolloju, N. (2005). Supporting knowledge management in organizations with conversational technologies: Discussion forums, Weblogs, and Wikis. Journal of Database Management, 16(2), i–viii. Wolfe, C. R. (2001). Creating informal learning environments on the World Wide Web. In Learning and teaching on the World Wide Web (pp. 92-112). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Push Transmission Model: Requires the sender to know the identity of the receiver in advance and pushes messages in an asynchronous manner to the receiver. Social Media: Uses technology as a conduit and depends on interactions between people to create shared-meaning. Often related to social media is the term “Web 2.0.” Web 2.0 is a phrase that describes the trend in World Wide Web technology and design which aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and collaboration. User Datagram Protocol (UDP): A transport protocol available to applications using the Internet. UDP is said to be connectionless and is the preferred protocol for time-sensitive applications that do not need guaranteed delivery of every data packet. Webcasting: The process of distributing media content (audio or video) over the Internet. Webcasting is essentially “broadcasting” over the Internet.

eNDNOTeS 1

Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS 2

Full Duplex: Systems allow communication in both directions simultaneously. Half duplex systems provide for communication in one direction at a time. IP Multicast: Delivers information to multiple destinations simultaneously, creating copies only when the links to destinations split. Point-to-Point (P2P): Commonly used to establish a direct connection between two networked computers. P2P gives each client a dedicated circuit with the added advantage of a full-duplex connection. Pull Transmission Model: Requires the receiver to initiate the message transfer by explicitly contacting the sender.

3 4

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http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_ id=5361&org=DRL&from=home http://www.nsta.org/about/positions/informal.aspx http://www.sems.und.edu http://sems1.cs.und.edu/~sems/index_ AboutSEMs.php Dr. Timothy Young (Assistant Professor, Physics Department), Dr. Ronald Marsh (Associate Professor, Computer Science Department). http://sems1.cs.und.edu/~sems/index_ Press_Coverage.php http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/transit/catalog/ VenusCatalog.html http://sems1.cs.und.edu/~sems/index_Past_ Future_Webcast.php

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http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/transit/catalog/ MercuryCatalog.html http://sems1.cs.und.edu/~sems/index_ AboutSEMs.php

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Ibidem. http://www.mogulus.com

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Chapter 39

Neogeography Judith Gelernter Carnegie Mellon University, USA

ABSTRACT Neogeography refers to geography in the Web 2.0 style. The practice of neogeography shares the characteristics of other social interactive technologies as it represents a collaborative effort by the general public rather than professionals. Volunteer-supplied geographic tags may assume informational value beyond entertainment. Their potential is tempered by problems stemming from its novelty. For instance, neogeography-related websites provide different ways for people to contribute tags, photographs, locations, and commentary. More serious concerns are whether data and commentary are accurate and whether photographs can be an invasion of privacy. Assuming we come to terms with these concerns and there is a future for neogeography, the next generation of applications might change in appearance, mode of access, and the sorts of layered geographical information that might be added above a map.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Neogeography refers to geography in the new, Web 2.0 style—a collaborative technology from the public rather than from those in the profession. The practice of neogeography1 shares the characteristics of other social interactive web technologies: a group of people (many unknown to one another) who volunteer to contribute data about a topic— in this case, mapping. The phenomenon could be DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch039

studied from many angles: namely, the identity of the active creators of the data, their “free time”, the nature of their data, and the identity of passive users of that data. Neogeography might be considered a subset of cybercartography or interactive, web-based spatially referenced data. Interest in geographical or geospatial websites as distinct from the page websites has lead to the term Geospatial Web or the GeoWeb (Sharl & Tochtermann, 2007). Any sort of data that conveys place can qualify as geographical data, including for example, zip codes, area codes,

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Neogeography

images of a place, census data or place names. A variety of technologies are used to integrate and display geospatial information. The Open Geospatial Consortium is a group of several hundred countries, universities and government agencies working to create and advocate standard geospatial techniques and formats. One such format is the XML format for geographic data known as GML (Geography Markup Language). The hope is that, by supporting certain technologies and formats over others, these will become the most widespread, and so more systems can interoperate. The use of open source software also encourages interoperability. The “real” geographic techniques referred to in the quote come from Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The difference is that GIS provides a framework to capture and store data located by latitude and longitude coordinates, whereas in neogeography, the coordinate grid of the base is secondary to the annotations above. Some academics call participant mapping projects GIS/2 (Miller, 2006, p. 191). Others see an overlap between traditional geospatial and neogeography in terms of the raster or vector basemaps, geocoding, GeoRSS and KML file formats and visualization (Satyaprakash, 2008). A basemap may follow a raster or vector model. Raster models show the earth’s surface continuously as in an aerial photograph, satellite image, or elevation surface. Vector models represent the surface of the earth by means of discrete points, lines and polygons, and are useful for storing data that have discrete boundaries, such as streets and country borders. Raster models in 3D show the earth’s surface in relief, and vector models in 3D show a bird’s eye view. Hybrid models of either dimension show both a continuous surface and overlay lines. Geography has been opened to the neo, new geographer, that is, the non-expert, with the falling prices of instruments that measure latitude and longitude automatically and with the creation of easy-to-use, freely-accessible map applications.

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Mapping applications allow geo-coded data to be uploaded and positioned above a map, and preexisting websites, such as Flickr for photographs that have added location-sensitive functionality to open geography to the enthusiast. Google Earth is one such application. Their chief technologist reported that, as of October 2007, the basic free version of Google Earth has been downloaded over 250 million times (GeoWeb, 2007, p. 16). A Global Positioning System (GPS) device lets the user determine location, which can then be uploaded to a neogeography application. The GPS device triangulates measurements from several earth-orbiting satellites to record a location that is generally precise to within about 15 meters, barring weather and other conditions that hinder signal transmission. Those whose mobile phones conform to the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard can pick up location WiFi. Those who own a GSM cell phone may use GSM localization that measures the relative strength of signals from the broadcast points. Some digital cameras also are equipped to record location, which is then encoded in the photographs. Unless the camera is close to the object of the image, however, the coordinates of the image only approximate the coordinates of the camera, making the image coordinates imprecise. Location coordinates automatically assigned to pictures makes it easy to add those pictures to maps.

NeOGeOGRAphy TeChNOlOGIeS Different neogeography technologies allow people to contribute variously. There are companies that specialize in basemaps; others, such as Google and Microsoft, have ventured into the market and financed their own large-scale topological photographing efforts. Smaller companies specialize in the neogeography application only, asking for the addition of locations, photographs, sound or video over their basemap. Complex

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data analyses, once the domain of GIS experts, now are performed also by plotting events such as criminal disturbances over maps. “What if” visualizations for urban planning, for example, have been uploaded for general comment in what is called Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS). An overview of basemaps and the different sorts of neogeography contributions follow a list of neogeo-related websites at the end of this chapter. Those looking for a discussion of neogeography applications might consult Turner (2006).

Basemaps Basemaps are the maps showing the earth’s surface or boundaries above which other sorts of thematic information can be plotted. Digital maps typically adopt a few standard scales that are derived from older printed maps. The high resolution of the basemaps and pan and zoom functionality allows scale flexibility. In piecing together the photographs comprising the basemap for Google Earth, it has been suggested that “Google has created a new datum, or horizontal reference system that is substantially different from the current North American datum, but which is widely accepted because of the authority of Google” (Goodchild, 2007, p. 219). Geobrowsers are used to view basemaps and the above data. Most geobrowsers can scan in any direction, and pan in and zoom out to change scale. Some such as Google Earth with 3D imagery allow the horizon line to be tilted so that the map can be seen from directly above, at ¾ or bird’s eye view, or horizontally such as at street level. NASA’s WorldWind and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth also allow viewing in 3D. Microsoft’s Virtual Earth adds to its basemap 3D models of cities derived from photographs, while the Google SketchUp program allows users to create 3D modeling of buildings fairly easily. Platial, Jpgearth, and Wikimapia provide raster rather than vector renderings of the earth with pan and zoom functionality and allow users to

add photos and/or brief descriptions. Loc.alize. us allows photographs to be set on raster, vector, or hybrid basemap. GeoCommons uses a raster base, and Mapufacture, a vector base, each along with a choice of data sources, so that users can create an end product mashup from two or more sources.

Adding Descriptive Information Users may add descriptive keyword and latitude and longitude via geotags. A common theme of neogeography projects is to invite different users to geotag the same map. Casual users may explore Platial2 maps, but a login in needed for full access to site features. Figure 1 displays a map of shark attacks that had been viewed over 400,000 times. This neogeography website gives users the code and the permission to publish this map elsewhere on the web. The detail screen gives an overview of the map (see Figure 1). Each marked place is shown in a list corresponding to a marker (as in Figure 2)—this map has 146 places marked. Annotation consists of either text or photographs or both (as in Figure 3). ClipGlobe too offers users a basemap and invites users to tag points of interest. The GeoSpatial Media Organizer combines social networking with GPS to allow users to publish locations from their hikes or vacations and share it privately or with communities. It is compatible with any Garmin or Magellan handheld GPS device. Wikimapia encircles political boundaries, or zooms to buildings or sites with bounding boxes that indicates annotations are available. Click on a bounding box, and a text box appears with a description of the place and sometimes a hyperlink to find more information. Geotags may be added to audio content in the FreeSound Project or to video in VlogMap.

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Figure 1. Shark attack map overview (© Platial.com. Used with permission).

Adding photographs Jpgearth and Loc.alize.us provide basemaps over which users are invited to add photographs with descriptions. Jpgearth allows users to add photographs of whatever they like; and browsing over current content shows that they like portraits of people or pets in daily living settings, at special

events, and travel photos of monuments, buildings or scenery. Loc.alize.us provides about as many features as any, thanks in part to its partners--address search is provided by Google and Geonames, photos are shared via Flickr, and satellite imagery via Google Maps. Loc.alize.us allows photographs to be uploaded with short descriptions and tag terms for indexing. Once

Figure 2. Shark attack item list (© Platial.com. Used with permission)

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Figure 3. Shark attack map example of annotation (© Platial.com. Used with permission)

a Loc.alize.us map is customized, anyone may employ the provided code to embed that map in a personal website.

Adding Dynamic locations Another kind of neogeography-related application tracks locations that are temporary. There are websites in which people can point out spots on a map where they have seen celebrities. Those unconcerned with celebrities might be content to share their location and stay connected with friends on websites similar to Plazes.com through stationary or mobile devices with Internet capabilities.3 Geoportail is a comparable site for French-speaking areas of the world.4 Finally, Location Based Services can register whereabouts of mobile phone callers in an emergency or track the location supply shippers.

(Balram & Dragićević, 2007). Participatory strategies include collaborative mapping, community review of data, collaborative data gathering, and community conflict resolution (Elwood, 200, p.199). Subsets of collaborative GIS are participatory GIS (PGIS) and public participatory GIS (PPGIS). Both PGIS and PPGIS provide information about places for decision-making. The distinction between the two seems to be that PGIS attempts to integrate widely held opinions about places with expert knowledge, whereas PPGIS focuses on widely held public opinions (Hawthorne et al., 2007, 46, 47). Level of involvement allowed by the technology in PPGIS projects varies. Creating an efficient PPGIS project requires background about the probable users and their level of interest or participation; otherwise, services will be provided that the public will ignore (Dunn, 2007).

value of Neogeography Techniques Adding Commentary for Decision-making Collaborative or cooperative Geographic Information Systems (GIS) integrate technologies that encourage participation in spatial decision making

The value of community-contributed data to authoritative GIS data could be enormous. World mapping has been declining, owing in some measure to mapping costs, and what there is has not invariably been kept current (Goodchild, 2007).

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Neogeography could help fill in the blanks left by official mapping agencies. Other types of map mashups could be valuable as well. ChicagoCrime.org created by Adrain Holovaty mashes code from Google Maps API with data from the Chicago police department’s selfpublished crime statistics (Miller, 2006, p.192). The site is read-only and non-participatory. The Canadian Century Research Infrastructure has a project to build early 20th-century datasets onto maps that show changes in the fabric of Canadian society (St-Hilaire et al., 2007). Scientists are attempting to use cancer records to show cancer outbreaks according to demographics and environment (Rushton et al., 2006). ExplorOurPlan. net mashes images and data on climate change. United States consumer projects include Zillow. com that mashes Microsoft’s Virtual Earth with data to show home prices across the country, and Gasbuddy.com that does the same for local gas prices. Citizens may contribute data to help monitor the environment, as in project PEOPLE (Population Exposure to Air Pollutants in Europe) that monitors city environments through the use of contour maps depicting air quality.5

CONTROveRIeS AND ISSUeS IN NeOGeOGRAphy Problems stem from factors that hinder the expansion and popularity of neogeography and the sharing of related data. Controversies singled out for comment are aspects of the annotations added by neogeographers, and how the neogeography products might be displayed and discovered.

Annotations Standards Location is stored in many geographic data formats. GPS uses the GPS exchange format. Microformats adr and geo are used within Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to show web

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pages graphically for a browser, and Geography Markup Language (GML) is the XML grammar used to describe geographic features. GeoRSS is an extension of RSS used for notification; it is a primary way location data is shared and aggregated. KML keyhole is the format used to display spatial data in a browser such as Google Earth or Google Maps, with KMZ being the compressed version. The Open Geospatial Consortium recently endorsed the KML format. Presently it is necessary to convert GeoRSS to KML or vice versa. The hidden controversy seems to be whether the GeoRSS or KML will dominate.

Accuracy Good data is carefully measured and current. One hope for the online community is that contributors will be interested in spotting others’ mistakes. If not, an editorial staff per web application might dictate what should appear and what ought to be altered.

Privacy Google’s street level imagery challenges accepted notions of privacy. However, changes often are made for security reasons and some image details are blurred to forestall lawsuits. Furthermore, photographs tend to be between six months and three years old, which is intended to limit their usefulness to malefactors. Knowledge of people’s whereabouts could save lives, and this is the original purpose of requiring many U.S. cell phones to be location-compliant. To prevent the invasion of our personal privacy, our signals could be blocked or obfuscated so that our location remains hidden (Drummond, João, & Billen, 2007). Who owns the data? Copyright is a possible concern. If one person owns data and another adds geotags, it is unclear whether the data has assumed a new form. It is one thing to create a temporary map; to re-use the map can be more

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complicated. But “there can be little use of geoinformation for democratization if widespread access to data is not a reality” (Bodum & Jaegly, 2007, p. 235).

Applications Some software is distributed as open source, meaning that the source code is available for anyone to copy or modify to create new applications. Some of the excitement conveyed in popular Geoweb writings (e.g., GeoWeb, 2007) comes from the untapped potential of how such content could be used. It is the map application developers and map makers themselves that will direct progress. We would be better able to predict what sites would become popular if we could define the participating community. But in general, we do not know any contributors, less so from their blog screen names. The variety of blog sites and softwares splinter the users.

map Users Interface Parameters to Find Geographic Information Some geographic search systems allow users to query by region size, whether semantically by name of state, city or country, for example, or by visualization allowing the user to alter the size of a footprint by re-sizing the borders of a bounding box. Users may prefer results to display in order of geographic proximity nearest to the query term, rather than in terms of frequency of occurrence of the location that appears in the document or map.

Looking for Geographic Information

category, when the categories included activity, adult, arts and humanities, shopping, computer, education, healthcare, people, and science (Sanderson and Han, 2007). Mashups and other products of neogeography would surely satisfy some of these location queries. But are people finding what they are looking for?

Finding Geographic Information Until recently, geographic indexing and access has relied on place names, often depending on the Library of Congress Subject Headings and Name Authorities. Many places share the same name. Often the names of people and organizations include place names, so irrelevant documents are commonly retrieved. The task of determining which place is meant by an address or a region is known as grounding or localization, or, to use a phrase coined by Leidner, toponym resolution (Leidner, 2007, p..34). Geographic indexing more recently has been supplied by geotags. These might be supplied by neogeography enthusiasts, or they can be made automatically (Pyalling, Maslov, & Braslavski, 2006) from information taken from zip codes and telephone area codes, for example. Research currently is being conducted on how to detect geographic locations from web pages (Wang et al., 2005). This involves determining which names are geographic and which are not: and then from among the geographic names, which place is indicated. Some of these problems have been solved by commercial products such as Metacarta. Community Coder 9.0 by ESRI and GeocodeCD 2.5 can take standard street addresses with zip codes and assign geotags. ESRI has purchased the current release of Community Coder that assigns to an address latitude and longitude.

We know that users want geographic information. Analysis of a four week sample from a million queries collected in 2004 from logs of a large search engine showed that geography words contributed the largest percentage of any query

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fUTURe TReNDS

how Geo-Information will look

All search queries in the coming GeoWeb might become location-targeted so that retrieved websites might be displayed over a map. John Hanke, Director of Google Earth and Google Maps, pointed to two specific trends that might shape the face of neogeography: the development of basemaps and annotations. Financial returns follow the trends, and we might see more investment in the basemaps, as well as acknowledgement of location-targeted advertising, and mergers and acquisitions of companies in this domain (Hanke & Seefeld, 2007). Also we might see an annotation explosion as social technologies become more popular and data collects. Hypothetical questions that may be raised of any social interactive web technology would apply equally to neogeography. What engendered the social climate of the early 21st century that attracts people to have their say on the web? What types of people spend their free time on the social interaction instead of entertainment on the web? When, how much, and why do they contribute? If everyone’s opinion matters, is the “expert” passé? What brings them to one social technology website rather than another? Turning to data generation raises another set of questions. How could we encourage data sharing that is free, or at least fair? Should there be an incentive to encourage contributions of higher quality? And if so, should the motivation be primarily social (wider acknowledgement or just at the website) or economic (such as revenue sharing)? Should data quality be monitored, and if so, who would set the standards? How could that data be used by others? Perhaps participation on a range of sites is diffusing effort from what could be an army of volunteers accomplishing a few important projects cooperatively. If the effort were channeled, which projects would merit collective attention? The answers should be given by the new map makers and users and the practice of neogeography.

Driving directions might continue to be preferred as flat plans, but other sorts of geo-information probably will be preferred in volumetric form. Browsers will need to accommodate 2.5D tilted and 3D volumetric views. Monitors will need fine resolution, as will screens of mobile devices. Systems created on a 3D model will be entirely new, rather than adaptations of present two-dimensional systems, in that 3D uses entirely different spatial referencing (Kolar, 2006, p. 210). Computers will need large caches so that pages load fast. Bandwidth will need to be wide enough to accommodate information flow increases.

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“Pull” Technology Geographic search in most current forms requires effort, entering a search term for example. This effort required to pull results from the system explains the idea of “pull” technology. We should not need to go to geo-sites for geo-information, however. Data sets increasingly might combine heterogeneous forms of data, and search interfaces might add features to search by or view results that are spatial. Results listings should accommodate a simultaneous display of different information forms, just as today’s television includes text crawl below video. How to determine relevance of different forms of information retrieved by a query term is an unsolved question.

“Push” Technology Relevant information could be sent to us during the day. This will come about as our GPS, mobile phones, cars and other devices automatically sense where we are and send us information that corresponds to our whereabouts. The system pushes us information without effort on our behalf.

Neogeography

New Ways to Use the New maps Community-made maps reveal as much about the community as about its land. Giaccari and Fogli propose the term affective geographies to describe how place is represented subjectively. A collectively-made map may show individual or collective perception, interpretations, and expectations about that mapped location (Giaccari and Fogli, 2008). Participation in the mapping, in its own way, can inspire community interest in its environment.

CONClUSION The practice of neogeography resembles that of other social interactive technologies in terms of the people who create it (web enthusiasts), their time (offered freely), the data (if user-generated), and the product (a combined effort in which many contribute to a whole). It differs from other social interactive technologies in the character and organization of data. The character of location data is as likely to be impersonal as personal, and the organization of the data is likely to be in layers. Neogeographers’ contributions have the potential to add significantly to official information created on behalf of governments or other public or professional organizations, many of which cannot afford to fund expensive mapping surveys routinely. Neogeography applications in the future may see changes in their basemaps, annotations, and file standards. In terms of the basemap, investments will be made in accurate data. Annotations will take the form of photographs, sound or video and labels for points of interest over the basemaps. Expanding annotation layers might be a new trend in web development, with the number and kinds of layers constrained only by bandwidth and by the imagination. Rather than a continuous stream of applications being created, Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that allow one program to run within another are becoming available; they allow

people to make adjustments to major systems such as Google Maps and Google Earth. The adoption of standards will encourage data sharing among applications. Volunteer-supplied geographic tags may assume informational value beyond entertainment. Their potential is tempered by problems stemming from its novelty. For example, neogeography -related websites provide different ways for people to contribute tags, photographs, locations, and commentary. More serious concerns are whether data and commentary are accurate, and whether photographs can be an invasion of privacy. Assuming we come to terms with these concerns and there is a future for neogeography, the next generation of applications might change in appearance, mode of access, and the sorts of layers of geographical information that might be added above a map.

RefeReNCeS Balram, S., & Dragićević, S. (2007). Collaborative geographic information systems: Origins, boundaries, and structures. In S. Balram & S. Dragićević (Eds.), Collaborative geographic information systems (pp. 1-22). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Bogum, L., & Jaegly, M. (2006). The democratizing potential of geographic exploration systems (GES) through the example of GRIFINOR. In A. Abdul-Rahman, S. Zlatanova, & V. Coors (Eds.), Innovations in 3D geo information systems (pp. 235-244). Berlin, Germany: Springer. Drummond, J., João, E., & Billen, R. (2007). Current and future trends in dynamic and mobile GIS. In J. Drummond, R. Billen, E. João, & D. Forrest (Eds), Dynamic and mobile GIS: Investigating changes in space and time (pp. 289-300). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

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Dunn, C. E. (2007). Participatory GIS—a people’s GIS? Progress in Human Geography, 31(5), 616–637. doi:10.1177/0309132507081493 Elwood, S. (2006). Negotiating knowledge production: The everyday inclusions, exclusions, and contradictions of participatory GIS research. The Professional Geographer, 58(2), 197–208. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9272.2006.00526.x GeoWeb: The world on your desktop. (2007, September 6). The Economist. Giaccardi, E., & Fogli, D. (2008, May). Affective geographies: Toward a richer cartographic semantics for the geospatial Web. In Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, Napoli, Italy (pp. 173-180). Goodchild, M. F. (2007). Citizens as sensors: The world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal, 69, 211–221. doi:10.1007/s10708-007-9111-y Hanke, J., & Seefeld, B. (2007, May 29). The evolution of the Geoweb (O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference Address). San Jose, CA. Retrieved June 30, 2008, from http://blip.tv/file/338542 Hawthorne., et al. (2007). Beyond the public meeting: Building a field-based participatory GIS for land use planning in Monangalia Country, WV. In S. Balram & S. Dragićević (Eds.) Collaborative geographic information systems (pp. 43-65). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Hill, L. (2006). Georeferencing: The geographic associations of information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kolář, J. (2006). On the road to 3D geographic systems: Important aspects of global modelmapping technology. In A. Abdul-Rahman, S. Zlatanova, & V. Coors (Eds.), Innovations in 3D geo information systems (pp. 207-223). Berlin, Germany: Springer.

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Leidner, J. L. (2007). Toponym resolution in text: Annotation, evaluation and applications of spatial grounding of place names. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh, UK. Retrieved January 8, 2008, from http://hdl. handle.net/1842/1849 Mateos, P., & Fisher, P. F. (2007). Spatiotemporal accuracy in mobile phone location: Assessing the new cellular geography. In J. Drummond, R. Billen, E. João, & D. Forrest (Eds.), Dynamic and mobile GIS: Investigating changes in space and time (pp. 189-212). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Miller, C. C. (2006). A beast in the field: The Google maps mashup as GIS/2. Cartographica, 41(3), 187–199. Pyalling, A., Maslov, M., & Braslavski, P. (2006, May). Automatic geotagging of Russian Web sites. In Proceedings of the 15th International World Wide Web Conference (pp. 965-966). Edinburgh, UK. Rushton, G., Armstrong, M. P., Gittler, J., Greene, B. R., Pavlik, C. E., West, M. M., & Zimmerman, D. L. (2006). Geocoding in cancer research: A review. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 30, S16–S24. doi:10.1016/j. amepre.2005.09.011 Sanderson, M., & Han, Y. (2007, November). Search words and geography. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Geographical Information Systems, Lisbon, Portugal (pp. 13-14). Satyaprakash (2008). Neogeography: Goodbye to GIS? GIS Development. Retrieved January 8, 2008, from http://www.gisdevelopment.net/ezine/ global/pdf/feb08/70-71.pdf Scharl, A., & Tochtermann, K. (2007). The geospatial Web: How geobrowsers, social software and the Web 2.0 are shaping the network society (Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series). London: Springer.

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St-Hilaire, M., Moldofsky, B., Richard, L., & Beaudry, M. (2007). Geocoding and mapping historical census data: The geographical component of the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure. Historical Methods, 40(2), 76–91. doi:10.3200/ HMTS.40.2.76-91 Turner, A. J. (2006). Introduction to neogeography. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly. Wade, T., & Somer, S. (Eds.). (2006). A to Z GIS: An illustrated dictionary of geographic information systems. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press. Wang, C., Xing, X., Wang, L., Lu, Y., & Ma, W.-Y. (2005, November). Detecting geographic locations from Web resources. In Proceedings of the 2005 workshop on geographic information retrieval, Bremen, Germany (pp. 17-24).

http://mapstraction.com - Resources to create a common interface for various mapping providers http://mapufacture.com - Allows to build your own maps http://photrax.com – Allows to create a global travel guide http://pininthemap.com - A placemark sharing website http://planetgs.com - Aggregates geospatial blogs http://platial.com - Allows to create maps http://QuikMaps.com - Allows to draw on a map and show it in Google Earth http://veryspatial.com/about.php - Geographyrelated blog and podcast

NeOGeOGRAphyRelATeD WeBSITeS

http://wikimapia.org - Combines blogs with a map

http://bluweb.com/us/chuset/gmapez - Allows to build maps

http://woophy.com- - Allows to upload photos to the map

http://ClipGlobe - Allows to embed video clips in a map

http://www.geocommons.com - Allows to visualize data sets on raster map base

http://earth.google.com - Allows to add text and photos to a map

http://www.jpgearth.com - Sharing, discovering, and browsing geotagged pictures on the web

http://earth.google.com - Allows to upload photos to the map

http://www.mapbuilder.net - Allows to build maps

http://gutenkarte.org - Generates maps by extracting places from classical literature

http://www.mapsalive.com - Combines maps, markers, photos, and text

http://labs.metacarta.com/GeoParser/documentation.html - A tool to geo-parse personal documents or websites

http://www.OpenSourceGIS.org - A list of software tools for a variety of applications including mapping

http://loc.alize.us - Combines addresses, photos and satellite map

http://www.tagzania.com - Allows to add a place tag and description to a map

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Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Basemap: The map with background information that can be used as a reference for thematic information. Cybercartography: Web mapping applications. Geocoding (or Geotagging): A form of location-related metadata such as geographic coordinates added to a map, website, photograph, etc. Geographic Data Formats: File formats for computer storage and manipulation of geographic data (GPS exchange, GML, and XML). Geospatial Web (Geoweb): Web-based geographically-related data and services. Neogeography: A blend of personal, nonexpert input and scientifically accurate nongeographic practices. Participatory GIS (PGIS) and Public Participatory GIS: (PPGIS): Both PGIS and PPGIS provide information about places for decisionmaking. PGIS attempts to integrate widely held opinions about places with expert knowledge, whereas PPGIS focuses on widely held public opinions.

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Raster Map: Shows the earth’s surface continuously as in an aerial photograph, satellite image, or elevation surface. Vector Map: Represents the surface of the earth by means of discrete points, lines and polygons, and are useful for storing data that have discrete boundaries such as streets and country borders.

eNDNOTeS 1

2 3 4

5

Neogeography should not be confused with “New Geography.” New Geography of the 21st century has been defined as a mobile geography, where personal location is knowable with GPS or other location-sensitive devices (Mateos & Fisher, 2007). http://platial.com (as of June 30, 2008). http://plazes.com (as of June 30, 2008). http://www.geoportail.fr (as of June 30, 2008). http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/97.html (as of June 30, 2008).

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Chapter 40

Social Software Use in Public Libraries June Abbas University of Oklahoma, USA

ABSTRACT With the emergence of Web 2.0, libraries have started employing social software applications (such as blogs, tagging, social networking, and wikis) to engage readers, encourage user-contributed content, and connect with user populations in novel ways. However, little research has been conducted on the applications of Web 2.0 technologies within public libraries. This chapter focuses on the applicability of social software in a library setting and examines the use of such innovative techniques as live tagging, social cataloging, and social bookmarking. The chapter evaluates the potential of social software tools for facilitating collaboration between librarians and library patrons; it addresses the concerns expressed by the library and information science community related to the issues of trust, authority, accuracy, responsibility, and ethics in the context of the Library 2.0.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND User-centered philosophies are at the heart of libraries’ service and have been in practice long before the emergence of Web 2.0. However, with the advent of the social-interaction technologies, such as blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking, libraries have seen a radical shift as they are now faced with web-users’ expectations. These expectations may not be met with less interactive computer technoloDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch040

gies, such as library online public access catalogs (OPACs). Libraries have recognized the value that technologies of Web 2.0 can provide to their users and are implementing social software in innovative ways. This chapter provides an overview of social software use in public libraries and evaluates its potential for facilitating collaboration between librarians and library patrons. The author focuses on the applicability of Web 2.0-type technologies in a library setting and presents an overview of social software use in public libraries. Additionally, the chapter addresses concerns expressed by

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library and information science professionals related to the issues of trust, authority, accuracy, responsibility, reliability, and ethics in the context of Web 2.0, as well as outlines the directions for future research.

where digital tools allow users to create, change, and publish dynamic content of all kinds… to make connections, carry on conversations, and collaborate” (p. 253). They distill Web 2.0 principles to: •

Web 2.0 At the base of all social software use is the concept of Web 2.0. The term itself was coined in 2004 by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle, at a conference on web technologies (O’Reilly, 2005; Anderson, 2007). O’Reilly (2005) defines Web 2.0 as: “the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continuallyupdated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an architecture of participation”. Abram (2005) expands the philosophy further to include more human aspects of interactivity, such as conversations, interpersonal networking, personalization, and individualism. He explains Web 2.0 as: “fundamentally about a transition of the Web site and email-centric world from one that is mostly about information to one where the content is combined with functionality and targeted applications….It’s primarily about a much higher level of interactivity and deeper user experiences….characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and reuse, and the market as a conversation.” (emphasis added) Stephens and Collins (2007) view Web 2.0 as “the next incarnation of the World Wide Web,

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• • •

•

Conversations: User participation, discussion and feedback are welcomed and encouraged Community: Open conversations can lead to a sense of community and belonging Participation: New information is created via collaboration between users Experience: Engagement with other users and the community is rewarding and provides some type of fulfillment Sharing: Users can contribute as much or as little as they like (p. 253)

O’Reilly (2005), Anderson (2007), and McDermott (2007) develop a conceptual framework for the examination of Web 2.0 philosophies and technologies in the context of libraries. For instance, Anderson (2007) emphasizes a need for more serious discussion on Web 2.0 and expands on O’Reilly’s “Six Big Ideas” of individual production and user-generated content, harnessing the power of the crowd, data on an epic scale, architecture of participation, network effects, and openness (2005). Anderson suggests a) focusing on both mature social software applications, e.g., blogs and wikis, and new applications, e.g., data mash-ups, which build on earlier applications; and b) investigating web technologies and standards that enable the software applications of Web 2.0, including XML and AJAX (p. 196). McDermott (2007) presents a breakdown of the specific functions of each application as a means to evaluate Web 2.0’s potential and uses. The most commonly used technologies in libraries include: •

Blogs (for example, “What’s New” pages; blogs designed for specific user audiences or community outreach programs)

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• •

•

•

•

Wikis (mainly used within libraries by library staff) Social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio. us, LibraryThing, and photo sharing sites where users can describe books or photos (used to provide book reviews, reader’s advisory lists, user contributed subject terms or “tags”) Open source software (used to develop or enhance library OPACs to allow user comments, reviews, and tagging) Social networking tools such as Facebook or MySpace (to notify specific user groups about programs or new resources in the library) Podcasting or videocasting (to teach library/information literacy skills; to let users know about new programs and resources; or for guest lectures)

library 2.0 Timeline Applications of Web 2.0 philosophies within the library context have been conceptualized as Library 2.0, or L2 for short. The term Library 2.0 is attributed to a post by Michael Casey in 2005 on his blog “LibraryCrunch.” Casey and Savastinuk (2006) emphasize the need for user-centered change, encouraging participation by users in the creation of both physical and virtual library services, and the breaking down of barriers between libraries and users. However, in libraries, as in any other organizational or cultural context, radical trust is required to embrace change. According to Fichter (2006), “radical trust” implies trust within the community, allowing and encouraging users to participate in developing library services. In libraries, one area where the issues surrounding radical trust are seen most is through libraries’ use of social software by allowing users to contribute to library OPACs. Librarians are concerned with the loss of authority and accuracy when users contribute content, such as tags, reviews, or comments to library catalog records. However,

Abbas and Graham (2006) see this user participation as a means to bridge the chasm between users and library resources. Learning more about user-generated, collaborative content can also inform library and information professionals of new ways to augment past practices and develop new systems and services (Abbas, 2007; Graham & Abbas, 2007; Spiteri, 2007). Below is a brief timeline demonstrating milestones of social software adoption in libraries. This timeline, however, is not inclusive of all forms of social software, as little documentation is available about the initial use of blogs, wikis, or podcasts in libraries. Prior to 2003 – 2004: One of the first websites that allowed users to contribute links and sites to newstories was Slashdot, which was developed in 1997. Further sites such as Del.icio.us (developed by Joshua Schachter in 2003-2004), Furl (in 2004), and a host of others (Simpy, Spurl, Raw Sugar) were developed during 2003-2004. The year 2004 also saw the first use of the term Web 2.0 by O’Reilly and Battele. 2005: Library 2.0 was coined by Michael Casey and LibraryThing, Flickr, and other social sharing sites were made available on the web in 2005. Users were encouraged to organize and tag their own collections of books, photos, and bookmarks, and to tag and comment on other user’s collections as well. The Steve.museum.org tagging project began to explore user-generated tags in museum’s online collections. This project illustrates one of the first large scale research efforts to learn more about the feasibility of employing user-contributed tags to index images on the museums’ websites. 2006: The PennTags project at the University of Pennsylvania began. The University of Pennsylvania community is invited to tag or comment on library resources within the library’s OPAC using a homegrown system developed by the University of Pennsylvania. Library integrated system vendors also begin to integrate tagging, faceted and visual search and classification into library OPACs.

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2007: Libraries begin implementing usercontribution features into their library OPACs. For example, in Jan. 2007 SOPAC was developed by the Ann Arbor District Library, which incorporated tagging, commenting, and reviews into the library’s OPAC. In May 2007 LibraryThing for Libraries was launched. Libraries could connect their OPACs to LibraryThing using specialized software, that allowed users to provide tags for library resources. Danbury Library, in Connecticut, was the first library to have gone live with LibraryThing for Libraries. As of February 2008, the LibraryThing for Libraries site notes 40 member libraries.1

Technorati reflect current standards for developing controlled vocabularies (thesauri and subject heading lists). It is important to note that research on the use of “user-generated content” in libraries began much earlier than the emergence of the concept of Library 2.0. Image retrieval researchers concerned with achieving better access to rich collections of images in contexts such as libraries, archives, art history departments, and newspapers have been exploring the use of user-generated descriptors (user-contributed content) since the mid 1990’s to present. Examples include: •

USe Of SOCIAl SOfTWARe IN lIBRARIeS To date, little research has been conducted into the extent, uses, and implications of social interactive technologies in libraries. Abbas, Chen, and Lomax (2007) and Bejune (2007) focused on the use of social software in public libraries. A landmark study conducted by the OCLC Online Computer Library Center (2007), a nonprofit service and research library consortium, presented attitudinal responses from the general public and library directors about the role that libraries should play within social networking. The study also measured the general public and library directors’ use of social networking and social media sites, as well as other online habits (e.g., use of commercial sites, search engines, etc.). The results related to the use of social software in libraries are presented below. Contemporary research on Web 2.0 technologies in libraries appears to be concentrated on the phenomena of “tagging” within social bookmarking and photo sharing sites like Del.icio.us, Furl, LibraryThing, and Flickr. One such study that is tangentially related to libraries’ use of social software was conducted by Spiteri (2007), who explored how tags in Furl, Del.icio.us, and

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•

•

•

•

Hastings (1995) had users apply their own descriptions to a collection of Caribbean paintings, and O’Connor, O’Connor, and Abbas (1999) explored the gathering and application of user-defined/supplied descriptors for personal photographs; Ornager (1997) and Neal (2006) examined how newspaper journalists requested and searched for images by using captions in newspaper databases; Greenberg (2001) examined user-supplied descriptors for business and medical applications; Abbas (2001, 2005) explored the vocabulary problem in digital libraries and systems designed for youth, and proposed utilizing most frequently used search terms as user-defined descriptors to build controlled vocabularies; Reuter and Druin (2004) used descriptors provided by children for digital picture books in the International Children’s Digital Library.

Most of the related literature focuses on defining Library 2.0, as well as presenting the best practices and ideas for using the different technologies in one’s own library. The literature demonstrates how libraries can implement proprietary applications that augment existing systems, use open source

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software, develop their own in-house applications, and integrate currently available social interaction technologies. Additionally, the literature conveys a number of concerns that members of the profession hold, including acting too abruptly to embrace new technologies before they are fully matured; or, as is the case in many libraries, before their basic web presence has developed. Breeding (2007) sees the current implementation of Web 2.0 technologies as creating “silos of information” or “small containers of isolated information” on a library website (pp. 24-25). As a result, patrons may experience difficulty navigating through library websites to locate the silos that may be present on blogs and wikis pages. Breeding is concerned with the issues of interoperability between systems, as well as the need for the development of common information architecture for library systems. Interoperability issues still remain in the current library automation environment, and Web 2.0 tools have done little to resolve them. Bejune (2007) presents the first study on the use of wikis in libraries. The study uses the framework of CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) to examine how libraries and librarians are using wikis to collaborate with each other and with users. Bethune used a sample of 33 wikis identified from a review of library and information science literature, the Library Success wiki,2 and messages from three professional listservs (LIBREFL, Web4lib, and DIG_REF). Bethune developed four categories of collaborations using CSCW as a framework. Results of his study (p. 32) demonstrated that the majority of library wikis (77.1%) were used for collaboration among libraries and among library staff within a library (categories I and II). Collaborations between library staff and patrons or between patrons themselves (categories III and IV) were less frequent (22.9%). The results are summarized below. •

Collaboration among libraries (extra-organizational) 45.7 percent

• • •

Collaboration among library staff (intraorganizational) 31.4 percent Collaboration among library staff and patrons 14.3 percent Collaboration among patrons 8.6 percent

Further examination of library wikis reveals that the majority of the wiki sites analyzed by Bejune were hosted by academic libraries (19 out of 33), including 1 public library, 1 school library media center, 3 professional library associations, 2 wikis related to professional conferences, and 3 associated with either national or state-wide digital library projects. While Bejune’s study is by no means exhaustive, it does provide a useful framework to study the application of wiki technologies within the library community. Bejune also presents some ideas on why wikis are used more in categories I and II rather than in III and IV. For example, librarians are accustomed to collaborating with each other within their organization or between libraries. Reasons for low use in categories III and IV include: (1) libraries are perceived by users as repositories of resources, not places for collaborative work; (2) there may be concerns within the library community about authority, responsibility, and liability; (3) wikis may be better suited for activities in categories I and II; and (4) wikis are still new technologies. Librarians may be experimenting within “safer contexts” before trying more public projects (p. 32-34).3

OClC Study of Attitudes toward Social Software Use in libraries To learn more about online habits, social software, and social media site use by the general public and library directors, OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) conducted an online survey of 6,163 members from the general public of Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. Researchers also surveyed 382 U.S. library directors. The findings illustrated the use of social

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interactive technologies in libraries worldwide. The survey also uncovered many telling features related to the attitudinal views of the general public and library directors related to social software use in libraries. The study did not measure the actual use or implementation of social software within libraries, since few libraries were actually using social software at the time. The key attitudinal points were identified as follows: •

•

• •

• •

•

The general public does not currently see a role for libraries in the social networked world 6% of the general public answered that they were very likely/extremely likely to describe their collection on a library social site 5% of the general public would share videos/photos on a library social site 13% of the general public would like notifications when new items were added to the library 8% of the general public would share ideas with library staff about services 6% of the general public would participate in online discussion groups or use library social sites to meet others with similar interests 14% of U.S. library directors considered building social networking sites for their communities (OCLC, 2007, pp. 5-1 – 5-5).

In an effort to ascertain the implementations and use of social software within libraries and museums, Abbas and colleagues have been conducting a census of social software use and tagging in libraries and museums. Preliminary findings of this research were presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIST) during a panel session on tagging activities in libraries, newspapers, and education (Abbas, Chen, & Lomax, 2007). The sampling frame,

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method, and preliminary findings of this ongoing study are presented below. The study is currently examining the extent of use of all types of social software within libraries.

Sampling frame and Research method To gather a sample of libraries (public, academic, school, and special), a directory of library web sites and catalogs (lib-web-cats) was utilized. 4 The lib-web-cats directory is a searchable database of over 32,000 libraries worldwide developed by Marshall Breeding, the Jean and Alexander Heard Library’s director for innovative technologies and research at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. The directory contains links to each library’s website and online catalog, information about the library type, geographic location, address, current and previous library automation systems used, size of the collection, and also presents the most exhaustive source of information on libraries. At the time of the study, the site included information on 16,887 public libraries in the U.S. In addition, research literature on libraries and tagging was reviewed and all websites listed there were visited. Libraries were selected by state from within the U.S from the lib-web-cats database. To provide a random sample, every tenth library site was accessed. Data was gathered on types of social software being used by the library, whether or not the library allowed users to tag or create content on their website, any specific uses noted, audiences/users targeted by the technology, type of library, location, as well as issues with accessing or locating the social software within the library’s website. The data were gathered in a Microsoft Access database and notes about access issues and other relevant information about each site were recorded in a spreadsheet.

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preliminary findings As mentioned above, since this is an ongoing study, the findings presented reflect the study as reported in 2007 and only focus on use of social software and tagging within libraries. A total of 70 sites were reviewed for this analysis. Of that sample, it was found: •

•

•

•

70% of the total sample of libraries and museums (49 out of the total sample reviewed) included some mechanism for tagging on their website 81% of the public library sites reviewed (30 out of 37 total public library sites) included some mechanism that allowed users to contribute tags to their library 76% of the academic library sites reviewed (13 out of 17 total academic library sites) provided user tagging, and 37.5% of the museum sites reviewed (6 out of 16 total museum sites) included user tagging.

Only the Ann Arbor District Library, SOPAC, and two academic libraries, the University of Pennsylvania, and Midlands Technical College in South Carolina were employing live tagging at the time of the study. Libraries can utilize LibraryThing services as follows: (a) they can link directly to their LibraryThing account where users can view a tag cloud of tags used by the library; (b) with LibraryThing for Libraries, the library’s OPAC is integrated with LibraryThing. • • •

Users can search by tags through a special “Tag Browser” Tags are imported from LibraryThing Users of the OPAC catalog cannot directly add their own tags.

At the time of the study, the Danbury Public Library, in Connecticut, was the only public library employing LibraryThing for Libraries, and no academic libraries were using LibraryThing.5

Social Bookmarking Tagging in libraries was found to employ different methods of social cataloging, live tagging, and social bookmarking, described in detail below.

live Tagging and Social Cataloging Some libraries allowed users to contribute their own subject terms or tags directly to online public access catalogs (OPAC): • •

• •

Tags appear on records in the library’s OPAC catalogs Users can choose from a tag cloud, e.g., “500 Most Popular Tags,” “Top 10 Tags” or “10 Most Recent Tags” Users have access to customer reviews Users are offered cooperative bookmarks such as “Customers who checked out this item also checked out…”

Libraries use social bookmarking sites to organize online resources for their patrons. Typically, there is a link to the Del.icio.us page from the library’s website, though few libraries in the sample linked back to the library’s website from their Delic.io.us site. Delic.io.us was also used by libraries to set up online reading lists for their users. This social bookmarking site was the most popular technology in use–80% of all public libraries in the sample that provided mechanisms for tagging used Delic. io.us. Academic libraries also used Del.icio.us, but preferred more academic-centric social bookmarking sites, e.g., Connotea and CiteULike.

fUTURe TReNDS As mentioned above, there is little research focused on the adoption and applications of Web 2.0

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technologies within public libraries. The research by Bejune and Abbas provides a useful framework to study this issue in greater depth. The OCLC study offers valuable insights into the attitudinal views of both the general public and library administrators on the role of libraries in the social networked world. For now, these views do not overly support the adoption of social interactive technologies, although the findings encourage libraries to do so. More research into the extent of use, motivations for use, and feasibility of using each novel technology is needed. The social and organizational aspects of implementing and utilizing Web 2.0 technologies in libraries should also be addressed. The literature illustrates the concern that library and information professionals express about issues of trust, authority, accuracy, responsibility, reliability, and ethics related to employing Web 2.0 tools. These discussions also raise the question of whether or not library and information professionals believe the critical tenants of librarianship are being challenged when libraries encourage collaboration and contribution by their users in this novel, everchanging environment. Overall, several areas of interest within the library and information science (LIS) community relating to future research of social software have been identified (Graham & Abbas, 2007): (a) the long-term success of social software and tagging in practical and scholarly use, (b) specific use in scholarly environments, (c) effect on LIS practices of annotation, cataloging, and indexing and abstracting, (d) effect on LIS education, (e) scalability within systems, and (f) continued support and participation by users.

CONClUSION Social software deployment in libraries is an important phenomenon that requires further study. As more libraries begin to use social interaction technologies, more research into practical, social, organizational, and professional issues

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encountered by the library and information science community is needed so that libraries can make informed decisions about whether or not to use social software. While it is beneficial to hear success stories to garner ideas for augmenting library services, there are still technological and ethical issues needing exploration. Web 2.0-based applications can offer much to libraries, and while the philosophies of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 may refresh and advance the thinking of the profession, their adoption should be looked at with an eye for outcomes and usefulness, and not on the threat of being outmoded.

RefeReNCeS Abbas, J. (2001). Smoothing the information seeking path: Removing representational obstacles in a middle school digital library environment. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas. Abbas, J. (2005, October). Out of the mouths of middle school children: I. Using student generated keywords for subject access in a digital library. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56(14), 1512–1524. doi:10.1002/asi.20245 Abbas, J. (2007). In the margins: Reflections on scribbles, knowledge organization and access. Knowledge Organization, 34(1). Abbas, J., Chen, L., & Lomax, E. (2007, November). Who is tagging information? Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Milwaukee, WI. Abbas, J., & Graham, J. (2006, November). So, let’s talk about tagging, user-defined/supplied descriptors. A research and curricular agenda. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Austin, TX.

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Abram, S. (2005). Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and Librarian 2.0: Preparing for the 2.0 world. Retrieved March 8, 2008, from http://www.imakenews.com/ sirsi/e_article000505688.cfm Anderson, P. (2007, December). ‘All that glitters in not gold’. Web 2.0 and the librarian. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 39(4), 195–198. doi:10.1177/0961000607083210 Bejune, M. M. (2007, September). Wikis in libraries. Information Technology in Libraries, 26(3), 26–38. Breeding, M. (2007, May). We need to go beyond Web 2.0. Computers in Libraries, 27(5), 22–25. Casey, M., & Savastinuk, L. (2006, September). Library 2.0: Service for the next generation library. Library Journal. Retrieved March 8, 2008, from http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/ CA6365200.html Fichter, D. (2006, April 2). Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and radical trust: A first take. Retrieved March 8, 2008, from http://library.usask.ca/~fitcher/ blog_on_the_side/2006/04/web-2.html Graham, J., & Abbas, J. (2007, November). Tagging the tags... Process, observations and analysis of conversations in metatagging. Poster presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Milwaukee, WI. Greenberg, J. (2001). Automatic query expansion via lexical-semantic relationships. Journal of the American Association for Information Science, 52(6), 487–498. doi:10.1002/asi.1093 Hastings, S. (1995). An exploratory study of intellectual access to digitized art images. In Proceedings of the Fifty-ninth Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, (pp. 3-8).

McDermott, I. (2007, October). All a-Twitter about Web 2.0: What does it offer libraries? Searcher, 15(9), 34–39. Neal, D. (2006). News photography image retrieval practices: Locus of control in two contexts. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of North Texas, Denton, TX. O’Connor, B. C., O’Connor, M. K., & Abbas, J. (1999). User reactions as access mechanism: An exploration based on captions for images. Journal of the American Society for Information Science American Society for Information Science, 50(8), 681–697. doi:10.1002/(SICI)10974571(1999)50:8<681::AID-ASI6>3.0.CO;2-J O’Reilly, T. (2005, October 1). Web 2.0: Compact definition? Retrieved March 8, 2008, from http:// radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/web_20_ compact_definition.html OCLC. (2007). Sharing, privacy, and trust in our networked world: A report to the OCLC membership. Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center. Ornager, S. (1997). Image retrieval: Theoretical analysis and empirical user studies on accessing information in images. Digital collections: Implication for users, funders, developers, and maintainers. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science (pp. 202-211). Reuter, K., & Druin, A. (2004). Bringing together children and books: An initial descriptive study of children’s book searching and selection behavior in a digital library. In Proceedings of the 67th ASIST Annual Meeting (pp. 339-348). Spiteri, L. (2007, September). The structure and form of folksonomy tags: The road to the public library catalog. Information Technology and Libraries, 26(3), 13–25.

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Stephens, M., & Collins, M. (2007). Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and the hyperlinked library. Serials Review, 33, 253–256. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2007.08.002

ONlINe ReSOURCeS Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us Flickr http://www.flickr.com Furl http://www.furl.net Library Success wiki http://www.libsuccess.org Library Technology Guides. lib-web-cats http:// www.librarytechnology.org/libwebcats LibraryCrunch http://www.librarycrunch.com LibraryThing for Libraries http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries LibraryWikis http://librarywikis.pbwiki.com PennTags http://tags.library.upenn.edu Raw Sugar http://www.rawsugar.com Simpy http://www.simpy.com Slashdot http://slashdot.org Spurl http://www.spurl.net

Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Blog: Short form of the word weblog. Blogs are online interactive journals or newsletters. Readers are encouraged to post comments and to engage with the author and other readers. Blogs can include other Web 2.0 technologies, such as RSS feeds, podcasts, videos, and tagging. Library 2.0: The application of the Web 2.0 technologies and philosophies within the library context to improve or provide new services to user communities.

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OPAC: A library’s online public access catalog that provides access to the services and collections of a library. Social Bookmarking: Web environments that provide users with the means to organize, describe, and share their resources (web bookmarks, books, and photographs) with others. Sites such as Del. icio.us, LibraryThing, and Flickr are examples. Social Networking: A Web 2.0 service that provides users with a platform to set up personal spaces online to share information, music, software applications, etc. Social Software: Web 2.0 technologies used to communicate, share, organize, collaborate, and extend functionality of other web applications. Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, and social networking technologies are examples. Tagging: Providing terms to describe resources in a social bookmarking environment. Tags can be used to sort, retrieve, and find the resources by the tagger or others that use the site. Tagging is also referred to as user-generated descriptors or user-contributed content. Web 2.0: Using the World Wide Web as a service-oriented platform to connect devices, protocols, standards, and applications. The Web 2.0 philosophies include: rethinking how software is developed and distributed, and enabling more human connections through conversations, collaboration, participation, and exchange of ideas and technologies. Wiki: A collaborative website that provides a platform for users to contribute, edit, or remove content.

eNDNOTeS 1 2 3

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http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries/ http://www.libsuccess.org See also Bejune’s companion wiki available at http://librarywikis.pbwiki.com Lib-web-cats directory is available at http:// www.librarytechnology.org/libwebcats

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LibraryThing for Libraries launched in May 2007.

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Chapter 41

Marketing for Children Using Social Interaction Technologies Ruth E. Brown The University of Nebraska - Lincoln, USA

ABSTRACT Children are spending more time online and, in most cases, this means they are using social interaction technologies. Beyond the concern for safety, another issue is gathering strength: namely, interactive marketing to children. This chapter looks at the immersive nature of interactive marketing, which can be found in blogs, chat rooms, virtual worlds, advergaming, and other forms of advertainment. The chapter also examines: the ages of targetable audiences (some of whom cannot yet read the “advertisement” label), websites for children that use interactive marketing, where and how ads are displayed, the effects of interactive marketing, the potential for data collection through interactive marketing, the lack of regulation in interactive marketing, and the future trends of interactive marketing to children.

INTRODUCTION Early use of social interaction technologies by young people seemed to elicit one primary concern from adults. That concern was safety, because children and teens often reveal too much private information online in blogs, chat rooms, and such social networking sites as MySpace. However, a related issue is gaining momentum. It is the power of interactive marketing on social networking sites and similarly

interactive websites for children. The concerns are that (1) young children are unable to discern marketing messages, and (2) even for older children, much of the advertising on social networking sites is so closely tied to the environment that it may be seen more for its participatory nature rather than for its marketing purpose. This chapter will look briefly at the safety issue and then move to explanation and discussion of the growing concern over marketing branded products to children through immersive interactive environments of the Internet.

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch041

Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

Marketing for Children Using Social Interaction Technologies

BACKGROUND The proportion of children with access to computers and the Internet at home is steadily increasing. A 2005 Kaiser Family Foundation report stated that 86 percent of eight-year-olds to eighteen-yearolds had computers in their homes compared to 73 percent in 1999, and 74 percent had Internet access compared to 47 percent in 1999. Time spent by eight-year-olds to eighteen-year-olds on the computer for recreational purposes alone averaged a little over an hour each day in 2005. Eight-yearolds to ten-year-olds clocked in at thirty-seven minutes, eleven-year-olds to fourteen-year-olds at an hour and two minutes, and fifteen-year-olds to eighteen-year-olds at one hour and twenty-two minutes (Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005). Those numbers are expected to be higher today with the popularity of social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, plus the many online communities for children. About 55 percent of American youths ages twelve to seventeen use an online social networking site, according to a national survey of teenagers conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project (Lenhart & Madden, 2007). The number of children and youth who use social networking sites and create online profiles is growing daily. Although some participants choose to make their profiles available only to those in their network, much information is still available to all. A study by Huffaker & Calvert (2005) of teenagers’ blogs found that the teens volunteered far too much private information. Two-thirds provided their ages and at least their first names, while 60 percent gave their locations and contact information. One in five told their full names. MySpace.com has a policy that does not allow children under age sixteen to become members. Spokesman Bennet Ratcliff said the firm immediately removes members’ sites that are in violation of the terms of service, including those with too much personal information. However, participants can get around the rule by lying about their age,

according to Sullivan (2005), who browsed the site and quickly turned up several pages on which children stated they were sixteen, but in their personal descriptions provided information that they were actually younger. Parry Aftab, who runs the WiredSafety.org program, stressed that she does not think any blogs or community sites are safe for children. Her organization receives complaints every day: “There are underage kids on every social networking site on the Net. They are engaging in highly provocative conversations and doing things they would never do offline” (cited in Sullivan, 2005, p. 2). Now add to this issue the fact that marketers have found social networking sites and are trying to establish their brands in the minds of youthful consumers.

INTeRACTIve mARKeTING TARGeTS ChIlDReN Marketers have already created MySpace profile pages for characters from their advertisements and have invited users to add those characters to their list of friends. On Facebook, marketers have created groups around branded products and are trying to use those groups to increase word-ofmouth advertising about their product. Marketer sites often include video clips and quizzes to increase engagement, as well as free downloadable ring tones and other promotions to increase traffic. Some of these promotions utilize viral marketing, offering incentives for users to send information to friends. Chase financial services had a promotion on Facebook that rewarded site visitors for getting friends to sign up for credit cards (Hansell, 2006). Of course marketers’ social networking sites all have links to their brands’ websites, which have more games and activities for a variety of ages. Younger children are not left out of the interactive social networking strategy of marketers. Virtual worlds are three-dimensional environ-

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ments where preteens and children can go to play and to interact with others from around the world. Unlike television ads that children view for thirty seconds to a minute, marketers’ virtual worlds often create a video game-like atmosphere in which children may be immersed for thirty minutes or more. Some of these virtual worlds were created by brands (such as Barbie, Bratz, Disney, Nabisco, and Nickelodeon). These worlds are loaded with “advergaming” and other “advertainment” that use the brand’s own products. Children as young as preschoolers are playing games that involve some of these branded products. In addition, the sites sell products, such as toys, clothes, and DVDs. Other virtual worlds (such as Whyville, Gaia Online, and Stardoll) were not created by and for brands to push their products. Whyville was created as a safe social networking site with an educational platform. However, that does not exclude Whyville or similar sites from marketing influence. Children are driving virtual Toyota Scions at Whyville.net and Gaia Online, and they are wearing the latest digital fashions from DKNY at Stardoll.com. In these virtual worlds, children can craft their own “avatars” (representations of themselves), customize a car, play games and socialize. Marketing of this nature is designed to function at a subconscious level, according to Kathryn Montgomery, author of Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce and Childhood in the Age of the Internet (Olsen, 2007). She noted the purpose of ads and product placements in three-dimensional worlds is often to blur the line between content and advertising. What makes virtual worlds and their interactive games such powerful delivery tools is that a child’s emotional engagement is so high: “With their engaging, interactive properties, the new digital media are likely to have a more profound impact on how children grow and learn, what they value, and ultimately who they become than any medium that has come before” (Montgomery, 2001, pp. 635-6).

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SOme vIRTUAl WORlDS ReQUIRe pURChASe Webkinz was the first company that required purchase of a toy for children to enter its virtual world online. The Webkinz plush animals are sold with special codes that permit children to access the website where they can play games, chat, participate in other activities, or “work” to earn KinzCash to purchase virtual things for their virtual rooms or their virtual pets. More recently, Barbie began selling a bundle that includes a fashion doll, a pink portable MP3 player, and a USB key that provides access to BarbieGirls.ca where children can play games, chat, and buy other Barbie things. Similarly, a Bratz doll can be purchased with a necklace that has a special “key” to provide access to Be-Bratz.com where children can play games, decorate their virtual rooms, communicate with each other, and buy more Bratz products. Time spent with a brand generally translates to brand preference and purchase intent. However, for children who are not old enough to purchase these products on their own, some marketers may value their engagement more for its “nag factor” – that is, children’s ability to influence their parents – and for the positive impression it is making as a foundation for children’s future interaction with the brand. When a child creates a character in a virtual world or when the child plays a game online, the child is using a firstperson perspective, so interaction with a brand will likely form, revise, or challenge the child’s association, emotions, and attitudes toward that brand (Nelson, 2005). Toyota is hoping that the youthful car enthusiasts at Whyville and Gaia will influence their parents’ car purchases and that the children will grow up with some Toyota brand loyalty. According to the New York Times, Toyota believes the product placement in Whyville is working. After only ten days, the word “Scion” had been used in chats on the Whyville website more than

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78,000 times; hundreds of virtual Scions were purchased by children using “clams,” the currency of Whyville; and the community meeting place, Club Scion, was visited 33,741 times. These new virtual Scion owners customized their cars online, drove around the website, and picked up their non-car-owning friends for a ride around Whyville (Bosman, 2006). Toyota may well be experimenting with “cradle-to-grave marketing” which emerged in the mid-1990s and refers to attracting a customer early in life and keeping that customer through adulthood and into old age: “It has been estimated that corporations whose marketing campaigns appeal to a toddler can expect to collect as much as $100,000 from her over the course of her lifetime – starting with the money spent on her as a child and, later, the money she spends on her own children and grandchildren” (Thomas, 2007, p. 125). Targeting young people before they can buy the product is a tactic being utilized by more and more marketers. “It’s early branding,” said Matthew Diamond, the chief executive of Alloy Media and Marketing, a consultancy in New York that specializes in youth marketing. “You are branding your product at a relevant time to the young person. You’re establishing that brand presence and positive association, since important buying decisions are forthcoming” (Bosman, 2006, p. 2). Capture them before they have any opinions on brands. Talk to young people in their environments in a relevant way: “Too often advertisers wait to convert them later, and then it’s too late” (Bosman, 2006, p. 2).

ChIlDReN’S vIRTUAl WORlDS mUlTIplyING Virtual worlds targeting children are a relatively new market, but one that seems to be growing quickly. It is anticipated that more than half of the young people online will belong to a virtual

world by 2011 (Olsen, 2007). Ad spending in these environments is expected to increase tenfold, and that “excludes marketers spending on their own virtual worlds, like BarbieGirls.com” (Olsen, 2007). The anticipated increased ad spending is one reason that Montgomery (2001), who helped found the Center for Digital Democracy advocacy group, emphasized that advertisements need to be labeled as such. Nickelodeon labeled ads in its Nicktropolis three-dimensional environment for kids ages seven to fourteen. Other sites are also labeling ads, but the labels are small and the ads look flashy and exciting. Color, movement and sound are just some of the features that draw in children. Identifiable characters, such as Mickey Mouse or Barbie, are also heavily used. Disney has a special section on its website for preschoolers who can be enrolled by a parent in Club Mickey. These preschoolers probably can neither read nor understand the meaning of the label, “Advertisement.” Premiums are yet another method used to draw children’s attention to a product and move them to action (Comstock, Scharrer, 2007). In addition, many ads online and off that target young children use symbols (such as flowers, butterflies, cars, or soccer balls) to attract children and help them identify with the message being sent. Although most children’s virtual worlds are now targeted for those ages seven to fourteen or eight to fifteen, some are being created for even younger children. MGA Entertainment, the toy company that makes Bratz dolls, launched MyePets.com in 2007. It targets five-year-olds to seven-year-olds, using plush animal toys that need to be “rescued” (purchased). Similar to Webkinz, the site is closed to all except those who have purchased a pet, which provides a password that allows access to the website (York, 2007). Kurnit (2000), founder and president of KidShop youth marketing company, said there are now five different age groups that are considered addressable targets for marketing to children. They are as follows:

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• • • • •

toddlers, considered children from birth to age three preschoolers ages two to five kids ages six to eight tweens ages nine to twelve teens ages thirteen to fifteen.

This presents a dilemma since television research shows that most children who are ages eight years and under do not understand the persuasive intent of marketing, and most children ages four and under cannot consistently determine the difference between advertising and programming on television, much less on the Internet (McGinnis, Gootman, & Kraak, 2006). To learn more about computer use by children, Kurnit (2000) surveyed sixty-two mothers with children ages two to five. Nearly all acknowledged their children used a computer, most started at the age of two, and they spend between one and three hours a week on computer activities. Special software, dubbed “lapware,” is available for parents to purchase so that infants and toddlers, sitting on a grownup’s lap, can learn to use the keyboard for the reward of seeing stars or shapes fly across the monitor (Thomas, 2007). “Moms unanimously agree that what they like best about their child’s computer interaction is the educational benefit their kids derive from it” (Kurnit, 2000, p.5). The computer “enjoys a special halo effect because it is seen as an educational tool that replaces television” (p. 5). A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation confirmed that finding. The 1,000 parents of children ages six months through six years who were studied were more enthusiastic about computers than any other electronic media, with 72 percent saying that it “mostly helps” children’s learning (Rideout, Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003).

‘KIDS GeTTING OlDeR yOUNGeR’ Although computers have this halo effect, Kurnit (2000) argued that they contribute to a phenom-

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enon referred to as “kids growing older younger.” Computers and the Internet give children access to learning and experiences that previously would have occurred much later in life, probably with more parental supervision. Two-thirds of Kurnit’s sample of mothers confirmed that their children are brand aware. Most thought that brand awareness began around age two or three, but about a quarter of the sample said their children began to recognize brands as early as twelve to eighteen months (Kurnit, 2000). Thomas (2007) noted other marketing studies found that children can distinguish brands as early as eighteen months and are asking for branded products, such as Cheerios, Pop-Tarts, Coke, and McDonald’s, by age two. She added that since the 1980s, marketers have been refining ways of mining the tween market, which has always been brand conscious, but now this brand consciousness is dribbling down to even younger ages. In the past, marketers that wanted to reach children did so with campaigns targeting both mothers and children, but today’s marketers are able to send their messages directly to the children, primarily because of heavy media use by the children and knowledge of children’s preferences. According to Schor (2004), marketers create direct connections with children in isolation from parents and are sometimes allied with children against parents. Furthermore, marketers reach children in parent-free environments, such as school and the Internet, and while children are watching television alone. There the marketers can speak directly to the children. Sometimes this leads to conflict with parents as children make their wants known and parents attempt to defend their ground, often unsuccessfully. The estimated $2 billion of advertising funds directed specifically at children – a larger proportion of which are going to the Internet each day – are believed to be creating a consumer culture among many children (Sheehan, 2007). Seventy-five percent of tweens in the United States want to be rich when they grow up, and

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more children in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world believe that the brands they wear define who they are and identify their social status (Schor, 2004). Two-thirds of parents say that their children describe their self-worth in terms of possessions, and half of the parents say their children would rather be at the mall than at other activities or with family (Gibbs, et. al., 2001). Critics are concerned that children are developing a consumer-based value system in which problems can be solved and happiness attained by buying things. “Contemporary American ‘tweens and teens have emerged as the most brand-oriented, consumer-involved, and materialistic generations in history. And they top the list globally” (Schor, 2004, p. 13). Experts increasingly describe them as “bonded to brands.” Schor (2004) claimed her research shows that, in addition to obesity, involvement in consumer culture appears to be at least partly responsible for dysfunction in the form of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and psychosomatic complaints. Additionally, reports of addiction to web surfing and online games are beginning to surface.

DATA mINING AND lAWS As if the explosion of marketing material disguised as content on websites for children were not enough, there is yet another concern – data mining. Children play games, take quizzes and fill out surveys to earn the currency of the social networking site in order to purchase items from the website store for their virtual environments. While they are doing this, their actions are being monitored, and data is being collected. Data mining technology can create detailed profiles of children online which can then be used to document trends in youth markets. Sometimes the information is used only by that website, but sometimes it is sold in the aggregate to other marketers (Chung & Grimes, 2005). One site that was found selling its information was Neopets.com, an online

community launched in 1999, where children can care for virtual pets, play games, participate in contests, and purchase items for their pets using online currency. Neopets collected and processed its users’ data, then sold it in the aggregate as Youth Pulse reports (Grimes & Shade, 2005). This demographic and behavioral data is valuable to marketers who want to construct highly targeted marketing campaigns. As yet, there are no laws that deal with privacy regarding aggregate data. The only law that has been enacted in the United States to protect children on the Internet is the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which became effective April 21, 2000. Regulated by the Federal Trade Commission, the law prohibits online sites from collecting personal information from children under the age of 13. This includes full name, address, email address, telephone number, information on hobbies and interests, as well as information gleaned through cookies or other types of tracking mechanisms “when they are tied to individually identifiable information” (COPPA, 2000, p. 1). The COPPA law has helped control websites’ harvesting information from children but has left teenagers open to websites’ innovative methods of gathering names, addresses, and product preferences through memberships, surveys, polls, games, newsletters, premiums, and the like. Further, no law addresses the commercialization of children of any age through immersive interaction made possible by the Internet and social interaction technology. The Children’s Television Act (CTA), passed by Congress in 1990, limited advertising in programming aimed primarily at children twelve years old and younger to ten and a half minutes an hour on weekends and twelve minutes an hour on weekdays. In addition, the CTA banned host selling which was defined as any product endorsement by a character in the program being viewed that confused a child viewer so that the child had difficulty distinguishing between the program and the advertisement (Federal

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Communications Commission, 1990). However, neither of these limitations affects the Internet where marketing messages are likely to be more immersive, of longer duration, and processed with less skepticism. Moore and Rideout (2007) studied online marketing directed at children and identified six issues that they thought were significant in terms of public policy relevance. They are as follows: •

•

•

•

•

•

Questionable nutritional profiles of promoted brands; an overwhelming majority of the products promoted to children online were of poor nutritional quality. Tacit persuasion that occurs through games; the simple enjoyment of an advergame can influence children. Absence of limits on total time exposed to ads; children can participate in advertainment for as long as they want and can return as often as they want. Use of viral marketing; children are asked to e-mail their friends with brand-related information, which is often influential because it comes from a peer. Lack of breaks between ads; children need to be reminded that they are watching or participating in an advertisement and so should be vigilant. Direct inducements to purchase through special rewards offered; for example, purchase product X for access to game tips, or for access to a secret site, or to save your game score in the Hall of Fame.

fUTURe TReNDS The future may bring even more personal interaction. Technology is now able to put talking heads on websites so that visitors can interact with them. The idea is that visitors will spend more time on a site that has interactive characters, explore it further, remember it more easily, and return to

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it more often. How long will it be before these talking heads are brand-related icons that interact with children, using data mined from the child’s previous visits, to build a trusting relationship and instill loyalty? As technology advances to offer more bells and whistles on the web, more ways of collecting data, and more opportunities for marketers to connect with children, it behooves the players involved to step back and assess the pros and cons of this technology, of the opportunities that it enables, and to look with the concern of a parent at the long-term consequences that could result. Schor (2004) quoted a critic who pointed out that parents are put in the position of “playing David to the corporate Goliaths” (p. 184). Schor stressed that parents blame the advertising industry, and the industry blames parents, when both bear responsibility. Advertising agencies, clients, and media should recognize that children are vulnerable subjects and place the “need to do well by kids” over and above the pressure to make money. This could mean eliminating the “nag factor,” providing shorter and less immersive games, or including less product placement and branding in them. It also might mean that online sites determine uniform style and placement of ads. Parents should not shrug off the consumptive society as inevitable but should take proactive measures to assure the well being of their children. This might mean limiting their children’s time on the computer, spending time with their children on the computer, or teaching them about the nature and intent of advertising. The concept of advertising is a complex one for children to understand. Very young children see television ads simply as sound and visuals presented in a brief, entertaining format. By age four, most preschoolers recognize commercials as being distinct from television programming. Also, these children can match characters shown in a commercial with the products that they promote. However, it is between the ages of seven-and-ahalf and eight-and-a-half that the selling nature

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of a commercial is understood by a majority of the children (Comstock & Sharrer). No research has yet been done on children’s comprehension of Internet advertising which, it seems, would be much more difficult to differentiate and for which it would be more difficult to recognize the selling intent. Websites are available to help educate children, teens, and even parents and law enforcement officers regarding Internet use. One such site is NetSmartz.org; yet even it includes Opinion Polls clearly, although inconspicuously, labeled “Marketing Research.” The advertising industry has addressed concerns regarding online marketing to children through self-regulatory guidelines established by the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (2006), which is a branch of the National Advertising Review Council. The guidelines apply to children under age twelve and address blurring of advertising and editorial content online, use of program personalities, premiums, kids’ clubs, sweepstakes and contests both online and off. For example, the guidelines state that when an advertiser integrates an ad into a game or activity, the advertiser should make clear, “in a manner that is easily understood by the intended audience,” that it is an ad (p. 7). This is easier said than done. Simply labeling it may not be enough. Take a look at a map of the Nickelodeon website (Figure 1), and you will see the word “Advertisement” reversed with white type on black. It is run horizontally in some places, rotated so that it is vertical in other places, and shortened to “Ad” in still other places. Sometimes the word “Ad” is not reversed (white on black) and is, therefore, even more difficult to find. On the left side of the page are buttons to click for more games and movies plus podcasts, a virtual world, blogs, message boards, and shopping. When a child selects something from this list, ads appear on the new page, sometimes as a window that has to be closed. Because the ads are sprinkled throughout, the site is a virtual minefield of commercial messages for children attempting to navigate it. Simply placing all of

the ads in a clearly designated area would help children differentiate ads from page content, but that will not solve all of the related issues.

CONClUSION Children fall into three general categories as consumers of marketing communication. They are viewed as the primary target for some goods, such as cereals and toys. Other marketers see them as an influence market, one that is sought after for its ability to affect purchases made by parents and other caregivers. Still other marketers see children as a future market that must be courted so that brand preference is instilled long before the need for the branded product arises (Comstock & Sharrer, 2004). All of these marketers are sending their messages to younger and younger audiences, and the messages are coming in more interactive and immersive media with little regulation. Children, some of whom do not yet understand what advertising is, are encountering it on a regular basis. Although the self-regulatory guidelines adopted by the Children’s Advertising Review Unit are an excellent start, they must be enforced through attentive monitoring. The websites themselves need to find better ways to arrange and display ads so children can more easily and knowledgeably choose whether or not to participate in their many enticements. Close parental supervision is, of course, a deterrent, but parents first must understand that Disney, Barbie, and even Whyville are commercial enterprises with marketing messages, both apparent and discreet, and often undeserving of a halo effect. Parental vigilance is needed, and explanations are necessary to prepare children for the marketing messages aimed at them. Advertising agencies and clients should place themselves in the parental role and find ways to connect with their vulnerable subjects in ways that are ethically acceptable so that government is not called to step in.

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Figure 1. The Nickelodeon website has ads that are scattered throughout. It demonstrates that merely labeling an ad is not enough. The ads should be placed together in an area clearly designated and easily understood by the intended audience.

Thus, as online interactive marketing becomes progressively more common for increasingly younger online audiences, it requires increasingly more attention from those who need to be aware of its dynamic and immersive nature, moderate its effects, and from those in positions to control its use – be they industry watchdogs, advertising agencies, clients, media, parents, or government officials.

RefeReNCeS Bosman, J. (2006, June 14). Hey, kid, you want to buy a Toyota Scion? New York Times, C1, 2.

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Children’s Advertising Review Unit. (2006). Selfregulatory program for children’s advertising. Retrieved March 16, 2008, from http://www.caru. org/guidelines/index.asp Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. (2000). Retrieved March 12, 2008, from http://www. coppa.org/comply.htm Chung, G., & Grimes, S. M. (2005). Data mining the kids: Surveillance and market research strategies in children’s online games. Canadian Journal of Communication, 30, 527–548.

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Comstock, G., & Scharrer, E. (2007). Media and the American child. Burlington, MA: Academic Press. Federal Communications Commission. (1990). Children’s educational television: FCC consumer facts. Retrieved March 14, 2008, from http://www. fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/childtv.html Gibbs, N., August, M., Cole, W., Lofaro, L., Padgett, T., Ressner, J., & Winters, R. (2001). Who’s in charge here? Time, 158, 40–48. Hansell, S. (2006, October 16). Joining the party, eager to make friends. The New York Times, C2, 1. Huffaker, D. A., & Calvert, S. L. (2005). Gender, identity and language use in teenage blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(2), article 1. Retrieved January 23, 2008, from http:// jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html Kurnit, P. (2000). Kids getting older younger. Retrieved January 23, 2008, from http://www. aef.com/on_campus/classroom/speaker_pres/ data/35 Lenhart, A., & Madden, M. (2007). Social networking sites and teens (Pew Internet & American Life Project). Retrieved January 25, 2008, from http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/c/1/topics.asp McGinnis, J. M., Gootman, J. A., & Kraak, V. I. (2006). Food marketing to children and youth: Threat or opportunity? (Committee on Food and the Diets of Children and Youth). Retrieved January 22, 2008, from http://www.nap.edu/ catalog/11514.html Montgomery, K. C. (2001). Digital kids: The new on-line children’s consumer culture. In D. G. Singer & J. L. Singer (Eds.), Handbook of children and the media (pp. 635-650). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication.

Moore, E. S., & Rideout, V. J. (2007). Online marketing of food to children: Is it just fun and games? Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 26(2), 202–220. doi:10.1509/jppm.26.2.202 Nelson, M. R. (2005). Exploring consumer response to advergaming. In C. P. Haugtvedt, K. A. Machleit, & R. F. Yalch (Eds.), Online consumer psychology: Understanding and influencing consumer behavior in the virtual world (pp. 167-194). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Olsen, S. (2007, October 16). Are kids ready for ads in virtual worlds? Retrieved January 23, 2008, from http://www.news.com/Are-kids-ready-forads-in-virtual-worlds/2009-1024_3-6213661. html Rideout, V. J., Vandewater, E. A., & Wartella, E. A. (2003). Zero to six: Electronic media in the lives of infants, toddlers and preschoolers (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation). Retrieved March 20, 2008, from http://www.kff.org/entmedia/3378.cfm Roberts, D. F., Foehr, U. G., & Rideout, V. (2005). Generation M: Media in the lives of 8-18 year-olds (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation). Retrieved February 5, 2008, from http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm Schor, J. (2004). Born to buy: The commercialized child and the new consumer culture. New York: Scribner. Sheehan, K. (2004). Controversies in contemporary advertising. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Sullivan, B. (2005). Kids, blogs and too much information. Retrieved January 25, 2008, from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7668788/ Thomas, S. G. (2007). Buy, buy baby. London: HarperCollins. York, E. B. (2007). The hottest thing in kids marketing? Imitating Webkinz. Advertising Age, 78(40), 38.

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Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Advergaming: Advertising a product through a game. Originally coined in reference to video games, the term is now also used for online games. Advertainment: Entertainment that incorporates brand advertising. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA): Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which became effective April 21, 2000. It prohibits websites from collecting personal information from children under the age of thirteen. Children’s Television Act (CTA): Children’s Television Act of 1990 that limited commercial

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advertising in children’s TV programming for twelve-year old children and younger to ten and a half minutes an hour on weekends and twelve minutes an hour on weekdays. Host Selling: Product endorsement by a TV character. Interactive Marketing: Conversation-based form of marketing enhanced by technology. Viral Marketing: Self-replicating marketing messages ranging from text to video that are spread by the word of mouth through social networks. Virtual World: Computer-simulated environment in which individuals interact with others through avatars.

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Chapter 42

The Use of Social Media by Nonprofit Organizations An Examination from the Diffusion of Innovations Perspective Richard D. Waters North Carolina State University, USA

ABSTRACT Nonprofit organizations are an essential part of the social, political, and economic landscape of contemporary society. Social media provide ample opportunities for these organizations to increase their community presence, impact, effectiveness, and efficiency. A qualitative study of 39 nonprofit leaders explored how nonprofits are utilizing the potential of the social media technologies to carry out their programs and services. Thematic analysis revealed that nonprofits are slowly embracing the possibilities offered by the new social interaction technologies. Most nonprofit organizations lag behind and wait to see how other nonprofits incorporate these new communication outlets into their budgets and daily operations. Paralleling Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory, innovators and early adopters are using social media to revitalize their fundraising and volunteering efforts while the majority lags behind.

INTRODUCTION Nonprofit organizations are an essential part of the social, political, and economic landscape of contemporary society. They provide a way for individuals to connect to their communities, effectively participate in the democratic process and ultimately to “make a difference.” Currently, there are more than 1.9 million nonprofits in the United States (IRS, 2006). Though it is difficult to DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch042

generalize about what nonprofit organizations are or what they do, most of these organizations share similar experiences, for example, raising funds or attracting volunteers. Despite widespread interests (e.g., healthcare, economic development, religion, political, and social issues), a nonprofit organization can be defined as a voluntary association of a group of individuals bound together to pursue shared missions or goals (Lohmann 1992). In such mission-based organizations members are neither forced to relate nor enticed by the prospect of personal profit or gain, while

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their operation is facilitated by an endowment of resources. Through their mission-oriented work, nonprofits generate social capital—the attitude and willingness of people to engage in collective activity to address issues on the basis of shared values and beliefs, which in turn reinforce trust, confidence, and commitment of the participants (Hall, 2005). Although nonprofits vary enormously in scope and scale, ranging from informal grassroots organizations with no assets and employees to multibillion-dollar foundations, they are facing new challenges as technological advances change the way nonprofits carry out their missions. Moreover, external stakeholders increasingly influence nonprofit organizations to adopt new technologies, including social media. The present chapter introduces a qualitative study of 39 nonprofit leaders designed to explore how nonprofits are utilizing the potential of social media to carry out their programs and services. During the study, twelve one-on-one interviews and three focus groups were conducted with nonprofit organization communicators.

BACKGROUND: NONpROfITS AND WeB 2.0 TeChNOlOGIeS Accountability and Transparency Topper (2007) encouraged nonprofit organizations to consider all types of social media to help spread the word about their programs. Whether it be through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, Twitter updates, or podcasts, increasing the awareness of a nonprofit’s activities will ultimately benefit the organization in terms of increased donations, volunteer hours, and participants in their programs and services. “It’s pretty simple really. My job is to do anything I can to help educate people about what we do. Technology is helping me reach more people than our newsletter and brochures ever could,” said one senior communications officer for a nonprofit research

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organization participating in the interview. RSS feeds, podcasting, and making pictures or videos of the nonprofit’s events available through sites similar to Flickr or YouTube are still mainly a one-way distribution of information. Albrycht (2004) encourages nonprofits to truly become interactive with their stakeholders by blogging about their successes and failures. Blogs can be useful in spreading word about a nonprofits’ programs or services, but they can also be used to address an individual’s questions and concerns (Wasserman, 2005). Increasingly, nonprofit organizations are being challenged to demonstrate their accountability to donors, their operating community, and their clients and program participants. Blogs provide a channel for open communications. Individuals can openly question an organization’s practices in front of their virtual peers, and the organization’s answer (or lack thereof) is available for everyone to scrutinize. Marken (2005) argues that an organization’s blog can provide a powerful strategic and tactical communications tool because it offers an organization the opportunity to respond to inquiries directly. This direct communication works to solidify relationships the organization has established with its stakeholders. When organizations fail to respond to comments or delete them from their blog, they risk damaging the trust they have built with their stakeholders. Finally, blogs allow individuals to discuss a nonprofit’s events in a manner that brings people together. “Last summer, we wanted to hold rallies to draw attention to the harm (a company’s) operations were causing to the local watershed. We posted an announcement on our blog and had a lot of replies within 24 hours,” explained one of the participants during the focus group discussion. “The connections we made online resulted in a large turnout at our rallies.” For this nonprofit organization the virtual connection resulted in a unified voice addressing an environmental concern in the physical world.

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Fundraising Social media are also helping considerably with nonprofit organizations fundraising efforts. As it was noted in the previous research (Waters, 2007b), nonprofits organizations incorporate blog management into their online fundraising, efforts because blogs offer an effective and economic means of two-way communication with potential donors. One study participant in charge of fundraising said: “We had one donor say he gave to our organization because of our blogging. We answered his questions about our programs in a timely manner, and he wanted to see us continue to advance our cause.” Recently, new websites have been created to facilitate charitable donations to nonprofits in lieu of birthday and wedding gifts. Sites, such as ChangingthePresent.org, allow individuals to register their special occasions online and have invitations sent to family and friends. These invitations encourage the recipients to donate to a specified nonprofit organization instead of purchasing a gift for the event’s host.

Cybervolunteering One new aspect of nonprofit organizations has emerged because of social interaction technologies. Cybervolunteering is similar to traditional volunteering in that an individual gives time and effort to work for an organization, except the work is done remotely through an Internet connection rather than being required to be onsite to complete the tasks. Online volunteers perform a variety of tasks, including: translating documents, proofreading and editing reports, designing logos and communications materials, moderating online discussion groups, and even database management. Virtual volunteering has helped many smaller nonprofit organizations attract volunteers with highly technical skills because the volunteers are able to perform work on these complex projects on their own time rather than having to work only

when the nonprofits are open (Cravens, 2000). Virtual volunteering has helped increase awareness of some nonprofit organizations’ services because of vlogging (or video blogging). Similar to text-based blogs, vlogs provide regular updates and commentary on a topic through online videos. “We simply don’t have the resources to produce our own videos, but one of our virtual volunteers videotapes our events and activities then edits them down to short videos that we can distribute to our donors and government officials,” emphasized an interviewed communications officer from a nonprofit focusing on substance abuse recovery. Volunteers are able to develop sophisticated videos that can be presented on YouTube, Google video, or the organizations’ own websites. While these video presentations can be helpful, many organizations wish to have more control over their content. The organizations may record their own footage, upload the files to the Internet, and relay them to their cybervolunteers, who work remotely for a nonprofit organization to edit the video clips down into a clip ready for widespread Internet distribution.

Online Scheduling and Internet Conferencing Previous research has found that nonprofits use websites, such as Meetingwizard.com and other online meeting scheduling services, to arrange meetings for their boards of directors (Lipnack & Stamps, 2000). These scheduling services offer for those who are invited to the meetings the ability to reserve a seat at the meeting or state that they would not be attending. One of the study participants, a communications director for a healthcare nonprofit said: “We use a scheduling system online that allows our board members to tell us whether or not they’re coming to the meeting. The system also lets them read the minutes from the previous meeting and also lets them discuss the agenda before the meeting starts.” Internet conferencing has also helped nonprof-

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its reach a larger number of constituents. A public information officer for a nonprofit educational institution who participated in the focus group noted, “Instead of just looking at people in our city, we’re now able to reach out and help people across the country. Our local research and planning efforts are now having an impact on communities all over the U.S.” By taking advantage of the boundary-free reach of the Internet, nonprofit organizations are able to increase the magnitude of their training and strategic planning efforts by reaching larger populations while reducing the costs of holding sessions on-site (Mitschke, 2008). Whereas some scheduling software allows individuals to offer comments about a meeting’s agenda or minutes from past meetings, one participant volunteered that his organization was actively incorporating a wiki - a social software application that allows multiple users to add and edit content collaboratively. Another focus group participants said, “It took some convincing but now that our wiki is up and running, we’re getting great feedback. It lets our senior staffers share their knowledge about organization procedures in a non-threatening manner.” Fitch (2007) felt that wikis would be a valuable institutional resource since content can be updated and maintained by all users and can be instantly updated as the organization’s environment changes.

nonprofit sector to solve information technology problems. TechSoup.org and other similar forums are also used to help develop coalitions and grassroots movements within the nonprofit sector so that societal issues can be brought to the forefront of the public’s attention (McNutt & Boland, 1999). The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), a membership organization of nonprofit technology professionals, helps the nonprofit sector utilize the latest technology resources to enhance community outreach and pursue effective fundraising, including online fundraising campaigns.1

The USe Of SOCIAl INTeRACTION TeChNOlOGIeS By NONpROfIT ORGANIZATIONS: A QUAlITATIve STUDy Nonprofit organizations often face operational and technical challenges in carrying out their missions due to the financial constraints. However, one recent survey revealed that public relations practitioners in nonprofit organizations were not laggards in the adoption of new technologies (Porter & Sallot, 2003). Instead, they were found to be advocates for new technology. The purpose of the present study was to explore how nonprofit organizations use social media and for what purposes.

Technical Assistance prior Research One final area where social interaction technologies are used by nonprofits involves the organizations reaching out to one another for technical assistance in implementing new technologies. Nonprofit organizations, large and small, have embraced the Internet Relay Chat, instant messaging and most commonly online forums so that the sectors can turn to one another for help in designing and evaluating programs and services. One such forum hosted by TechSoup.org is dedicated to nonprofit sector employees and volunteers who have an interest in helping others working in the

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Review of literature on the topic of the use of technology by nonprofit organizations shows that they have slowly come to adopt new interactive online applications and services (Porter & Sallot, 2003). Employees of nonprofit organizations mostly use the Internet for productivity, efficiency, research, evaluation, and issues management (Sallot, Porter, & Acosta-Azuru, 2004). Nonprofits are generally successful in giving their organization a professional virtual presence and have been encouraged to capitalize on the interactive

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nature of the Internet to reach out to like-minded individuals when focusing on advocacy efforts (McNutt & Boland, 1999; Waters, 2007), but they often fail to incorporate interactive elements and two-way communication into their websites (Kang & Norton, 2004). In part, their reluctance to incorporate the elements of interactivity has been based on their lack of sufficient resources to maintain sophisticated websites (Hill & White, 2000). Nonprofits often have minimal staff to monitor communications efforts, such as web traffic and Internet requests (Guo & Acar, 2005). Instead, they are more likely to dedicate their time, energy, and financial resources to carrying out their programs and services, rather than their communication efforts (Markam, Johnson, & Bonjean, 1999). Ryan (2003) raised additional concerns. A survey of nonprofit communicators showed that most practitioners have the skills needed for effective web communication. However, they struggle with teaching others the components of good websites. Training in concepts and technical skills were also shown to be problematic. Yet, nonprofits recognize the beneficial nature of web-based communication, and they are making efforts to increase their competencies especially as they see how the medium can benefit their organization’s programs and services. Corder (2001) indicated that nonprofit organizations are more likely to use interactive technologies and emerging social media if their external stakeholders, such as donors or volunteers, are using them. With the expansion of social interaction technologies, nonprofits quickly have to learn how to use different applications, or they risk being viewed as behind the technological curve (Var, Chon, & Doh, 2001). Increases in web-based inquiries, the exponential growth of e-philanthropy (or Internet-based fundraising) and new developments in social media have led nonprofits to become more engaged with the Internet.

Theoretical perspective It takes time for innovations to diffuse within a system, and organizations go through several phases while implementing an innovation. These stages begin with identification and move through experimentation and rationalization before widespread technology transfer occurs (Raho, Belohlav, & Fiedler, 1987). Lundvall (1992) argued that technological change is gradual and cumulative in nature. For more than six decades, scholars have studied how innovative technologies expand throughout social groups. The diffusion of innovations theory by Everett Rogers examines “the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (2003, p. 5). Research has shown that innovations are largely spread through interpersonal channels and networks. The first adopters of technology are innovators, enterprising individuals who imagine the possibilities of the new technology and are eager to try it. As innovators test the new technology and discuss their experiences, early adopters take mental notes based on the evaluations of the innovators to confirm their decision to either adopt or reject an innovation. Early adopters are known for their well-informed decision making abilities, and they often represent the opinion leaders in a community. When the early adopters share their experiences, it creates a domino effect throughout the rest of the social system as the early majority group adopts the innovation. After the majority of a social group adopts an innovation, the late majority catches on. Rogers labels the last few members of a population to adopt a technology, laggards.

Research Questions The diffusion of innovations theoretical perspective discussed above informed the following research questions:

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RQ1: How are nonprofit organizations using social interaction technologies? RQ2: How often are nonprofit organizations incorporating these technologies into their efforts? To answer these exploratory questions, twelve in-depth interviews and three focus group discussions were conducted. Although the findings cannot be generalized to the entire nonprofit sector because of the qualitative nature of the study, the researcher used a purposive sampling design to ensure that the participants were selected with a variety of experiences in adopting social interaction technologies. The interviews and focus groups were conducted outside of the nonprofit organizations so that the participants felt comfortable to discuss their organizations’ use of technologies openly.

participants The participants in this research study represented the diverse composition of the nonprofit sector. They came from a variety of cultural backgrounds: Caucasians (41 percent), Black or African Americans (26 percent), Hispanic/Latinos (13 percent), and Asian/Pacific Islanders (10 percent), and Native Americans (10 percent). More than half (62 percent) of the participants were female. Slightly more than half worked at nonprofits with budgets larger than $1 million, and 38 percent worked at organizations with annual budgets under $300,000. All six of the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ nonprofit subsections were represented: namely, arts/culture, education, health, human services, public/society benefit, and religious organizations.

Sampling Technique Snowball sampling was used to recruit active users of social software in the nonprofit setting after three individuals responded to an initial online invitation posted on the TechSoup.org discus-

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sion board. During the interviews, participants were asked about their motivations for using the technologies, how they used social software, and what were their successes and failures with incorporating social media into their organization’s communication practices. At the conclusion of the interviews, the participants were asked if they knew any other nonprofit organizations that were actively using Web 2.0 technologies or specifically individuals who might be willing to discuss their organizations successes and failures with the new technologies.

focus Groups For the three focus groups, participants were contacted based on their membership in professional communication associations, such as the Public Relations Society of America, the International Association of Business Communicators, and the American Marketing Association. All of these associations have nonprofit organization divisions. These individuals were informed that there would be no financial compensation for their participation; however, they would be exposed to others’ views on the benefits and challenges of incorporating social software into their communication efforts. Refreshments were served at the beginning of the focus groups, and an experienced moderator was used to ensure that all focus group participants had the opportunity to speak about their experiences with social software whether they were experienced users or had not implemented the strategy into their programming.

Interviews For the one-on-one interviews and the focus group sessions, both audio and video recordings were made to maintain accuracy in the participants’ meaning. Following an approved institutional review board protocol, participants were required to sign a form indicating that they consented to be recorded. In-depth interviews and focus groups

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were chosen for this project since these methods allow researchers to openly explore the issues without trying to classify them into predetermined categories (Creswell, 1997).

Thematic Analysis Thematic analysis involved reading the transcriptions and comparing each statement with the others while looking for similarities and grouping them together by category (Lindlof, 1995). Once the data stopped providing new insights into the subject being examined, the process ended. However, the researcher had to take the findings back to the participants for a member check phase to make sure that their words and experiences were interpreted correctly. Validity checks prevent the researcher from coming to faulty conclusions based on the analysis. Member checks were conducted within ten days of the final analysis.

ReSUlTS AND DISCUSSION The first research question sought to determine how these nonprofit organizations were incorporating social media into their daily operations. Thematic analysis revealed that social interaction technologies were used to facilitate virtual meetings, to boost fundraising efforts, to demonstrate an organization’s accountability and transparency, and to reach out to a new group of volunteers. Though the results of this qualitative study cannot be generalized to the entire nonprofit sector, they highlight some major points of emphasis that parallel Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory. The three participants of the in-depth interviews who responded to the initial posting on TechSoup.org were clearly innovators, using diffusion terminology. Throughout the interviews, they spoke proudly of what the new technologies were allowing them to do with their organizations in ways that the organizations’ management and board of directors had not imagined. One female

participant (communications officer) said: “My [executive director] knew that web conferencing was a possibility but she had no idea how easy it was to use. It has increased our efficiency tenfold, especially with conducting our board meetings. We’re not tied to having a monthly meeting in a location that requires members to drive to and from the meeting every month. They’re happier, we’re happier, and our work is being done more effectively.” Another public relations officer said that they had begun using web conferencing as a way to connect their affiliate branches throughout the Southeast. “Social media are helping us reduce the amount of money we spend on overhead. We can meet virtually, get the same amount of work done, and not run up travel expenses.” As the number of Congressional hearings (e.g., 2005’s “Charities and Charitable Giving: Proposals for Reform”) and public scrutiny intensify, nonprofit organizations have had to work harder to demonstrate their social and fiscal accountability. In 1999, the Independent Sector - a coalition of corporations, foundations, and nonprofit organizations that work together to strengthen America’s nonprofit sector - conducted research and found that public confidence ranged from 28 percent to 72 percent for different types of nonprofit organizations (Saxon-Harrold, 1999). A Gallup Poll from May 2005 found that only 15 percent of the American public has a great deal of confidence in charitable organizations (Light, 2005). The falling levels of confidence were due to the increasing number of questions the public has about the effectiveness and efficiency of nonprofit organizations. Light (2005) maintains that the public is less concerned about nonprofit organizations’ ability to “show us the mission” but instead is more concerned with how nonprofits can demonstrate their impact and reduce the amount of overhead they spend on their programs. As the use of social media advances through the stages of the diffusion of innovations process, more nonprofit organizations will come to see that social

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media can help them demonstrate their financial and social accountability to audiences that are becoming increasing more web savvy. Of all the advances the Internet has brought to nonprofit organizations, they seem most receptive to how it has changed their fundraising efforts. A representative of the Harvard Business School commented that nonprofit management officers who fail to recognize the power of e-philanthropy will find their organizations falling behind the curve. Organizations seem to be receptive to incorporating web-based fundraising; however, they have not truly grasped the benefits of social media yet. Increasingly, nonprofits are recognizing how blogs can be used to maintain a two-way communication channel with their donors and like-minded individuals. They also have begun to explore the impact of YouTube, Flickr, and other video and photograph sharing sites as vehicles for spreading information about their programs. Interestingly, the results of this research contradict the findings of previous nonprofit organization studies. Often, changes stem from the nation’s largest nonprofits and trickle their way down to smaller, local nonprofit organizations. For example, the national headquarters of the American Red Cross was one of the first organizations to conduct official fundraising campaigns online after the 1999 Kosovo relief crisis. Their successes led other larger, established nonprofits to experiment with online fundraising (Wallace, 2003). Waters (2007b) documents the rapid expansion of Internet fundraising from large nonprofits and notes how they expanded to smaller community-based organizations. The participants in this study indicated that a reverse effect might be present. Perhaps because of the strong connectivity involved with social media, smaller nonprofits tend to be innovators and early adopters of social media technology. One participant said: “Smaller nonprofits are at greater risk for falling by the wayside because they don’t have a huge financial endowment to fall back on during tough times. They need to reach

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out to their donors, volunteers, and everyone else however they can reach them. Facebook, YouTube, and all the other websites give us more channels to reach people.” Reflecting the diffusion stages, one public information officer from a large national nonprofit admitted the following: “We lag behind others in how we use technology. We have to follow the guidelines from our national office. We can’t take advantage of Facebook or YouTube with local efforts because of the possibility of risking the national brand.” For this individual, there was a desire to explore social software within the local organization; however, a bureaucracy prevented the organization from pursuing this option. For others, they seemed to fall into the late majority, or laggard cycle, simply because they were unsure of how to use social media to advance their causes. “I really would love to be able to record a video and send it out to people when we have good news to share, but I just don’t know how,” said one participant dealing with fundraising. Still for others, the current success level using traditional communication channels has prevented their organizations from reaching out to new communication technologies: “My boss says if it’s not broken, why fix it. I think we could benefit from seeing how other nonprofits are using the technology, but a strong resistance to change is keeping us from moving forward.” As the Chronicle of Philanthropy and other nationally recognized nonprofit trade publications highlight the successes of organizations that use the social media, increasing numbers of individuals will recognize the potential the software has for their organizations. Though it may take time for nonprofits to truly incorporate social media into their communication practices, the exponential growth of the use of these technologies by the entire American public—not just the “Millennial generation”—will result in greater understanding of social media and how it can be used effectively. The second research question sought to de-

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termine how often nonprofit organizations were using social interaction technologies. Even though the study participants offered several different examples of how social media helped them advance their missions, several nonprofit communicators expressed concern about the implementation. “I see the benefit of these strategies, I really do. But, I simply don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to using them,” said a public affairs director for a large religious nonprofit. Another communications officer asserted, “If I had more time, I would really like to see [my organization] produce some podcasts or videos to help get our messages out beyond our core supporters.” Finally, one public relations director stated, “People who use the Internet a lot get annoyed when they don’t get immediate replies. I wish I had the time to be able to sit in front of a blog and monitor it all day, but I don’t.” Another concern that nonprofit organizations had involved the training necessary to maintain the social media functions. Reflecting Hill and White’s (2000) results, several nonprofit communicators said they simply did not know how to incorporate these strategies into their efforts. “It took me forever to figure out how to design web pages and that was with one of those WebSites for Dummies books. I wouldn’t even know where to begin with RSS feeds or podcasting,” said one senior communications officer at a science and technology museum. Another summed up her feelings by saying: “Even though I blog regularly on my personal website, I’d be scared to represent the organization. I’m not sure I’m prepared to be the sole voice of my organization online, and I certainly don’t want others to chime in on certain topics.” Reflecting the diffusion of innovations, several individuals said that they had been using social media sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, for some time, and others had mixed experience levels with Flickr and other social interaction technologies. One focus group participant summed up her experience saying, “I think I was one of the first

of my peer group to use Facebook. I’m totally comfortable using it for me. I’d have to see how other organizations used it before I tried it with (my agency).” Several nonprofit organizations represented in a study appear to be in the early majority phase. They are waiting to see how the innovators and early adopters incorporate these technologies into their daily work especially since they have experience with them in their personal lives. The question that must be asked with future research, then, is who are the innovators and early adopters of the social media technologies for the nonprofit sector. One might expect that the larger nonprofits (e.g., those with annual budgets greater than $1 million) would be the technology leaders because of the increased availability of resources. However, based on the results of this study, smaller nonprofit organizations appeared to be the innovators of the social media. Despite the lack of resources, smaller organizations have created a sense of community and the social media have brought them further together to work towards the organizations’ missions. A volunteer in charge of communications for the nonprofit with the smallest budget said, “[Our organization] doesn’t have the resources to create an expensive marketing or public relations campaign to compete with other nonprofits in town, but using social media lets me reach a lot of people without spending a lot of cash.”

fUTURe TReNDS As virtual presence becomes even more important for an organization’s day-to-day operations, nonprofits are beginning to learn how to use Web 2.0 technologies to reach the stakeholders. The new approach is gaining support from donors, volunteers, and nonprofit organization clients. Technologies such as podcasting, blogging, microblogging and vlogging, RSS feeds and tagging, photo and video sharing, and social networking

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services, have created a promise for a nonprofit sector with greater outreach and interactivity. This trend in using social interaction technologies for strategic communication is resonating with many nonprofits as the interactivity offered by social media channels offers a unique ability to cultivate and develop a two-way communication relationship with the stakeholders rather than maintaining a one-way information conduit. Incorporating blog management into their communications efforts allowed, for example, a Seattle-based environmental nonprofit organization Oceana to increase donations and interest in volunteering at the organization (Waters, 2007b). Shortly after this news spread through TechSoup. org, many larger organizations began expressing interest in how they could successfully blog with their stakeholders. Social software allows these smaller organizations to demonstrate their fiscal and social accountability to external and internal audiences, and the software is frequently used to help foster a greater sense of community within the nonprofit sector (Bach & Stark, 2004). Even though some nonprofits are still resisting the integration of new technologies into their strategic communication efforts, other nonprofits (mostly smaller organizations) are serving as the harbingers of change. It is reasonable to assume that as their success stories spread, more nonprofits will be inclined to adopt social interaction technologies in the future and their influence will be felt across the entire nonprofit sector.

CONClUSION Nonprofit organizations are carrying out vital work to address the nation’s social, economic, and political problems. Social interaction technologies are slowly changing the way nonprofits perform their work allowing nonprofits to reach out to the community in effective, open and transparent ways. Most importantly for nonprofits, social interaction technologies allow users to share

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their thoughts and opinions and give feedback on how the operation of an organization can be improved (Finin, Ding, Zhou, & Joshi, 2005). It may be of interest that communication consulting companies that work with nonprofit organizations have started to distribute guides to teach how to use blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, wikis, virtual worlds, and online social networking to advance the organizational missions in an Internet-driven world. Fichter (2007), for example, encourages nonprofits to start using new technologies and learn about them first hand. Social interaction technologies offer a rich, participatory, and collaborative experience for the user—the type of experience shown to result in enduring relationships between an organization and its stakeholders (Tyler, McGirr, & Stanley, 1998). These technologies allow community members to participate and collaborate in a nonprofit organization’s efforts in a meaningful and gratifying way (Needleman, 2007). Whether through posing questions to the organization’s discussion forum or blog or receiving updates about programs and services through microblogging, social media allow nonprofits to become more open and attractive to their stakeholders. Based on the results of the interviews and focus groups conducted for this research project, it appears that currently the use of social software by the nonprofit sector still is still in the early adopters stage. However, to extrapolate findings of this study to the nonprofit sector, more research should be undertaken. The rapid growth of the usage of social media by nonprofit organizations parallels how the social interaction technologies are being used by individuals in a larger society. Early adopters of social media are encouraging their organizations to pursue the strategy of innovations, and take the possible risks that are paying off with increased fundraising results and volunteer recruitment efforts. As the adoption of the existing social software tools and applications continues to progress through the diffusion of innovations stages, the nonprofit sector can

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only wonder what is beginning to emerge on the horizon for the innovators to explore.

RefeReNCeS Albrycht, E. (2004). Turning blogs into useful communications tools. Public Relations Tactics, 11(3), 14–15. Bach, J., & Stark, D. (2004). Link, search, interact. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(3), 101–117. doi:10.1177/0263276404043622 Corder, K. (2001). Acquiring new technology. Administration & Society, 33(2), 194–219. doi:10.1177/00953990122019730 Cravens, J. (2000). Virtual volunteering: Online volunteers providing assistance to human service agencies. Journal of Technology in Human Services, 17(2/3), 119–136. doi:10.1300/ J017v17n02_02

Hall, P. D. (2005). Historical perspectives on nonprofit organizations in the United States. In R. D. Herman (Ed.), The Jossey-Bass handbook of nonprofit leadership and management (pp. 3-38). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Hill, L. N., & White, C. (2000). Public relations practitioners’ perception of the World Wide Web as a communications tool. Public Relations Review, 26(1), 31–51. doi:10.1016/S0363-8111(00)000291 Internal Revenue Service. (2006). Tax-exempt organization and other entities listed on the exempt organization business master file, by type of organization and internal revenue code section, fiscal years 2002-2005. In R. Schwartz (Ed.), Internal Revenue Service data book 2006 (p. 55). Washington, DC. Retrieved March 3, 2008, from http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/06databk.pdf

Creswell, J. W. (1997). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five traditions. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Kang, S., & Norton, H. E. (2004). Nonprofit organizations’ use of the World Wide Web: Are they sufficiently fulfilling organizational goals? Public Relations Review, 30(3), 279–284. doi:10.1016/j. pubrev.2004.04.002

Fichter, D. (2007). Seven strategies for marketing in a Web 2.0 world. Marketing Library Services, 21(2), Retrieved March 1, 2008, from http://www. infotoday.com/MLS/mar07/Fichter.shtml

Light, P. C. (2005, September 1). What it takes to make charities effective. The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Retrieved April 20, 2007, from http://www. brookings.edu/views/op-ed/light/20050901.htm

Finin, T., Ding, L., Zhou, L., & Joshi, A. (2005). Social networking on the Semantic Web. The Learning Organization, 12(5), 418–419. doi:10.1108/09696470510611384 Fitch, D. (2007). Wherefore Wikis? Journal of Technology in Human Services, 25(4), 79–85. doi:10.1300/J017v25n04_05 Guo, C., & Acar, M. (2005). Understanding collaboration among nonprofit organizations: Combining resource dependency, institutional, and network perspectives. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 34(3), 340–361. doi:10.1177/0899764005275411

Lindlof, T. R. (1995). Qualitative communication research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lipnack, J., & Stamps, J. (2000). Virtual teams: People working across boundaries with technology. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Lohmann, R. (1992). The theory of the commons. In J. S. Ott (Ed.), The nature of the nonprofit sector (pp. 297-310). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Lundvall, B. A. (1992). National systems of innovation. Towards a theory of innovation and interactive learning, London: Francis Pinter.

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Markham, W. T., Johnson, M. A., & Bonjean, C. M. (1999). Nonprofit decision making and resource allocation: The importance of membership preferences, community needs, and organizational ties. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 28(2), 152–184. doi:10.1177/0899764099282003 McNutt, J. G., & Boland, K. M. (1999). Electronic advocacy by nonprofit organizations in social welfare policy. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 28(4), 432–451. doi:10.1177/0899764099284004 Mitschke, D. B. (2008). Using Net conferencing to facilitate cancer care and education. Journal of Technology in Human Services, 26(1), 57–66. doi:10.1300/J017v26n01_04 Needleman, M. (2007). Web 2.0/Lib 2.0—what is it? If it’s anything at all. Serials Review, 33, 202. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2007.05.001 Porter, L. V., & Sallot, L. M. (2005). Web power: A survey of practitioners’ World Wide Web use and their perceptions of its effects on their decisionmaking power. Public Relations Review, 31(1), 111–119. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2004.11.014 Raho, L. E., Belohlav, J. A., & Fiedler, K. D. (1987). Assimilating new technology into the organization: An assessment of McFarlan and McKenney’s model. MIS Quarterly, 11(1), 46–58. doi:10.2307/248824 Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). New York: Free Press. Rogers, E. M. (2004). A prospective and retrospective look at the diffusion model. Journal of Health Communication, 9(1), 13–19. doi:10.1080/10810730490271449 Ryan, M. (2003). Public relations and the Web: Organizational problems, gender, and institution type. Public Relations Review, 29(3), 335–349. doi:10.1016/S0363-8111(03)00040-7

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Sallot, L. M., Porter, L. V., & Acosta-Alzuru, C. (2004). Practitioners’ Web use and perceptions of their own roles and power: A qualitative study. Public Relations Review, 30(3), 269–278. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2004.05.002 Saxon-Harrold, S. K. E. (1999). Facts and findings, 3(1). Topper, E. F. (2007). Social networking in libraries. New Library World, 108(7/8), 378–380. doi:10.1108/03074800710763662 Tyler, K., McGirr, D., & Stanley, E. (1998). Contextualising: Technology, relationships and time in a financial services virtual organization. The Services Industry Journal, 18(3), 70–89. doi:10.1080/02642069800000033 Var, T., Chon, J., & Doh, M. (2001). Acceptance of technology by Texas museums: An application of learning curve. Information Technology & Tourism, 4(2), 123–130. Wallace, N. (2003). Online donations making gains. Chronicle of Philanthropy, 15(17), 20–25. Wasserman, T. (2005). Blogs cause word of mouth business to spread quickly. Brandweek, 46(35), 9. Waters, R. D. (2007). Fund raising on the Internet: A content analysis of e-philanthropy trends on the Internet sites of the organizations on the Philanthropy 400. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 18(1), 59–76. doi:10.1002/nml.171 Waters, R. D. (2007b). Building the nonprofitdonor relationship online: The increasing importance of e-philanthropy. In S. Duhe & T. Adams (Eds.), Mediated public relations: Relationship management across space, time and new media (pp. 299-312). New York: Peter Lang.

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Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Cybervolunteering: Contributing time and effort to a nonprofit organization through an online connection, rather than, or in addition to, an on-site service. Diffusion of Innovations: The study of how, why, and at what rate new technologies and ideas spread through a social system or organization. Early Adopters: The second (after the innovators) wave of adopters of new technologies, who represent opinion leaders in a social system because of their decision-making skills. E-Philanthropy: The cultivation and management of relationships with key stakeholders of nonprofit organizations using the Internet. Early Majority: The third wave of adopters of new technologies, who represent the group that adopts a technology just before the “average” person based on the actions of opinion leaders in their social system. Innovators: The first adopters of new technologies who are willing to face uncertainty and

risks as they interact with new technologies and ideas. Laggards: The fifth and final wave of adopters of new technologies, who want to maintain the status quo by refusing to purchase or accept new technologies or ideas because they are very skeptical. Late Majority: The fourth wave of adopters of new technologies, who represent a group that generally adopts new technologies to stay even with their peer networks even though they are often cautious of change and sensitive to prices. Vlogging: Blog authoring that contains video clips to assist in relaying messages; vlogging is becoming more common as equipment becomes more accessible and distribution channels, such as YouTube and Google Video, increase their storage capacity.

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Chapter 43

Towards Understanding the Successful Adoption of Blog-Based Knowledge Management Systems A Socio-Psychological Approach Joowon Park Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea Sooran Jo Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea Junghoon Moon Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea

ABSTRACT Knowledge has been recognized as a valuable resource for organizational activities. As businesses are entering the world of Web 2.0, knowledge sharing is widely regarded as a critical issue in the area of organizational knowledge management (KM). Recently, organizations have started adopting blog-based knowledge management systems (KMS) with encouraging results. Used as a tool for sharing organizational knowledge, blogging can aggregate the intellectual power of individual members, serve as innovative KMS, and lead to the creation of a trust-based corporate culture. However, despite the increasing adoption of blogs by organizations, a theoretical framework for understanding a blog-based KMS has not been developed. This chapter attempts to present a framework for understanding a blog-based KMS in an organizational setting, grounded in a socio-psychological approach and the application of social identity and symbolic interaction theories. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch043

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Towards Understanding the Successful Adoption of Blog-Based Knowledge Management Systems

INTRODUCTION Knowledge has been recognized as a valuable resource for organizational activities (Miller & Shamsie, 1996). Prior studies have argued that knowledge is the most valuable organizational resource because it represents intangible assets, operational routines, and creative processes that are hard to imitate (Grant, 1996; Liebeskindk, 1996). There are many research questions associated with corporate knowledge management (KM) such as the effects of knowledge boundaries on KM, the significance of social relations in KM, and the role of experience and environment in KM. Another issue associated with KM involves the methods and incentives necessary to promote knowledge sharing within and between organizations. In this regard, organizational knowledge sharing has been debated intensely by business practitioners as one of the most critical parts of knowledge management. Even though the pieces of knowledge required to complete an organizational task may be dispersed among different members (Agrote, McEvily, & Reagans, 2003), those users may not be aware of others who need or possess this knowledge. Also, even when knowledge owners know of someone in need, current incentive structures may discourage knowledge sharing and make members reluctant to “give away” their knowledge to others, as this may affect their current status within an organization (Alavi & Leidner, 2001; Huber, 2001). As a result, there may be limited organizational knowledge sharing with an increasing knowledge gap resulting in undesirable work outcomes (Baird & Henderson, 2001). Today, leading companies (including IBM, Sun Microsystems, etc.) have launched new KM systems based on blogs to foster knowledge sharing throughout their organizations. Studies and reports indicate that these companies have effectively managed blog-based KM systems and achieved notable results in the area of organizational knowledge sharing (Dearstyne,

2005). However, there has been little theoretical work aimed at understanding the current state of KM systems and knowledge sharing within organizations. This chapter attempts to present a new a framework for understanding a blog-based KMS within an organizational setting based on a socio-psychological approach and integrating the application of social identity and symbolic interaction theories.

BACKGROUND Blogging is known to enhance information diffusion and knowledge sharing between users (Gruhl, Liben-Nowell, Guha, & Tomkins, 2004). Although the content of most blogs is personal, there are many topic-oriented blogs related to specific interests or to business promotions. In this regard, blogs are sometimes used by organizations as educational or knowledge management tools (e.g., blogs at Sun Microsystems), and this type of blog use is growing (Cayzer, 2004; Maag, 2005). Because blogs are relatively low cost and easy to maintain, the employment of blogs in the business world is growing. Currently, organizations are using blogs for internal information sharing and knowledge management applications (Ives & Watlington, 2005; Wagner & Bolloju, 2005). Blogs can be viewed as a technology (King, 2007) and a communication channel (Holt, 2005). Information shared within corporate blogs may include: industry or company news, strategy brainstorming, activities within specific department, and the sharing of customer related information (Holtz, 2005). However, as businesses come to view the blog as a KMS, qualms about the possible side effects of corporate blogs emerge. These concerns include: a waste of work time, loss of productivity, reluctance of employees to share knowledge, and increasing bandwidth requirements. Consequentially, the number of businesses managing corporate blogs for knowledge sharing purposes is currently

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insignificant. Even after the adoption of blogs, concerns about the posting of inappropriate content remain. Although it is now easier for employees to express ideas and share knowledge through blogs, companies do not generally provide complete freedom to their employees. For example, Sun Microsystems (2008) has provided its employees with guidelines for proper blogging.

SUCCeSfUl ADOpTION Of BlOG-BASeD KmS Blogging encourages organizational knowledge sharing and directs brainpower toward an organization’s strategies, new products, and processes (Orr, 2004). Ultimately, organizations can build a trust-based corporate culture through a blog-based KMS. Several cases of companies implementing corporate blogs are highlighted below: namely, IBM, General Motors, Dresdner Kleinwort Bank, and Allen & Overy law firm. For example, Fringe is the name of a profile blog system at IBM. Because people tend to be reluctant to share knowledge with others unless they are required to do so, social distance can be great even among those who work on the same team or the same project. When people do not know other employees personally, they tend not to share their knowledge. The purpose of Fringe is to reduce the social distance among IBM employees so that they can easily share information and knowledge by creating personal connections, openness, and trust, ultimately resulting in added productivity for the company. As people freely post information from various sources, it becomes easier for them to gather information, personal or work-related, about other members. Therefore, IBM employees feel more comfortable when they meet face-toface for the first time (Orr, 2004). Demonstrating the effectiveness of blog use, IBM field technicians have created blogs to share problem-solving experiences with their team members. Through blogs they can provide

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members with valuable advice on how to deal with specific technical situations. The blog can also foster the growth of new ideas, as members can interact with each other and exchange experiences when they read materials posted by those with similar interests. Some IBM professionals are sharing knowledge through IBM’s developerWorks community blog portal. Post topics range widely, from autonomic computing to Renaissance Jazz (Dearstyne, 2005; Ives & Watlington, 2005; Orr, 2004). General Motors’ FastLane blog was developed as a channel of direct communication with the public to bypass traditional media. More than 5,000 visits and 13,000 page views have been recorded (Lutz, 2005, p. 1047). Hundreds of people are routinely posting comments on blog entries relating to GM products (Gillin, 2007). Bob Lutz, vice chairman of global product development at General Motors, has contributed to the GM FastLane blog, along with other senior management members, and found the blog to be an effective direct communication channel encompassing fans and nonfans of GM. According to Lutz (2005), the blog is successful because it keeps the tone “conversational, open, and honest” and does not “filter out negative comments, complaints, or hate mail” (p. 1047). By doing so, a wealth of comments is retained while the credibility of the blog is preserved. GM FastLane is the fastest source of communication the company has to inform the public directly about new products while maintaining a high level of credibility that cannot be found in advertising. Dresdner Kleinwort, an investment arm of one of the biggest banks in Europe, Dresdner Bank, employs over 6,000 people in 35 countries1 and is known for implementing internal blogging on the Socialtext platform. Traditionally, internal collaboration and knowledge sharing between departments in investment banks were not actively pursued due to such factors as separation of fiefdoms for every major asset class and activity, regional isolation, and internal regulations.

Towards Understanding the Successful Adoption of Blog-Based Knowledge Management Systems

However, client focused strategy and the pressure for financial consistency has led members of the industry to become more collaborative. Internal blogging, as a form of knowledge sharing, was initially tested using IT staffers and subsequently made available for a larger group of employees. During the first 15 months of corporate blogging at Dresdner Kleinwort, 30 blogs were created resulting in approximately 100 postings per month. The 4th quarter of 2004 brought rapid blog growth with over 300 existing blogs, 180 postings, and over 350 comments each month (Sjoman & McAfee, 2006, p. 1). Dresdner Kleinwort’s bloggers were encouraged to consider the blog as a forum to campaign their ideas, request help, and provide criticism. To encourage blogging, the IT department offered frequent updates of blogs upon user request. The overarching results of the implementation of blogs have been positive: lower e-mail traffic, more effective communications, shorter timeto-market implementation of the new ideas, and faster problem solving. Dresdner Kleinwort is expecting some blogs to become available for the outside community, which would increase the transparency of work being done. For a post to be made available to the public, it would undergo a review process by the internal media relations group (Sjoman & McAfee, 2006). Allen & Overy, a London-based international law firm with 5,500 employees in 22 countries2 has been an early adopter of blogs. Ward, a senior member of Allen & Overy’s global knowledge team, saw the benefits of using Web 2.0 technology as a tool for knowledge sharing within the firm (Thomas, 2006). With help from the IT department and external consultants, Ward and her colleagues began experimenting with combining the functions of blogs and wikis to promote effective communication and knowledge sharing among members. To encourage people to post, Ward set the rules at a minimum. The labeling feature was also improved to reinforce the es-

sential property of a wiki: namely, the ease of finding information. Blogging at Allen & Overy has contributed to a decrease in e-mail traffic and has become effort saving for participating employees. For instance, if numerous people send the same question via an email to other workers, the possibility that various employees would answer the same question without knowing it would be very common and likely to happen. In the end, knowledge may be hardly shared at all, yet time and effort would be wasted. With a KMS combining blogs and wikis, however, when a person posts a question to a KMS, many people can answer, improve, and share their personal knowledge on a subject to answer the question. The resulting communication is available for everyone. Allen & Overy continues to work on improving its KMS, and many of its clients and competitors have shown interest in the new technology. Blogging between the firm and its clients, as well as collaboration with other businesses using blogs, is quickly becoming a present-day norm (Thomas, 2006). Other well-known corporate blogs include the Amazon Web Services Blog3 (Amazon.com Inc.), Cisco High Tech Policy Blog4 (Cisco Systems, Inc.), Digital Straight Talk Blog5 (Cox Communications), eBay Developers Program Blog6 (eBay), EDS’ Next Big Thing Blog7 (Electronic Data Systems), GE Global Research Blog (General Electric Company), Real Baking with Rose Levy Beranbaum8 (General Mills, Inc), Official Google Blog9 (Google), HP employee business blogs10 (Hewlett-Packard Company), McDonald’s Corporate Social Responsibility Blog11 (McDonald’s Corporation), Nuts about Southwest12 (Southwest Airlines), The Lobby13 (Starwood Hotels & Resorts), TI Blogs14 (Texas Instruments), Randy’s Journal15 (The Boeing Company), Guided by History16 (Wells Fargo & Company), Yahoo! Search Blog17 (Yahoo!).

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A fRAmeWORK fOR KNOWleDGe ShARING: INTeRACTIONeNhANCING STRATeGy How should we interpret these practices? Social identity theory and symbolic interaction theory are utilized below for the development of a new framework aimed to provide a better understanding of the successful adoption of blog-based KMS.

Social Identity, Socialization, and Symbolic Interaction Social identity is defined as an individual’s knowledge of belonging to a certain social group, and associated with the emotional and valued significance of a person’s membership within a group (Abrams & Hogg, 1990; Ashforth & Mael, 1989). Tajfel (1978) believed that social identity is a part of an individual’s self-concept; it derives from the individual’s knowledge of his or her membership in a social group (or groups) combined with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership. A core tenet of social identity theory is that after having defined oneself in the terms of a particular social identity, an individual acts to maintain or enhance a positive distinctiveness in the group with which his/her identity is associated (Haslam, Eggins, & Reynolds, 2003). Tajfel and Turner (1979) argued that feelings of social identity emerge through three consecutive processes. The first process is self-categorization and relates to how groups provide a social identity to group members, allowing group members to acquire a positive distinctiveness in terms of we rather than I (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). This happens due to the fact that people tend to classify themselves and others as belonging to various social categories based on favoritism. After creating social categories, people may obtain positive attitudes, such as self-esteem, and develop a social identity through comparisons of their own in-groups and out-groups (Tajfel, 1978). The second process entails social comparison,

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which is related to social categorization as in the previous process. Ellemers, Gilder, and Haslam (2004) defined social comparison as “the process by which a social categorization is invested with meaning” (p. 463). The last process, called social identification can be viewed as “the process by which information about social groups is related to themselves” (Ellemers et al., 2004, p. 465). Moon (2006) suggested that these processes can be identified with socialization. Socialization is the process of how individuals become part of a group, involving the actions that confine behavioral potentialities within an acceptable range as well as processes that progressively prepare members for the type of roles they will be expected to play in life (Ryder, 1965). Maltas (2004) pointed out that the phenomenon of socialization can be understood through the concept of symbolicinteractionism, as the theory explains the gestures, reference groups, and significant others that can construct meaning for an individual within a specific social situation. According to symbolic interaction theory, social interaction helps create shared meaning among situated actors. Interaction facilitates coordinated actions that help define the uses and outcomes of communication technology in informal or formal groups (Fulk, Schmitz, & Ryu, 1995). In short, an individual in a particular group or organization can develop a strong social identity through appropriate social interactions with other members and by following certain processes of socialization. Ashforth and Mael (1989) claim that a clear social identity facilitates the internalization of organizational values and beliefs; it enables a newcomer to reify an organization and develop a strong organizational commitment. In addition, there are many studies showing that a strong social identity yields job satisfaction, leadership, and loyalty to an organization (e.g., Bergami & Bagozzi, 2000; Clair, Beatty, & MacLean, 2005; Ellemers, Gilder, & Haslam, 2004).

Towards Understanding the Successful Adoption of Blog-Based Knowledge Management Systems

Figure 1. Interaction-enhancing strategy for organizational knowledge sharing

Online Social Identity and Blogging Several studies have demonstrated that social identity can be developed online (Bagozzi & Dholakia, 2006; Dholakia, Bagozzi, & Pearo, 2004). Web 2.0 technologies, for example online forums, were found to facilitate symbolic interaction between users in virtual environments (Churchill, Girgensohn, Nelson, & Lee, 2004; Kollock, 1998). Moon (2006) argued that a broad range of interactive features of a blog interface (for example, comments, RSS feed, permalink, trackback function, blogroll, as well as the integration of audio and video) provide for a much stronger social interaction between users than a static website or e-community. Moon, Li, Jo, and Sanders (2006) investigated the impact of blog use on the perceived well-being of bloggers. Their research revealed that social interaction through blog use increases cognitive, affective, and evaluative dimensions of a virtual social identity. The study provided empirical evidence indicating that blog-based social interaction positively influenced a person’s identity and that a strong sense of identity yielded a strong commitment to a group. Similarly, Bagozzi and Dholakia (2006) and Dholakia and Bagozzi (2004) concluded that a positive relationship exists between social identity and the level of participation within a virtual community (e.g., level of discussion). Due to blog interactivity, internal communication and team collaboration at the enterprise level can

be significantly improved by integrating blogging within an organization (Ives & Watlington, 2005; Wagner & Bolloju, 2005). Based on the findings of the above-mentioned studies, it can be assumed that the dynamic nature and interactivity of a blog-based KMS can facilitate social interaction between co-workers and can stimulate the development of employees’ sense of organizational identity. Employees who closely identify with an organization are not likely to be reluctant to share their knowledge with other members of the organization through a KMS, as they would not want to lose a favorable reputation within the organization (Glazer, 1998). However, success is possible only if social interactions between KMS users are encouraged. This chapter proposes an interaction-enhancing strategy for organizational knowledge sharing and a framework conceptualizing this strategy (see Figure 1). According to the proposed framework, an organization should provide workers with access to adequate Web 2.0 technologies, for example a personal blog, to develop knowledge sharing between employees and create successful interaction between workers. The authors of this chapter claim that through appropriate social interactions with others members of an organization, employees can develop a sense of belonging and identity within the group. Successful social interaction yields the development of a stronger sense of identity and allows employees to maintain

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enduring social relationships with each other and with the organization. Moreover, a strong sense of identity will lock-in employees to the KMS, as employees will likely be more willing to share knowledge to maintain their social identity level. Finally, drawing on various social interaction technologies and capabilities, a KMS can play a variety of roles in the support of organizational knowledge management processes, extending beyond the traditional storage and retrieval of knowledge. The organizational emphasis on social connectedness and collaboration will help bring KMS users closer to obtaining a strong identity within the organization and closer to increasing knowledge creation and dissemination.

with the intention of confusing the public). Blog readers should be aware of these problems, and efforts should be taken to minimize the possible effects. With these concerns in mind, combining the properties of blogs and wikis with the intent of maximizing the effectiveness and efficiency of knowledge sharing can be a solution. In a wiki, all users can edit the content and add information to make an entry more complete, accurate, and upto-date. Therefore, providing guiding principles for posting on an organizational blog should be taken seriously, since the absence of user guidelines can depreciate the virtues of a blog and even decrease participation.

fUTURe TReNDS

CONClUSION

Blogging has various dimensions. As businesses are entering the world of Web 2.0, there are many instances of successful corporate adoption of blogs. As blogging on the web grows, blog-based KM systems also continue to evolve. As discussed earlier, the wide range of interactive characteristics of blog interface (i.e., comments, RSS, permalink, etc.) help foster social interaction between members of an organization. The principles for a better web are continuously being developed to aid this interaction. As more organizations acknowledge the advantages of sharing knowledge via blogs, the rate of adoption of blog-based KM systems will accelerate. To manage a high-functioning corporate blog, a company should make an effort to adopt the most suitable features for the organization and its members. Yet, relatively low reliability of content of blogs, compared to other sources of information such as books and academic journals, should be taken into consideration. Blog postings may include unverified prospects, inaccurate information, or mere rumors. Also, the possibility exists that some bloggers may share disinformation (that is, intentionally include false information

The importance of knowledge and knowledge management for organizations, with an emphasis on knowledge sharing, was discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The main goal of the chapter was to provide a new framework for knowledge sharing. The authors introduced the idea of a blog-based KMS and provided several real business cases depicting the use of organizational blogs as tools for knowledge sharing. The chapter presented a new theoretical framework for understanding the factors for a successful blogbased KMS by integrating a socio-psychological approach with social identity theory and symbolic interaction theory. It can be concluded that an individual within a particular group or organization can develop a strong social identity through appropriate interactions with other members and by following certain processes of socialization. The interactive features of a blog interface, such as comments, RSS, permalink, trackback, and blogroll, have been found to facilitate and encourage the successful social interaction between users of KM systems. A strong social connection facilitated through a blog-based KMS may lead members of an organization to feel

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less reluctant to share knowledge with others and bring users closer to obtaining a strong sense of identity within the organization. Therefore, providing adequate interaction-enhancing features is one of the most critical factors for a blog-based KMS to succeed.

RefeReNCeS Abrams, D., & Hogg, M. A. (1990). An introductory to the social identity approach. In D. Adams & M. A. Hogg (Eds.), Social identity theory: Constructive and critical advance (pp. 1-9). New York: Springer-Verlag. Agrote, L., McEvily, B., & Reagans, R. (2003). Managing knowledge in organizations: An integrative framework and review of emerging themes. Management Science, 49(4), 571–582. doi:10.1287/mnsc.49.4.571.14424 Alavi, M., & Leidner, D. (2001). Review: Knowledge management and knowledge management systems: Conceptual foundation and research issues. MIS Quarterly, 25, 107–136. doi:10.2307/3250961 Ashforth, B. E., & Mael, F. (1989). Social identity theory and the organization. Academy of Management Review, 14, 20–39. doi:10.2307/258189 Bagozzi, R. P., & Dholakia, U. M. (2006). Open source software user communities: A study of participation in Linux user groups. Management Science, 52, 1099–1115. doi:10.1287/ mnsc.1060.0545 Baird, L., & Henderson, J. C. (2001). The knowledge engine. San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler. Bergami, M., & Bagozzi, R. P. (2000). Selfcategorization, affective commitment and group self-esteem as distinct aspects of social identity in the organization. The British Journal of Social Psychology, 39, 555–577. doi:10.1348/014466600164633

Blumer, H. (1962). Society as symbolic interaction. In A. M. Rose (Ed.), Human behavior and social process: An interactionist approach. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin. Cayzer, S. (2004). Semantic blogging and decentalized knowledge management. Communications of the ACM, 47(12), 47–52. doi:10.1145/1035134.1035164 Churchill, E., Girgensohn, A., Nelson, L., & Lee, A. (2004). Blending digital and physical spaces for ubiquitous community participation. Communications of the ACM, 47(2), 39–44. doi:10.1145/966389.966413 Clair, J. A., Beaty, J. E., & MacLean, T. L. (2005). Out of sight but not out of mind: Managing invisible social identities in the workplace. Academy of Management Review, 30(1), 78–95. Dearstyne, B. W. (2005). Blogs: The new information revolution? Information Management Journal, 39(5), 38–44. Dholakia, U. M., Bagozzi, R. P., & Pearo, L. K. (2004). A social influence model of consumer participation in network- and small-group-based virtual communities. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 21, 241–263. doi:10.1016/j. ijresmar.2003.12.004 Ellemers, N., Gilder, D. D., & Haslam, A. (2004). Motivating individuals and groups at work: A social identity perspective on leadership and group performance. Academy of Management Review, 29, 459–478. Fulk, J., Schmitz, J., & Ryu, D. (1995). Cognitive elements in the social construction of communication technology. Management Communication Quarterly, 8(3), 259–288. doi:10.1177/0893318995008003001 Gefen, D., & Ridings, C. (2003). IT Acceptance: Managing user - it group boundaries. The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems, 34(3), 25–40.

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Gillin, P. (2007). Looking at the best-of-breed blogs. B to B, 92(7), 11. Glazer, R. (1998). Measuring the knower: Towards a theory of knowledge equity. California Management Review, 40(3), 175–194. Grant, R. (1996). Toward a knowledgebased theory of the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 17, 109–122. doi:10.1002/ (SICI)1097-0266(199602)17:2<109::AIDSMJ796>3.0.CO;2-P Gruhl, D., Liben-Nowell, D., Guha, R., & Tomkins, A. (2004). Information diffusion through blogspace. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 6(2), 491–501. doi:10.1145/1046456.1046462 Haslam, S. A., Eggins, R. A., & Reynolds, K. J. (2003). The ASPIRe model: Actualizing social and personal identity resources to enhance organizational outcomes. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 76, 83. doi:10.1348/096317903321208907 Holtz, S. (2005). Using employee blogs on the Internet. Strategic Communication Management, 9(5), 3. Huber, G. P. (2001). Transfer of knowledge in knowledge management systems: Unexplored issues and suggested studies. European Journal of Information Systems, 10, 72–79. doi:10.1057/ palgrave.ejis.3000399 Ives, B., & Watlington, A. (2005). Using blogs for personal KM and community building. Knowledge Management Review, 8(3), 12–15. King, W. R. (2007). IT strategy and innovation: Recent innovations in knowledge management. Information Systems Management, 24(1), 91–93. doi:10.1080/10580530601082004 Kollock, P. (1998). Design principles for online communities. PC Update, 15(5), 58–60.

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Liebeskindk, J. P. (1996). Knowledge, strategy, and the theory of the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 17, 93–108. Lutz, B. (2005). Nothing to fear from executive blogging. Information Week, 74, 1047. Maag, M. (2005). The potential use of ‘blogs’ in nursing education. Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 23(1), 16–24. doi:10.1097/00024665200501000-00005 Maltas, C. J. (2004). The rural music teacher: An investigation of the relationship between socialization factors and career satisfaction using symbolic interaction theory. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oklahoma. Miller, D., & Shamsie, J. (1996). The resourcebased view of the firm in two environments: The Hollywood film studios from 1936 to 1965. Academy of Management Journal, 39(3), 519–543. doi:10.2307/256654 Moon, J. (2006). The role of psychological ownership and social identity in e-business: Strategies for building e-loyalty towards blog services. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo. Moon, J., Li, J., & Sanders, G. L. (2006). Improving quality of life via blogs and development of a virtual social identity. Journal of Information Technology Management, 17(3), 26–37. Orr, B. (2004, October). Blogging for profits. ABA Banking Journal,106–110. Raman, M., Ryan, T., & Olfman, L. (2005). Designing knowledge management systems for teaching and learning with Wiki technology. Journal of Information Systems Education, 16(3), 311–320. Ryder, N. B. (1965). The cohort as a concept in the study of social change. American Sociological Review, 30, 843–861. doi:10.2307/2090964

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Sjoman, A., & McAfee, A. P. (2006). Blogs at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (A) (Case No. 606072). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Publishing. Sun Microsystems. (2008, May). Sun guidelines on public discourse. Retrieved December 15, 2008, from http://www.sun.com/communities/ guidelines.jsp Tajfel, H. (1978). Social categorization, social identity and social comparison. In Differentiation between social groups: Studies in the psychology of intergroup relations. London: Academic Press. Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Thomas, K. (2006, November 13). A blog standard approach. Information World Review, 229, 16–18.

associated with emotional and valued significance of group membership. Symbolic Interaction Theory: A theory that sees human interaction as being mediated by the use of symbols, signification, and interpretation to ascertain the meaning of one another’s actions. Socialization: The process by which an individual becomes a part of a group. Wiki: An expandable collection of interlinked web pages allowing anyone who accesses the page to add or modify its content.

eNDNOTeS 1

2

3 4 5

Wagner, C., & Bolloju, N. (2005). Supporting knowledge management in organizations with conventional technologies: Discussion forums, Weblogs, Wikis. Journal of Database Management, 16(2), 1–7.

6

7

8 9 10

Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS 11

Self-Categorization: A social identity provided by social groups to their members so that group members can have a positive distinctiveness in terms of we rather than I. Social Comparison: The process by which a social categorization is invested with meaning. Social Identification: The process by which information about social groups is relayed to its members. Social Identity: An individual’s knowledge that a person belongs to a certain social group

12 13 14 15 16

17

http://www.dresdnerkleinwort.com. Accessed December 15, 2008 http://www.allenovery.com. Accessed December 15, 2008 http://aws.typepad.com/ http://blogs.cisco.com/gov http://www.digitalstraighttalk.com/about/ http://developer.ebay.com/community/ blog/ http://www.eds.com/sites/cs/blogs/eds_ next_big_thing_blog/default.aspx http://www.realbakingwithrose.com/ http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/blogs/index. html http://www.crmcdonalds.com/publish/csr/ home/_blog.html http://www.blogsouthwest.com/ http://www.thelobby.com/ http://blogs.ti.com/feed/ http://boeingblogs.com/randy/ http://blog.wellsfargo.com/GuidedByHistory/ http://ysearchblog.com/

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Chapter 44

Social Software for Customer Knowledge Management Zuopeng (Justin) Zhang State University of New York at Plattsburgh, USA

ABSTRACT Social software is assuming a significant role in electronic business, increasingly referred to as ebusiness, and has been utilized recently on a growing scale by companies in customer relationship management. However, it is largely unclear at what levels firms should implement social software. This chapter addresses the gap by identifying the optimal level of social software deployment for a firm that plans to maximize its transactional benefits through the management of a customer knowledge base. The conclusion reached is that the optimal level of social software depends on a range of factors: for example, the initial volume of knowledge base, transaction benefits, and the estimates of the positive and negative effects of social software use. The chapter offers insights and guidance for business managers and practitioners.

INTRODUCTION Social software is defined as computer software that “supports, extends, or derives added value from human social behavior” and includes “messageboards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking” (Coates, 2005). In business contexts, social software is commonly referred to as social and networking software used by companies to organize internal DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch044

and external communication. For instance, IBM launched Lotus Connections to compete with Microsoft’s SharePoint for the enterprise-wide social software market (Lynch, 2008). The recent development of Web 2.0 technologies has created remarkable opportunities for Knowledge Management (KM). In particular, companies have recently started to apply social software for managing customer knowledge, maintaining good customer relationships, and enhancing customer satisfaction (Johnston, 2008). Applying social software on their electronic storefronts, firms

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Social Software for Customer Knowledge Management

Figure 1. Four types of effects of social software implementation

can create virtual communities for customers to interact with each other and share information and knowledge about products and services. For instance, CircuitCity (2006) launched its online forum to provide better customer experiences and is partnering with IBM to explore the application of virtual worlds in business. Currently available Web 2.0 technologies enable firms to implement different types of social software, from the very basic ones, such as electronic bulletin boards, to those with advanced features, including tagging, blogging, and wikis. Although social software is gradually assuming a more essential role in e-business, it is still unclear at what level firms should implement social software. Since there exits a wide range of social software applications (including online forums, social tags, blogs, wikis, as well as Lotus Connections and Microsoft SharePoint), firms have to decide which one to implement on their electronic storefronts. This chapter seeks to address this gap by modeling and analyzing the relationship between social software and customer knowledge management. We maintain that social software dynamically influences customer knowledge bases and subsequently describe four types of direct and indirect effects of social software implementation on businesses, as shown in Figure 1. The first and second effects relate to the transactional benefits that firms can obtain by implementing social software to achieve effective customer knowledge

management. For instance, social software can provide a platform for customers to interact with each other and acquire valuable information before completing their transactions and supplementing the deficiency of a “static” customer knowledge base. Therefore, social software can complement customer knowledge base by facilitating potential customers’ transactions. The third effect describes the negative influence that social software may have on the customer knowledge base. Specifically, customers who are dissatisfied with their shopping experiences may impact the current knowledge base affecting the transactions of future potential customers. Finally, the fourth effect encompasses the costs that firms should incur from maintaining and managing social software. The purpose of this analysis is to identify the best strategies to implement different types of social software as well as understand the tradeoffs for firms seeking maximal profits. Specifically, in this chapter we would like to address the following three research questions: RQ1: When should firms employ social software to “dynamically” manage customer knowledge? Most companies have built knowledge bases for “static” customer knowledge management. However, few of them have experiences in utilizing social software as effective tools of “dynamic” customer knowledge management. We are interested in the sufficient conditions for firms to migrate to “dynamic” customer knowledge management with social software.

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RQ2: What is the optimal level for firms to implement social software? Based on different direct and indirect effects of social software on firms through customer knowledge management, we intend to explore the best level of social software for firms to dynamically manage customer knowledge assets. RQ3: How does the optimal level of social software change with different influential factors? From our framework illustrated in Figure 1, we identify several critical factors of implementing social software and investigate how the optimal level of social software changes with these factors. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. The next section presents the background of this research by reviewing related literature on social software and customer knowledge management. The “Analytical Model: Analysis and Discussion” section explicates the main focus of the chapter, detailing our model formulation, derivation of analytical results, and discussion of managerial insights. The “Future Trends” section outlines the directions for future research, and the last section provides a concluding discussion of the results.

BACKGROUND In this section, we review prior literature, focusing on two recent streams of research in Knowledge Management (KM): that is, the role of social software in knowledge management and customer knowledge management. Social software provides the following three major types of support for people to interact and communicate with each other: (a) support for conversational interaction between people or groups, (b) support for social feedback, and (c) support for social networks (Boyd, 2006). Therefore, the key areas of social software considered are blogs, wikis, as well as various social network services, such as online forums and social bookmarking. Recent studies have shown a growing interest

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in the relationship between social software and KM, especially the role of social software in disseminating and creating knowledge. For instance, Avram (2006) analyzes how to use social software to regulate the core knowledge management activities. Efimova (2005) examines how to use blogs for personal knowledge management, particularly “personal knowledge repositories, learning journals or networking instruments” (p. 1). In a special report, Greenfield (2007) assesses four enterprise social bookmarking solutions that are currently available to e-buisnesses and argues that social bookmarking applications can provide an effective KM platform. From a technical perspective, Kim and others (2007) establish a conceptual framework that combines the social network activities and knowledge processes through social software agents. They build a prototype, called WANT, in a wiki-based environment for knowledge workers to collaborate and communicate via a software agent. Based on the survey of a number of different social software websites, Chai, Potdar, and Chang (2007) analyze and categorize the revenue models of social software, including advertising, premium memberships, affiliate programs, donations and merchandise sale. Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) is the other emerging research stream for knowledge management. CKM refers to the management of organizational knowledge residing on the customer side. Gibbert, Leibold, and Probst (2002) illustrate the concept of CKM and propose five styles of CKM: prosumerism, team-based co-learning, mutual innovation, communities of creation, and joint intellectual property. Bueren, et al. (2004) describe how to utilize information technologies to support Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with an integrated CKM process in order to achieve knowledge transparency, knowledge dissemination, knowledge development, and knowledge efficiency. García-Murillo and Annabi (2002) argue that approaches in marketing and CRM cannot successfully capture knowledge from customers, so appropriate methods of CKM have

Social Software for Customer Knowledge Management

to be employed to retrieve and manage customer knowledge. Rowley (2002) contends that customer knowledge is the indispensable element for firms engaging in e-business. Rowley discusses various topics of customer knowledge: such as, the role of customer communities in CKM, the boundary and structure of knowledge communities, the ownership of knowledge assets, the integration of customer knowledge across different channels, the comparison of customer knowledge management with customer relationship management, and the necessity for organizations to develop strategies to dynamically integrate systems and people. Rollins and Halinen (2005) regard CKM as an integrated management approach with an ongoing process of generating, disseminating, and using customer knowledge; they propose a theoretical framework of CKM that integrates with CRM processes. Despite the growing interest in social software and customer knowledge management, the economic values of social software for firms are not well understood. Prior research in the field provides a solid foundation for understanding the role of social software in KM and the unique features of CKM; yet, there is a paucity of research investigating social software as it relates to CKM. In particular, the possible economic benefits that social software can bring through managing customer knowledge assets have not been examined.

ANAlyTICAl mODel: ANAlySIS AND DISCUSSION This section details our model formulation, analysis, and discussion. Beginning with the presentation of our analytical model of social software for customer knowledge management, we then proceed to derive meaningful results from the model and provide managerial insights. Finally, we show the optimal level of social software and discuss how it changes with various influential factors.

We consider a firm which implements social software to manage its external knowledge assets, primarily those related to the customers who regularly visit the firm’s electronic storefront. The cost C(T) for implementing the social software is a convexly increasing function of its level T, which means that if the firm wants to implement the more sophisticated social software, it will incur a higher cost. Customers visit the firm’s website to solve certain problems and eventually make transactions. Before completing their transactions, customers would like to utilize both the social software and the customer knowledge base integrated with the firm’s website to make sure that their problems are solved and the transactions are beneficial for them. Given the technology level T of the social software and the current volume K of knowledge stored in the customer knowledge base, a customer’s problem will be solved, and he or she will eventually consummate the transaction with the probability p(T, K), which benefits the firm with a profit B. Here, the probability function p(T, K) parameterized with T and K is a concavely increasing function of the technology level T of the social software and an increasing function of the volume of the customer knowledge base K; this implies that: (1) when the technology level of the social software is higher, it is more likely that customers will complete their transactions; (2) when the volume of the customer knowledge base is larger, consumers are more likely to complete their transactions; and (3) the rates of both increments of the probability decrease with the level of the social software or the volume of the knowledge base. We assume that once the transaction is made, the customer will always be satisfied with the service or goods he or she received from the transaction with the support of the social software and the current customer knowledge base. It is also assumed that customers will always tend to participate in the social activities related to the customer knowledge base, such as writing a

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review of his or her experiences and transactions. Therefore, if the customer makes a transaction, he or she will try to contribute to the current customer knowledge base in a positive manner. The positive contribution σ that a consumer can make to the knowledge base is assumed to be equal for all the customers. As a parallel, a customer’s problem may not be solved with the probability 1 – p(T, K) due to insufficient knowledge in the base or poor capabilities of social software; therefore, the customer may have an unpleasant experience and shall give negative reviews, negatively impacting the knowledge base by the amount of δ. Hence, the influences of current customers’ experiences and transactions on the current knowledge base will affect the experiences and transactions of future potential customers. Consequently, the firm’s problem is to maximize its total expected profit π over n periods by determining an optimal level T of social software. We grant that customers are visiting the firm’s electronic storefront uniformly. Then, the firm’s decision problem [P] can be formulated as max T

n

p = å l × B × p(T , K i ) - C (T ), (1) i

Table 1. Summary of notations B C(T)

benefit of individual transactions to the firm cost of implementing social software at the level T

δ

negative effect on customer knowledge base

K0

initial volume of customer knowledge base

Ki

volume of customer knowledge base in ith period

λ

discount rate

n

total number of periods

p(T, Ki)

probability of a customer’s problem being solved

σ

positive effect on customer knowledge base

T

level of social software

cial software. Based on the simplification of the probability function, we next show the solution to the optimal level of social software in the following proposition. Proposition 1.For a infinite time horizon (when n → ∞), the optimal level T of social software can be solved from the following equation

B(K 0 - dl) ×

i =0

C ¢(T ) 1-l = 2 r ¢(T ) {1 - l[1 + r(T )(s + d)]} (3)

where K i +1 = K i + s × p(T , K i ) - d × (1 - p(T , K i ))

with the sufficient condition as follows,

(2) r(T ) And λ is the discount rate. All the notations are summarized in Table 1. To derive meaningful results without compromising the generality of our model, we assume that T and Ki are multiplicatively separable in the function p(T, Ki); and, thus let p(T, Ki) = ρ(T) · Ki, where 0 ≤ Ki ≤ 1 and ρ(T) serve as a concavely increasing function of T with ρ(T) ∈ [0,1]. The concave and increasing function of ρ(T) with respect to Tensures that the probability function p(T, Ki) concavely increases in the level Tof so-

500

2[r ¢(T )]2 1-l £ . ¢¢ r (T ) l(s + d)

(4)

Proof. See Appendix A. ■ In Proposition 1, the condition captured by Inequality (4) ensures that the firm’s expected profit is a concave function of the level T of social software so that the global optimal level T* of the social software can be derived from Equation (3). It can be observed from Equation (3) that the optimal level T*of social software increases with the transactional benefit Bfor the

Social Software for Customer Knowledge Management

firm. This suggests that the firm should consider implementing the most advanced social software applications if transactional profit is significant. In addition to the positive effect of the transactional benefit, several other critical factors modeled in our framework also influence the optimal level T* of social software. These are summarized and discussed in the next three propositions. Proposition 2.When the initial volume K0 of the customer knowledge base is sufficiently large, such that K0 > δλ, the feasible solution to the optimal level T*of social software will exist. In addition, the larger the initial volume K0 of the customer knowledge base, the higher the optimal level T* of social software. Proof.Equation (3) clearly shows that when K0 − δλ > 0, the left hand side of the equation is positive and the solution of T may exist. In addition, when K0 increases, the left hand side of the equation increases as well, resulting in a larger optimal level T*of social software. ■ Proposition 2 specifies the necessary condition for social software implementation by firms that seek to complement their extant customer knowledge bases. The condition implies that the initial volume of knowledge stored in the customer knowledge base should be large enough for the firm to be able to utilize social software effectively and efficiently. In particular, the initial amount of knowledge data in the knowledge base should be sufficiently large to compensate the discounted negative effect δλ on the customer knowledge base from customers in one period. Additionally, the proposition demonstrates that the firm should employ advanced social software technologies on its website if it starts with a large consumer knowledge base. This proposition also suggests that the application of social software for “dynamic” CKM is suitable for firms with experience in “static” CKM as well as firms that have established mature knowledge bases for their customers. Only when the above condition is met, firms will be able to withstand the possible negative impact of implementing social software

and manage the knowledge assets when dealing with the potential customers. Having illustrated the necessary condition for the adoption of social software products, we next turn to investigating the effects of social software utilization on customer knowledge base. The next proposition indicates how the optimal level of social software changes when the effect of social software is positive. Proposition 3.The optimal level T* of social software increases with, the positive effect of social software on the customer knowledge base. Proof. See Appendix B. ■ Proposition 3 implies that the larger the incremental positive effect of social software on the customer knowledge base, the more elaborate social software should the firm implement. If social software can bring profit through augmenting the current customer knowledge base, the firm should adopt social software packages with advanced features and take advantage of their positive impact. However, parallel to the positive effect, the negative effect of social software implementation on the customer knowledge base can also influence the level of adoption, which is formally summarized in the next proposition. Proposition 4.There exists a threshold level of social software as follows, Tc = r -1[

1-l ]. 2K 0 + l(s - d)

(5)

When the optimal level T* of social software is greater than the threshold level Tc of social software, or T* > Tc, the optimal level T* of social software increases with the negative effect δof social software on the customer knowledge base; in contrast, when the optimal level of social software is lower than the threshold level of social software, or T* < Tc, the optimal level T* of social software decreases with the negative effect δof social software on the customer knowledge base. Proof. See Appendix B. ■ Proposition 4 demonstrates that there exists a threshold for the level of adoption of social

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software: only when the optimal level of social software is lower than this threshold, should the firm implement less advanced social software applications. When social software technology applied is not advanced, the firm may continue adopting a less advanced version of social software since potential customers may jeopardize the existing knowledge base by misusing the implemented software. In contrast, the other part of the proposition indicates that when the firm’s optimal level of social software is advanced and the negative effect of social software on the consumer knowledge base increases, the firm should apply more elaborate social software products to mitigate the negative effects. The threshold level of the social software displayed in Equation (5) in Proposition 4 also has some important implications. First of all, when the firm has a fairly large amount of knowledge data in consumer knowledge base, the threshold level of social software will become low; therefore, the optimal level of social software will mostly increase with the negative effect of the social software on the customer knowledge base. Second, when the positive effect of social software on customer knowledge base in each period is significant, the threshold level of social software will be low; so the optimal level of software will mostly increase with the negative effect of social software on the customer knowledge base as well. Finally, when the negative effect of social software on the customer knowledge base in each time period is significant, the threshold level of social software will be high; hence, the optimal level of social software will most likely decrease when the effect of social software on the customer knowledge base is negative. Based on the above analysis and discussion, firms should implement varying levels of social software under different conditions. Table 2 summarizes the diverse strategies that a firm should consider when it encounters various scenarios regarding the changing parameters: the initial volume of customer knowledge base, the trans-

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Table 2. Changes of optimal level T* with various parameters Parameters

Optimal Level T*

transactional benefit B↑

increase

initial volume of customer knowledge base K0↑

increase

positive effect of social software σ↑

increase

negative effect of social software δ↑ when T*
decrease

negative effect of social software δ↑ when T* >Tc

increase

actional benefit, and the positive, and negative effects of social software on customer knowledge base. For instance, a firm can implement highly sophisticated social software technologies when the potential transactional benefits are foreseeable, when the firm initially has a large volume of knowledge data in customer knowledge base, or when the positive effect of social software has a significant impact on the customer knowledge base. These strategies provide valuable guidance for managers to integrate appropriate levels of social software on their electronic storefronts.

fUTURe TReNDS Our proposed model and strategies for implementing social software are by no means the best strategies available to manage external customer knowledge assets with the help of social software technologies. However, the suggested social software strategies provide some insights for understanding the relationship between social software and customer knowledge management, which also lays a foundation for related future research. For the purpose of tractability, the results derived from the above analytical model are based on an unlimited timeframe. For firms who want to seek the best knowledge management strategies within finite periods of time, the model may

Social Software for Customer Knowledge Management

yield different results. It might be useful in future research to focus on specific scenarios within a certain timeframe, which will offer additional guidance for practicing managers. The current model considers the expected total profit from a firm’s perspective. Future research should investigate customers’ rational behaviors by incorporating customers’ strategies into the framework and analyze how a firm should design incentives to align customers’ interests with the firm’s goals utilizing social software applications. The knowledge management discussed in this chapter is limited to potential customers. The general view of knowledge management can be integrated by utilizing customer knowledge as the interface. In this regard, social software technologies implemented for managing customer knowledge will be able to influence the entire organization. Therefore, future research should examine how social software strategies can be adjusted for managing customer knowledge at different levels, both within and outside of organizations. Furthermore, the proposed model of social software should be empirically tested to reveal the impact of critical factors of social software adoption and implementation on effective customer knowledge management. Empirical tests may corroborate the usefulness of the implementation strategies outlined in our chapter and help us understand the intricacies of the adoption process.

CONClUSION Knowledge management has been commonly regarded as an important business practice for organizations to gain a competitive edge. With the rapid development of Web 2.0 technologies, many organizations begin to use these new tools to manage knowledge assets related to their customers. Based on the analysis of the appropriate strategies for using social software to manage

customer knowledge assets, we conclude the following: The first research question asked about the optimal timeframe for firms to employ social software. The chapter presents an analytical model of implementing social software technologies for effective customer knowledge management over multiple time periods. The model captures the major effects of social software on firms that aspire to maximize the total expected profit through managing customer knowledge base, which lays the foundation for a further discussion of the relationships between social software and customer knowledge management. The second research question considered the optimal level of social software implementation. The proposed model is solved over an infinite time horizon under certain conditions. The analysis indicates that given a sufficiently large volume of knowledge in a customer knowledge base, a firm can successfully integrate appropriate levels of social software on electronic storefronts to take advantage of the “dynamic” effects of social software on the consumer knowledge base. The initial volume of customer knowledge base ensures the firm to be strong enough to withstand the potential negative effect of the adoption of social software on the customer knowledge base. The third research question examined the essential properties of the optimal level of social software with respect to several critical factors. Specifically, we investigate how the derived optimal level of social software changes with the initial volume of the customer knowledge base, the transactional benefits, and the positive and negative effects of social software on the consumer knowledge base. The analysis shows that the larger the initial volume of customer knowledge base, the higher the optimal level of the adopted social software. When the transactional benefits are high, the optimal level of the adopted social software is also high and the positive effects of social software on the customer knowledge base increase. Finally, the results demonstrate that

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there exists a threshold level of social software implementation that may influence the optimal level of change and negatively affect the customer knowledge base.

RefeReNCeS Avram, G. (2006). At the crossroads of knowledge management and social software. Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management, 4(1), 1–10. Boyd, S. (2006, October). Are you ready for social software? Retrieved October 16, 2006, from http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2006/10/are you ready f.html

García-Murillo, M., & Annabi, H. (2002). Customer knowledge management. The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 53(8), 875–884. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601365 Gibbert, M., Leibold, M., & Probst, G. (2002). Five styles of customer knowledge management, and how smart companies use them to create value. European Management Journal, 20(5), 459–469. doi:10.1016/S0263-2373(02)00101-9 Greenfield, D. (2007, August 12). Social bookmarking apps provide a new knowledge management platform. Retrieved August 12, 2007, from http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/Social-Bookmarking-Apps-Providea-New-Knowledge-Management-Platform/

Bueren, A., Schierholz, R., Kolbe, L., & Brenner, W. (2004). Customer knowledge management -improving performance of customer relationship management with knowledge management. In Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences – 2004.

Johnston, R. (2008, January). Knowledge management in the Web 2.0 age. Associations Now. Retrieved June 15, 2008, from http://www.asaecenter.org/PublicationsResources/ANowDetail. cfm?ItemNumber=30024

Chai, K., Potdar, V., & Chang, E. (2007). A survey of revenue models for current generation social software’s systems. In Computational science and its applications – ICCSA 2007 (LNCS 4704, pp. 724-738). Berlin, Germany: Springer.

Kim, H. L., Choi, J. H., Kim, H. G., & Hwang, S. H. (2006). WANT: A personal knowledge management system on social software agent technologies. In Agent and multi-agent systems: Technologies and applications (LNCS 4496, pp. 785-794). Berlin, Germany: Springer.

Circuit City enters Second Life. (2006, December). Retrieved December 15, 2006, from http:// money.cnn.com/2006/12/15/news/companies/ bestbuy sl/index.htm Coates, T. (2005, January 5). An addendum to a definition of social software. Retrieved December 15, 2007, from http://www.plasticbag.org/ archives/2005/01/an_addendum_to_a_definition_of_social_software/ Efimova, L. (2005). Understanding personal knowledge management: A Weblog case. Retrieved December 15, 2007, from https://doc.telin.nl/ dsweb/Get/Document-44969/pkm_weblogs_final.doc

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Lynch, C. G. (2008, June 17). Enterprise 2.0: Three thoughts on the state of social software in business. Retrieved June 17, 2008, from http:// www.cio.com/article/399713/Enterprise_._ Three_Thoughts_on_the_State_of_Social_Software_in_Business Rollins, M., & Halinen, A. (2005). Customer knowledge management competence: Towards a theoretical framework. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2005, HICSS’05. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. Retrieved June 17, 2008, from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all. jsp?arnumber=1385729

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Rowley, J. E. (2002). Reflections on customer knowledge management in e-business. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 5(4), 268–280. doi:10.1108/13522750210443227

Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Customer Knowledge Management (CKM): Customer knowledge management is a subfield of knowledge management that deals with the creation, storage, transfer, and application of consumer knowledge assets, typically with the help of information technologies. Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Customer relationship management describes all aspects of a company’s strategic relationship with its customers; it is often referred to as software-based techniques in order to attract, retain, and manage customers to increase customer satisfaction. e-Business: e-Business stands for electronic business and any kind of sales, purchasing, services or other business activities on the Internet. It also refers to the processes and tools that enable or-

ganizations to utilize Internet-based technologies and infrastructure, both internally and externally, in conducting daily business operations. Knowledge Base: A knowledge base is a specialized database with a collection of data, information, and knowledge within an organization that can be used for problem solving, decision making, project management, or other businessrelated activities. Knowledge Management (KM): Knowledge management involves the design and implementation of both social and technological processes to improve the application of knowledge to achieve organizational objectives. Knowledge management defines the processes organizations utilize to systematically gather, create, store, transfer, and apply knowledge. Social Software: Social software refers to a range of web-based software programs that allow users to interact and share data, information, and knowledge with each other. Web 2.0: Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of Internet-based applications and services that encourage people to produce content, share information and engage in social interactions

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AppeNDICeS A. proof of proposition 1 Proof. With our assumption that p(T, Ki) = ρ(T) · Ki, where 0 ≤ Ki ≤ 1, Equation (2) can be simplified as K i +1 = K i + s × r(T ) × K i - d × (1 - r(T ) × K i ) = [1 + r(T )(s + d)]K i - d, which suggests that the volume of customer knowledge base can be expressed as the function of the initial volume of the customer knowledge base as follows, K i = [1 + r(T )(s + d)]i K 0 - [1 + r(T )(s + d)]i -1 d, "i = 1, 2,...n. Therefore, the firm’s total expected profit can be reformulated as follows, n

p = r(T )å l i × B × K i - C (T ) i =0

= r(T )B {K 0 +

K 0l[1 + r(T )(s + d)][1 - l n (1 + r(T )(s + d))n ]

1 - l[1 + r(T )(s + d)] dl[1 - l (1 + r(T )(s + d))n ] } - C (T ). 1 - l[1 + r(T )(a + d)] n

When the total number of periods goes to infinity, i.e., n → ∞, the firm’s total expected profit will become ìï K l[1 + r(T )(s + d)] - dl üïï p = r(T )B ïíK 0 + 0 ý - C (T ) ïï 1 - l[1 + r(T )(s + d)] ïïþ î r(T )B(K 0 - dl) = - C (T ), 1 - l[1 + r(T )(s + d)] where first order condition with respect to T can generate the following condition, B(K 0 - dl) ×

C ¢(T ) 1-l = . r ¢(T ) {1 - l[1 + r(T )(s + d)]}2

In addition, the second order condition indicates that the sufficient condition for T from the above equation to be the optimal solution is

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r ¢¢(T ){1 - l[1 + r(T )(s + d)]} + 2l(s + d)[r ¢(T )]2 £ 0, which further implies that l(s + d) £

1-l r(T ) - 2[r ¢(T )]2 / r ¢¢(T )

or r(T ) -

2[r ¢(T )]2 1-l £ . r ¢¢(T ) l(s + d)

Therefore, for an infinite time horizon (when n → ∞), the optimal level T of social software can be solved from the following equation B(K 0 - dl) ×

C ¢(T ) 1-l = 2 r ¢(T ) {1 - l[1 + r(T )(s + d)]}

with the sufficient condition as r(T ) -

2[r ¢(T )]2 1-l . £ ¢¢ r (T ) l(s + d) ■

B. proof of propositions 3 and 4 Proof. When the positive effect σ on the knowledge base increases, the left hand side of Equation (4) will also increase. Therefore, the optimal level T* will increase as well. The first order derivative of the left hand side of Equation (3) with respect to the negative effect δon the knowledge base suggests that when the following condition holds, or -(1 - l) + l × r(T ) × (s + d) + 2r(T ) × (K 0 - dl) < 0, the optimal level T* of social software decreases with the negative effect δon the knowledge base. The above inequality can be rearranged as r(T ) <

1-l . 2K 0 + l(s - d)

Similarly, it can be shown that when the following condition holds, or

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r(T ) >

1-l , 2K 0 + l(s - d)

the first order derivative of the left hand side of Equation (3) with respect to the negative effect δon the knowledge base is positive, so the optimal level T*of social software increases with the negative effect δon the knowledge base. If we define the threshold level for the social software as follows, Tc = r -1[

1-l ], 2K 0 + l(s - d)

then the optimal level T* of the social software increases with the negative effect δ on the knowledge base when the optimal level of social software is greater than this threshold, or T* > Tc and decreases with δ when the optimal level of social software is lower than this threshold or, T* > Tc. ■

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Chapter 45

Critical Success Factors in the Development of Folksonomy-Based Knowledge Management Tools Kenneth Owen Lakehead University, Canada Robert Willis Vancouver Island University, Canada

ABSTRACT This chapter examines three important aspects of folksonomies: common design factors found in folksonomies, developmental patterns of mature folksonomies, and the identification of knowledge consumer behaviors that can act as metrics for the evaluation of a small-scale folksonomy. In identifying desirable design elements, a comparative examination of tags and objects was made using a study conducted at Lakehead University. From this project, an exemplar of an effective folksonomical data structure was derived. User behavior was examined and categorized to identify behaviors that can be monitored and measured as indicators of user satisfaction. The authors analyze the structures of a folksonomy and synthesize a practical model of an effective folksonomy in the context of knowledge management.

INTRODUCTION In today’s knowledge economy, companies struggle to find ways to collect, retain and reuse information as efficiently as possible. Control structures found in traditional Knowledge Management (KM) systems are difficult to maintain and require specialized knowledge and training to be effective (Davis, Studer, Sure, & Warren, 2005). Tradition-

ally, knowledge management experts are hired to develop complex hierarchies and ontologies to design systems based on pre-defined information structures (such as categories and relationships). Maintaining these systems and ensuring they continue to match the needs of an organization is a skilled art. If managed poorly, these systems have the potential to miscategorize and lose data. Additionally, overly rigid information structures can hinder the collection of information while overly

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch045

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Critical Success Factors in the Development of Folksonomy-Based Knowledge Management Tools

ambiguous structures can draw information into a virtual black hole. Recently, a new instrument has appeared in the knowledge manager’s toolbox -folksonomy. Folksonomies represent a nearly diametrically opposite approach to traditional information organization. For example, while ontologies rely on knowledge management experts to develop specific functional definitions, folksonomies impose no preconceived definitions and allow group consensus to reinforce appropriate classifications that emerge organically. Hierarchies attempt to organize information and give context to data through a branching structure while folksonomies allow for a multiplicity of contexts. Rather than working from the top down to build a structure and then insert data, folksonomies start at the data level and allow communities of knowledge for consumers to apply their own organization, in the form of tags and metadata, to whatever information they see as valuable. “Folksonomies [have allowed] communities of users to build structure on top of content using tags as annotations” (Dubinko, Kumar, Magnani, Novak, Raghavan, & Tomkins, 2006). As metadata grow, the context of the information also broadens and thickens. This process leads to folksonomies adapting to their communities’ needs and offers a flexible strategy for maintaining dynamic information resources: “[S]ystems employing free-form tagging that are encouraging users to organize information in their own ways are supremely responsive to user needs and vocabularies, and involve the users of information actively in the organizational system” (Mathes, 2004). One of the most frequently observed challenges of the use of folksonomies in knowledge management is the lack of control and structure around the use of tags (Peters, 2006): “A folksonomy represents simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information. Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity…”

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(Mathes, 2004). However, it remains to be determined whether, in scaling down a folksonomy from its traditional global scope (involving millions of contributors) to a size more commensurate with corporate-sized KM solutions, there is enough metadata to make a folksonomy effective. Large-scale social bookmarking sites (such as Del.icio.us or Redit.com) have been among the earliest adopters of using folksonomies to organize information. These sites have been drawing a great deal of attention from the web-surfing public and some now claim to have client bases in the millions (Del.icio.us, n.d.). There is a plethora of anecdotal evidence to suggest that these sites are both appreciated and effective tools for storing, finding, and sharing Internet-based resources – a form of social knowledge management. Much of the success of social bookmarking is attributed to its loosely structured approach to organizing data and the ease with which consumers can learn and integrate a folksonomical strategy. If this knowledge management strategy could be adapted to a smaller scale, one that more closely matches user needs in a business environment, the benefits to the knowledge management industry would be significant. As Mathes (2004) notes, “Folksonomies leverage the expertise of knowledge consumers to create an opportunity that has the lowest investment in time effort and cognitive cost to collect the information.” The purpose of this chapter is to examine the critical success factors in the development of a small-scale folksonomy and outline the key features needed to build a folksonomy that can be scaled to a size that might be more readily operationalized in organizations.

BACKGROUND Folksonomies can be described as ad hoc information management systems that acquire their entire structure through the context created by the descriptive contributions from an interested

Critical Success Factors in the Development of Folksonomy-Based Knowledge Management Tools

Figure 1. Entity relationships of a folksonomy

and involved community (Brooks & Montanez, 2006). Within a specific folksonomy, there is a requirement that three entities exist: an object being classified; at least one descriptive single word tag to categorize the object; and an actor to interact with the object. For example, Jordan (the actor) may tag a photograph of a new puppy (the object) as “photo, puppy, Kujo, cute” (four distinct tags). While this example only manages data from a single knowledge consumer, theoretically other actors, such as Jordan’s family, could make contributions. Regardless of how information is added to the folksonomy, it is important to recognize that a tag reflects the unique perspective of the contributor. Although two actors may use the same tag on differing objects, there may be disagreement between the actors as to the specific meaning of that tag. The argument therefore can be made that tag selection represents how knowledge consumers think about data rather than how the data owners/managers perceive and classify it (Fichter, 2006). For this reason, folksonomies need to associate an object and its tags with the contributor to maintain a full definition of the object. Figure 1 illustrates this relationship. Although a knowledge management solution is meant to facilitate the sharing of information, the motivation for individuals to contribute to such a system is somewhat more selfish (Fay,

2007). By allowing members to have their own personal lists of contributions, the system grows around the needs of the knowledge consumer. In this way, it is the uncoordinated and selfish interests of the community’s individual members that create the folksonomy (Cattuto, Loreto, & Pietronero, 2006). Each contributor adds links to a bookmarking site and tags it in a way that will facilitate future use. For an individual, the focus of activity is on personal needs and not the needs of the community. The community benefits from the activity by aggregating the selfish actions of all the participants: “Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one’s own retrieval. The tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others). Folksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information” (Vander Wal, 2007).

Critical Success factors in Building a folksonomy-Based Knowledge management Tool The popular trade media have already pointed at a number of social networking sites and enumerated several common characteristics for a folksonomy-based knowledge management tool. Importing data, popular links, recent additions, friends, ratings, privacy, tag suggestions, RSS, widgets, browser add-ons, among others, were identified by Read Write Web (Alex, 2006). The editors of the “Lifehacker Blog” also emphasized the importance of ranking, RSS, and various forms of collaboration as common features (Lifehacker, 2007). Consultants Common, a social bookmarking comparison tool, indicated several key factors that included: RSS, tagging, descriptions, bookmarklets, tag browsing, sharing, importing, exporting, integration, and page caching (Webb, Kanter, White, Simon, & Loving, 2005). Therefore, the following critical success factors can be identified as being relevant to small-scale folksonomies:

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Critical Success Factors in the Development of Folksonomy-Based Knowledge Management Tools

• • • • • • • •

Personalized reference lists Community lists Tag clouds Metadata Tag recommendations A searchable database Cross linked tags, and Cross-linked users.

If an organizationally appropriate KM system were to be built based on the experiences of large-scale social bookmarking sites, the evidence cited suggests that these eight features need to be included in the design.

Operationalizing the Critical Success factors For folksonomies to be adopted by knowledge workers in substitution for a traditional and hierarchically structured KM system, there needs to be an exploration of some of the limitations or boundaries that constrain the folksonomical approach. Adopters must determine whether a folksonomy would work with a small number of contributors and how its performance would be measured. Three lines of inquiry can be identified that need to be explored to evaluate a folksonomy’s effectiveness as an organizational knowledge management tool: • •

•

Identification of empirical measures of user interaction Identification of key features that would entice participation in the use of such a folksonomy tool, and Development of a user satisfaction instrument to validate findings based on the first two challenges.

In effect, adopters must ask what a folksonomy might look like when implemented, what would people do with the tool, and how well does it satisfy their needs? “Performance measurement,”

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a measure of user interaction, is a crucial measurement in knowledge management; in this regard, log files tracking user behaviour play a key role. Zipf’s principle of least effort developed in “Human Behaviour and The Principle of Least Effort” (1949), also known as Zipf’s Law, has been shown to be a signature behaviour for self-organizing human activity (Cattuto, Loreto, & Pietronero, 2006). Zipf argued that people are predisposed to seek solutions that require the least effort; in essence, people create tools to solve problems more easily. The principle of least effort states that an information-seeking actor (person) will tend to use the most convenient search method available, generally opting for using that search method’s least exacting mode. In other words, if an online search tool is most readily available, as opposed to a printed resource, such as a textbook, the person will tend to search online. However, if the textbook is more useful (or the computer is further away and not turned on, for example), the person will use the textbook. Informationseeking behaviour stops as soon as minimally acceptable results are found. Zipf’s principle holds true regardless of the user’s proficiency as a searcher or their level of subject expertise; it takes into account the user’s previous information seeking experience. The user will use the tools that are most familiar and easy to use that finds results. The principle of least effort is known as a deterministic description of human behaviour. The principle applies to any information seeking activity. Zipf’s argument is further supported by the notion of the selfish user (Fay, 2007). Additionally, one can use Zipf’s Law to understand how the principle of least effort is supported by the use of tags and tagging behaviour. Zipf’s Law was developed using empirical data and statistical procedures; it refers to the fact that many types of data can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution, one of a family of related discrete power law probability distributions. Zipf’s Law maintains that given a body of language occurrences, such as tags, the frequency of any word

Critical Success Factors in the Development of Folksonomy-Based Knowledge Management Tools

in a body of textis inversely proportional to that word’s rank in a frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, which occurs twice as often as the fourth most frequent word, and so on. Since large-scale social bookmarking sites can be viewed as following Zipf’s principle of least effort, it can be argued that if a small-scale folksonomy also follows the principle of least effort, the information held within the folksonomy must have similar value to the community. When folksonomies are deconstructed and tested, they are shown to follow the principle of least effort (Zipf, 1949). While there are a number of distributions associated with tagging and folksonomies (Peters, 2007), Zipf’s work clearly draws a connection between a power distribution and the knowledge consumers desire to act selfishly and reduce the effort that they are required to invest (Zipf, 1949). Butler (2004) succinctly sums up the connection: “I think the lack of hierarchy, synonym control and semantic precision are precisely why it works. Free typing loose associations is just a lot easier than making a decision about the degree of match to a pre-defined category (especially hierarchical ones).” Within a folksonomy, there are certain actions that can always represent the transfer of information. These value-indicating actions are behaviours identified in the system logs where participants are either accessing a resource listed in the database or contributing to the database in some way: adding a link to a resource; adding a new resource; or editing the tags and metadata associated with an existing object. Therefore, the first line of inquiry - the identification of empirical measures of user interaction – can be addressed through examining log files for the types of valueindicating actions. When displaying a collection of tags, social bookmarking sites often use minimal formatting; this gives a tag collection a chaotic appearance. To help identify which tags are most common,

Figure 2. Folksonomy tag cloud

individual tags are often emphasized using a combination of font sizes and colors. This gives the collection of information a cloud-like appearance and has lead to the adoption of the term tag cloud. Tag clouds appear to serve two purposes: (1) they display all the tags associated with an object, thus allowing the knowledge consumer an opportunity to holistically evaluate the community’s perception of an object; and, (2) they allow for a sense of key themes related to a given object. Figure 2 shows an example of a tag cloud with varied font sizes and clickable links. Folksonomies derive their structure from the reinforcement of tags through repeated use. If a tag referring to an object is used more frequently than another, it can be argued that that tag is perceived as more important to the description of the object by the users of the folksonomy. To create reinforcement behaviour, social bookmarking sites often display some or all of the tags that have already been used to describe an object. This reinforcement behaviour, combined with the development of a tag cloud, satisfies several of the critical success factors listed earlier. Although folksonomies are popularly associated with the use of tags, social bookmarking

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sites frequently included additional metadata in the form of a comments field. This additional field is also tied to the search engine feature built into many social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is seen as community activity. Not only can tags be used to describe objects they can also be used to cross-link other objects, tags and users into common themes. This cross-linking ultimately exposes knowledge consumers to broader definitions for tags and could possibly impact how individuals select tags. The final key to the measurement puzzle is related to user satisfaction and whether a tool, such as a folksonomy, actually improves participation in knowledge management projects. A simple survey tool can be used to explore such questions as: • • •

How satisfied were you using a tag cloud? How satisfied were you using a search tool based on metadata? How satisfied were you using your own tag lists to retrieve material?

Further, questions exploring whether tags conveyed important information, the degree of control a person felt over the data, and how effective the knowledge consumer felt the tool to be when coupled with the secondary data collected from log files will lead to a clear understanding of how well a folksonomy can be adapted to corporate or small-scale knowledge management.

Testing the Critical Success factors An online experiment was conducted at Lakehead University, where a Learning Object Repository was constructed based on the success factors identified above. The repository incorporated all eight critical success factors in its design: personalized reference lists, community or global lists, tag clouds, metadata, tag recommendations, a searchable database, cross linked tags, and cross linked users. Post-secondary instructors in Management

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Information Systems were invited to contribute to the repository and use a folksonomy to organize their materials. Forty-eight teaching professionals and other interested parties were tracked as they used the system. In two months, the participants were surveyed on their impressions of the Learning Object Repository. To construct an effective small-scale folksonomy, a three-pronged approach was developed. The first step was to scrutinize the public social bookmarking environment and, as described, eight critical success factors were identified as crucial to developing a working folksonomy based tool. Next, metrics for evaluating and assessing user engagement were developed using information from log files. Although many important characteristics of performance can be derived from log files, they are not the sole source of information regarding user satisfaction. As discussed above, only direct questioning of a system user can address satisfaction issues. All web hits entering and exiting the site were tracked to identify value-indicating actions. At the end of the trial period, the repository had been visited a total of 467 times. The repository grew to 37 objects with 172 distinct tags being used 299 times. During the experiment, the website was visited an average of 8.19 times every day and 490 value-indicating activities occurred in 203 of the visits to the repository. Of the 490 value-indicating activities recorded, 86% of those activities involved following links to resources within the Learning Object Repository. When tags within the system were sorted by popularity and their frequency plotted against their rank, the results fully accord with the predictions consistent with Zipf’s Law. The survey distributed to all the participants at the end of the research period had a 29% response rate. The results indicated that participants considered the community tag cloud useful, scoring it 7 out of 10. The survey also found that satisfaction with an individual’s own tag cloud was slightly more conservative, scoring 5.69 out of 10. The

Critical Success Factors in the Development of Folksonomy-Based Knowledge Management Tools

study determined that the folksonomy site had been an effective tool for managing information within small groups and that the critical success factors for a folksonomy were as described.

fUTURe TReNDS Future applications of folksonomy-based approaches to knowledge management will require designers and managers to see past the current drawbacks that arise from the use of an uncontrolled vocabulary in the tagging activities. Indeed, it is this non-predefined use of language that presents a number of opportunities and unique benefits. Using folksonomies to sort and organize images, for example, appears to be a good match to the capabilities of this KM tool. As others have noted (e.g., Jörgensen, 1999; Gordon, 2001), the classification of images using standard KM hierarchies is both challenging and time consuming and may not lead to a usable data set. On the other hand, browsing as a method of navigating an image collection is a fitting solution and within the capabilities of a folksonomy. Tagging images with user-defined tag sets encourages browsing and may add an element of serendipity to the results, which increases the value of the search results. A major benefit of the folksonomical approach is that it begins with a blank slate on which the structure of a content space can be allowed to develop through use until patterns emerge (Haverty, 2002). Giving the end user control over the organization of content can also allow entirely new content domains to develop. It becomes possible, then, to create specific tags to allow them to share new content forms that either have not been conceptualized at the time a hierarchical KM tool was designed or that are extremely difficult to classify under a hierarchical structure. For example, participants in Flickr.com have developed tags that permit them to share images of their computer desktops

or instant messaging status as a sort of personal history or discovered narrative. In this way, categories become things, and the classification becomes a shared space for communities of users to explore and develop (Lakoff, 1987). As Herwig notes: “One of the outcomes of the research into folksonomies is FolkRank, a search algorithm that exploits the structure of folksonomies; the name reveals that it was inspired by PageRank, but as the graph of folksonomy structures does not correspond to the web graph, some adaptations had to be made” (2008). Other trends derived from this approach include: detecting trends (in tag sets); detecting spam in tag sets (a major challenge) to improve the results; and developing a logsonomy (i.e., the structure of search engine query log files). Dawson (2007) proposes five key frames for leveraging knowledge in organizations that are emerging as the successors to knowledge management and that executives find relevant, compelling, and actionable: social networks, collaboration, relevance, workflow, and knowledge-based relationships.

CONClUSION Based on the results of the above study, it can be concluded that the critical success factors identified above are in fact effective design elements in a folksonomy-based knowledge management tool. The critical success factors are: personalized reference lists, community lists, tag clouds, metadata, tag recommendations, a searchable database, cross linked tags and cross linked users. Best design practices were identified from a selection of popular social networking sites and criteria for measuring the effectiveness of a folksonomy and user satisfaction were established. One of the major benefits of the folksonomical approach to knowledge management, as has been noted in this chapter, is the fact that it is developed and maintained by the users of that body of knowledge. In much the same way that wiki tech-

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nology improves the availability of knowledge, folksonomies make the storage and dissemination of knowledge much more accessible to the user community itself. Although a folksonomy-based KM system is less expensive, more flexible (scalable), and user-friendlier, a socially created folksonomy demonstrates strength and value. Communities of users create storehouses of shared meanings and understanding when they contribute to the tag cloud of any given folksonomy. As this storehouse of knowledge evolves over time, it has the dual outcome of creating a more viable knowledge management tool while strengthening the bonds of the user community, which facilitates the longevity of the tool.

Chakrabarti, D., & Faloutsos, C. (2006). Graph mining: Laws, generators, and algorithms. ACM Computing Surveys, 38, 1–69. doi:10.1145/1132952.1132954

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Fay, R. (2007, July 28). The anti-Google. Retrieved December 30, 2007, from http://www.robfay. com/2005/07/28/the-anti-google/ Fichter, D. (2006, May/June). Intranet applications for tagging and folksonomies. Online, 43-45. Gordon, A. S. (2001). Browsing image collections with representations of common-sense activities. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(11), 925–929. doi:10.1002/asi.1143 Haverty, M. (2002). Information architecture without internal theory: An inductive design process. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53(10), 839–845. doi:10.1002/asi.10096

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Herwig, J. (2008). The wild vs. the orderly: Folksonomies and semantics (TRIPLE-I 2008). Retrieved September 15, 2008, from http:// blog.semantic-web.at/2008/09/04/the-wild-vsthe-orderly-folksonomies-and-semantics-triplei-2008/ Jörgensen, C. (1999). Access to pictorial material: A review of current research and future prospects. Computers and the Humanities, 33, 293–318. doi:10.1023/A:1002065412222 Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lifehacker [blog]. (2007, October 17). 50+ social bookmarking sites. Message posted to http://lifehacker.biz/articles/social-bookmarking-sites/ Mathes, A. (2004). Folksonomies - cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata. Retrieved October 23, 2007, from http:// www.adammathes.com/academic/computermediated-communication/folksonomies.html O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Retrieved May 6, 2007, from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/ news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html Owen, K. D. (2007). An examination of the effectiveness of a folksonomy when implemented in a learning object repository. Thunder Bay, Canada: Lakehead University. Peters, I. (2006). Against folksonomies: Indexing blogs and podcasts for corporate knowledge management. Retrieved July 14, 2008, from http:// www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/infowiss/content/forschung/publikationen/IsabellaPeters_onlineInformation.pdf

Peters, I., & Wolfgang, G. (2007, October). Folksonomy and information retrieval. In Proceedings of the 70th ASIS&T Annual Meeting, Joining research and practice: Social computing an information science, 44. Retrieved July 14, 2008, from http://wwwalt.phil-fak.uniduesseldorf.de/infowiss/admin/public_dateien/ files/1/1194344432asist_am07.pdf Sturtz, D. N. (2004). Communal categorization: The folksonomy. Retrieved September 15, 2008, from http://davidsturtz.com/drexel/622/communal-categorization-the-folksonomy.html#1 Vander Wal, T. (2007, February 2). Folksonomy. Retrieved December 14, 2007, from http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html Webb, M., Kanter, B., & White, N. Simon, & Loving, A. (2005, June 6). Social bookmarking tool comparison. Retrieved November 18, 2007, from http://www.consultantcommons.org/node/239 Zipf, G. (1949). Human behaviour and the principle of least effort. Cambridge, MA: AddisonWesley Press.

Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Folksonomy: Folksonomies can be described as an ad hoc information management structure that acquires its entire structure through the context created by descriptive contributions from an interested community. A folksonomy is a usercreated taxonomy used to categorize information. Folksonomies rely on single word tags assigned by users to create context and establish the value of information. Hierarchies: A series of ordered groupings within a system, moving from broad categories to narrowly defined. Knowledge Management: Knowledge management is the process by which information is collected and disseminated for the purpose of

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improving the effectiveness of a decision making process. Metadata: Metadata are structured data that describe the characteristics of a particular resource. Ontology: The goal of an ontology is to ensure that all users of a given set of data have the same understanding of the words and concepts within that dataset. In knowledge management, ontologies focus on creating dictionaries of commonly defined terms.

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Semantic Web: This term refers to the development of a highly structured XML- based WWW alternative that is more conducive to automated analysis. Social Networks: The term refers to individuals and their interconnections with others, which could include business relationships, kinship or trust.

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Chapter 46

Representing and Sharing Tagging Data Using the Social Semantic Cloud of Tags Hak-Lae Kim National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland John G. Breslin National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland Stefan Decker National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland Hong-Gee Kim Seoul National University, South Korea

ABSTRACT Social tagging has become an essential element for Web 2.0 and the emerging Semantic Web applications. With the rise of Web 2.0, websites that provide content creation and sharing features have become extremely popular. These sites allow users to categorize and browse content using tags (i.e., free-text keyword topics). However, the tagging structures or folksonomies created by users and communities are often interlocked with a particular site and cannot be reused in a different system or by a different client. This chapter presents a model for expressing the structure, features, and relations among tags in different Web 2.0 sites. The model, termed the social semantic cloud of tags (SCOT), allows for the exchange of semantic tag metadata and reuse of tags in various social software applications.

INTRODUCTION With the rise of Web 2.0, websites which provide content creation and sharing features have become extremely popular. Many users have become actively involved in adding specific metadata in the

form of tags and content annotations in various social software applications. While the initial purpose of tagging is to help users organize and manage their own resources, collective tagging of common resources can be used to organize information via informal distributed classification systems called folksonomies (Mathes, 2004; Merholz, 2004).

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch046

Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

Representing and Sharing Tagging Data Using the Social Semantic Cloud of Tags

Studies of tagging and folksonomies can be divided into two main approaches: (a) semantic tagging concentrates on folksonomies that are inconsistent and even inaccurate because a large group of untrained users assign free-form terms to resources without guidance. Since this approach aims to resolve tag ambiguities, a wealth of ideas and efforts is emerging regarding how to use and combine ontologies with folksonomies (Weller, 2007); (b) social networking focuses on a community of users interested in a specific topic that may emerge over time because of their use of tags (Mika, 2005). The power of social tagging lies in the aggregation of information (Quintarelli, 2005). Aggregation of information involves social reinforcement by reinforcing social connections and providing social search mechanisms. Thus, a community built around tagging activities can be considered a social network with an insight into relations between topics and users. Using freely determined vocabularies by a participant is less costly than employing an expert (Sinclair & Cardew-Hall, 2007) and a cognitive load of tagging in comparison with taxonomies or ontology is relatively low (Merholz, 2004). However, tagging the data from social media sites without a social exchange is regarded as an individual set of metadata rather than a social one. Although tagging captures individual conceptual associations, the tagging system itself does not promote a social transmission that unites both creators and consumers. To create social transmission environments for tagging, one needs a consistent way of exchanging and sharing tagging data across various applications or sources. In this sense, a formal conceptual model to represent tagging data plays a critical role in encouraging its exchange and interoperation. Semantic Web techniques and approaches help social tagging systems to eliminate tagging ambiguities.

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BACKGROUND Social Tagging Social tagging and folksonomies have received much attention from the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 communities as a new way of information categorization and indexing. Among the most popular websites that employ folksonomies are Del.icio.us1 (social bookmarking system) and Flickr2 (photo-sharing network). CiteULike, using a similar approach to Del.icio.us, focuses on academic articles.3 There are a number of multimedia sites that support tagging, such as Last.fm4 for music and YouTube5 for video. Although the idea of a tag is not new, most people agree that a tag is no longer just a keyword. There is semantic information associated with a tag (Weller, 2007). A tag represents a type of metadata used for items such as resources, links, web pages, pictures, blog posts, and so on. Tagging can be defined as a way of representing concepts through keywords and cognitive association techniques without enforcing a categorization. The term folksonomy is a fusion of the two words folk and taxonomy (Vander Wal, 2004); it became especially popular with the proliferation of web-based social software applications, such as social bookmarking or annotating photographs. Building on the above definitions, folksonomy can be considered as a collaborative practice and method of creating and managing tags for the purpose of annotating and categorizing content (Mathes, 2004). Advantages and disadvantages of social tagging present an issue for discussion. Although social tagging and folksonomies have much to offer users who utilize tags in various social media sites, there are important drawbacks inherent within the current tagging systems: for example, there is no formal conceptualization to represent tagging data in a consistent way and no interoperability support for exchanging tagging data among different applications or people (Marlow et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2007). The simplicity and accessibility of

Representing and Sharing Tagging Data Using the Social Semantic Cloud of Tags

tags may lead to a lack of precision resulting in keyword ambiguity caused by misspelling certain words, as well as using synonyms, morphologies, or over-personalized tags. Since there are many different ways of using tags, it may be easy to misunderstand the meaning of a given tag. Aside from these problems, social tagging systems do not provide a uniform way to share and reuse tagging data amongst users or communities. There is no consistent method for transferring tags between the desktop and the web or for reusing one’s personal set of tags between either webbased systems or desktop applications. Although some folksonomy systems support an export functionality using their Open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and share their data with a closed agreement among sites, these systems do not offer a uniform and consistent way to share, exchange, and reuse tagging data for leveraging social interoperability. Therefore, it may be difficult to meaningfully search, compare, or merge similar tagging data from different applications. With the use of tagging systems increasing daily, these limitations will become critical. The limitations come from lack of standards for tag structure and the semantics for specifying the exact meaning. To overcome the current limitations of tagging systems, it may be beneficial to take into account not only standards for representing tagging data but also develop interoperable methods to support tag sharing across heterogeneous applications.

SemANTIC TAGGING AppROACheS folksonomy vs. Ontology In general, a taxonomy is the organization of a set of information for a particular purpose in a hierarchical structure. An ontology is set of welldefined concepts describing a specific domain. It has strict and formal rules for describing relationships among concepts and for defining properties. The distinction between an ontology and a

taxonomy is sometimes vague. A simple ontology without properties and constraints (i.e., concept hierarchy) could be considered a taxonomy, but a heavyweight ontology should clearly specify its capabilities. From a classification perspective, folksonomies and ontologies can be placed at the two opposite ends of the spectrum. When compared to a traditional classification system, a folksonomy can be seen as a set of terms forming part of a flat namespace; that is, a folksonomy is a completely uncontrolled and flat system (Tonkin, 2006). To its disadvantage, folksonomy has no hierarchy and there are no directly specified parent-child relationships between the varying descriptions of the same object. Despite these limitations, the usefulness of folksonomies has been acknowledged: a folksonomy is a user-generated classification created through a bottom-up consensus.

Tag Ontology There are certain disagreements on the merits of folksonomies and traditional classifications (see, for example, Hendler, 2007; O’Reilly, 2005; Shirky, 2004; Spivack, 2005). Shirky (2004) makes an argument that ontological classification or categorization is overrated in terms of its value. Shirky views folksonomies as emergent patterns in users’ collective intelligence and claims that they can be harnessed to create a bottom-up consensus view of the world. According to Shirky, traditional classification systems have been structured using hierarchical taxonomies by experts studying a particular domain. Therefore these systems do not satisfy user-specific ways of thinking and organizing information. Meanwhile, Gruber (2005) criticizes Shirky’s approach in that he fails to point out that a folksonomy has limitations to represent, share, exchange, and reuse tags and confuses “ontology-as-specified-conceptualization” with a very narrow form of specification. Hendler (2007) also argues that Shirky misunderstood how ontologies could be built on the principles

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of the Semantic Web. Spivack (2005) asserts that folksonomies are just specific, highly simplistic cases of ontologies with minimal semantics. Despite conflicting differences between folksonomies and ontologies, the Semantic Web and ontologies can be seen as a complement to folksonomies. Gruber (2005) and Spivack (2005) emphasize the importance of folksonomies and ontologies working together. In particular, Gruber (2005) proposes the “Tag Ontology.” This aims at identifying and formalizing a conceptualization of the activity of tagging, and building technology that commits to the ontology at a semantic level. This approach is a good starting point to bridge Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web: •

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Gruber’s Conceptual Model: Suggests a model that defines a tagging activity including an object, a tag, a tagging, and a source. Richard Newman’s Tag Ontology: Defines the three core concepts of Tagger, Tagging, Tag for representing the tagging activity (Newman, 2005) and is based on a tripartite tagging (i.e., user, resource, and tag).

The two approaches are focused on tagging activities or events that people used to tag in resources using terms. Therefore the core concept is Tagging. The concept of tagging has a relationship, as a concept, with Tagger and Resource to describe people who participate in a tagging event and objects to where a tag is assigned. However, there are no ways to describe the frequency of tags in these ontologies.

SCOT: Social Semantic Cloud of Tags SCOT (Social Semantic Cloud of Tags) is an ontology for sharing and reusing tag data and representing social relations among individuals. It aims to describe the structure and the semantics

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of tagged data as well as offer interoperability of data among different sources. Figure 1 illustrates the relations among the elements as well as a tagging activity. The vocabularies can be used to make explicit a collection of users, tags, and resources; they are represented by a set of RDF classes and properties that can be used to express the content and structure of the tagging activity as an RDF graph. The TagCloud, which represents a conceptual model of a folksonomy, has a connection point to combine other concepts (i.e., tag, tagging, tagger, and so on.) and can be connected with other tag cloud with a unique namespace. The scot:TagCloud is a subclass of sioc:Container. All information consisting of relationships among taggers, items, and all tags is connected to this class. This class has the scot:contains and the scot:hasUsergroup properties. The former represents tags in a given domain or community while the latter describes taggers who participate in a tagging activity. A tagger may not be a single person according to contexts. For instance, if multiple taggers in a certain community generate a tag cloud, this tag cloud should contain all taggers. The scot:hasUsergroup property represents a person with a container. The scot:composedOf property describes a part of a TagCloud. In particular, if a TagCloud has more than two tag clouds, the property identifies each tag cloud. The scot:taggingActivity property present a relationship between a TagCloud and a Tagging. The scot:Tag class, a subclass of tags:Tag (Tag class of Tag Ontology), allows users to assert that a tag is an atomic conceptual resource. A tag is a concept associated with a piece of information. The concept has many different variations according to taggers’ cognitive patterns. Tag ambiguities, one of the most critical problems, result from this reason. The SCOT ontology provides several properties such as scot:spellingVariant, scot:synonym to solve this problem. It is called the “linguistic property” since these properties focus on representing the meaning of a tag and

Representing and Sharing Tagging Data Using the Social Semantic Cloud of Tags

Figure 1. Terms and relations in SCOT that can be used to describe tagging activities

the relationships between each tag. In addition, the ontology has properties to describe occurrence of a tag (i.e., scot:frequency). A tag itself has its own frequency. The frequency is not unique, but it is an important feature to distinguish or compare with other tags. We called it a “numerical property.” The properties have their own numerical values by computing. The properties in Figure 1 show high-level properties in the SCOT ontology. In addition to representing the structure and the semantics of tags, the model allows the exchange of semantic tag metadata for reuse in social applications and interoperation amongst data sources, services, or agents in a tag space. These features are a cornerstone to being able to identify, formalize, and interoperate a common conceptualization of tagging activity at a semantic level. SCOT aims to incorporate and reuse existing vocabularies as much as possible to avoid redundancies and to enable the use of richer metadata descriptions for specific domains. The ontology has a number of properties to represent social tagging activity and relationships among elements occurring in an online community.

•

•

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DC, or Dublin Core, provides a basic set of properties and types for annotating documents. In SCOT, we use the properties dc:title for the title of a TagCloud, dc:description to give a summary of the TagCloud, dc:publisher to define what system is generating the TagCloud, dc:creator to link to the person who created this set of tags. dcterms:created, from the Dublin Core refinements vocabulary, is used to define when a TagCloud was first created. FOAF (Brickley & Miller, 2004), or Friend of a Friend, specifies the most important features related to people acting in online communities. The vocabulary allows us to specify properties about people commonly appearing on personal homepages, and to describe links between people who know each other. foaf:Person is used to define the creator of a particular TagCloud. foaf:Group can be used to define a group of people who have created a group TagCloud. SIOC (Breslin et al., 2005), Semantically-

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Interlinked Online Communities, provides the main concepts and properties required to describe information from online communities (e.g., message boards, wikis, blogs, etc.) on the Semantic Web. In the context of SCOT, sioc:Usergroup can be used to represent a set of sioc:User who have created the tags contained within a particular group TagCloud. A TagCloud is also a type of sioc:Container, in that it contains a set of Tags (subclass of sioc:Item). SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization Systems) provides specifications and standards to support the use of vocabularies, such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, other types of controlled vocabulary as well as terminologies and glossaries (Miles & Bechhofer, 2008). Tag is a subclass of skos:Concept, and a number of SKOS properties are used to define the relationships between Tags: broader, narrower, and so on.

tags. In addition, users can search people, tags, or resources and can bookmark some resources or integrate different instances. Through this iterative process, the tags reflect distributed human intelligence into the site. Int.ere.st is the first OpenTagging Platform7 of the Semantic Web, since users can manage a collection of tagging data in a smarter and more effective way as well as search, bookmark, and share their own as well as other’s tagging data underlying the SCOT ontology. Those functionalities help users exchange and share their tagging data based on the Semantic Web standards. The site is compatible with other Semantic Web applications, and its information can be shared across applications. This means that the site enables users to create Semantic Web data, such as FOAF, SKOS, and SIOC automatically. RDF vocabularies can be interlinked with the URIs of SCOT instances that are generated in the site and shared in online communities.

fUTURe TReNDS Int.ere.st: platform for Tag Sharing Int.ere.st is a website where people can manage their tagging data from various sources, search resources based on their tags which were created and used by themselves, and leverage a sharing and exchanging of tagging data among people or various online communities.6 The site is a platform for providing structure and semantics to previously unstructured tagging data via various mashups. The tagging data from distributed environments (such as blogs) can be stored in a repository, such as SCOT, via the Mashup Wrapper, which extracts tagging data using Open APIs from host sites. For instance, the site allows users to dump tagging data from Del.icio.us, Flickr, and YouTube; these tagging data are transformed into SCOT instances on a semantic level. Thus, all instances within Int.ere.st include different tagging contexts and connect various people and sources with the same

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Social computing enables building social systems and software; it also allows for embedding social knowledge in applications rather than merely describing social information. Within social network analysis, traditional approaches have focused on static networks for small groups. As the technologies move forward, a major challenge for social network analysis is to design methods and tools for modeling and analyzing large-scale and dynamic networks. In particular, folksonomies are inherently dynamic and have different contexts among sources. To facilitate the development of a social network for folksonomies, it is important to pay attention to social information. Although SNA allows analyzing phenomenon of social behavior at both individual and collective level, we do not have a solution that represents the relations among elements and reflects them to the objects. Tag

Representing and Sharing Tagging Data Using the Social Semantic Cloud of Tags

ontologies are promising in providing the tools and formalism for representing social information including users, resources, tags, and their relationships. Social search has become an active area in academic research as well as industry. Social search is a type of search engine that determines the relevance of search results by considering user interactions, contributions, or activities, such as bookmarking, tagging, and ranking. For instance, Del.icio.us and Spurl8 (social bookmarking services) rely on user rankings, while Technorati9 and Bloglines10 (tag aggregators) analyze blogs and feed-based content. In particular, Swicki11 and Rollyo12 offer a community-based topic search as well as “searchles”13 (these allow users to tag, group, and save links and create their own “SearchlesTV” channels through video mashups). Most approaches, however, are limited to different types of resources and to show a comprehensive perspective on social relations across different applications. For instance, if users are involved in two different social spaces such as Del.icio.us and YouTube, one cannot build an integrated social network unless the two services have a mutual agreement. This issue, to some degree, is related to social information representation, since both websites have different aspects and events for building social connections. Thus, if one has a common conceptualization for social events, it is easy to build social connections among different spaces and to search them from different sources. Since tag ontologies are suitable to represent common conceptualization of social events, a social search can adopt Semantic Web technologies. We believe that a social search can benefit from a formal conceptualization of social knowledge, including tagging data based on the Semantic Web.

CONClUSION Tags have become an essential element for Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web applications. There is a vast collection of user-created content residing on the web. Tagging is a promising technological breakthrough offering new emerging opportunities for sharing and disseminating metadata. The critical issues discussed in this chapter offer many implications and challenges for representing tagging data semantically and exchanging them socially. With emphasis placed on tag ontologies and opportunities, these issues must be confronted without delay. Creators and consumers of folksonomies, as well as service providers, will profit from effective and efficient tagging methods that are socially and semantically enhanced.

RefeReNCeS Breslin, J. G., Decker, S., Harth, A., & Bojars, U. (2005). SIOC: An approach to connect Web-based communities. International Journal of Web-Based Communities, 2(2), 133–142. Brickley, D., & Miller, L. (2004). FOAF vocabulary specification. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1 Golder, S. A., & Huberman, B. A. (2006). Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science, 32(2), 198–208. doi:10.1177/0165551506062337 Gruber, T. (2005). Ontology of folksonomy: A mash-up of apples and oranges. International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, 3(2), 1–11. Hendler, J. (2007). Shirkyng my responsibility. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from http://www. mindswap.org/blog/2007/11/21/shirkyng-myresponsibility

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Kim, H. L., Breslin, J. G., Yang, S. K., & Kim, H. G. (2008). Social semantic cloud of tag: Semantic model for social tagging. In Proceedings of the 2nd KES International Symposium on Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications (pp. 83-92). Berlin, Germany: Springer. Kim, H. L., Yang, S. K., Breslin, J. G., & Kim, H. G. (2007). Simple algorithms for representing tag frequencies in the SCOT Exporter. In Proceedings of Intelligent Agent Technologies (pp. 536-539). Marlow, C., Naaman, M., Boyd, D., & Davis, M. (2006). HT06, tagging paper, taxonomy, Flickr, academic article, to read. In U. K. Wiil, et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (pp. 31-39). New York: ACM Press. Mathes, A. (2004). Folksonomies: Cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from http:// adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediatedcommunication/folksonomies.html

O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/ news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html Quintarelli, E. (2005). Folksonomies: Power to the people. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from http:// www.iskoi.org/doc/folksonomies.htm Shirky, C. (2004). Ontology is overrated: Categories, links, and tags. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html Sinclair, J., & Cardew-Hall, M. (2008). The folksonomy tag cloud: When is it useful? Journal of Information Science, 34(1), 15–29. doi:10.1177/0165551506078083 Spivak, N. (2005). Folktologies--beyond the folksonomy vs. ontology distinction. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from http://novaspivack.typepad. com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2005/01/whats_after_fol.html

Merholz, P. (2004). Metadata for the masses. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000361.php

Tonkin, E. (2006). Folksonomies: The fall and rise of plain-text tagging. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/tonkin/

Mika, P. (2005). Ontologies are us: A unified model of social networks and semantics. Web Semantics: Science . Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 5(1), 5–15. doi:10.1016/j. websem.2006.11.002

Vander Wal, T. (2005). Explaining and showing broad and narrow folksonomies. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from http://www.vanderwal.net/random/ category.php?cat=153

Miles, A., & Bechhofer, S. (2008). SKOS Simple knowledge organization system reference. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from http://www.w3.org/ TR/skos-reference Newman, R. (2005). Tag ontology design. Retrieved July 15, 2008, from http://www.holygoat. co.uk/blog/entry/2005-03-23-2

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Weller, K. (2007). Folksonomies and ontologies. 2007. Two new players in indexing and knowledge representation. In H. Jezzard (Ed.), Applying Web 2.0. Innovation, impact and implementation: Online Information 2007 Conference Proceedings, London (pp. 108-115). Retrieved July 15, 2008, from http://www.phil-fak.uniduesseldorf.de/infowiss/admin/public_dateien/ files/35/1204288118weller009_.htm

Representing and Sharing Tagging Data Using the Social Semantic Cloud of Tags

Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Folksonomy: A practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags for the purpose of annotating and categorizing content. The term folksonomy is a fusion of two words: folk and taxonomy. Folksonomies became popular with the introduction of web-based social software applications, for example, social bookmarking and photograph annotating. Mashup: Involves web services or applications combining data from different websites. In general, mashup services are implemented by combining various functionalities with open APIs. Ontology: Is set of well-defined concepts describing a specific domain. Open API (Application Programming Interface): Is used to describe a set of methods for sharing data in Web 2.0 applications. Semantic Web: Is an extension of the current World Wide Web that links information and services on the web through meaning and allows people and machines use web content in more intelligent and intuitive ways. Social Computing: Is defined as any type of collaborative and social applications that offer the gathering, representation, processing, use, and dissemination of distributed social information. Social Semantic Cloud of Tags (SCOT): Is an ontology for sharing and reusing tagged data and representing social relations among individuals. It aims to describe the structure and the semantics of data and to offer the interoperability of data among different sources. Social Software: Can be defined as a range of web-based software programs that support group

communication. Many of these programs share similar characteristics, for example, open APIs, customizable service orientation, and the capacity to upload data and media. Social Tagging: Also known as collaborative tagging, refers to assigning specific keywords or tags to items and sharing the set of tags between communities of users. Tag: A type of metadata used for items such as resources, links, web pages, pictures, blog posts, and so on. Tagging: A way of representing concepts through tags and cognitive association techniques without enforcing a categorization. Taxonomy: A method of organizing information in a hierarchical structure using a set of vocabulary terms.

eNDNOTeS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

http://del.icio.us http://www.flickr.com http://www.citeulike.org http://www.lastfm.com http://www.youtube.com http://int.ere.st http://opentagging.org http://www.spurl.net http://www.technorati.com http://www.bloglines.com http://www.swicki.com http://rollyo.com http://www.searchles.com

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A Framework for Analyzing Social Interaction Using Broadband Visual Communication Technologies Susan O’Donnell National Research Council, Canada Heather Molyneaux National Research Council, Canada Kerri Gibson National Research Council, Canada

ABSTRACT Broadband visual communication (BVC) technologies—such as videoconferencing and video sharing— allow for the exchange of rich simultaneous or pre-recorded visual and audio data over broadband networks. This chapter introduces an analytical framework that can be utilized by multi-disciplinary teams working with BVC technologies to analyze the variables that hinder people’s adoption and use of BVC. The framework identifies four main categories, each with a number of sub-categories, covering variables that are social and technical in nature: namely, the production and reception of audio-visual content, technical infrastructure, interaction of users and groups with the technical infrastructure, and social and organizational relations. The authors apply the proposed framework to a study of BVC technology usability and effectiveness as well as technology needs assessment in remote and rural First Nation (indigenous) communities of Canada.

INTRODUCTION People, groups, organizations and communities are increasingly using broadband visual communicaDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch047

tion (BVC) technologies for social interaction in a wide range of settings - from institutional uses such as business, government, health and education to more informal uses, such as entertainment for family and friends, social networking and digital storytelling.

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A Framework for Analyzing Social Interaction Using Broadband Visual Communication Technologies

Researchers use the terms broadband visual communication and broadband video communication interchangeably. The term broadband refers to both broadband networks and broadband Internet - telecommunication in which a wide band of frequencies is available to transmit information. BVC technologies allow both simultaneous and pre-recorded exchange of rich visual and audio data over Internet. The visual and audio data may also be accompanied by text data. The National Research Council Canada (NRC) has used the term “BVC” for many years to refer to videoconferencing which allows synchronous audio-visual communication. More recently, we use “BVC” to refer also to asynchronous communication using pre-recorded videos, such as video sharing on the Internet by people with the capacity to both create and view videos. Increasingly, synchronous and asynchronous BVC are used together for social interaction. Videoconferencing was introduced commercially in the 1970s. For the next decades, it was used almost exclusively in health care, military, and educational institutions, failing to gain more widespread adoption. In the past few years the decreasing costs and increasing penetration of broadband Internet has stimulated a huge uptake in videoconferencing. Set-top videoconferencing units are now found not only in the previously mentioned settings but also in voluntary organizations, community centers, community health clinics, and schools. Videoconferencing has several immediate and tangible benefits: it encourages interaction between people who cannot meet in person and allows the exchange of visual information, such as facial expressions that encourage trust and intimacy; it encourages “green” meetings that reduce participants’ travel and carbon footprint. Videoconferencing can also be an important tool for knowledge sharing, provide essential social services, support for people in rural or remote communities, and aid in community building and development (Molyneaux et al., 2007a; Molyneaux et al., 2008a).

Sharing videos online has exploded in popularity in a very short time as home computers with webcams and digital video cameras have become ubiquitous. The most popular video sharing website, YouTube.com, claimed to receive more than 100 million views per day by more than 20 million users internationally with more than 65,000 new user-generated videos uploaded daily - a mere 22 months after its launch. YouTube users also posted millions of comments about the videos and engaged in exchanges with other users. In 2006, Time Magazine named its “Person of the Year” as “You,” claiming that the users of YouTube and other user-generated content-sharing Internet sites were “seizing the reins of the global media… founding and framing the new digital democracy …and beating the pros at their own game” (Grossman, 2006). The objective of this chapter is to discuss the requirements for analyzing social interaction using BVC technologies and to provide an overview of our solution – creating an analytical framework. The analytical framework is a common reference point for multi-disciplinary teams working with BVC technologies seeking to understand the variables that help and hinder people’s use of social interaction technologies. We use our research framework to understand the social implications of BVC technologies and the social aspects of technology design and implementation. We also apply the framework to the study of technology usability and effectiveness as well as technology needs assessments. We illustrate how this framework can by used by presenting a case study of BVC in remote and rural First Nations (Indigenous) communities in Canada.

BACKGROUND BVC involves both simple and complex social and technical interactions. The complexities arise as the interaction grows from communication between two individuals in the same location to

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communication between multiple individuals in multiple locations, working for multiple organisations rooted in different communities. The main technologies are a camera, a microphone, and some recording and viewing software and hardware. There are multiple hardware and software versions and platforms with compatibility problems, using broadband networks that have access, bandwidth, and management challenges. In 1997, a study was published that outlined different ways to approach research on videomediated communication (Finn, Sellen, & Wilbur, 1997). Referring to this publication, in 2002, colleagues working on BVC at the National Research Council developed a cluster of evaluation factors for analyzing BVC among multiple stakeholders in different geographical locations. Five evaluation factors were identified: social infrastructure, technical infrastructure, physical space, interaction style, and content (Barfurth et al., 2002). Since 2002, broadband Internet capable of supporting high-quality visual communications has become mainstream in most developed countries. This has led to a virtual explosion of visual communications. Applications such as online video sharing, which until 2006 were unknown by the general public, are now used regularly by hundreds of millions of Internet users globally. The use of desktop videoconferencing has also seen a huge upsurge, particularly in young people: a recent study of 1,060 adolescents found that 57% occasionally use webcams while instant messaging and 32% sometimes use microphones (Peter et al, 2007). Given these new developments, we decided it was time to propose a more comprehensive framework for analyzing social interaction using BVC technologies. Our framework started with our colleagues’ earlier work (Barfurth et al., 2002). We then reconfigured it to focus on social interaction and include videoconferencing and online video sharing. This moves it from the realm of small groups to both small very large groups of people, communicating synchronously, asynchronously, or both.

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ANAlyTICAl fRAmeWORK Basic Requirements We aimed for the analytical framework to meet four basic requirements.

Provide a Common Point of Reference for Multidisciplinary Teams There is a shift in technology research and development toward multi-disciplinary teams. (Members of our research team have advanced degrees in 10 different disciplines.) The framework needed to be flexible enough to embrace a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches and research interests. We envisioned the framework as a focal point that would let us share a common language. If we review literature from disciplines as diverse as those found in our research team - communications and media studies, computer science, clinical psychology, cognitive psychology, educational psychology, philosophy, electrical engineering, sociology, history, and educational technology - we find that there are literally hundreds of variables involved in social interaction using BVC. The concept that many different variables will help or hinder communication using technology is understood and theorised in many different fields. The framework needed to encompass many variables – enablers and constraints – of many kinds. To give a practical example, excellent audio quality during a videoconference enables communication in one location, while poor audio quality constrains it in another location. Other constraints would be if certain participants in one location cannot access the technology to make videos or view them online because they cannot afford it or if their rural community does not have adequate bandwidth. These enablers and constraints shape social interaction. The framework needed to accommodate variables that address different types of concerns from different disciplines.

A Framework for Analyzing Social Interaction Using Broadband Visual Communication Technologies

Include Both Social and Technical Elements Along with the trend toward multidisciplinary research teams, there is a growing recognition in the technology development field of the need to address both the social and technical elements of technology use and deployment. Actor network theory and the social actor concept posit that the technical and the social are inseparable: people together with their technologies comprise social networks while social actors are simultaneously enabled and constrained by socio-technical affiliations and environments (Blechar, Knutsen, & Damsgaard, 2005; Lamb & Kling, 2003; Rowlands, 2006). In particular, our framework is guided by the social informatics approach of Kling: that is, the relationship between the social and technical is complex and mediated by context, structure and agency, history, culture and meaning systems, political and social processes and symbolic and material interests and resources (Kling, 1999; Lamb & Sawyer, 2005; Robbin & Day, 2006).

Emphasize Both the Production and Reception of Visual Content A novel feature of new media is the ability for people to be both producers and viewers of digital content (Lievrouw & Livingston, 2006). Traditionally, videoconferencing research has included both the production and reception aspects of communication, but research on traditional forms of video and visual content generally has focused on either the production or the reception, but not both. Analysing online videos presents a new challenge for researchers because it is important to understand the users of the technology as both producers and viewers or audiences (Molyneaux et al., 2008b). The most influential theorist of how people respond to visual images is Hall (1999). His central argument is that although creators of a visual

image may have a message in mind when they create or “encode” it for its viewers, it does not necessarily follow that the viewers will “decode” the message the way it was intended. Viewers actively construct meanings rather than passively receive them. Both encoding and decoding are socially constructed activities, and Hall’s theory stresses that visual messages will be constructed and interpreted differently depending on sociocultural contexts. Some messages are connected to specific beliefs, practices and interests and are thus dominant in social groups that share these perspectives. Therefore analyzing visual images can reveal the dominant beliefs held by the encoders, and analyzing the viewing audience can reveal the different interpretations decoded by different social groups.

Focus on Multiple Levels of Social Interactions As noted earlier, using BVC for social interaction is a complex process. Visual communication among multiple people in multiple locations rooted in different contexts implies many analytical variables. There are numerous theories and approaches that build understanding of social interaction using communication technologies at the levels of individuals, groups, organizations and communities. For example, at the group level, the concept that different groups of people have different levels of acceptance and use of a new technology is implicit in influential theories: such as, Rogers’ (2003) diffusion of innovations in the field of communication and media research and Davis’ technology acceptance model (TAM) in management information systems research (Davis, 1989). In the TAM model, people who perceive technology as useful and easy to use will accept it more readily than those who do not, with usefulness more important than ease of use. Extensions of the TAM model identified gender differences (Gefen & Straub, 1997) and cultural differences in e-mail perception and use (Straub,

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Figure 1. Analytical framework

Keil, & Brenner, 1997). The framework needed to include variables for social interaction using BVC at the individual, group, organization and community level.

Core Categories and variables Based on the essential requirements outlined above, our analytical framework includes social and technical variables in four core categories: the production and reception of audio-visual content, technical infrastructure, interaction of users and groups with the technical infrastructure, and social and organizational relations (see Figure 1). The categories are not entirely discrete: there is some overlap among the variables in each category. To identify variables within these four categories, we first conducted a wide-ranging review of almost a hundred published articles and reports on the use of videoconferencing and multi-site videoconferencing and participatory communication in many different contexts, including health and medicine, education, government, corporate,

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non-profit, research and community uses (Liu, Molyneaux, & Matthews, 2008; Molyneaux et al., 2007a; Molyneaux et al., 2008a). The studies included: literature on virtual teams (Becker &Goodwin, 2005; Jarman, 2005; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1998; Mankin, Cohen, & Fitzgerald, 2004; Mansour-Cole, 2001; Nemiro, 2000), literature on multi-party videoconferencing (Anderson, 2006; Blignault, 2000: Sonnenwald et al., 2002), and literature on videoconferencing in health, education, and other areas (Blignault, 2000; Ho & Jarvis-Selinger, 2005; Rees & Haythornthwaite, 2004). The review focused on identifying issues and variables of concern under the four core categories. We then refined our framework through a series of studies that allowed us to validate the existing variables and add new variables under each of the core categories. These studies produced publications on the use of: YouTube (Milliken et al., 2008; Molyneaux et al., 2008a, 2008b; O’Donnell, 2008), the use of videoconferencing and online video technologies in a live discussion on topi-

A Framework for Analyzing Social Interaction Using Broadband Visual Communication Technologies

cal issues by students in six high schools across Canada (O’Donnell et al., 2007; Simms et al., 2008); the use of videoconferencing and online video by First Nation (Indigenous) communities in remote and rural areas of Canada (O’Donnell, Perley, & Simms, 2008); challenges to conducting participatory research on videoconferencing in a health organization (Gibson & O’Donnell, 2008a); and the use of multi-site videoconferencing by a regional health board in Canada for non-clinical health administration and education (Gibson & O’Donnell, 2008b). Whenever possible we also solicited and included feedback from our research partners and participants to inform our procedures, findings, and thinking. Some of our studies also used participatory research approaches. The four core categories and their associated sub-categories are described below.

Technical Infrastructure This category covers the variables that are primarily technical. To date we have identified four main sub-categories: Quality and Availability of Networks and Bandwidth Broadband visual communication requires considerably more bandwidth than text exchange, and two-way communication requires similar upload and download speeds. The term broadband is used to describe many different types of networks and Internet connections, not all of which support adequate two-way exchange of audio and visual data. For example, some people have “broadband” Internet connections that allow them to download and play videos easily, but they run into difficulties when uploading their own videos to share with others. Another infrastructure variable affecting social interaction is the need for managed networks and quality of service (QoS) for synchronous visual communication in remote communities - especially areas serviced by satellite connections. For example, a videoconference

from a community with limited bandwidth may have poor visual and audio quality if QoS is not managed, thus limiting the quality of social interaction. Another variable in this sub-category is firewalls in corporate networks. Type of Software and Hardware for Video Capture, Storage, and Playback For videoconferencing, there are several brands of set-top units and a wide variety of desktop options. Videoconferencing by mobile phone is now possible as well. Each of these options presents different possibilities and challenges. Some of the variables include: the capacity of the devices and software; the flexibility of the technology to support different group setups, locations, and time constraints; the maximum number of users and groups who can communicate synchronously and asynchronously using the technology; the availability of a critical mass of the technology; the technical compatibility of systems, hardware, software; and the flexibility and capacity of a system for incorporating new features and elements. Availability of a Videoconference Bridge and Video Sharing Server For some kinds of multi-site videoconferencing, a videoconferencing bridge (also known as an MCU) is required, and technical challenges for bridging different kinds of software and hardware can be considerable. A server is required for sharing videos, and again there can be many technical challenges associated with this. Quality and Placement of Cameras, Microphones, Screens, and Speakers In other publications we have discussed the many issues involved with cameras and microphones for BVC (Molyneaux et al., 2007a; Molyneaux et al., 2008a). Not having a good quality audio or visual connection when communicating with this technology can be a significant inhibitor to communication in many settings.

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Interaction of Users and Groups with the Technical Infrastructure This category includes variables that have both technical and social elements. To date we have identified four main sub-categories: Access by Users and Groups to the Hardware, Software, and Network As noted earlier, BVC, and its software and equipment requirements, is more complex than text-based communication. Most households in the US and Canada have computers and an Internet connection; however, not all of these households also have a digital video recorder or a webcam and microphone as a part of their computer setup. Accessing higher-end videoconferencing equipment can be a challenge and may have prohibitive associated costs. Levels of Awareness, Comfort, and Technical Skills of Participants Different people have varying levels of awareness, comfort and technical skills with BVC, and these will have an impact on the communications and social interaction. One variable is that some people are camera-shy. Our study of online video production and viewing by 150 high-school students in three Canadian provinces found that more than 25% said that in general they do not like to appear on camera (Simms et al., 2008). Our work with the health board found anecdotal evidence that sometimes participants will point the videoconference camera at the site location sign rather than themselves if they do not want people looking at them that day. Levels of Technical Support For videoconferencing in particular, the technical support required is generally beyond what an ordinary computer user can manage. Participants who have ready access to technical support will find it much easier to participate in many different forms of BVC.

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Ease of Use, Ease of Viewing Many variables are involved in making BVC easy to use and easy to view. These include the computer interface, position of the screen or monitor, and a wide range of human-computer interaction variables.

Production and Reception of Audio-Visual Content This category also includes both social and technical variables. To date we have identified four main sub-categories. Task Relevance and Usefulness of Broadband Visual Communication Broadband visual communication can be very useful for supporting certain kinds of interactions and tasks. At other times BVC might not be worth the effort. For it to be successful for social interaction, BVC must be a good fit with the group or organization process and be a real solution to a real communication need. Participants will not be motivated to use the technology effectively if they do not believe it will be useful for them (Davis, 1989). Use of Protocol and Etiquette Successful meetings by videoconference will use established etiquette (Molyneaux et al., 2007a). Sharing online videos successfully also requires that certain protocols be followed: for example, considering privacy concerns and not sharing material without permission from everyone on camera. Use of Communication Modes and Methods For video sharing in particular to have a communication impact, the video producers should be thinking about the communication value of their production. It does not necessarily follow that the message intended would be the one received by the viewer; however, a video made without any consideration of the communication

A Framework for Analyzing Social Interaction Using Broadband Visual Communication Technologies

intent and impact on the viewers will likely not have a good communication outcome. There are many variables involved in making an effective audio-visual message, from body language and clarity of the speaker to the production values of the video. For videoconferencing as well, if the speakers are not actively trying to communicate with people at the remote sites, their communication is not likely to be effective. Other variables in this sub-category include: how the visual is framed, the use of color and movement, and other visual elements. Use of Participants’ Physical Space For videoconferencing and also for making and viewing videos, there will be an optimum use of the physical space. Variables include furnishings (position, quality), room (size, obstructions), lighting, room configuration, and even the color of the wall or background. To give an example, in our multi-site videoconferencing study in a health authority organization (Gibson & O’Donnell, 2008b), it was clear that room size could have a significant impact on the success of a videoconference. In one instance, the room could comfortably fit up to 16 people; but it was not uncommon for 45 individuals to be put into this room for the videoconference event, leaving many people without a view of the videoconference screen, without a seat, and without the opportunity to ever appear on the video.

Social and Organizational Relations This category includes purely social variables. To date we have identified five main sub-categories. Impact of Group Dynamics: Trust, Norms, Group Size, Leadership Many variables in the sub-category of group dynamics can make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful social interaction using BVC. Trust is a primary consideration. Participants

who prefer to build up trust by meeting in person rather than by video and who have that option readily available will not be very interested in meeting by videoconference or by sharing videos. Other variables in this sub-category are: group size, structure, and stage of development; group norms; and group leadership. For multi-site videoconferencing, we have identified a tendency for people who come together for a committee meeting to rate their feelings of connection (e.g., perceive that a warmer environment is created, feel more like part of a group) with the other videoconference participants as higher than people who do not consider themselves to be a part of a group and who meet for educational videoconference events (Gibson & O’Donnell, 2008b). Influence of Gender, Class, and Race A sociological perspective on communication will always consider the core sociological issues of gender, class and race; and they do need to be considered when analyzing BVC for social interaction. There are many ways that these variables will have an impact on social interaction using BVC technologies. Our study of gender on YouTube, for example, found differences between how females and males used video sharing to connect with the YouTube community (Molyneaux et al, 2008b). Participants’ Culture and Community Membership Broadly speaking, BVC is used among people separated by geographical distance; often this will mean participants are living in different cultural and community contexts. Some communities and cultures will have different levels of comfort with and attitudes toward communicating visually using technology. For example, in our research with First Nations (Indigenous) communities in Canada, we found concerns about cultural exploitation by sharing videos online. One participant interviewed said it was important to get the permission of community leaders before making a video about their culture (O’Donnell, Perley, & Simms, 2008).

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Location of Participants One’s social location and position will shape the social interaction experience – in our multi-site videoconferencing study within a health organization, we found that often the remote and rural sites were at a disadvantage. For example the majority of individuals in a videoconference session, including the event’s chair or facilitator, were situated at an urban site. The rural and remote sites were sometimes forgotten, as noted by several participants in our study who added that if they are lucky they may be solicited for feedback a few times during a session (Gibson & O’Donnell, 2008b). Economic and Political Factors Finally, structural social relations can shape social interaction using BVC technologies in numerous ways. If there is a stakeholder organization involved, it will make a difference if it has a governance model that is top-down vs. community-based and bottom-up. Other variables are the availability of funding and business models to support development of audio-visual content and the demand for and marketing of services and information.

Case Study Our analytical framework is a tool that can be used by multidisciplinary research teams to explore how BVC is used and can be used for social interaction. The expectation is that every investigation we conduct will consider not every single variable in the framework – that would be unrealistic. Rather, we will consider variables from each of the four core categories: social and technical issues, production and reception issues, and social relations. In this section we present a case study based on our recent research using the framework (O’Donnell, Perley, & Simms, 2008).

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Challenges for Broadband Visual Communications in Remote and Rural First Nations in Canada For Canada’s remote and rural communities, BVC provides a vital lifeline. We used our analytic framework to explore the challenges for BVC in remote and rural First Nation (Indigenous) communities. We collected data from actual users of visual communications technologies in First Nation organizations and communities. The study, part of an ongoing participatory research project with First Nation partners, draws on data from 18 in-depth interviews, 43 completed survey questionnaires, and the transcripts of two public meetings held by multi-site videoconference with participants from many remote and rural First Nations across Canada. This research, and all our other research involving people, was approved by our institution’s research ethics board. We used our analytical framework at four stages of the research. First we used it to develop the questions for the in-depth interviews and survey questionnaires. This involved selecting variables from each of the four categories and formulating questions for the interview participants and survey respondents about their experiences with these variables. Second, we used the framework to identify major coding categories for qualitative data analysis of the interview transcripts. This involved creating codes for variables in the four core categories and their sub-categories. With these codes, we coded the transcript text using a qualitative data analysis software tool, NVivo. Third, we drafted the research report using the four core categories from the framework as headings and the relevant variables as sub-headings. Finally, we verified the draft findings by consulting with our First Nation research partners. This checking process allowed us to validate the framework in the specific community context, add more variables to our framework, and strengthen our confidence in this framework as a research tool. Using the framework in this specific study en-

A Framework for Analyzing Social Interaction Using Broadband Visual Communication Technologies

abled us to identify the many and varied challenges to using BVC for social interaction in remote and rural communities. All the examples and quotes below are from our publication about the study (O’Donnell, Perley, & Simms, 2008). The main technical infrastructure challenges identified in the study were network and bandwidth constraints, the need for network management and quality of service in remote communities serviced by satellite, the need for a critical mass of quality videoconferencing units in communities, and specific technical challenges for sharing videos online in communities with limited bandwidth. For example, one participant interviewed stated: “In our regions, in our communities and in our organizations, we have to carefully manage a limited resource. There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth, so it has to be carefully managed, just like the highway has to be carefully managed and taken care of.” The main challenges identified for community members interacting with the technology were the lack of awareness of and comfort with using BVC technologies in communities, low levels of skills training and few community champions, the low level of technical support in many of the remote communities, and difficulties accessing equipment in the communities. To give an example, we found that although a community center may have videoconferencing equipment, it may only be available at certain hours that are not convenient for everyone in the community, and it may be difficult to find the key to the room with the equipment. The main challenges for the production and reception of audio-visual content included: the varying levels of time, interest and motivation to produce audio-visual content, the low levels of knowledge about topics of interest to other community members, low levels of knowledge of videoconference etiquette, the lack of visibility of existing audio-visual content in the communities, and concerns about cultural exploitation by sharing video content online.

Finally, the two main challenges for social and organizational relations were the need for program developers and sponsors of broadband infrastructure to have a community development focus and the low level of BVC activity by urban organizations. One participant interviewed described the need for a community development focus for funding BVC: “Because too often in the communities, there’s such a small pool of people that are comfortable enough and trained to use the equipment, and if we can support those persons and if we make sure they’re compensated, then they’re going to take a lot better interest in keeping the equipment and therefore be more willing to use it. So it’s not only supporting the community network, but supporting the community people as well.”

fUTURe TReNDS We are confident that social interaction using BVC technologies will continue to increase in both institutional and informal settings. Market research reports predict that videoconferencing will see solid and steady growth over the next five years – 19% growth in North America and 24% for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (Frost & Sullivan Reports, 2008a, 2008b). The use of online video is exploding – predictions of 40% growth per year are common. There is little doubt that the rapidly growing use of these technologies will involve increasing levels of social interaction. The analytical framework described in this chapter identifies the core categories and subcategories with variables that enable and constrain social interaction using BVC technologies. Using the framework and exploring these variables in specific situations is the focus of future work. We consider this framework a work in progress and will continue to refine it as our research on BVC technologies continues. Further research needs to be conducted to find ways to encourage the enablers and mitigate or overcome the constraints

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using practical and innovative social processes and technological solutions. One of the next steps for us as researchers is to explore and expand our use of participatory research methods for doing this kind of research. We are mindful of the feminist approach of standpoint theory (Harding, 2004). Standpoint theory suggests that although there are commonalities and differences between various members in a group, there can also be solidarity among diverse group members. Drawing on the assumptions of standpoint theory we value the experiential knowledge and perspectives of the users of the technology. Consequently, much of our research is participatory-action research and involves working closely with authentic user groups and using their knowledge and experience to inform our needs assessments, interventions, and evaluations.

CONClUSION The use of broadband visual communication (BVC) technologies for social interaction is increasing rapidly as digital video cameras, webcams, videoconferencing equipment and broadband approach ubiquity. Analysing social interaction using BVC technologies is challenging. We created an analytical framework as a reference point for our multidisciplinary research and development team working in this area. We developed our framework initially by reviewing almost a hundred studies of BVC technologies and participatory communication. We further developed and validated our framework by conducting a series of studies of social interaction using BVC technologies in different social and cultural contexts. Our framework is a key research tool that guides our work from the development phase through to data analysis and interpretation and presentation of findings. We will continue to strengthen and develop our framework in the coming years through ongoing and new research

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projects. Our hope is that our analytical framework will be useful for other researchers in this exciting research area.

ACKNOWleDGmeNT The authors would like to thank their colleagues working on the National Research Council Canada’s Broadband Visual Communication Strategic Initiative (BVC-SI) who contributed to many discussions of the analytical framework and variables introduced in this chapter.

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Mansour-Cole, D. (2001). Team identity formation in virtual teams. Virtual Teams, 8, 41–58. doi:10.1016/S1572-0977(01)08018-9 Milliken, M. C., Gibson, K., O’Donnell, S., & Singer, J. (2008, May). User-generated online video and the Atlantic Canadian public sphere: A YouTube study. Paper presented at the International Communication Association, Montreal, Canada. Molyneaux, H., Gibson, K., Singer, J., O’Donnell, S., & Brooks, M. (2008a). New visual media and gender: A content, visual and audience analysis of YouTube vlogs. Paper presented at the International Communications Association, Montreal, Canada. Molyneaux, H., O’Donnell, S., Fournier, H., & Gibson, K. (2008a, June). Participatory videoconferencing for groups. Paper presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS 08), Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Molyneaux, H., O’Donnell, S., Gibson, K., & Singer, J. (2008b). Exploring the gender divide on YouTube: An analysis of the creation and reception of vlogs. American Communication Journal, 10(2). Molyneaux, H., O’Donnell, S., Liu, S., Hagerman, V., Gibson, K., Matthews, B., et al. (2007). Good practice guidelines for participatory multi-site videoconferencing. Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada: National Research Council. Nemiro, J. E. (2000). The climate for creativity in virtual teams. Team Development, 7, 79–114. O’Donnell, S., Gibson, K., Milliken, M., & Singer, J. (2008, May). Reacting to YouTube videos: Exploring differences among user groups. Paper presented at the International Communications Association, Montreal, Canada.

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O’Donnell, S., Perley, S., & Simms, D. (2008, June). Challenges for video communications in remote and rural communities. Paper presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS 08), Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. O’Donnell, S., Singer, J., Milliken, M., & Fournier, H. (2007). BVC-SI - Technical update report. Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada: National Research Council. Peter, J., Valkenburg, P. M., & Schouten, A. P. (2007). Precursors of adolesecents’ use of visual and audio devices during online communication. Computers in Human Behavior, 23, 2473–2487. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2006.04.002 Rees, C. S., & Haythornthwaite, S. (2004). Telepsychology and videoconferencing: Issues, opportunities and guidelines for psychologists. The American Psychologist, 39(3), 212–219. do i:10.1080/00050060412331295108 Robbin, A., & Day, R. (2006). On Ron Kling: The theoretical, the methodological, and the critical. In J. Berleur, M. I. Numinen, & J. Impagliazzo (Eds.), Social informatics: An information society for all? In Remembrance of Ron Kling. Boston, MA: Springer. Rogers, E. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). New York: Free Press. Rowlands, B. H. (2006, April). The user as social actor: A focus on systems development methodology enactment. Paper presented at the 21st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), Dijon, France. Simms, D., O’Donnell, S., & Perley, S. (2008). BVCam in the virtual classroom. Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada: National Research Council.

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Sonnenwald, D. H., Soloman, P., Hara, N., Bolliger, R., & Cox, T. (2002). Collaboration in the large: Using video conferencing to facilitate large group interaction. In A. Gunasekaran & O. Khalil (Eds.), Knowledge and information technology in 21st century organizations: Human and social perspectives (pp. 115-136). Hersey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Straub, D. W., Keil, M., & Brenner, W. (1997). Testing the technology acceptance model across cultures: A three country study. Information & Management, 33(1), 1–11. doi:10.1016/S03787206(97)00026-8

Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Actor Network Theory: Related to the social actor concept, actor network theory states that people, together with their technologies, comprise social networks. Technical and social elements cannot be separated in this theory. Asynchronous Visual Communication: Communication using pre-recorded videos, such as video sharing on the Internet. Broadband: In this chapter, broadband refers to both broadband networks and broadband Internet. In general, the term refers to telecommunication in which a wide band of frequencies is available to transmit information. Broadband Visual Communication (BVC): BVC technologies allow the simultaneous or pre-

recorded exchange of rich visual and audio data over broadband networks. First Nations (Indigenous) communities: First Nations are recognized by the Canadian Constitution as one of the founding nations of Canada. Online Video Sharing: Posting and viewing asynchronous (pre-recorded) videos over broadband networks. Social Informatics: A theory that argues that the relationship between the social and technical is complex and mediated by context, structure and agency, history, culture and meaning systems, political and social processes and symbolic and material interests and resources. Synchronous Visual Communication: Simultaneous video communication, accomplished by videoconferencing. Technology Acceptance Model (TAM): In the TAM model, people who perceive technology as useful and easy to use will accept it more readily than those who do not, with usefulness more important than ease of use. Videoconferencing: Synchronous audio-visual communication using broadband networks. Videoconferencing Bridge: The multipoint control unit (MCU), commonly known as the videoconferencing bridge, is a device that allows multiple sites to videoconference simultaneously.

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Chapter 48

Using the Social Web for Collaborations in Software Engineering Education Pankaj Kamthan Concordia University, Canada

ABSTRACT The discipline of software engineering has been gaining significance in computer science and engineering education. The technological environment in which software engineering education (SEE) resides and thrives has also been changing over the past few years. A technological revitalization of SEE requires a considerate examination from human and social perspectives. This chapter studies the impact of integrating Social Web technologies and applications based on these technologies in collaborative activities pertaining to SEE. In particular, teacher–student and student–student collaborations, both inside and outside the classroom, are highlighted. In doing so, the feasibility issues in selection and adoption of technologies/applications are emphasized and the use of pedagogically-inclined patterns is made. The potential prospects of such an integration and related concerns are illustrated by practical examples.

INTRODUCTION In the last decade, software engineering has been playing an increasingly prominent role in computer science and engineering undergraduate and graduate curricula of Universities around the world (Rezaei, 2005; Surakka, 2007). As software engineering matures, the question of how its body of knowledge is shared, communicated, and consumed arises. In particular, the role of collaboration is likely to remain DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch048

crucial to software engineering in the foreseeable future (Whitehead, 2007). Like other disciplines, software engineering education (SEE) is prone to evolution. To do that, it needs to be sensitive to the variations and evolution of the social and technical environment around it. In particular, any changes in the information technology (IT) environment need to be reflected in SEE, if it leads to viable opportunities and demonstrated benefits (Kamthan, 2008b). The Social Web, or as it is more commonly referred to by the pseudonym Web 2.0 (O’Reilly,

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Using the Social Web for Collaborations in Software Engineering Education

2005), is the perceived evolution of the Web in a direction that is driven by ‘collective intelligence,’ realized by information technology, and characterized by user participation, openness, and network effects. In particular, the Social Web has enabled new avenues for collaborations (Coleman & Levine, 2008). The aim of this chapter is to assess the implications of the Social Web for teacher–student and student–student collaborations in SEE, and underscore the prospects and concerns in doing so. It assumes a basic background in software engineering (Ghezzi, Jazayeri, & Mandrioli, 2003) on part of the reader. The terms Social Web and Web 2.0 are used interchangeably. For the sake of this chapter, it is also acknowledged that the notions of coordination and cooperation differ from the term collaboration and are subsumed by it. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. First, the background necessary for later discussion is provided and related work is presented. This is followed by a proposal for a systematic introduction of the Social Web technologies/applications for collaborations in SEE, labeled SW4CSE2 henceforth. The prospects of SW4CSE2 are illustrated using practical examples. The limitations of the underlying Social Web technologies/ applications are highlighted. Next, challenges and directions for future research are outlined. Finally, concluding remarks are given.

BACKGROUND For the sake of this chapter, collaboration is defined as collective work to achieve common goals. In this section, motivation for collaboration in software engineering is provided and related work in the area is briefly highlighted.

motivation for Collaboration in Software engineering education The human and social aspect of software engineering has been known since for quite some time (Weinberg, 1998). There is a need to foster a collaborative environment in SEE at several different levels for a variety of different goals (Whitehead, 2007), which is discussed briefly in the rest of the section. The development of large-scale software has reached a point that it is no longer possible for an individual to grasp its size and complexity. This has necessitated (1) the use of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools and (2) carrying out a software project in teams, both of which require dedicated collaboration. Indeed, currently deployed commercial CASE tools such as Microsoft Project, IBM/Eclipse, and IBM/Rational Method Composer, and non-commercial CASE tools such as Subversion need certain degree of collaboration among their users. The need for collaboration is relevant to the situative/pragmatist–sociohistoric theory of learning (Bennedsen & Eriksen, 2006). Indeed, group assignments and team projects are two common approaches to induce collaboration among students. It is often the case that a software engineering course is equipped with a team project intended to prepare students for a similar environment later in their careers, including industrial software development. In a team project, there is a need for collaboration throughout the duration of the project at two levels: (1) internal, that is, collaboration among participating students themselves and (2) external, that is, collaboration between students and the (individual(s) playing the role of a) client.

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Collaborations in Software Process Environments The software process environments with the client and user involvement have increasingly become collaborative (Williams, 2000). In particular, the movement in the past decade has been towards social flexibility of which agile methodologies and open source software (OSS) ecosystems are exemplars. Indeed, one of the agile principles is that “the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” The human aspect and indeed the social aspect of software process environments trickle down to process workflows. The following examples illustrate how collaboration permeates certain activities performed in process workflows. To create an understanding of the problem domain of a software project, structural and behavioral models are constructed, both of which require collaboration among the project team members. For example, the terms and their definitions need to be agreed upon by the team as a whole. It has long been recognized that requirements elicitation is a social process (Macaulay, 1993) where the participants must work together for the most optimal outcome that may require making compromises in the process. The crucial design decisions, such as selection of views and viewpoints for software architecture and subsequent application of architectural styles or patterns, often depend upon close collaboration. Among the interaction design approaches, participatory design involves active collaboration between designers and end-users to ensure that the product is useful and usable. The Class-Responsibility-Collaborator (CRC) cards (Bellin & Simone, 1997) is an informal, highlevel object-oriented design (OOD) approach that relies explicitly on the collaboration between the participants for identifying appropriate classes for the software system. The success of Pair Programming (Williams & Kessler, 2003), one of the core practices of Extreme Programming (XP) (Beck &

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Andres, 2005), strongly depends on the collaboration between the pair. Finally, usability evaluation methods such as card sorting, focus groups, and pluralistic walkthroughs involve moderated participation and collaboration of real users.

An Overview and Analysis of Related Work The technologies/applications enabling the social component of software engineering and its education have taken time to get established. In the 1970s, the technologies/applications to support the social aspect of software engineering were not mature, and in the 1980s, they were largely limited to the use of electronic mail (e-mail). It was the 1990s, particularly the ascent of the Web, that opened new frontiers for people that were non-proximal to communicate in a variety of ways on a global scale. Indeed, the use of Java applets in illustrating the dynamics of non-trivial algorithms in a classroom has been emphasized (Kamthan, 1999) and the benefits of hypertext for relating software artifacts and navigating through them have been shown (Bompani, Ciancarini, & Vitali, 2002). The use of instant messaging and the Web is made in a distributed software engineering course project that required collaboration at a global scale (Favela & Peña-Mora, 2001). The concerns related to the use of course management systems based on the Web have been pointed out (Wijekumar, 2001) and it has been concluded that the dynamics of group composition are critical for a successful collaborative learning. The benefits of collaborative learning in the construction and understanding of UML Class Diagrams have also been highlighted (Baghaei, Mitrovic, & Irwin, 2007). The use of Web to solicit feedback from stakeholders on requirements and bug information from users has become increasingly common (Whitehead, 2007).

Using the Social Web for Collaborations in Software Engineering Education

Advantages and Limitations of Social Web Technologies/Applications

Initiatives for Integrating Social Web Technologies/Applications in Education

There are three primary factors that make the Social Web relevant to SEE:

There have been relatively few initiatives towards integrating Social Web technologies/applications in education. An overview of the potential of Social Web technologies/applications for education in general has been given (Anderson, 2007). However, the correspondence to any teaching strategy or learning theory is unclear, and the limitations in the deployment of Wikis have not been discussed. The uses of Wiki as a teaching tool in software engineering have been reported (Parker & Chao, 2007). In particular, it is pointed out (Parker & Chao, 2007) that Wikis can be used to publish and share course material and management of software process artifacts. A learning process that is based on the socialization, externalization, combination, internalization (SECI) model of knowledge management and uses Social Web technologies/applications has been suggested (Chatti et al., 2007). However, the discussion is largely peripheral and one-sided: the precise advantages of the Social Web towards teaching and learning are not given and the corresponding limitations have not been pointed out. In a recent work, the limitations of conventional computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) are pointed out and, via the introduction of an application, namely eLogbook, the usefulness of next generation of social software in engineering education has been demonstrated (Gillet et al., 2008). However, the treatment of Social Web technologies is largely one-sided, and eLogbook is not yet mature and its relationship to other social software and technologies is unclear. It has been reported that due to computer-mediated communications via Social Web, new social structures can emerge among students that in turn can help reduce the number of students leaving computer science programs prematurely (Jahnke, 2008). In recent years, there has been an emergence of both commercial and non-commercial course management systems (CMS), such as Black-

1.

2.

3.

The enablement of a many-to-many bidirectional communication paradigm in which the Web is (merely) the broker. The maturation of the underlying technological infrastructure and the availability of its implementations as open source. The awareness of the public followed by immense interest and large-scale participation.

These factors have made students ‘first-class’ active participants — rather than being mere passive observers — in the use of the Internet for education. By lowering the financial entry barrier, they have also helped level the playing field for students. It has been pointed out in surveys (Whitehead, 2007) that a heterogeneous combination of desktop- and Social Web-based technologies will be crucial for the future of collaborative software engineering. However, there are evident side-effects of use of the Social Web for SEE. Unlike traditional commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) desktop software, there are little or no a priori guarantees that a Social Web application will be available when accessed or provide the functionality as claimed. The open source Social Web applications inherit the issues pertaining to open source software (OSS) (Kamthan, 2007). For example, the legal realm in which these applications operate is currently unclear; technical support, if any, may not be assured; and technical documentation (such as a user manual or context-sensitive help), if any, may vary significantly.

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Table 1. A feasibility-sensitive methodology for integrating Social Web technologies in software engineering education. 1. Deciding the Scope of Software Engineering Knowledge 2. Adopting a Learning Theory and a Teaching Strategy for Collaborative Software Engineering Education 3. Selecting and Applying Suitable Social Web Technologies/Applications to Collaborative Software Engineering Educational Activities

board/WebCT, Moodle, and Sakai that enable some degree of collaboration using the Web and provide assistance towards learning. In particular, Moodle (Cole & Foster, 2008) integrates some of the Social Web technologies like blogs and Wikis as part of its system. However, CMS are modeled primarily after the needs of the teacher, not necessarily that of the students. For example, CMS may enable teacher–student collaboration but are not designed for use in course projects or for student–student collaboration.

TOWARDS COllABORATIONS IN SOfTWARe eNGINeeRING eDUCATION vIA SOCIAl WeB TeChNOlOGIeS/ApplICATIONS

2.

3.

Feasibility

responsibility. Practical. This type of collaboration is related to decomposition of work and allocation of tasks followed by integration of results. Educational. This type of collaboration is related to help each other learn.

This chapter is primarily concerned with conceptual and educational collaborations that occur within the scope of SW4SE2 where the activities and artifacts (produced during some of those activities) are assisted by patterns. Figure 1 illustrates the underlying collaboration model for SW4CSE2. Since these collaborations result primarily from asynchronous communication, they are non-ad hoc (Cherry & Robillard, 2008).

To be effective, the integration of any technological environment in SEE (Kamthan, 2008b) should be both disciplined and systematic, and the Social Web is no exception. SW4SE2 is a specialization is a methodology for integrating Social Web technologies/applications in SEE. It consists of a nonlinear and non-mutually exclusive sequence of steps as shown in Table 1. The steps 1–3 in Table 1 are stated at a highlevel and could be granularized further if necessary. They must also be feasible in order to be practical. In a software engineering context, collaboration can be one of the following three types (Goldberg, 2002):

Step One: Deciding the Scope of Software engineering Knowledge

1.

The two theories of learning on which pedagogical strategies are being modeled today are objectivism and constructivism (Smith & Ragan, 1999). From

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Conceptual. This type of collaboration is related to sharing information, sharing work products, as well as, sharing

The initial step in realizing SW4CSE2 is a characterization of software engineering knowledge. For that, the relevant software engineering topics could correspond to the knowledge areas of the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) and the Software Engineering Education Knowledge (SEEK).

Step Two: Adopting a learning Theory and a Teaching Strategy for Collaborative Software engineering education

Using the Social Web for Collaborations in Software Engineering Education

Figure 1. A model for collaborations enabled in software engineering education by the Social Web

an objectivist view, knowledge is external to an individual (and therefore objective), and therefore learning involves a ‘transfer of knowledge’ from the teacher to the student. From a constructivist view, knowledge is not external to an individual, and therefore learning involves constructing one’s own knowledge from one’s own experiences. In this case, it is a necessary that there are opportunities for social interaction among students. In recent years, constructivism has received attention in computer science education (Ben-Ari, 2001) in general, and SEE and OOD in particular (Hadjerrouit, 1999; Hadjerrouit, 2005). There has been much debate over the years in the educational community on the virtues and drawbacks of objectivism and constructivism. There are, however, signs of reconciliation (Cronjé, 2006). Indeed, a classroom use of collaborative Social Web technologies/applications in SEE could be more objectivist than constructivist where the

teacher plays the role of an ‘instructor.’ This could, for example, entail preparing Social Web technologies/applications-based lesson plans and lectures, and encouraging questions from students on a timely basis without severely interrupting the flow of the lectures. The teacher may also have to exercise some degree of discipline in the role of a ‘manager’ outside the classroom. For example, there may be need for a teacher to moderate a course mailing list, feedback to blog postings, a course Wiki, and so on, to maintain a level of decorum. A project use of collaborative Social Web technologies/applications in SEE could be more socially constructivist than objectivist where the educator plays the role of a ‘guide.’ This could, for example, entail providing a balance between discipline and flexibility to the students in carrying out a software project with minimal guidance and timely feedback by the educator as and when

Table 2. A mapping between the types of possible interaction and educational contexts Type of Interaction Teacher–Student Student–Student

Educational Context Inside Classroom: Lecture ect), Support

Outside Classroom: Assessment Mode (Assignment, Proj-

Outside Classroom: Assessment Mode (Assignment, Project)

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Using the Social Web for Collaborations in Software Engineering Education

needed: the crucial aspect being that the students play the primary role and the educator plays the secondary role.

From Theory to Practice The reliance on the knowledge garnered from past experience and expertise is crucial for any endeavor. A pattern (Buschmann, Henney, & Schmidt, 2007b) is one such type of empirically proven and conceptually reusable knowledge. Both objectivist and constructivist approach to collaborative SEE can be put into practice using pedagogical patterns. In particular, there are patterns for forming study groups (Sharp, Manns, & Eckstein, 2006), carrying out course projects (Hayes et al., 2006), and soliciting feedback from students (Bergin, 2006). These general high-level patterns can subsequently be supported by specialized lowlevel patterns for collaborative learning (DiGiano et al., 2002; Garzotto & Poggi, 2005; Hernandez-

Leo, Asensio-Perez, & Dimitriadis, 2004) and patterns originally intended for computer-mediated communication (Schümmer & Lukosch, 2007). For example, APPLICATION SHARING, COLLABORATIVE SESSION, SHARED ANNOTATION, SHARED EDITING, and SHARED FILE REPOSITORY are patterns applicable to the Social Web context. As shown in the next step, solutions of these patterns manifest themselves in Social Web applications like blogging, social bookmarking, collaborative modeling, and so on.

Step Three: Selecting and Applying Suitable Social Web Technologies/Applications to Collaborative Software engineering educational Activities Table 2 highlights the types of possible interaction between teachers and students in the context of SEE.

Table 3. A mapping of student–student collaborations and corresponding Social Web technologies/applications Collaborative Educational Activity Researching

Social Web Technology/Application Collaborative Annotation (Google Notebook, Microsoft OneNote)

Scheduling Events

Web Calendar (Google Calendar)

Brainstorming

Mind Map (bubbl.us)

Developing Software Process Artifacts

Collaborative Read/Write Application (Wiki, Google Docs)

Managing Software Source Files

Collaborative Source File Sharing (SourceForge)

Table 4. A mapping of teacher–student collaborations and corresponding Social Web technologies/ applications Collaborative Educational Activity

Social Web Technology/Application

Classroom Demonstrations, Audio/Video Interviews

Mashup, Podcast, Shared Presentation (YouTube, Google Video)

Dissemination of Lecture Material

Collaborative Note Taking (NoteMesh), Folksnomy, Wiki

Supplementary Course Material Notification and Syndication, Asynchronous Communication, Discussion

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Social Bookmarking (del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! Bookmarks) News Feed (RSS, Atom), Blog, Mailing List, News Group (Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups)

Using the Social Web for Collaborations in Software Engineering Education

Tables 3 and 4 provide a relationship between common types of collaboration in SEE and Social Web technologies/applications. For a given collaboration context, there may be multiple Social Web technologies/applications that are applicable. However, they may not necessarily be equally suitable. The following criteria may be used for selection of a suitable technology or its application in SW4CSE2: nature of information (such as sensory modality) being communicated, alignment with teaching and learning goals, considerations for openness (commercial versus non-commercial), maturity, and feasibility. An objective third-party review of a candidate technology can also help in making the decision for adoption.

examples of Collaborations in a Software engineering educational Context using Social Web Technologies/Applications As evident from Tables 3 and 4, the Social Web lends various opportunities for collaboration and sharing. A sampling of these is considered next.

Collaborative Learning The discipline of CSCL has a long history with origins in situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991). For the sake of this chapter, collaborative learning is a social interaction involving a community of teachers and students that acquire and/or share experience or knowledge. In an objectivist approach to SEE, lectures and tutorials are still the norm where a teacher (or a teaching assistant) often makes use of black/ white board or overhead projector for delivery. It is (theoretically) expected that each student will attend all of these lectures and tutorials from beginning to end, and be attentive all the time during the session. However, in practice, this need not be the case. The author has come across dedicated students who for one reason or another had to

come in late, had to leave early, or for reasons of fatigue or otherwise, missed the essence of the session. A partial solution is to make the slides available for download. However, at times, there is implicit knowledge being communicated by the teacher that is not always made explicit. In such cases, students could benefit from their peers. NoteMesh is a Social Web application that allows students in the same courses to share notes with each other as well as edit each others notes. Its motto is ‘collaborate to graduate.’ For the reason of time constraints or otherwise, the introduction of a topic during a lecture or tutorial is often relatively ‘local’ and from a single viewpoint. However, during assignments or tests, the students are expected to see the ‘big picture.’ Using the notion of folksonomy or social tagging (Smith, 2008), the students could associate other relationships with the lecture as they see fit. For example, phrases from past lecture(s) or the textbook could be candidates for tags. A collection of tags can lead to the formation of a tag cloud. A tag cloud is set of related tags with associated weights that represent frequency of use of each tag. The frequency of use of each tag within a tag cloud is illustrated by visual cues, such as distinct font color and size. The reliance on the knowledge garnered from past experience and expertise is important for any development, and a pattern is one such type of conceptually reusable knowledge. Figure 2 shows a tag cloud for the TEMPLATE VIEW pattern (Buschmann, Henney, & Schmidt, 2007a) used in the design of distributed software systems. It should be noted that folksonomy (as opposed to taxonomy) is an uncontrolled vocabulary, and the lack of terminological control can have linguistic implications due to synonymy, homonymy, and polysemy. It is also not automatic that all tags that are created by the students may be relevant to the context. For example, a tag labeled ‘template’ or ‘view’ may not be related to the TEMPLATE VIEW pattern as depicted in Figure 1. In general, the success of collaborative learning

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Using the Social Web for Collaborations in Software Engineering Education

Figure 2. A tag cloud embedded in the lecture notes on the TEMPLATE VIEW pattern

may also depend on the students’ background and past experience with technologies (Liaw, Chen, & Huang, 2008). For example, younger students may be more accustomed to technologies pertaining to the Web and are likely to have different attitudes than their older peers.

Collaborative Researching The Social Web can be an indispensable source for students researching for information for assignments, or during the realization of a software project. There are Social Web applications that can assist in collaborative researching. Social bookmarking goes beyond traditional bookmarking and enables management (for example, storage, organization, search, and sharing) of bookmarks residing remotely at third-party services. There are several social bookmarking services in use today including del.icio.us and Google Bookmarks. By unifying their knowledge base, social bookmarking can help both teachers and students to collaborate and share their links to resources. The notion of social bookmarking can be extended to annotating the actual resources at the end of the hyperlinks. For example, applications such as Evernote, GoBinder, Google Notebook,

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Microsoft OneNote, and NoteScribe allow one to ‘attach’ notes to and clip text, graphics, and links during researching. Furthermore, the notebooks in Google Notebook can be exported to certain formats including Google Docs. The annotations associated with the resources found during researching can take various useful forms including comments on the relevance of the resource to the specifics of the software project, individual perceptions of the quality of the resource, reminders for comparing them with other resources, and so on. These notebooks can be saved, and can subsequently be used for collaboration and sharing with others. Furthermore, these notebooks persist once they have been created, and therefore can also be useful for future references.

Social Scheduling There is a need for meetings in a software project. For example, a team working on a software project has to schedule face-to-face meetings involving the members. An interview of representative members of the team with the client for the purpose of user requirements elicitation also requires meetings. A schedule that is agreeable to all and is flexible (for example, due to frequent changes) can become difficult to manage, particularly as the

Using the Social Web for Collaborations in Software Engineering Education

Figure 3. An example of a partial mind map reflecting a brainstorming session on the viability of an implementation language

number of persons involved increases. The use of Social Web applications that facilitate calendar sharing (such as the Google Calendar) can reduce some of the tedium involved in scheduling a meeting agenda.

Brainstorming In a collaborative approach towards completing an assignment or formulating the details of a software project, students often need to engage in brainstorming. For example, for a given project, students may need to select a quality model, prioritize requirements, decide the best algorithm/data structure, or choose an implementation language, all of which necessitate brainstorming. One way to brainstorm is through visualization, and mind mapping is a graphically-oriented approach to realize it. The authors can share these mind maps over the Web and, depending on the permissions, read and/or edit others’ maps. Figure 3 illustrates a snapshot in time (work in progress) of a mind map using bubbl.us. In it, three students, namely S1, S2, and S3 are in a brainstorming session on the feasibility of a proposed implementation language. The ‘bubbles’ in

the figure reflect respective inputs by students. There are evidently other instances in which brainstorming is imperative. For example, the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) (Van Solingen & Berghout, 1999) approach to software measurement necessitates formulation of recursively granular questions and assignment of corresponding metrics, both of which require brainstorming by the participants involved.

Collaborative Modeling and Prototyping The activities of conceptual modeling and prototyping are critical to the success of software projects. They are becoming increasingly common in SEE (Cowling, 2005), particularly in model-driven approaches to software development (Völter et al., 2006) and interaction design (Beaudouin-Lafon & Mackay, 2008), respectively. They also should be carried out collaboratively. For example, the task of creating a large and complex model can be decomposed, and parts of it could be created by different students. Then, a conceptual model such as a domain model or a use case model being created by one student could benefit from informal inspections and feedback by another.

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Figure 4. The construction in progress of a low fidelity prototype with six user interface elements

Figure 4 illustrates a snapshot of Gliffy, a Social Web application that allows collaborative modeling and sharing of diagrams. However, it should also be noted that Gliffy has limited capabilities compared to its desktop counterparts like Microsoft Visio or IBM Rational Rose XDE. For example, support for the Unified Modeling Language (UML), a standard language for modeling object-oriented software systems, is partial. It is also currently not possible for users to extend a given template.

Collaborative Authoring The Social Web presents a suitable environment for collaborative authoring of software process artifacts using various means including Google Docs and Wiki. Google Docs is a Social Web application that provides capability to create word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, as well as their import and export in various commonly-used formats. It also allows real-time collaboration and sharing of these resources using the Web. However, Google Docs has yet to completely replace a conventional office suite. The support is limited to certain user agents and there are currently physical limits on files sizes and designated storage space that may be constraining.

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The concept of Wiki was invented in the mid-1990s as a group communication utility. It allowed open editing of information as well as the organization of the contributions and, with various enhancements, continues to serve well in that vein (Spinellis & Louridas, 2008). Wikis can be used, for example, for distributed collaborative authoring and multi-versioning of software process documents, recording design alternatives decision rationales, and feedback threads. The construction of knowledge takes places by the mutual influence of the social processes facilitated by a Wiki and the cognitive processes of the students (Cress & Kimmerle, 2008). There are several, opens source flavors of Wiki available today addressing different target groups and organizational needs. Most flavors of Wiki, including MediaWiki and TinyWiki, can be easily acquired, installed, and administered under commonly-deployed computing platforms (Ebersbach, Glaser, & Heigl, 2006). The Wiki environment can be used in a software project in various ways. For example, as shown in Figure 5, students could use Wiki to produce software process documents. These documents can be developed collaboratively and maintained independently, and can be hyperlinked for traceability and other purposes. In software process documents, the key terms that are directly related to the domain of the project

Using the Social Web for Collaborations in Software Engineering Education

Figure 5. A collection of software process documents using the Wiki environment

should be defined in a self-contained glossary. As shown in Figure 6, the terms that are not directly related to the domain of the project could point to resources from the projects of the Wikipedia Foundation (such as Wikibooks, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and so on) for definitions and/or further details. There are a few challenges in adopting a Wiki for SEE. It appears that the acceptance and use of Wikis varies significantly across education systems and countries (Gotel et al., 2007), and so their adoption may not be automatic. Since only some of the students may be extrovert in nature and may be prolific writers, others may not be, and therefore the participation of students is not guaranteed. Indeed, the personality traits of participants of Wiki may not be all that different from those involved in blogging (Guadagno, Okdie, & Eno, 2008). Wikis are also known for ‘noise’ (impertinent information), ‘casual writing’ (presence of phonetic and 1337 style of writing), and ‘editing wars’ (discussions that have morphed into endless debates). These, however, can be attributed to human usage rather than to inherent limitations of the underlying technology. Also, the incidence of errors introduced by end-users involved in the development but not sufficiently familiar with the computing environment can be

high (Costabile et al., 2008). Therefore, some form of monitoring and control, perhaps initiated by the institution or the teacher, is essential.

Guidelines for Adoption of Social Web Technologies/Applications for Collaborations in Software engineering education Even when it is clear that the benefits outweigh the associated costs, any novel undertaking comes with its own challenges, and the same is true for adoption of the Social Web as a platform for SEE. The following set of guidelines is presented to help prospective teachers in making an informed decision towards enhancing their collaborative activities in software engineering-related courses via the Social Web. •

Administration. It is needless to say that the teachers must be aware of the current policies of the institution pertaining to legal and privacy issues regarding students, and security issues regarding information and computing infrastructure. It can also be useful to keep the administration (such as the department Chair or the Dean) abreast of any new endeavors, and periodically inform them of successes and failures.

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Figure 6. A software design document using external resources in the Wiki environment

•

•

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Students. The students should be informed of any ‘social experiments’ being pursued as part of the course, made aware of their rights and responsibilities that comes with flexibility of Social Web technologies/applications, including any acceptable use policy (AUP) put forth by the institution, and introduced to the ethical issues in software engineering (Kamthan, 2008a) before they embark on a software project. The relation of collaborative work to assessment should also be made explicit in advance, say, at the beginning of the course. Infrastructure. The selection and adoption of Social Web technologies/applications does not have to be a matter of ‘all or nothing’ and could be introduced progressively. Indeed, it may be useful initially to introduce technologies/applications in activities that can benefit most, select technologies/applications that are relatively stable, hopefully sustainable, and in which the teacher does not have to relinquish control completely, and the presence of technologies/applications is not apparent to students (that is, technologies/applications

are transparent to and do not interfere with the learning goals). Then, based on a retrospective, the use of technologies/applications can be scaled appropriately.

fUTURe TReNDS The work presented in this chapter can be extended in a few different directions. In the rest of the section, the significance of these directions is discussed briefly.

management The introduction of any new technology/application in education is susceptible to indirections. For example, a sustained integration of Social Web technologies/applications in SEE needs to address associated quality-related concerns that can outweigh the benefits of collaborating electronically. In particular, an assessment of the impact on the credibility of information emanating from relaxation of control and governance (from teacher’s viewpoint) and emergence of privacy and reliability issues (from student’s viewpoint) is of research interest.

Using the Social Web for Collaborations in Software Engineering Education

The hardware and software demands of Social Web technologies/applications on both server-side and client-side can not be ignored. For example, the file sizes of podcasts that are not streamed but are available only as download could be prohibitive to those on low bandwidth. It is also not automatic that educational institutions will simply abandon the resources to which they may have invested in past years and embrace the Social Web. Therefore, an investigation into a cost estimation model for integrating Social Web technologies/applications in SEE would be of interest.

evolution The focus of this chapter is on software projects being carried out by students registered at the same institution. It would be interesting to examine the challenges of a global software engineering project that is carried out in a distributed environment by students from multiple institutions and the role of Social Web technologies/applications in overcoming those challenges. This chapter does not discuss teacher–teacher collaboration, an issue that has received little attention. The courses in a software engineering program (such as at the author’s institution) are usually not isolated from each other. It may even be necessary and/or mutually beneficial for teachers for courses software requirements, software design, and software testing to collaborate with each other during the semester. For example, the software requirements produced iteratively and incrementally in one course could serve as input to software design in another course. Indeed, many of the aforementioned Social Web technologies/ applications can assist teacher–teacher collaboration as well. This chapter does not discuss the suitability of computing environments for collaboration. While certain technologies and their applications may be targeted for stationary devices, others may be generic. Further investigations into this mapping could help identify and channel appropriate services to requesting clients.

maturation It is still early to predict the outcome of the Social Web phenomenon in general and its impact on SEE in particular. Although certain benefits of integration are evident, studies of the impact on the changes to the learning model and further evaluation based on actual teaching experience followed by surveys are indispensable. It would be useful to distill this experience and subsequently present it in the form of ‘best practices.’ Finally, it is evident that the level of adoption of (Social Web) technologies in software engineering programs will vary across educational institutions. It may be useful to devise a Technology Maturity Model (TMM) that an institution could use to assess and improve its technological awareness, capability, and support. It is anticipated that TMM would include a finite number of levels, definition of those levels, and a rationale for the assignment of a technology to a level. TMM could be ‘instantiated’ for different areas, including collaboration. The requirements for an institution to qualify at higher levels will be more stringent than at lower levels. For example, a software engineering program that allows the use of mailing lists only would be at a lower level compared to another program that provides explicit support for real-time streaming media that can be annotated and shared, and has policies in place for its practical realization.

CONClUSION This chapter highlights the collaborative disposition of software engineering in general and SEE in particular, and the role of the Social Web in enabling it. It is evident that the perception, realization, and manifestation of collaboration outlined here are likely to change with the evolution of software engineering as a discipline and with the societal views of education. For example, the needs for global software engineering projects, say, conducted and shared by multiple educational

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institutions may require modifications to the Wiki model (Hohman, & Saiedian, 2008). The challenges facing the practice of software engineering today are as much technical as they are organizational and social in nature. The social and organic aspects of software engineering not only need to be acknowledged by teachers but also made explicit to the students in a feasible manner. In doing so, there is a need to communicate the significance of and help develop the necessity of a collaborative culture (Tabaka, 2006) in which the students, individually or as a team, can thrive. The technological infrastructure underlying the Social Web provides an avenue for teachers and students to collaborate and share information both inside and outside the classroom. This departure from the current status quo can open vistas for teachers to convey to students in an educational setting some of the dynamism and excitement of IT the students they may be exposed to in their daily lives. It can also help form a ‘bridge’ between academia and the real-world, and thereby demonstrate, particularly to undergraduate students, that software engineering is indeed ‘alive’ and constantly evolving discipline. At the same time, the promise of the Social Web must be kept in perspective with the associated costs.

ACKNOWleDGmeNT The author would like to thank his students for their commitment and dedicated participation in course projects over the years, many of which involved implicit and explicit use of the Social Web technologies/applications.

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O’Reilly, T. (2005). What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. O’Reilly Network, September 30, 2005. Parker, K. R., & Chao, J. T. (2007). Wiki as a Teaching Tool. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, 3, 57–72. Rezaei, S. (2005). Software Engineering Education in Canada. The Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education (WCCCE 2005), Prince George, Canada, May 5-6, 2005. Schümmer, T., & Lukosch, S. (2007). Patterns for Computer-Mediated Interaction. John Wiley and Sons. Sharp, H., Manns, M. L., & Eckstein, J. (2006). Evolving Pedagogical Patterns: The Work of the Pedagogical Patterns Project. Computer Science Education, 16(2), 315–330. Smith, G. (2008). Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. New Riders. Smith, P., & Ragan, T. J. (1999). Instructional Design (Second Edition). John Wiley and Sons. Spinellis, D., & Louridas, P. (2008). The Collaborative Organization of Knowledge. Communications of the ACM, 51(8), 68–73. doi:10.1145/1378704.1378720 Surakka, S. (2007). What Subjects and Skills are Important for Software Developers? Communications of the ACM, 50(1), 73–78. doi:10.1145/1188913.1188920 Tabaka, J. (2006). Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders. Addison Wesley. Van Solingen, R., & Berghout, E. (1999). The Goal/Question/Metric Method. McGraw-Hill. Völter, M., Stahl, T., Bettin, J., Haase, A., & Helsen, S. (2006). Model-Driven Software Development: Technology, Engineering, Management. John Wiley and Sons.

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Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Constructivism: A theory of learning that views learning as a process in which the learner actively constructs or builds new ideas or concepts based upon current and past knowledge. It is based on the premise that learning involves constructing one’s own knowledge from one’s own experiences. Information Technology: Technology for activities related to information, such as acquisition, creation, communication, dissemination, processing, archival, retrieval, transformation, and so on, within the context of the Internet and the Web. Mind Map: A diagram that represents goals, tasks, or other concepts linked to and arranged radially around a central theme or an idea. It is used to generate, visualize, and organize ideas, and as an aid to understanding, problem solving, and decision making. Objectivism: A theory of learning that views knowledge as some entity existing independent of

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the mind of individuals. The goal of instruction is to communicate or transfer knowledge to learners in the most effective manner possible. Open Source Software: A single encompassing term for software that satisfies the following conditions: (1) non-time delimited, complete software whose source is publicly available for (re) distribution without cost to the user, (2) imposes minimal, non-restrictive licensing conditions, and (3) is itself either based on non-proprietary technologies or on proprietary technologies that conform to (1) and (2). Software Engineering: A discipline that advocates a systematic approach of developing

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high-quality software on a large-scale while taking into account the factors of sustainability and longevity, as well as, organizational constraints of resources. Software Process: A set of activities, methods, and transformations that are used to develop and maintain software and its associated products. Web 2.0: A set of economic, social, and technological trends that collectively form the basis for the future Web as a medium characterized by user participation, openness, and network effects.

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Chapter 49

Online Scams

Case Studies from Australia Michelle Berzins University of Canberra, Australia

ABSTRACT The adoption of new technologies presents a risk that inexperienced users may become immersed in a virtual world of cyber-crime featuring fraud, scams, and deceit. In addition to the societal benefits of social interaction technologies (SIT), the adoption of social software tools brings a range of security issues. The chapter highlights the “darker” side of SIT in which online safety and interpersonal trust become tangible commodities and where fraudsters prey on unsuspecting netizens; it demonstrates that an assortment of technological tools and psychological practices may be used to gain the confidence and trust of unsuspecting consumers. The author argues that consumer education can be successfully utilized to enhance the ability of Internet users to detect and avoid fraudulent interactions and safely enjoy the many benefits afforded by the emerging social interaction technologies.

INTRODUCTION Online experiences, such as shopping, gambling, and dating, are vivid examples of social interaction technologies (SIT). Using Internet-based applications, consumers can perform interactive transactions within the seemingly anonymous comforts of their own home or office. Essentially, all that is required is a credit card and Internet access, and consumers are able to freely interact with others during the purchasDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch049

ing of goods or the creation of personal attachments. Whilst the Internet has generated countless benefits, it has also provided new opportunities for criminal behaviour (Savona & Mignone, 2004), including fraudulent solicitations, fraudulent transactions, and the transmission of the proceeds of crime (Davila, Marquart, & Mullings, 2005). The use of new technologies therefore brings a risk that inexperienced users may become immersed in a virtual world of cyber-crime featuring scams, fraud, and deceit. Emerging social interaction technologies can be used as tools through which crimes can be planned

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Online Scams

or implemented (Savona & Mignone, 2004). Wall (2004) defines cyber-crime as criminal acts that are transformed by networked technologies. They are crimes that are traditionally executed by other means yet are now being executed via the Internet or some other technological computing advancement. There are so many benefits to Internet-based services: e.g., cost effectiveness, timeliness, accessibility, speed, and convenience (Krone & Johnson, 2007). However, there are also innumerable scams transmitted via the Internet everyday; these include: get rich quick schemes, romance scams, requests to launder money under the guise of a legitimate offer of employment, and offers to purchase cheap products (such as pharmaceuticals). Digital versions of traditional fraud readily target Internet users regardless of their location, age, or level of education. They are scams conducted by computer-savvy individuals who know how to instill confidence in consumers by manipulating an online situation to produce the type of behaviour that they desire. Even people who are confident that they would not fall victim to a scam may be at risk, particularly given the seemingly legitimate appearance of many scams. This is called unconscious manipulation and occurs when a consumer perceives an illegitimate offer or situation to be legitimate due to the specific information and artificial reality created by the scammer. The proliferation of online scams comes from this apparent legitimacy which results in people failing to independently evaluate the authenticity of an online offer or situation. This chapter aims to highlight the dangers of SIT in exposing unwitting participants to fraudulent activity in Australia. By exploring specific cases of online shopping and online dating scams, significant risks are demonstrated that consumers and everyday users of SIT should be aware. Greater attention to consumer education could possibly reduce the risk of SIT users falling for online scams and go some way towards keeping SIT users alert to new forms of Internet deceit.

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BACKGROUND Scams, confidence tricks, and other types of fraudulent activity have existed for a long time. Some of the earliest scams were advance fee frauds where individuals pretended to sell something that they did not have, while taking money in advance from their victims. While these types of scams were initially transmitted via mail and facsimile, the early 1990s saw their existence proliferate due to the speed and ease with which they could be transmitted via the Internet by individuals around the globe (Holt & Graves, 2007). This proliferation has had two noticeable effects: first, a decline in consumer confidence levels, and second, increased reports of monetary loss as a result of scam activity. With regard to a decline in consumer confidence levels, the e-business report released in May 2007 by Sensis, an advertising subsidiary of a major communications provider in Australia – Telstra, used the results of telephone interviews with 1,800 small and medium businesses to assess their attitudes towards, and experiences with, ebusiness (Sensis, 2007). The study found that 42% of small to medium enterprises were concerned about the risk of people hacking into their computer system, and 12% noted that their customers were not prepared to carry out their financial transactions over the Internet due to security concerns (Sensis, 2007). These types of concerns are not uncommon, nor are they unfounded as shown by the Sensis consumer report (Sensis, 2008). This study involved the surveying of 1,500 people to measure their consumer confidence and expectations. The March 2008 consumer report indicates that consumers reported an average of 5.49 when asked to rate their concerns about Internet security on a scale between 1 and 10. The highest level of concern on this issue was among those in the 65+ age bracket (5.77). These concerns ranked 15th behind other issues such as: the price of gasoline, the environment, the cost of living, drought, health, and education (Sensis, 2008).

Online Scams

The cost of identity theft to Australian businesses is over AUS$1 billion per year (Debus, 2008), with advance fee frauds alone costing Australian consumers between $170 million and $680 million per year (Bowen, 2008). By comparison, it has been estimated that around ten million Americans were victims of identity theft with a total cost of approximately US$50 billion within a single year (Sarel & Marmorstein, 2006). Of those incidences that have been reported within the Australian region, it has been possible for the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce to rank the frequency of certain types of scams. As reported by Smith (2007), the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce found the most prevalent types of scams to be: lottery advance fee scams followed by pyramid/chain letters, offers to work from home, offers relating to investment opportunities, banking scams, online auction issues, offers of a business opportunity, and advertising or merchandising scams. In its original form, a scam would see an individual forwarding an amount of money in a belief that they would receive access to larger funds. Over time, this original format evolved into “advance fee fraud” where unsuspecting victims would act upon the directions contained within the letter and remit payment for services supposedly rendered or for goods that would supposedly be sent. Given their success, advance fee frauds have evolved to include somewhat intangible products, such as romantic relationships or guarantees of a more rewarding professional or personal life. Grabosky, Smith and Dempsey (2001) classified the four types of scams that can affect consumers in the online environment: First, advanced fee schemes where the seller pretends to sell something that he or she does not have while taking money in advance. Examples of this type of scams include: pyramid schemes, chain letters, “Nigerian” e-mails, deceiving business opportunities, prizes, and lotteries. Second, non-delivery or defective products and services where the seller supplies goods or services of a lower quality than

the goods or services paid for, or fails to supply the goods and services at all. Examples of this type of scams include: online auctions, misleading credit and loan facilities, health and remedial products and educational qualifications. Third, unsolicited and unwanted goods and services whereby sellers persuade consumers to buy something they do not really want through oppressive or deceptive marketing techniques. Examples of this type of scams include: unsolicited advertising (spam), securities and investment fraud, bait advertising, and inertia selling. Fourth, identity fraud which is the gaining of money, goods, services or other benefits, or the avoidance of obligations, through the use of fabricated, manipulated or stolen/ assumed identities. Examples of this type of scams include: phishing, plastic card fraud, card skimming, unauthorized transactions, and online banking fraud. The evolution and diversity of scams has resulted in creating a “darker” side of SIT where online safety and interpersonal trust become tangible commodities that fraudsters prey on and abuse. This darker side attracts criminals for many reasons: the scams are relatively easy to plan and execute; they can generate substantial profits; victims practically present themselves to offenders by engaging in certain SIT environments; trust is readily established; there is a low probability that the scam will be investigated and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies; and, it is practically impossible to accurately locate the offender. The use of Internet-mediated communication has resulted in scams evolving rapidly (Holt & Graves, 2007), particularly given that online scams can be operated from any Internet connection. As a result, the detrimental effect of online crime is widespread. For example, a study by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2008) found that 806,000 Australians were victims of personal fraud in 12 months. This equated to a fraud victimisation rate of 5% of the population, with 21% of these people being victimised online. Around 453,000 of those affected by personal fraud lost money,

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with a combined financial loss of $977 million, a mean of $2,156, and a median of $450 per person). These figures and detrimental societal effect are not unique to Australia, as over 40% of all complaints received by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission during 2002 related to identify theft (Davila et al., 2005). Many of these were found to be facilitated through an online environment. During 2006 alone, the FBI-endorsed Internet Crime Complaint Center (n.d.) referred over 86,000 complaints to law enforcement agencies of which 45% related to Internet auction fraud and 19% related to the non-delivery of merchandise which had been pre-paid by the consumer. Despite these figures, it is common for incidences of online scams to go unreported. The high levels of underreporting can be due to a number of reasons, including embarrassment of “being scammed” and even confusion as to whether the incident was legitimate or fraudulent. As a result of this underreporting, it is not possible to estimate the exact number of online scams being committed throughout the world on a daily basis. So while online transactions are occurring in practically every country touched by technological advancement and globalisation, the exact level and impact of online scams is largely immeasurable. Regardless of the absence of exact incident rates, online consumer fraud is becoming such a problem that the Australian Bureau of Statistics recently updated its census data collection processes to include questions on such crimes (Smith, 2007). Different in their execution, each of these types of online scams has one thing in common: an unwitting Internet user is exploited and is often defrauded of his or her money. While initial attempts at being scammed (perhaps through the receipt of spam mail) may not be regarded by victims as serious, it can be a pre-cursor for further offences, resulting in more significant forms of fraud victimisation (Wall, 2004). Indeed, the personal details of people successfully scammed by fraudulent behaviour are often on-sold to other scammers, thus perpetuating the individual’s

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exposure to other scams (Cratchley, 2008; Ward, 2004). The risk of being victimised by online fraud is quite high, and this is exacerbated by the large number of users and subsequent amount of traffic on the Internet. Indeed, whenever consumers transmit their credit card numbers or other personal information via the Internet, there is the risk that they may be intercepted if the transfers are not encrypted or that the individual’s privacy is compromised via the placement of cookies that enable others to monitor clickstream histories (Milne, Rohm, & Bahl, 2004).

Issues, Controversies, and problems SIT may inadvertently facilitate scams by ensuring an absence of verifiable interaction between the target and the scammer. This results in high levels of trust being established between the parties which may not otherwise occur as quickly in more usual face-to-face interactions. Beyond the establishment of trust between parties, Wall (2004) identified some of the typical attributes of victims including their distinct lack of computer knowledge and their possession of large sums of money. Victim vulnerability can also arise through factors, such as isolation, loneliness and/or an inability to locate work or romantic partners. Whilst these factors may predispose or exacerbate an individual’s vulnerability to online fraud, the plethora of current scams also add to the confusion and risk associated with SIT. Holt and Graves (2007) identified a number of current scams including business solicitations, fixed fee transfers, charity requests, lottery win notifications, and requests from so-called diplomats, barristers, government officials and ordinary citizens. Of particular interest to this chapter are the scams that successfully run via SIT, such as online auction houses or shopping sites and online dating forums.

Online Scams

The pitfalls of Online Shopping The absence of face-to-face interaction in the online shopping environment means that a certain level of trust is required between the buyer and seller regarding the description, quality and authenticity of the product (Cameron & Galloway, 2005). It is this very requirement of trust that leaves users of SIT exposed to perpetrators of scams who blatantly abuse it through deception. There are two mains types of online shopping: purchases made through an auction house (such as eBay) or those made privately between a seller and a buyer in response to an advertisement or other form of notification. Either way, there are substantial risks to making purchases online. The key differences between online transactions and those made in stores include the absence of a time lag between purchasing a product and receiving the items and the inability of consumers to use all their senses as they otherwise would during a typical transaction in a shop (Janda & Fair, 2004). Despite these differences, Raphaeli and Noy (2002) found that social facilitation occurs as much in an online auction environment as it does in a regular retail setting. This is surprising given that the absence of face-to-face interaction can impede the purchaser’s ability to form his or her own opinion about the suitability, quality, and legitimacy of a given product. While online shopping has proven very successful, the growth in online activity levels has been accompanied by a similar rise in online fraud (Janda & Fair, 2004). Despite the data demonstrating increasing levels of online fraud, consumers do not appear to be deterred from using the Internet to purchase goods, perhaps because their concerns are outweighed by other considerations. Hirsh (2001) found that Internet users cited convenience (not financial security) as the most important element of online shopping, whilst respondents in the Cameron and Galloway (2005) study believed the benefits of using online auctions far outweighed the potential threat of fraud. Two participants in

that study noted that despite significant losses, they had not been deterred from conducting online transactions in the future. Those involved in the Janda and Fair (2004) study were most concerned about children’s access to inappropriate material and potential hacking, with concerns relating to online fraud ranking a distant fifth. The results from the studies by Hirsh (2001), Cameron and Galloway (2005) and Janda and Fair (2004) suggest that whilst individuals are aware of the risks inherent to online transactions, the benefits are sufficient to see consumers continuing to use a range of SIT to facilitate their online purchases.

The Sydney Opera house Online Shopping Scam To demonstrate the malicious use of technology in an online shopping scam, it may be helpful to consider a specific case. The Sydney Opera House (operated by the Sydney Opera House Trust) is a renowned landmark known throughout the world for its distinctive design and location. At the time of the scam, the Trust held registrations for five official domain names including Sydney Opera House (www.sydneyoperahouse.com). Each of the five registered domain names provided online consumers with access to the Sydney Opera House’s official website where the consumers could view general information and purchase event tickets. During 2002, several fraudulent websites were created which appeared legitimate due to the false representation of an affiliation with the Sydney Opera House Trust. When a consumer seeking to buy tickets to events at the Sydney Opera House typed “www.sydneyopera.org” into their browser, they would reach the imitation website which was designed to look like the legitimate Sydney Opera House website. Search engines also directed people who were seeking information on the Sydney Opera House to the imitation website. When downloaded onto the person’s computer, the front page of the website appeared identical to

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the front page of the official Sydney Opera House site, but all other web pages on the imitation site were different. The imitation website contained a link to another web page where unsuspecting consumers were offered to purchase tickets (by use of a credit card) for performances at the Sydney Opera House. The charge for tickets almost doubled the original price. In most cases, the consumers found that no bookings had been made for their chosen performance even though their credit cards had been debited. By skillfully imitating an affiliation with the legitimate Sydney Opera House website, the Internet fraudsters managed to portray that ticket sales were legitimate. The court proceedings of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) versus Chen commenced in the Federal Court of Australia on October 3, 2002 and progressed undefended. It was alleged that a resident of the United States had engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct over the Internet to the detriment of Australian consumers. The Federal Court found that each of the four domain names which provided access to the imitation websites could be linked in various ways to the respondent. The court ruled that the respondent had contravened several provisions of the Trade Practices Act 1974 through his actions that detrimentally affected many online consumers. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission sought declarations from the court that the respondent: engaged in conduct that was misleading or deceptive or was likely to mislead or deceive; made false or misleading representations; and engaged in conduct that was liable to mislead the public in relation to services. Injunctions were also sought requiring the respondent to take all steps to remove and prevent access to the imitation websites by persons or computers within Australia and to restrain the respondent from publishing, operating or maintaining the websites or any similar Internet website for the purpose of engaging in misleading or deceptive conduct that can affect unsuspecting online consumers.

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Despite the ability of authorities to prosecute in this instance, there are many occasions of online scams where prosecution is not possible. Typical reasons include jurisdictional problems or the inability of authorities to identify the offender. To explore the challenges inherent to pursuing scammers who use the Internet to facilitate their crime, the nature of online romance scams is examined below.

Online Romance and Online Romance Scams An increase in chat-room activity (such as that typically experienced in online romance forums) results in individuals being more vulnerable to identity theft and the invasion of their privacy (Milne et al., 2004). Dating and online romance scams are particularly difficult to detect and avoid given the involvement of emotional attachments and the Internet user’s perception that there is the potential for companionship and happiness. There are three main types of online romance scams: first, becoming a member of a chat room or Internet dating site and being charged for each communication that is sent or received; second, being approached online by someone who claims they are either poor or have an ill relative and who subsequently requests money be sent to assist them; and third, the situation where rapport is established over a period of time until the scammer either requests money to cover a fee that he or she says needs to be paid, or the scammer confides in the target that he or she has money that needs to be transferred between countries. Regardless of the type of online romance scam, it is estimated that victims lose an average of $35,000 (Cratchley, 2008). Victims of dating scams are typically found through virtual environments: such as MSN, chat-rooms, online dating agencies, and even religious sites. Each of these forums provides an ideal environment for scammers, as unwitting users trust that they will meet like-minded, honest people who are in a similar situation. Through

Online Scams

the creation of trust comes vulnerability. This is further compounded by the fact that whilst online communities facilitate social interaction, they also provide users with an “escape” from reality (Janda & Fair, 2004) that further separates them from the very real risks and dangers associated with SIT. It is common to have some combination of warning signs and genuine events which culminate in a romance scam. Cratchley (2008) reports how a woman spent six months developing a “loving” relationship with a man posing as a retiree. The man supposedly traveled to Nigeria with the aim of buying real estate that would set the couple up for their coming lives together. The man contacted his victim claiming that he had been mugged in Nigeria, and she immediately responded by sending cash so he could supposedly return to her. A total of $8,500 was sent, and the man was not heard from again. In this situation, there was a clear establishment of trust between the victim and the scammer. According to ScamWatch (n.d.), there are a number of warning signs that a romance scam may be occurring. The signs include the following: if users are addressed by the wrong name or the contact is not personally addressed; if the contact is vague, poorly articulated, demanding and/or repetitive; if a photograph is provided that seems too good to be true; if the contact declares their love or desire after only a few contacts or if the contact becomes desperate and subsequently applies pressure to get the individual to provide bank account details or to forward money or other gifts. Illegal scams have adversely affected many Australians who have used the Internet as a means of finding romance and companionship. To demonstrate this, two additional cases are provided that reveal the devastating effects of online romance scams. In the first case, a male victim was scammed of approximately $20,000 after meeting a female companion on an online personal site. The 45 year old male began chat-

ting online with a person who identified themself as being an Australian woman living in Nigeria. After some time, and without any warning, the romantic communications stopped. A few days later, an e-mail was received by the male from a person claiming to be a Nigerian doctor who advised that the man’s female friend had been in a car crash and urgently needed money to cover the cost of her emergency surgery. Believing the scenario, the man sent money to Nigeria via electronic transfer. It was not until almost $20,000 worth of wire transfers had occurred that the man realised he had been scammed by a person who was neither romantically interested in him nor involved in a serious accident. Given the use of a wire transfer service, it was not possible to recover any of the man’s money nor accurately identify the perpetrator of the scam. In the second case, a 47 year old woman lost several thousand dollars and was left waiting at the airport for a romantic interest that never arrived in Australia. The relationship was initiated online. After some time, the man indicated a desire to travel to Australia to meet the woman in person. After weeks of correspondence to organise and progress the travel bookings, the man sent an e-mail to his companion requesting financial assistance to pay for his airfares and visa charges. The woman immediately sent money via electronic transfer. It was not until a further request for money to cover local taxes and customs charges was received that the woman realised she had been scammed. As in the first example, the use of an electronic wire transfer service meant it was not possible to recover any of the woman’s money. As shown, a number of psychological tricks are played on scam victims. For the online shopping scam, these tricks included making consumers believe they were purchasing a genuine product. For the online romance scam, the tricks included the adoption of a fake identity and the manipulation of the victim’s emotions to make them believe that they were entering into a genuine relationship.

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psychological Traps Similar to the trust required in online shopping transactions, the trust needed when pursuing romance online exposes users to fraudulent behaviour that can ultimately result in deception. It is therefore of benefit to explore some of the psychological traps commonly used in online scams. Software and hardware filters may be of assistance in protecting from spam in e-mail, yet they do little to safeguard the SIT user from predators who might be using a range of psychological traps to gain the confidence and trust of their victims. These traps include using reciprocity, creating a sense of urgency amongst consumers and the manipulation of agreements and interactions (ScamWatch, n.d.). Reciprocity is a term used to describe the relationship established between social actors as a result of some exchange of either money or goods. The creation of this relationship is a common psychological component of scamming, and arises through scammers providing their targets with a “free” gift in exchange for their agreement to undertake something at a later time. A psychological obligation is then established between the scammer and the target. Sadly, the level of fraud and brazenness of the acts are typically in direct proportion to the level of obligated reciprocity experienced by the consumer. The creation of a sense of urgency (or fear of missing out on scarce products or promotions) is another psychological trick resulting in targets making hasty – and often ill-informed – decisions regarding their spending or relationships. Finally, the manipulation of pre-existing agreements is common, and typically involves the scammer getting the target to commit to something at the outset, only to then rescind the initial agreement in order to replace it with another – often more detrimental and costly–agreement. These psychological traps may appear relatively straightforward, yet they can prove costly to the unwitting consumer caught up in the net of online fraud.

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Further enhancing the effectiveness of the psychological traps used in online scams is the absence of face-to-face interaction between the scammer and the target. Given the target’s reliance on the SIT forum to give them sufficient information through which an informed decision about their relationships or purchases will be made, it is essential to raise the awareness of new types of scams and to educate consumers who are eager to participate in the exciting but risk-laden world of SIT.

SOlUTIONS AND ReCOmmeNDATIONS Australian researchers estimate that between one and five percent of consumers in western countries are victimised by scams (Smith, 2007). Beyond eroding a consumer’s trust in Internet transactions, exposure to scams can have many other consequences. These include bankruptcy, difficulty securing future lines of credit due to identity theft and occurrences of psychological ill-health: such as poor self-esteem, depression, and the breakdown of family relationships. There have even been reports of victims feeling suicidal (Cratchley, 2008). These factors alone contrast distinctly with the general aim of SIT and bring a sobering reminder to users that they must be mindful of the darker side of such technology. When using the Internet, there are many options which can enhance a user’s safety whilst simultaneously protecting his or her identity. Common enhancements include hardware, protected software, security processes, and the use of strong firewalls. Yet while software and hardware have an important role in preventing online scams from reaching the average Internet user, they are ineffective in protecting the user from fraudulent interactions inherent to romance websites or online shopping sites. As noted by Sarel and Marmorstein (2006), the first line of defense is prevention, and it is

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this concept that provides some direction for the future trends of online scams. Ward (2004) also notes that consumer education is at the root of tackling the growing threat posed by fraud. It is therefore essential for consumer education to be used as a means of developing the skills of users to detect and avoid fraudulent interactions on SIT. Consumer education regarding the safe use of SIT includes the adoption of preventative measures as well as following tips to enhance safety. Indeed, “if consumers could become more educated about potential threats, more knowledgeable about detection and more proficient at avoiding some of the phishing attacks, security would be significantly better” (Sarel & Marmorstein, 2006, p. 105). The future direction for alleviating the darker side of SIT subsequently lies in consumer education and awareness initiatives. Some general preventative measures to consider when undertaking any type of online transaction include: (1) checking beforehand with the local office of fair trade or competition regulation regarding current scams that consumers should be alert to; (2) ensuring that quality up-to-date software is installed on any computer with Internet access to protect it from viruses, hacking, and the installation of unwanted programs via downloads; and, (3) never following a hyperlink embedded within an unsolicited contact, such as those received via e-mail. A number of more specific precautionary measures can be used when shopping online or entering romance forums. These include: (1) remembering that if a product or offer sounds too good to be true, then it probably is; (2) only using reputable vendors which have a verifiable, trusted, and established history; (3) being careful to read all the terms and conditions of any sale or contract carefully and to verify the physical address or telephone number of the individual or business involved, as well as only divulging personal and identifiable information where it is essential and where you have knowingly initiated the contact and trust the other party. Krone

and Johnson (2007) offer further suggestions on maintaining transaction security. These include: (1) ensuring that encryption is applied to sensitive information, such as bank account numbers or personal information; (2) opting for safer payment options that provide consumer protection; and (3) avoiding the use of public facilities or insecure wireless connections when transmitting sensitive information. It has been suggested that the consumer’s ability to distinguish genuine online offers from fraudulent improves over time (Cameron & Galloway, 2005). The author argues that consumer education can be successfully utilised to enhance the ability of Internet users to detect and avoid fraudulent interactions and safely enjoy the many benefits afforded by the emerging social interaction technologies. A combination of technical solutions and behaviour management (whereby consumers take responsibility to detect and avoid fraud, as well being willing to modify their online behaviour) is therefore necessary to establish consumer trust in the safety of online interactions and transactions (Sarel & Marmorstein, 2006). Following the adoption of such technical and behavioural solutions, opportunities would arise for future research to be conducted that assesses the impact of these initiatives.

fUTURe TReNDS It is likely that online fraud will continue to proliferate. Disaster fraud is emerging as a significant risk to those not alert to the intricacies of ever-changing online scams. Disaster fraud can occur in two main ways: first, where victims of natural disasters are targeted and exploited; second, where concerned well-wishers who are otherwise unaffected by the event are targeted and exploited. Disaster fraud itself (in the form of false insurance claims and person-to-person scamming) has been around for sometime; more recently, it has started to emerge as a future trend for online scams.

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Disaster fraud became particularly apparent in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina which hit the mainland of the United States of America on 29 August 2005. In response to the criminal behaviour stemming from the Hurricane event, the United States Department of Justice (USDOJ) established the Hurricane Katrina Fraud Task Force to deter, investigate, and prosecute disaster-related federal crimes, such as charity fraud and insurance fraud (USDOJ, 2005a). The Task Force was directed to track referrals of potential cases and complaints, coordinate with law enforcement agencies to initiate investigations, and ensure timely and effective prosecution of identified fraud cases. Of interest to this chapter is their work in preventing, detecting, investigating, and prosecuting online scams associated with natural disasters. For example, in November 2005, three people were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for falsely and fraudulently representing themselves as agents of the American Red Cross for the purpose of soliciting and receiving money from citizens to purportedly aid victims of Hurricane Katrina (USDOJ, 2005b). In creating such scams, it becomes apparent that the pain and vulnerability associated with devastating natural events, combined with the outpouring of kind-heartedness from those unaffected by the event, make these disaster-affected situations particularly appealing to online scammers. As noted by Davila and colleagues (2005), the large-scale devastation of a natural disaster combined with the substantial amounts of public and private funding of recovery efforts create an environment of victims who are vulnerable to financial exploitation. One example of disaster fraud affecting victims is the receipt of unsolicited e-mails from so-called “workmen” or “repair companies” who promise to restore lost services or carry out repairs upon confirmation of the victim’s credit card number or bank account details. Upon supplying the number, victims’ accounts are then drained of their funds or unapproved charges are placed on their credit card. Such online scams can be traced back to

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Tropical Storm Allison which destroyed parts of Texas in June 2001 and resulted in many citizens reporting their victimisation through various frauds and scams (Davila et al., 2005). A second example of disaster fraud is that concerning well-wishers who are otherwise unaffected by the disastrous event. According to the Hurricane Katrina Fraud Task Force (2006), one of the first types of fraud to emerge from a natural disaster are charity-fraud schemes. Such schemes see criminals exploiting the outpouring of private and public support for disaster victims by creating fraudulent websites which are then used to try and persuade the public to send their charitable donations. The lifecycle for these charity-fraud schemes is said to last from the onset of the disaster to between four and six weeks after the event. These scams usually commence with an e-mail contact from the scammer. False promises are made that all donations will be sent on to either finance disaster-recovery efforts or to finance the needs of victims. In reality, the donations are kept by the scammer. A recent example of this type of online scam arose in May 2008 after an earthquake hit China. Despite the substantial loss of both life and property, the scammers capitalised on the opportunity to wreak havoc. Within days of the China earthquake, fake websites were established and e-mails were being sent by entities posing as either victims or legitimate charities. E-mails were also received that appeared to be sourced from legitimate aid agencies or were alternatively presented as news updates regarding the disaster. Embedded within the e-mails were viruses and/or malicious codes that silently gathered confidential information from recipients’ computers to facilitate the theft of their identities and personal information (Weizhen, 2008). When the official-looking nature of the emails is combined with the heartfelt sorrow and empathy of the recipient, a dangerous combination is produced that may result in the recipient being scammed financially or defrauded of their identity. The scams of the future therefore touch

Online Scams

at a different aspect of our psychology: rather than exploiting just the vulnerabilities of victims, people are now being exploited because of their kindness and concern for their fellow humans. Other directions for future research of online scams may include examining meta-scams or e-mails which are received by individuals that contain an offer to compensate past victims of online scams. This type of newly-emerging online scam asks the recipient for his or her personal information and advises that the amount previously lost by the individual as the result of an online scam will be quickly refunded with an additional amount paid as “compensation.” These are, of course, scams about scams and further highlight the need for education and preventative measures to protect online users.

CONClUSION This chapter identified an assortment of technological tools and psychological practices that may be used to deceive consumers online. Increasing fraud awareness of Internet users and helping consumers arm themselves with necessary information and knowledge can partially alleviate these dangers. Whilst reputable online shopping sites make use of comprehensive measures to ensure the legitimate trading of goods in exchange for payment, it is essential that individual consumers enhance their own online security and awareness of potential scams. Consumer education regarding the safe use of SIT (including knowledge of the future trends of online scams) is therefore very important. Likewise, hardware and software protection measures, such as firewalls and other up-todate security products, should also be employed. It is evident that the future challenges facing society relate to ensuring that social interaction technologies do not cteate virtual playgrounds for online criminals.

RefeReNCeS Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2008, June 27). Personal fraud. Retrieved October 7, 2008, from http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/ subscriber.nsf/0/866E0EF22EFC4608CA25747 40015D234/$File/45280_2007.pdf Bowen, C. (2008, February 24). Shining the light on scams and fraud. Retrieved February 25, 2008, from http://www.chrisbowen.net/pages/ministry. do?newsId=587 Cameron, D., & Galloway, A. (2005). Consumer motivations and concerns in online auctions: An exploratory study. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 29(3), 181–192. doi:10.1111/ j.1470-6431.2005.00385.x Cratchley, D. (2008, February 6). Love cons on rise. The Courier Mail, p. 17. Davila, M., Marquart, J., & Mullings, J. (2005). Beyond mother nature: Contractor fraud in the wake of natural disasters. Deviant Behavior, 26, 271–293. doi:10.1080/01639620590927623 Debus, B. (2008, March 27). New identity crime offences proposed [Press Release]. Retrieved October 2, 2008, from http://www. ministerhomeaffairs.gov.au/www/ministers/ ministerdebus.nsf/Page/MediaReleases_2008_ Firstquarter_27March2008-Newidentitycrimeoffencesproposed Federal Court of Australia. (2003, August 27). Australian Competition and Consumer Commission v Chen. Retrieved September 30, 2008, from http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/ FCA/2003/897.html Grabosky, P., Smith, R., & Dempsey, G. (2001). Electronic theft: The unlawful acquisition in cyberspace. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Hirsh, L. (2001, December 20). As digital divide diminishes, e-commerce might not benefit. ECommerce Times. Retrieved from http://www. ecommercetimes.com Holt, T., & Graves, D. (2007). A qualitative analysis of advance fee fraud e-mail schemes. International Journal of Cyber Criminology, 1(1), 137–154. Hurricane Katrina Fraud Task Force. (2006, September). First year report to the Attorney General. U.S. Department of Justice. Retrieved June 11, 2008, from http://www.usdoj.gov/katrina/Katrina_Fraud/docs/09-12-06AGprogressrpt.pdf Hurricane Katrina Fraud Task Force. (2007, September). Second year report to the Attorney General. U.S. Department of Justice. Retrieved June 11, 2008, from http://www.usdoj.gov/katrina/ Katrina_Fraud/docs/09-04-07AG2ndyrprogrpt. pdf Internet Crime Complaint Center. (n.d.). Internet crime report January1,2006– December 31, 2006. Retrieved January 7, 2008, from http://www.ic3. gov/media/annualreport/2006_IC3Report.pdf Janda, S., & Fair, L. (2004). Exploring consumer concerns related to the Internet. Journal of Internet Commerce, 3(1), 1–21. doi:10.1300/ J179v03n01_01 Krone, T., & Johnson, H. (2007). Internet purchasing: Perceptions and experience of Australian households. Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, 330, 1–6. Milne, G., Rohm, A., & Bahl, S. (2004). Consumers’ protection of online privacy and identity. The Journal of Consumer Affairs, 38(2), 217–232. Rafaeli, S., & Noy, A. (2002). Online auctions, messaging, communication and social facilitation: A simulation and experimental evidence. European Journal of Information Systems, 11, 196–207. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000434

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Sarel, D., & Marmorstein, H. (2006). Addressing consumers’ concerns about online security: A conceptual and empirical analysis of banks’ actions. Journal of Financial Services Marketing, 11(2), 99–115. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fsm.4760025 Savona, E., & Mignone, M. (2004). The fox and the hunters: How IC technologies change the crime race. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 10, 3–26. doi:10.1023/ B:CRIM.0000037562.42520.d7 ScamWatch. (n.d.). Welcome to ScamWatch. Retrieved February 25, 2008, from http://www. scamwatch.gov.au Sensis. (2007, August). Sensis® e-business report: The online experience of small and medium enterprises. Retrieved June 13, 2008, from http://www.about.sensis.com.au/ resources/sebr.php Sensis. (2008, March). Sensis® consumer report. Retrieved June 13, 2008, from http://www.about. sensis.com.au/resources/scr.php Smith, R. G. (2007). Consumer scams in Australia: An overview. Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, 331, 1–6. United States Department of Justice. (2005a, September 8). Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales outlines anti-fraud priorities to protect the integrity of relief efforts in Hurricane Katrina-stricken region. Retrieved June 11, 2008, from http://www. usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2005/September/05_ag_462. htm United States Department of Justice. (2005b, November 3). Three indicted in Katrina relief scam. Retrieved June 11, 2008, from http://www. usdoj.gov/katrina/Katrina_Fraud/pr/press_releases/2005/nov/threeIndicted_KatrinaScam110305. pdf Wall, D. (2004). Digital realism and the governance of spam as cybercrime. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 10, 309–335. doi:10.1007/s10610-005-0554-8

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Ward, M. (2004, January). Fraud and the consumer. Credit Management, 22-24. Weizhen, T. (2008, May 27). Online scams soliciting ‘donations’ for disaster-hit. The Straits Times. Retrieved June 11, 2008, from http://www. asiamedia.ucla.edu

Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Advanced Fee Fraud: Pretending to sell something you do not have while taking money in advance. Computer Facilitated Crime: Crimes executed via the Internet or some other technological computing advancement. Cyber-Crime: Criminal acts that are transformed by networked technologies.

Disaster Fraud: Crimes including instances where victims of natural disasters are targeted and exploited, or where concerned well-wishers who are otherwise unaffected by the disaster are targeted and exploited. Meta-Scams: Scams about scams—such as an e-mail which is received by an individual that contains an offer to compensate him or her for being a past victim of an online scam. Online Scams: Fraudulent activity (involving but not limited to scams and identity theft) that occurs on or is transmitted via the Internet. Unconscious Manipulation: Occurs when a consumer perceives an illegitimate offer or situation to be legitimate as a result of the specific information and creative reality produced by a scammer.

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Chapter 50

The Usability of Social Software Lorna Uden Staffordshire University, UK Alan Eardley Staffordshire University, UK

ABSTRACT Emergent Web 2.0 technologies and applications (such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, mashups, and folksonomies) present a range of opportunities and benefits and are increasingly used by people to interact with each other. Despite the growing popularity of social software, there is a lack of research on the usability of these tools. This chapter focuses on how users interact with Web 2.0 technology, discusses a conceptual framework for a usability evaluation of social software, describes the different types of social software applications, and offers guidelines for their usability evaluation. The argument advanced is that social software usability should be viewed as a set of principles and practices aimed to deliver more service-orientated Web 2.0-based applications.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Social software has emerged as a driving force of Web 2.0. The term Web 2.0 was coined by Tim O’Reilly (2005) to describe a sea change in web services and technologies. It should be noted that Web 2.0 is not a single development but rather a heterogeneous mix of new and emergent technologies. Overall, there is an increasing presence of social software applications that allow users to communicate, collaborate, and share their personal interests. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch050

This chapter introduces a usability perspective on social software and offers guidance for evaluating the usability of social software applications. Bryant (2007) defines social software as a combination of various social tools within a growing ecosystem of online data and services, all joined together (aggregated) using common protocols, micro-formats and Application Programming Interface (API) methods. It is also underpinned by some general principles about engaging people as active participants in online social networks and communities to achieve new and exciting effects through distributed collaboration, co-production and

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The Usability of Social Software

sharing. Central to the notion of Web 2.0 is the ideas of scale, the belief that the tools become more useful as more people apply them, and changing the world through the Social Web. According to Leadbeater (2007), the tools associated with social software transform our capacity for civic activism. Firstly, these tools allow people to participate by creating, publishing and distributing content, such as video, pictures, music and texts through the Internet. Secondly, social software allows people with similar interests to find one another and connect through social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo. People can also use search tools and systems for collaborative tagging of information and ideas. Thirdly, people can coordinate their activities and collaborate through raising petitions and funds, and planning and conducting mobile campaigns and communities programs. Fourthly, through large-scale collaborations, people can create reliable, robust, and complex products such as open source software applications such as Linux. As to Leadbeater (2007), the rubric of social software is: contribute, connect, collaborate, and create. There are three characteristics commonly attributed to social software, namely:

Owen and others (2006) suggest that social software can be also characterized by community gains, that is, many users benefit from other users acting in sociable and community-oriented ways:

•

•

•

•

Support for conversational interaction between individuals or groups, ranging from real-time instant messaging to asynchronous collaborative teamwork spaces. This category also includes collaborative commenting on and within blog spaces. Support for social feedback that allows a group to rate the contributions of others, perhaps implicitly, leading to the creation of digital reputation. Support for social networks to explicitly create and manage a digital expression of people’s personal relationships, and to help them build new relationships (Boyd, 2003).

• • • • • • •

Social software delivers communication between groups Enables communication between many people Provides gathering and sharing resources Delivers collaborative collecting and indexing of information Allows syndication and assists personalization of priorities Has new tools for knowledge aggregation and creation of new knowledge Delivers to different platforms as is appropriate to the creator, recipient, and context.

In addition, social software offers great promise for education as it supports group interaction. Phipps (2007) lists the following educational benefits of social software: •

• • •

• •

Using instant messaging to conduct tutorials at a distance with a distributed group Providing easier opportunities for students to collaborate and make word of mouth recommendations about sites including, or related to, course content Allowing students to create their own interest groups allied to their studies Allowing students to interact with students from different universities and countries Providing researchers with ways to share results faster and with opportunities for instant feedback Allowing the formation of ad hoc research groups Providing a way of having material peer reviewed by a broad audience before publication

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USABIlITy peRSpeCTIve Usability is central to the use of any software application. Jacob Nielsen defines usability as the quality attribute that assesses how easy a user interface is to use (Nielsen, 2003; Nielsen & Loranger, 2006). Despite the rapid growth of social software, there is little research of its usability. According to Silva and Dix (2007), when a social software application such as YouTube was subjected to usability evaluation, it failed the test. The main aim of usability examination is to ensure that interactive products such as social software are easy to learn, effective to use, and enjoyable from the user’s perspective (Preece, Rogers, & Sharp, 2002). Usability goals include: • • • • • •

Effective to use (effectiveness) Efficient to use (efficiency) Safe to use (safety) Have good utility (utility) Easy to learn (learnability) Easy to remember how (memorability)

to

use

Usability goals are typically turned into specific criteria to enable the usability of a product to be assessed in terms of how it can improve a user’s performance. Usability tests are often used to orient web product designers towards thinking about different aspects of their applications. Social software design principles are derived from a mix of theory-based knowledge, experience, and common sense. Some well-known design principles include well-established testing criteria, such as visibility, feedback, constraints, mapping consistency, and affordances (Norman, 1998). When design principles are used in practice, they are referred to as heuristics. Whereas design principles are used mainly for informing a product development, usability principles are used mostly as the basis for evaluating prototypes and existing systems. They provide the framework for heuristics evaluation (Preece

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et al., 2002). Nielsen and his colleagues (2001) have developed ten main usability principles that can be equally applied to social software usability examination: 1.

Visibility of system status: Always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time. 2. Match between system and the real world: Speak the user’s language using words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. 3. User control and freedom: Provide ways of allowing users to easily escape from places they unexpectedly find themselves by using clearly marked “emergency exits.” 4. Consistency and standards: Avoid making users wonder whether different works, situations, or actions mean the same thing. 5. Help users recognise, diagnose, and recover from errors: Use plain language to describe the nature of the problem and suggest a way of solving it. 6. Error prevention: Where possible, prevent errors occurring in the first place. 7. Recognition rather than recall: Make objects, actors, and options visible. 8. Flexibility and efficiency of use: Provide accelerators that are invisible to novice users but allow more experienced users to carry out tasks more quickly. 9. Aesthetic and minimal: Avoid using information that is irrelevant or rarely needed. 10. Help and documentation: Provide information that can be easily searched and provides help in a set of concrete steps that can be easily followed.

Evaluation can be broadly divided into two types: evaluation by the designer (or a usability expert without direct involvement by users) and evaluation that studies actual use of the system. The former is useful for assessing early designs and

The Usability of Social Software

prototypes. On the other hand, the latter typically involves a working prototype or implementation. The goals of evaluation are: (a) to assess the extent and accessibility of the system’s functionality, (b) to assess user’s experience of the interaction and (c) to identify any specific problems with the system. Evaluation of the usability of social software should be tackled throughout the design life cycle, with the results of the evaluation feeding back into the modification of the design. Although it is not possible to carry out extensive experimental testing continuously throughout the design, analytic and informal techniques can and should be used (Silva & Dix, 2007). The functionality of the system is also important. It must be in accord with the users’ requirements as well as matching the use of the system to the users’ expectations of the task. In addition, it is important to assess the users’ experience of the interaction and its impact upon him/her. Usability testing is the approach typically used to carry out users’ evaluation. Although users should be involved in the evaluation of the software throughout the design process, this may not be possible because it is rather expensive. Another approach is to use experts to carry out the evaluation. This approach is relatively inexpensive because it does not require user involvement. However, this approach does not assess actual use of the system, only whether or not a system upholds accepted usability principles. According to Tognazzini (1995), user testing is an integral part of the design process. Usability evaluation is important to determine that software meets user needs and one can use the product and adopt it. Without evaluation we cannot be sure that the social software is usable and what the users want. Preece and colleagues (2002) identified four different evaluation paradigms: 1.

Quick and dirty evaluations: This is a practice in which designers informally get feedback from users or consultants to

2.

3.

4.

confirm that their ideas are in line with users’ needs. This method is called dirty because this can be done in a short space of time. It is particularly useful for applications that need to be completed in a short timescale. Usability testing: Usability testing involves measuring typical users’ performance on carefully prepared tasks that are typical of those for which the system was designed (Preece et al., 2002). In this evaluation, it is strongly controlled by the evaluator. Tests typically take place in laboratory-like conditions that are controlled. Everything that the participant does is recorded. Quantifying users’ performance is a dominant theme in usability testing. Field studies: Field studies are done in the natural settings where the aim is to increase understanding about what users do naturally and how technology impacts them. There are two approaches to field studies. The first involves observing explicitly and revealing what is happening, as an outsider looking on. Qualitative techniques are used to collect the data that can then be analysed qualitatively or quantitatively. The other approach is where the evaluator may be an insider or even a participant. A typical type of inside evaluation is ethnography. The aim of ethnography is to explore the details of what happens in a particular social setting, Predictable evaluation: In this method, experts apply their knowledge of typical users, often guided by heuristics, to predict usability problems. Users need not be present in predictable evaluation. This makes the process quick, relatively inexpensive, and attractive to companies.

Typical expert methods include heuristic evaluation and cognitive walkthrough. Heuristic evaluation is an informal usability inspection technique developed by Nielsen (1994), in which experts, guided by a set of usability principles

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The Usability of Social Software

(known as heuristics) evaluate whether user interface elements, such as dialog boxes, menus, navigation structures, online help, etc. conform to the principles. Expert evaluators work with the product, role-playing typical users and noting the problems encountered (Preece et al., 2002). The main advantage of this approach is, because users are not involved in the evaluation, it is quick and cheap. Heuristic evaluation is thus known as “discount evaluation.” Walkthroughs are another method for heuristic evaluation for predicting users’ problems without doing user testing. These involve performing a task and noting problems associated with system usability. There are cognitive walkthroughs and pluralistic walkthroughs. Cognitive walkthroughs involve simulating a user’s problem-solving processes at each step in the human-computer dialog, checking that the user’s goals and memory for actions can be assumed to lead to the next correct action (Preece et al., 2002). The steps involved are: 1.

2. 3.

4.

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Characteristics of typical users are identified and documented, and sample tasks are developed that focus on the aspects of the design to be evaluated. A designer and expert evaluators come together to do the analysis. The evaluators walk through the action sequence for each task replacing it within the context of a typical scenario. As they do this, they try to answer the following questions: ◦ Will the correct action be sufficiently evident to the user? ◦ Will the user notice that the correct action is available? ◦ Will the user associate and interpret the response from the action correctly? A record of critical information is compiled as the walkthrough is being performed.

5.

The design is revised to fix the problems presented.

Pluralistic walkthroughs are a method in which users, developers, and usability experts work together to step through a task scenario, discussing usability issues associated with dialog elements involved in the scenario steps. Each group of experts is asked to assume the role of typical users. Interestingly enough, Silva and Dix (2007) found that conventional usability evaluation does not work well for social software, such as YouTube. Despite this, You Tube has been a great success. Even though we know what usability means for such sites; how do the site developers take into account the usability of a radically configurable site? What about consistency? How do we effectively communicate with 10 million end-user designers? These and other issues should be addressed by further research of social software usability.

SOCIAl SOfTWARe USABIlITy Blogs A blog is a system that allows a single author (or group of authors) to write and publicly display time-ordered articles (called posts). Readers can add comments to posts. Increasingly, blogs incorporate multimedia, and you can also upload and read them via mobile devices. The main benefits of blogs are that users with disabilities can access an online blog using assistive technology (for example text-to-speech tools or voice recognition software) in a way that would be impossible to replicate in paper-based update reports. The inbuilt templates, content management, tracking and searching facilities of a blog system can make the organization and retrieval of information much simpler than using a process that depended on their own organizational skills. The main disadvantage of a blog is that users with learning difficulties may struggle to acquire the range of skills necessary to effectively keep records via an online system.

The Usability of Social Software

Different blog systems will have different levels of usability and accessibility, in the navigation and retrieval of content and their usability with different assistive technologies.

Wikis A wiki is a system that allows one or more people to build up a corpus of knowledge in a set of interlinked web pages, using a process of creating and editing pages. Wikipedia is the most famous wiki. There are many possible uses for a wiki, including research collaboration, multi-authored papers, project work, and maintenance of documents which require regular updating. There are several advantages of using wikis. These include giving an opportunity for users with different types of knowledge, confidence, and communication to contribute equally to a joint publication, reducing e-mail traffic. Collaborators who lack confidence to argue a case in a “live” face-to-face debate can feel more comfortable making the same points in a wiki environment where the pace of discussion is slower and the quality of the thinking is more significant than force of personality. The main drawback of a wiki is its iterative nature (sections appearing and disappearing as a document evolves), which can be very difficult to track, especially for those with slow reading speeds.

podcasts A podcast is a collection of digital media files which are distributed over the Internet, often using syndication feeds, for playback on portable media players and personal computers. Many podcasts also allow users to directly download, by giving a link to the audio file in an RSS feed or web page. The ability to listen to content rather than read it offers many benefits to users. Users with poor reading skills or visual impairment particularly benefit; however, there are also significant benefits for all users who want to absorb

content while doing something else, such as driving. Users need not only be recipients – it can be very easy to create personal audio content and in some circumstances it may be a more successful way of recording knowledge and understanding than a blog or a traditional textual write-up. The main problem with podcasts is that audio-only resources pose significant problems for people with hearing disability.

Social Networking Tools Social network services allow people to come together online around shared interests, hobbies, or causes. For example, some websites provide dating services where users post personal profiles, locations, ages, gender, etc, and are able to search for a partner. Other services enable business networking (Ryze, XING, and LinkedIn) and social event meetups (Meetup). More recent developments include virtual reality worlds, such as Second Life. Nowadays, social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo attract millions of users, and the services grow exponentially, with each new user encouraged to introduce others. The main benefits of social networking tools enable the creation of online communities, whether geographical communities, people linked by a particular interest, or simply random networks of online users. It also offers such benefits as expanded networks, informal positive filtering (e.g., “friend of a friend” recommendations) and opportunities to both advertise and search for specific skills and experiences. There is no disadvantage if the tool is built with accessibility in mind.

mashups A mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. An example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information

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to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source. The benefit is in being able to combine datasets in new ways. The limitation is that with a high reliance on spatial data, mashups are very difficult for visually impaired users. People with poor spatial skills (for example, those who prefer a list of directions rather than a map image) may also find mashups difficult to use.

Sharing Tools This provides users with the ability to record (bookmark) web pages and tags these records with significant words (tags) that describe the pages being recorded. Most websites enable the uploading of your own resources, and viewing of those uploaded by others, through configuration options that usually enable you to make your resources available only to a private group if required. Del.icio.us and Furl are two of the most popular bookmark-sharing services, while CiteULike and Connoteaare more academically oriented, for sharing bibliographical references. Image-sharing sites include Flickr and Phlog, while Odeo focuses on audio material. The benefits include: the ability to visualize information in different ways (for example, cloud tagging in Del.icio.us); the ability to collaborate effectively without needing physical access or physical proximity to other collaborators. The main problem is the interface. If the interface is designed for accessibility, there should be few difficulties.

folksonomies Folksonomy is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. It is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. A folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy. Folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increas-

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ingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. Among the most widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and Del.icio.us. The main benefit of folksonomy is that by using them, we can discover new and more current digital content due to its ability to be updated immediately. Folksonomies can also be organized so that one can explore the “long tail interests” – the less frequently used keywords that people choose that can help users focus their searches and applications. However it is criticized for a lack of terminological control causing it to produce unreliable and inconsistent results. Another problem is the lack of precision inherent in tags (Guy & Tonkin, 2006).

Usability evaluation Guidelines Nielsen (1994) derived his heuristics evaluation from an analysis of 249 usability problems. Preece and others (2002) expanded on that and produced the following guidelines: • • • • • • • • • •

Visibility of system states Match between system and real world User control and freedom Consistency and standards Help users recognise, diagnose, and recover from errors Error prevention Recognition rather than recall Flexibility and efficiency of use Aesthetic and minimalist design Help and documentation.

Nielsen (1999) argues that the above guidelines are too general for evaluating new products: such as, online communities, WAP devices, and others. Instead, Nielsen suggested an easy to remember constellation of usability principles (acronym HOMERUN): 1. 2.

High-quality content Often updated

The Usability of Social Software

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

The authors concur with Preece and colleagues (2002) that it is important to develop heuristics that are best tailored to the specific product. The heuristic evaluation method consists of three stages (Preece et al., 2002): 1. 2.

3.

◦ ◦

Minimal download time Ease of use Relevant to user’s needs Unique to the online medium Net-centric corporate culture

The briefing session in which the experts are told what to do The evaluation period in which each expert typically spends 1-2 hours independently inspecting the product using the heuristics for guidance The debriefing session in which the experts come together to discuss their findings and to prioritise the problems they found and to suggest solutions.

2.

3.

Whereas usability is concerned with how users interact with technology, sociability is concerned with how members of a community interact with each other through the enabling technology (Preece 2001). The success of professional learning social software is determined not only by its high usability, but also good sociability, with both of these principles comprising a set of criteria and measures (Law & Hvannberg, 2006). We concur with Klamma and others (2006) that four key quality attributes and their sub-attributes for social software are needed: functionality, usability, interactivity, and naturalness. 1.

Functionality ◦ How do I join the group? ◦ Do I feel part of a thriving community? ◦ What are the rules? ◦ Can I express myself as I wish? ◦ Is the community safe?

4.

Can I trust the application? Do people behave themselves appropriately? ◦ Would it support me to carry out the activities I want to do? ◦ Can I find out who is there? Usability ◦ Can I use the application easily? ◦ Do I feel that I am able to follow and understand what I am doing? ◦ Do I enjoy using the application? ◦ Do I know how to join the group? ◦ Can I get, read, and send messages? ◦ Can I send a private message? ◦ Can I find the information and people easily? ◦ Can I navigate the site easily? ◦ Do I feel comfortable using the application? Interactivity ◦ Does the application allow me to communicate easily? ◦ Does the application offer simple, consistent pages and clear navigation? ◦ Does the application know where I am at all times? ◦ Does it let me know clearly where I can go from here? ◦ Does it let me know where I have been? ◦ Does it make it obvious what to do to get somewhere? ◦ Does it indicate what clicking a link will do? ◦ Does the application give appropriate feedback? ◦ Does the application give concise, timely and polite help? Naturalness ◦ Is the layout simply and easy to use? ◦ Is the text clear and easy to read? ◦ Is the page consistent?

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The Usability of Social Software

◦ ◦

◦ ◦

Is the colour natural and pleasing? Are the navigation items large and bold: a. Using clear text to make the purpose of each link apart from unambiguous? b. Positioning permanent navigation links apart from content? c. Differentiating navigation using colour, tone, and shape? Does it have too many columns? Does the application provide appropriate help when I get stuck?

Currently no standard ways exist to measure the above attributes, making benchmarking studies especially difficult. Evaluation of social software is difficult, given the high variability in users, tasks, and contexts. Despite this, we believe that the principles of functionality, usability, interactivity, and naturalness can be successfully used for evaluating social software.

fUTURe TReNDS Emerging social interaction technologies present opportunities and benefits to institutionally based and personal learning. As familiarity with social software grows in the larger community, these tools are now being increasingly explored for their pedagogic value. According to Aspin and Chapman (2000), “life-long learning” refers to a society in which learning possibilities exist for those who want to learn (Fischer, 2001). There is an increasing demand for new approaches towards fostering life-long learning perspectives. Emergent Web 2.0 concepts and technologies are opening new doors for more effective learning and have the potential to support life-long competence development. Social software techniques enable richer capturing of context in which content has been produced. This allows for automating the genera-

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tion of metadata (“descriptions”): e.g., by reusing metadata from artefacts produced by “close neighbours” in the social network) (Klamma et al., 2007). This sort of mining of social information can enhance the Automated Metadata Generation framework (Cardinaels et al., 2005). According to Klamma and colleagues (2007), social software based context capturing offers great potential to create advanced tools and services for dealing with the need for content. A simple example is to augment user queries with metadata that constrain results to those that are relevant to the context at hand (e.g., in a language that the user has demonstrated mastery). A more advanced example is to alert users to relevant content, even before they are aware that it may help them in the task at hand (e.g., because the actions of their peers and colleagues have indicated that this content is relevant in this situation).

CONClUSION Users will not adopt an application if they find it difficult to use. Designers cannot expect that user-friendliness can be achieved automatically by following the product design guidelines. Usability evaluation is necessary to make sure that users approve the application. Creators of a usable Web 2.0 site should: 1) adhere to standards; 2) think about what users will actually do; and, 3) think about user tasks. The difference between traditional applications and social software is that users become both designers and end-users. As we argue above, many of the already established principles for software usability can be successfully applied to evaluating the usability of the Social Web. In addition, some new features have to be considered to take into account the specific nature of social software. Overall, social software usability should be viewed as a set of principles and practices aimed to deliver more service-orientated Web 2.0-based applications.

The Usability of Social Software

RefeReNCeS Aspin, D. N., & Chapman, J. D. (2000). Lifelong learning: Concepts and conceptions. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 19(1), 2–19. doi:10.1080/026013700293421 Boyd, S. (2003). Are you ready for social software? Retrieved November 20, 2006, from http://www. darwinmag.com/read/050103/social.html Bryant, L. (2007). Emerging trends in social software for education. Emerging Technologies for Learning, 2, 9-18. Retrieved August 12, 2008, from http://partners.becta.org.uk/page_documents/research/emerging_technologies07_chapter1.pdf Cardinaels, K., Meire, M., & Duval, E. (2005). Automating metadata generation: The simple indexing interface. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the World Wide Web (WWW 2005) (pp. 548-556). Fischer, G. (2001). Lifelong learning and its support with new media. In W. Kintsch. (Ed.), International encyclopedia of social and behavioral sciences (Cognitive psychology and cognitive science, contribution 41.) Retrieved July 7, 2007, from http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/ iesbs2001.pdf Guy, M., & Tonkin, E. (2006). Folksonomies: Tidying up tags? D-Lib Magazine, 12(1). Retrieved March 20, 2008, from http://www.dlib.org/lib/ january06/guy/01guy.html Klamma, R., Chatti, M. A., Duval, E., Fiedler, S., Hummel, H., Hvannberg, E. T., et al. (2006). Social software for professional learning: Examples and research issues. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2006), Kerkrade, Netherlands.

Klamma, R., Chatti, M. A., Duval, E., Hummel, H., Hvannberg, E. T., & Kravcik, M. (2007). Social software for life-long learning. Educational Technology & Society, 10(3), 72–83. Law, E. L.-C., & Hvannberg, E. T. (2006). Quality models of online learning community systems: Exploration, evaluation and exploitation. In N. Lambropoulos & P. Zaphiris (Eds.), User-centred design of online learning communities (pp. 71100). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing. Leadbeater, C. (2007, July). Social software for social change. A discussion paper for the Office of Third Sector. Retrieved August 20, 2008, from http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/cms/xstandard/ social_software.pdf Nielsen, J. (1994). Enhancing the exploration power of usability heuristics. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI’94 (pp. 152-158). Nielsen, J. (1999). useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on usability and Web design. Retrieved May 20, 2006, from http://www.useit.com Nielsen, J. (2001). Ten usability heuristics. Retrieved March 20, 2008, from http://www.dsoergel. com/794/NielsenUsability.pdf Nielsen, J. (2003). Usability 101: Introduction to usability. Retrieved September 12, 2005, from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html Nielsen, J., & Loranger, H. (2006). Prioritizing Web usability. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Norman, D. A. (1998). The design of everyday things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Retrieved June 23, 2007, from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/ news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

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Owen, M., Grant, L., Sayers, S., & Facer, K. (2006). Open education: Social software and learning. Retrieved December 12, 2006, from http://www.futurelab.org.uk

Tognazzini, B. (1995). Tog on interface. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Phipps, L. (2007). Web 2.0 and social software: An introduction (Joint Information Systems Committee [JISC]). Retrieved June 23, 2008, from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/ web2socialsoftwarev1.aspx

Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS

Preece, J. (2001). Sociability and usability in online communities: Determining and measuring success. Behaviour & Information Technology, 29(5), 347–356. doi:10.1080/01449290110084683 Preece, J., Rogers, I. R., & Sharp, H. (2002). Interaction design: Beyond human-computer interaction. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Silva, P. A., & Dix, A. (2007, September). Usability – not as we know it. In D. Ramduny-Ellis & D. Rachovides (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st BCS HCI Group Conference. British Computer Society.

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Heuristic Evaluation: A usability inspection technique based on a set of established usability principles. Social Software Usability: A set of principles and practices aimed to deliver more serviceorientated Web 2.0-based applications. Usability: A qualitative attribute that refers to the ease of use of computer software and webbased applications. Usability Evaluation: Refers to an assessment of the degree of efficiency to which a software product can be operated by the users. Usability Testing: Involves procedures and techniques to measure the users’ performance of most typical tasks. Walkthrough: A usability evaluation technique used for identifying potential problems.

Section 4

Selected Readings

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Chapter 51

Interactivity Redefined for the Social Web V. Sachdev Middle Tennessee State University, USA S. Nerur University of Texas at Arlington, USA J. T. C. Teng University of Texas at Arlington, USA

ABSTRACT With the trend towards social interaction over the Internet and the mushrooming of Web sites such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube in the social computing space, practitioners and researchers are motivated to explain the sudden surge in user interest. The authors propose that interactivity is an important and appropriate subject of investigation to shed light on this explosion in social media use. Based on a review of the extant literature, they justify the use of interactivity for addressing research questions motivated by this new phenomenon. In particular, they propose a redefinition of interactivity for the social computing domain and term it Social Computing Interactivity (SCI). The authors suggest possible operationalizations of the dimensions of SCI and explore theory bases which would inform a study of their relevance in predicting the continued growth of social computing.

INTRODUCTION The recent explosion in the individual use of websites such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and others, has generated a lot of buzz in the media. This buzz has not been without valid reason, as is evidenced by the amount of traffic these sites draw and the valuation being assigned to these companies, without any significant revenue streams to justify

those valuations (e.g., Google acquisition of YouTube for $1.6 billion and Microsoft’s investment of $240 million in Facebook). The number of users visiting these sites as well the growth rate they exhibit is staggering (see Table 1). Given the extraordinary success of these sites, it behooves us to address the following questions: a.

What is the motivation for users to participate in social computing?

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch051

Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

Interactivity Redefined for the Social Web

b.

What will it take for these sites to retain existing users and attract new ones?

However, before we attempt to answer these questions, it is pertinent to define social computing and have some sense of how popular it is.

Social Computing According to Schuler (1994), social computing refers to any type of computing where software serves as an intermediary for a social relation. However, his conceptualization is very broad and he includes in it the instance when the government devises policies involving software development. A good definition from the IBM Social Computing Group (IBM n.d.) is given below. “Social computing refers to systems which support the gathering, representation, processing and dissemination of social information, that is, information which is distributed across social collectivities such as teams, communities, organizations, cohorts and markets.” (IBM n.d.) We define social computing as computing where the user takes an active role in the process, often creating content or modifying the computing environment, and the computing experience extends from the individual to the social. In order to make our conceptualizations relevant, we limit the scope of our analysis to websites, and exclude applications such as e-mail and independent instant

messaging applications. We expect our research to extend to mobile computing too, since the distinctions between the computer and the phone are becoming hazy.

Current Trends According to a recent report by Forrester Research (Li 2007), 48% of US adult online consumers participate in activities such as publishing blogs/ webpages, uploading video to YouTube and other sites, commenting on blogs, posting reviews, using social networking sites, or simply consuming user generated content. This increase in interest in social computing is supported with some web traffic statistics. According to a February 2007 report from Hitwise (Prescott 2007), the top twenty social networking websites accounted for 4.9% of Internet Traffic in September 2006, a growth of 96% over September 2005. YouTube.com was the 26th most popular website on the internet in September 2006 (Prescott 2007). YouTube traffic alone comprises approximately 20% of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10% of all bandwidth usage on the Internet (Ellacoya Networks 2007). While the traffic statistics above indicate a high level of user activity, there are few sites, if any, that have a viable business model. However, because many of these websites are not very capital intensive until they reach a certain scale of traffic, there is a proliferation of clones of popular sites such as MySpace and YouTube. Given the statistics above, it is important to

Table 1. Usage and growth of some social Websites Website

Unique U.S. users (Sept.2007, Millions)

Growth from previous year (percent)

MySpace

68.1

23

Facebook

30.6

129

Flickr

13.1

90

Bebo

4.4

83

Imeem

3.2

1,590

Source: Businessweek, November 5, 2007 (pp. 24)

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find out the reason behind this tremendous increase in use of these websites. Based on our review of literature in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), we propose that Interactivity, with our suggested extensions, is an appropriate concept to study in an effort to shed light on the success of these websites. Interactivity has been conceptualized in many different ways depending on the perspective taken by the researchers and the context involved. We propose a redefinition of the interactivity construct and justify its salience as an important independent variable to study in line with our objectives above. We define the dimensions of interactivity or SCI, as we label it, and justify our additions to the dimensions popular in extant literature.

Contributions of this Research This conceptualization of interactivity will provide a theoretical grounding for further investigations into the likely impact of interactivity on user behavior on social websites or while interacting with social software. It will provide a platform from which we propose to conduct empirical investigations toward answering an important question about the role SCI can play in explaining the unprecedented success of social computing. While we will not evaluate the psychometrics of the dimensions of interactivity proposed in this article, we will provide an evaluation of extant literature on the existing operationalizations and provide guidance on their adaptation for social interactivity. The rest of the article is structured as follows. First, we review the importance of interactivity as a predictor variable in several contexts. Then we review the extant literature on different perspectives on interactivity, focusing primarily on the CMC literature, as it is the most appropriate foundation for our work. Our research is also informed by relevant studies in psychology, sociology and human-computer interaction (HCI). We highlight the need for extension of the concept and define

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the dimensions of SCI and suggest adaptations to existing definitions. Finally, we provide guidance on operationalizing the constructs and suggest theory bases which would inform a study of their relevance in predicting the continued growth of social computing.

BACKGROUND Interactivity has been an important construct in several fields of research such as marketing, communication, human computer interaction (HCI) and computer mediated communication (CMC). Given this diverse theoretical background there have been several competing and complementary conceptualizations of interactivity. While the concept of interactivity has attracted a fair share of attention, the disparate literature on interactivity has also been the subject of much discussion (Downes and McMillan 2000; Yadav and Varadarajan 2005; Kiousis 2002). We review this literature to establish the importance of interactivity as an independent variable and create a foundation for the redefinition of the concept in the context of social computing. In a study on interactive advertisements, Cho and Leckenby (1999) found that the level of perceived interactivity was positively associated with attitude toward the product as well as with the intention to purchase. Wu (1999) found that perceived interactivity was positively associated with the user’s attitudes towards the website. Likewise, Teo et al. (2002) found that increased level of interactivity on a website has positive effects on user’s perceived satisfaction, effectiveness, efficiency, value, and overall attitude towards the website. Ghose and Dou (1998) found that greater interactivity is associated with Internet presence sites being counted as ‘top sites’. Other research has considered the relationship of interactivity to choice difficulty (Ariely 2000), online navigation experience (McMillan and Hwang 2002; Novak et al. 2000), and processing of online advertise-

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ments (Liu and Shrum 2002; Stewart and Pavlou 2002). This representative review indicates the importance of the business to customer (B2C) aspect of communication in which the literature is based. However, this line of research ignores the current trend in social websites, where the emphasis is on user-user interaction, rather than just user-medium interaction or user-firm interaction. Since the central concern in the field of computer mediated communication (CMC) is the mediated enablement of user-user interaction, we anchor our research in the rich body of literature in that field. Early research in CMC indicated that it was low in social presence, which was defined as the user’s perception of the ability of the means of communication to marshal and focus the presence of communicating subjects (Short et al. 1976). This observation was consistent with the ‘cues filtered out’(CFO) perspective (Culnan and Markhus 1987), as well as with the views on media richness (Daft and Lengel 1986) and limited social cues (Kiesler et al 1984). However, this notion has been contradicted in research that builds on the foundations of the social information processing view (Walther 1992). The central theme of the latter perspective is that the level or richness of communication enabled by CMC is not only determined by the medium or the technology but may be contingent on other factors, such as the time spent in the interaction or the expectation of future interaction. The findings of some research studies contradict the results from early experiments in the ‘cues filtered out’ tradition, suggesting that CMC may be able to support effective interpersonal interactions partly due to the ability to optimize self-presentation, assuming there is an opportunity for repeated interactions (Walther and Burgoon 1992, Walther 1996). With the applications available today on the web, CMC has moved beyond the realm of the ‘text’ interface. The increased level of interactivity afforded by these applications requires a deeper level of analysis as well as a redefinition of the

notion of interactivity to make it germane to the context of social computing. We examine the various perspectives on interactivity below and then propose our redefinition.

perspectives on Interactivity Interactivity has been conceptualized in many different ways depending on the perspective taken by the researchers and the context involved. Kiousis (2002) provides an excellent review of the disparate conceptualizations of interactivity and conflicting results in extant research. For example, they mention that the operationalization of levels of interactivity as a function of the technological features (Schneiderman 1992) is in stark contrast to its operationalization as a perceptual report from the users (Newhagen et al 1995). Kiousis posits that interactivity has been defined with regard to technological properties, communication context, and user perceptions of interactivity. In addition to providing an excellent review of the multiple definitions of interactivity, Kiousis provides his own, which we quote below: “Interactivity can be defined as the degree to which a communication technology can create a mediated environment in which participants can communicate (one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many), both synchronously and asynchronously, and participate in reciprocal message exchanges (third-order dependency). With regard to human users, it additionally refers to their ability to perceive the experience as a simulation of interpersonal communication and increase their awareness of tele-presence.” (Kiousis, 2002, p.372) Yet another context-specific definition of interactivity for electronic marketplaces, proposed by Yadav and Varadarajan (2005), reads as follows:

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“Interactivity in the electronic marketplace is the degree to which computer mediated communication is perceived by each of the communicating entities to be (a) bidirectional, (b) timely, (c) mutually controllable, and (d) responsive.” (Yadav and Varadrajan, 2005, p.593)

2002; Wu 1999). These perceptions were measured using different operationalizations of interactivity, such as control (Steuer 1992), interpersonal communication (Kiousis 1999), awareness of telepresence (Kiousis 1999), and responsiveness (Wu 1999).

Both the definitions above propose a composite definition of interactivity based on the underlying dimensions identified by the authors. The definition by Yadav and Varadarajan (2005) is very appropriate for an extension to our context of social computing. A detailed review of the empirical work on interactivity, including several excellent meta analyses of the concept (McMillan and Hwang 2002; Tremayne 2005; Kiousis 2002), suggests three dominant perspectives: a) Interactivity as the users perception; b) as a function of the properties of the medium, and c) as a process of message exchange or interaction with the message/medium. For the sake of brevity, only an overview of the conceptualizations is presented below. See Table 2 for a summary of the research.

Interactivity as properties of the medium or Technology The traditional thinking on interactivity promoted it as a function of the features of the medium, sometimes as a gradient, with more features implying more interactivity. Prominent among them were Ha and James (1998) who identified five characteristics of interactivity and Novak et al. (2000) who focused on time required for interaction. Ghose and Dou (1998) listed twenty three site characteristics and evaluated which ones were most often found in a sample of ‘Internet Presence Sites’ and related them to a site being classified as a ‘top site’ in the rankings from Lycos, a search engine. McMillan (1999) used site features as indicators of interactivity, using the six dimensions proposed by Heeter (1989): complexity of choice available, effort users must exert, responsiveness to the user, monitoring information use, ease of adding information and facilitation of interpersonal communication. Clearly, the results/findings of these studies suggest a multidimensional conceptualization of interactivity.

Interactivity as a perception Earlier conceptualizations focused on interactivity as properties of the medium or the affordances. However, with empirical work showing that individual perception of the features was more important than the presence of the features themselves; this approach has gained ground (Kiousis 1999; McMillan 2000; McMillan and Hwang

Table 2. Different conceptualizations of interactivity Control

Communication

Responsiveness

Perception

Steuer 1992 Wu 1999, 2000 Liu&Shrum 2002 McMillan 2002

Kiousis 1999 Liu and Shrum 2002 McMillan 2002

Wu 1 9 9 9 , 2 0 0 0 S t e u er 1992 Coyle&Thorson 2001 Liu&Shrum 2002

Property

Jensen 1998 McMillan 2000

Massey & Levy 1991 Heeter 1989 McMillan 2000

Novak et al. 2000

Process

Williams et al. 1988 Yadav & Varadrajan 2005

Rafaeli 1988 Ha and James 1998

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Interactivity as process of message exchange or Interaction with message/medium The classical definition of interactivity, which is cited very often in the communication literature, was proposed by Rafaeli (1988). According to him, “Interactivity is an expression of the extent that in a given series of communication exchanges, any third (or later) transmission (or message) is related to the degree to which previous exchanges referred to even earlier transmissions.” (Rafaeli, 1988, p.111) This definition completely ignores the technological factors included in earlier conceptualizations. Here the focus is on the exchange of messages and implies that the messages in a sequence should relate to each other. Another prominently cited definition was proposed by Willams et al. (1988) which was “the degree to which participants in a communication process have control over, and can exchange roles in, their mutual discourse” (p. 10). In a similar vein, Cho and Leckenby (1999) measured interactivity as the process of interaction with an advertisement.

Social Computing Interactivity As the literature review above indicates, interactivity is a multi-dimensional construct. It has been studied as a media characteristic, as a perceptual variable, and as a process of message exchange (Tremayne 2005). In consonance with current research (Wu 1999; Sohn & Lee 2005), we conceptualize Social Computing Interactivity (SCI) as a perceived measure with multiple dimensions. Further, rather than restricting the definition to a particular kind or groups of software, we keep the definition independent of technology, but relevant to the context of social software use, which is the domain of interest in our study.

Since many conceptualizations of interactivity propose dimensions of control, responsiveness and reciprocal communication, we consider these three dimensions the core dimensions of interactivity and retain them in our redefinition of the concept. However, we argue that the ‘social’ aspect of the social computing phenomenon is not addressed by these dimensions. Motivated by Ma and Agarwal’s (2007) research, we propose three other dimensions, namely, social presence, self-presentation and deep profiling. These constructs were originally proposed in the context of participation in online communities. The authors highlight the importance of identity communication and subsequent verification in traditional non-mediated interaction and extend this argument to online community participation. They discuss technology artifacts, the use of which promotes identity verification. We adapt these for our context, and opine that the issue of identity communication is salient even for individual users engaged in social computing (not necessarily in a group or a community). Furthermore, since the dimensions of identity communication and verification have been shown to be a prerequisite for effective interaction (Ma and Agarwal, 2007), it seems appropriate to include them in our definition of interactivity. In keeping with the definitions reviewed above, we define SCI as “the degree to which the interaction (user-medium and user-user) is perceived to: a) enable control; b) exhibit responsiveness; c) enable reciprocal communication and social presence; and e) provide capabilities for selfpresentation and deep profiling”. As argued correctly by Sohn and Lee (2005), the dimensions of perceived interactivity should not be integrated into one score, since that dilutes the investigation into the differential impacts of these individual dimensions. So, instead of determining a single composite score and evaluating a medium for levels of interactivity on a gradient, we suggest that these dimensions should be independently measured before their relationships

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with suitable outcome variables are studied. We define the dimensions below:

Control The literature review above highlighted a formulation of interactivity as the degree of control afforded by the medium. This has been conceptualized in several ways: 1. 2.

3. 4.

Control over navigability, content or pace (Sohn and Lee 2005). ‘The extent to which users can participate in modifying the form and content of a mediated environment in real-time” (Steuer 1992 p.84). Though this is the definition of interactivity, it is referring to the users’ control over the form and content of the medium. Control over the communication process (Yadav and Varadrajan 2005). “the degree to which participants in a communication process have control over, and can exchange roles in, their mutual discourse is called interactivity” (Williams et al. 1988, p. 10).

Since we propose to conceptualize the dimensions as perceptions and keep them independent of the characteristics of the medium, the definition proposed by Steuer (1992) is used as the basis. He conceptualized three dimensions of interactivity, namely, speed, range, and mapping. Here the concept of range is most pertinent for our needs. We quote the definition here “The range of interactivity is determined by the number of attributes of the mediated environment that can be manipulated, and the amount of variation possible within each attribute” (Steuer 1992 pp. 86) When considered from the perspective of the number of attributes manipulated, control over the form of some social software, such as a social

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networking website, would include attributes such as the layout or the colors. The higher the number of attributes that the user can modify, the greater the degree of control. It is important to reiterate that we do not enumerate the attributes that can be modified to get a measure of controllability for the medium; instead, we will rely on the perceptions of the user. Control over the content of such a site would involve content that the users can put in there, the content they that want to see from their friends’ pages, or content from third party services (such as photos, music, stock prices, weather etc) using RSS feeds. The sources cited above offer alternatives for scale creation for measuring this variable, but we propose that the scale used by Liu and Shrum (2002), with appropriate modifications to capture the ability of the user to control the content, layout, colors and other personalization options.

Responsiveness This dimension captures the element of time it takes for the medium to respond to user action and the possibility of response as well. The speed of response was central to Steuer’s (1992) definition of interactivity. Coyle and Thorson (2001) also state that quick transitions between a user’s actions and the consequent outcome make a website interactive. Wu(1999) concluded that navigation and responsiveness are two dimensions to measure interactivity of websites. Liu and Shrum (2002) use a term called “Synchronicity”, which refers to the degree to which a user’s input and its attendant response is simultaneous. Since social computing is focused on usergenerated content, this dimension becomes very important. The users are no longer just browsing casually or doing information search. They are interacting actively with the medium, to change its form or content, and communicating with other users. Besides the speed of response, we also include the probability of response in this definition. Therefore, lower interactivity results

Interactivity Redefined for the Social Web

if the user interacts with the interface and does not get a response. For measuring responsiveness, we would again recommend using the scale by Liu and Shrum (2002) as the base and incorporate an item measuring the speed of response when the user is customizing the website to her needs, since that is an important activity on these websites.

Reciprocal Communication The ability of a medium to provide two-way communication is central to the definition of interactivity. Massey and Levy (1999) opine that providing user’s with communication tools such as chat rooms and bulletin boards enable “interpersonal interactivity”. According to Heeter (1989), facilitation of interpersonal communication is one of the dimensions of interactivity. McMillan (2002) uses the dimensions of control and direction of communication to identify four different types of interactivity. We conceptualize reciprocal communication as the enablement of user-to-user and user to website communication. User to user communication could be one to one, one to many and many to many. This may be explicit in the form of Blog posts and comments (one to many), chat rooms (one to many), bulletin boards (one to many), instant messaging, notes on a friends ‘wall’ on Facebook.com (one to one and one to many), etc. It could also be more implicit in terms of providing feedback to other users such as ratings on user content, such as the model in Digg.com or rating a user’s video uploaded on Youtube.com. User to website communication would be enabled by providing easy options to provide feedback on the site content or features to the site administrators. Many of these websites develop features iteratively based on user feedback. If the site administrators make it evident that they are accepting feedback and making changes, users are likely to rate the website higher on reciprocal communication. Since the construct is tapping two dimensions

of user to user and user to website communications and the resulting construct is a result of the rating of the website on these two dimensions, we propose that this construct should be operationalized as a formative construct. For items measuring the user to website communication capability, Liu and Shrum (2002) would be an appropriate source and we recommend development of new items to measure the user to user communication capability.

Social presence This construct along with the next two, Self-presentation and Deep Profiling, have been adapted from Ma and Agarwal (2007) along with suitable modifications to make them relevant to our context. As mentioned earlier, Short et al. (1976) define social presence of a medium as the user’s perception of the ability of the means of communication to marshal and focus the presence of communicating subjects. They define this as a subjective quality of the medium, with varying levels in different communication media. These levels are based on the ability of the media to transmit information about facial expression, direction of looking, and nonverbal cues. However, this perspective is based on the assumption that the benchmark for CMC is traditional face-to-face communication and thus CMC has been considered low in social presence (Short et al. 1976). Walther (1992) countered this argument and proposed the social information processing viewpoint, where he proposed that the level of presence afforded by a media cannot be measured using the features of the medium. Instead, the perception of the users dictates the level of presence. He also reviews literature which contradicts the ‘low social presence’ view of CMC and says that presence may be a function of the context, user characteristics, and purpose of use of the media as well. For a detailed discussion of the varied conceptualizations of presence, the reader is referred to Gunawardena (1995) and Biocca et al. (2003).

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A more relevant and contextual definition was proposed by Ma and Agarwal (2007) for a construct called virtual co-presence. Building on the conceptualization by Biocca et al. (2003), they defined it as the feeling of being together in a virtual environment in the context of users in an online community. According to Biocca et al. (2003, pp.456-457), these ‘others’ whose copresence is of interest to the user are “primarily technologically mediated representations of other humans or forms of intelligence including mediated representations of remote humans via text, images, video, 3D avatars...” So, this presence could be human or artificial. The definition used by Ma and Agarwal (2007) considers interactivity, speed of interaction, and vividness as factors that enable perceptions of virtual co-presence. Since we are conceptualizing social presence as a dimension of interactivity we need to avoid this broad definition. We want to capture the ability of the medium to simulate co-presence, in terms of sensory awareness of the other (Goffman 1959), and the perception that the others react to the focal user (Heeter 1992). Hence, we define social presence as the degree to which users perceive the physical existence of others and the perception of the extent of interaction with the other user(s). . Since this construct taps into two dimensions, we propose that this construct should be formative. Diamantopoulos and Winklhofer (2001) proposed guidelines regarding the creation and validation of the formative indicators, which is appropriate for this construct and the other formative constructs we propose. Though the items created by Ma and Agarwal (2007) for these constructs followed these guidelines, the context for their research was user’s knowledge contribution in two specific online communities. In our context, the role of these constructs in influencing the perception of relatedness with other users is most important and hence we recommend a modification of the items accordingly.

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Self-presentation Ma and Agarwal (2007) propose this construct and define it as “a process to communicate one’s identity, helping others form a more sophisticated and accurate understanding of “Who am I?””(p. 50). According to them, self-presentation can be achieved through the use of signatures, screen names, avatars (virtual representations, sometimes animated), personal profiles, and web pages or personal photographs, among others. The authors discuss the psychological processes involved in non technology-mediated interactions from the perspective of Attribution theory(Heider 1958), which contends that people use available social information to judge the personality and identity of others. This communication of identity is a first step in any new interaction (Goffman 1967). Since people with shared interests or tastes are more likely to communicate and build relationships (Newcomb 1961), identity communication will enable discovery of such people. Though the authors use this construct in the context of online community members, we propose that this conceptualization is equally valid for an individual user using social websites, even if it is not a formal online community. Ma and Agarwal (2007) formulate this as a formative construct and we propose the same and recommend the items used by them as suitable for our context, with minor modifications.

Deep profiling Ma and Agarwal (2007) contend that availability of artifacts such as rankings, feedback, detailed archives of user contributions, and ‘Who did what’ features are examples of deep profiling artifacts. Deep profiling, along with the earlier two dimensions of social presence and self-presentation, enables efficient identity communication. These artifacts provide a context which assists in reducing attribution differences arising due to the rarity of cues afforded by CMC. In contrast to self-

Interactivity Redefined for the Social Web

presentation, where it is the initiative of the user to use the features, deep profiling features are more under the control of the system, often dependent on the use of such features (e.g., feedback mechanisms) by other users. Since these mechanisms allow for users to evaluate other users and form perceptions, they are a prerequisite for effective interaction. Hence, we include deep profiling as another dimension of interactivity. In addition to self-presentation and social presence, we also conceptualize deep profiling as a formative construct, rather than reflective as was done by Ma and Agarwal (2007). In the original study, the items were measuring a user’s perceptions of what information about her was being viewed or considered by the other users while interacting with her. In our context, the perspective is about the ease of finding information about another user who is the subject of a possible interaction. Hence the language of all the items needs to be modified. For example, instead of the item “I think that other people have read my previous posts”, we would recommend an item “I can easily read the earlier posts of other users”. The list of constructs and the appropriate operationalization is presented in Table 3 below.

fUTURe ReSeARCh In the discussion above, we have proposed three new dimensions of interactivity to represent the richer and more complex social software that we see today. In order to confirm these dimensions of interactivity, we call for exploratory research to develop and validate scales for the dimensions and to study the impact of the various dimensions of SCI on the use of social computing websites. While there are several theoretical lenses that could be used to illuminate the relationship between SCI dimensions and use of these websites, we mention only some relevant theory bases here. One prominent theory in the communication and advertising literature is the use and grati-

Table 3. Constructs and their operationalizations Construct

Formative/Reflective

Control

Reflective

Responsiveness

Reflective

Reciprocal Communication

Formative

Social Presence

Formative

Deep Profiling

Formative

Self Presentation

Formative

fications perspective. This perspective focused on the psychological orientation of the receiver/ user of the communication and thus proposed an alternative to the predominant emphasis that was placed on the sender and the message in mass communication research until the 1970s. It offers the explanation that people consume different types of media, be it newspapers, television, radio or the Internet, because of the gratification they get out of their use. In a review of the literature on the use of this perspective to explain Internet use, LaRose and Eastin (2004) found that several studies explained very little variance in Internet use. They went on to propose additional constructs based on social cognitive theory (Bandura 1986) to better explain Internet usage. The use and gratifications theory base seems very appropriate to investigate the impact of the interactivity dimensions on gratifications obtained, which in turn may help explain the surge in social computing. On a related note, there is a well developed theory or rather a collection of mini-theories in psychology called the Self Determination Theory (SDT) that was proposed by Deci and Ryan (1985, 2000). This set of theories examines the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the effects of social contexts or environmental factors on intrinsic motivation, and the concept of basic psychological needs and their relationship to psychological health and well-being. They propose that all humans have some basic psychological

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needs - autonomy, competence and relatedness - and fulfillment of these needs is positively associated with higher levels of self-determined motivation, which subsequently leads to persistent behavior. If the dimensions of interactivity are considered to be the factors that the users are exposed to while using a particular website, then these dimensions could be hypothesized to fulfill certain needs. For example, a greater ability for self-presentation on the website might be associated with a higher level of relatedness perception, where relatedness is defined as the desire to feel connected to significant others.

CONClUSION In this article, we reviewed the importance of interactivity and proposed it as an important research construct in the context of social computing. We highlighted the major conceptualizations of interactivity and discussed the rationale for its redefinition. This traditional definition of interactivity is extended by adding three new dimensions, thus evolving a six-dimensional view of interactivity that is likely to be more useful in understanding issues pertaining to social computing. Further, we provided direction on operationalizing the constructs. Finally, we suggest some theoretical lenses to evaluate the impact of these dimensions of interactivity on the use of social software. The validation of this multi-dimensional model of interactivity relevant for the social computing domain as well as the development of theorybased models investigating the impact of SCI on the use of these websites would provide a useful conceptual platform for pursuing research in this rich and complex area of social computing.

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Novak, T. P., Hoffman, D. L., & Yung, Y. F. (2000). Measuring the customer experience in online environments: A structural modeling approach. Marketing Science, 19(1), 22–42. doi:10.1287/mksc.19.1.22.15184doi:10.1287/ mksc.19.1.22.15184 Prescott, L. (2007). Hitwise US Consumer Generated Media Report, Feb 2007. Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). The darker and brighter sides of human existence: Basic psychological needs as a unifying concept. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 319–338. doi:10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_03doi:10.1207/ S15327965PLI1104_03 Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000a). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 54–67. PubMeddoi:10.1006/ ceps.1999.1020doi:10.1006/ceps.1999.1020 Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000b). Selfdetermination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. The American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. PubMeddoi:10.1037/0003066X.55.1.68doi:10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68 Schuler, D. (1994). Social computing. Communications of the ACM, 37(1), 28–29. doi:10.1145/1 75222.175223doi:10.1145/175222.175223 Short, J., Williams, E., & Christie, B. (1976). The social psychology of telecommunications. London: Wiley. Sohn, D., & Lee, B. (2005). Dimensions of interactivity: Differential effects of social and psychological factors. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(3). Stewart, D. W., & Pavlou, P. A. (2002). From consumer response to active consumer: measuring the effectiveness of interactive media. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 30(4), 376–396. doi:10.1177/009207002236912doi:10 .1177/009207002236912

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Stromer-Galley, J. (2004). Interactivity-as-product and interactivity-as-process. The Information Society, 20(5), 391–394. doi:10.1080/01972240490 508081doi:10.1080/01972240490508081 Teo, H., Oh, L., Liu, C., & Wei, K. (2003). An empirical study of the effects of interactivity on web user attitude. International Journal of HumanComputer Studies, 58(3), 281–305. doi:10.1016/ S1071-5819(03)00008-9doi:10.1016/S10715819(03)00008-9 Tremayne, M. (2005). Lessons learned from experiments with interactivity on the web. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 5(2). Vallerand, R. J. (1997). Toward a hierarchical model of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 29, 271–360. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)600192doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60019-2 Vallerand, R. J., Fortier, M. S., & Guay, F. (1997). Self-determination and persistence in a real-life setting: Toward a motivational model of high school dropout. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(5), 1161–1176. PubMeddoi:10.1037/0022314.72.5.1161doi:10.1037/0022-3514.72.5.1161 Walther, J. B. (1992). Interpersonal effects in computer-mediated interaction: a relational perspective. Communication Research, 19(1), 52–90. doi:10.1177/009365092019001003do i:10.1177/009365092019001003 Walther, J. B. (1996). Computer-mediated communication: impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 23(1), 3–43. doi:10.1177/009365096023001001 doi:10.1177/009365096023001001

Walther, J. B., & Burgoon, J. K. (1992). Relational communication in computer-mediated interaction. Human Research Communication, 19(1), 50–88. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.1992.tb00295. xdoi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.1992.tb00295.x Williams, F., Rice, R. E., & Rogers, E. M. (1988). Research methods and the new media. Collier Macmillan. Wu, G. (1999). Perceived interactivity and attitude toward website. Proceedings of the 1999 Conference of the American Academy of Advertising, (pp. 254-262). Yadav, M. S., & Varadarajan, R. (2005). Interactivity in the electronic marketplace: an exposition of the concept and implications for research. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 33(4), 585. doi:10.1177/0092070305278487doi:10.1177/009 2070305278487

Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Control: The perception of control over the form of and content on a website. Deep Profiling: The perception of availability of information about users on a website. Reciprocal Communication: The perception of enablement of user to user and user to website communication. Responsiveness: The perception of the speed of response during a user interaction with a website and the probability of that response. Self Presentation: The perception of the ability to project one’s identity on the website. Social Computing Interactivity: The degree to which the interaction (user-medium and useruser) is perceived to: a) enable control; b) exhibit responsiveness; c) enable reciprocal communication and social presence; and e) provide capabilities for self-presentation and deep profiling.

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Social Presence: The degree to which users perceive the physical existence of others and the perception of interaction with the other user(s).

This work was previously published in Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, edited by S. Hatzipanagos and S. Warburton, pp. 434-447, copyright 2009 by Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global).

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Chapter 52

Social Technologies and Digital Commons Francesca da Rimini University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT This chapter investigates the premise that software is culture. It explores this proposition through the lens of peer production, of knowledge-based goods circulating in the electronic space of a digital commons, and the material space of free media labs. Computing history reveals that technological development has typically been influenced by external sociopolitical forces. However, with the advent of the Internet and the free software movement, such development is no longer solely shaped by an elite class. Dyne:bolic, Streamtime and the Container Project are three autonomously-managed projects that combine social technologies and cooperative labour with cultural activism. Innovative digital staging platforms enable creative expression by marginalised communities, and assist movements for social change. The author flags new social relations and shared social imaginaries generated in the nexus between open code and democratic media. In so doing the author aims to contribute tangible, inspiring examples to the emerging interdisciplinary field of software studies.“Humanity’s capacity to generate new ideas and knowledge is its greatest asset. It is the source of art, science, innovation and economic development. Without it, individuals and societies stagnate. This creative imagination requires access to the ideas, learning and culture of others, past and present” (Boyle, Brindley, Cornish, Correa, Cuplinskas, Deere, et al., 2005)

INTRODUCTION Software―sets of programmed instructions which calculate, control, manipulate, model, and display DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch052

data on computing machines and over digital networks―is culturally loaded. Whenever we load programs, we also load messy clusters of cultural norms and economic imperatives, social biases and aesthetic choices, into machines and networks whose own histories are linked to larger

Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

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sociopolitical forces. Increasingly instrumental in facilitating new forms of cultural expression and social activism, software is used to connect and mobilise diverse communities, interest groups, and audiences; spanning local, regional and global levels. New social assemblages, and new social relations, are thus arising out of software-assisted communication, collaborative production and the exchange of creative, intellectual artifacts.1 This model of autonomously-managed generative activity is termed “peer production.” The knowledge-based outcomes of peer production are framed as contributing to a global “Digital Commons.”2 Just as the concept of the earthly commons centres around communally shared and managed material resources—land, trees, water, air, and so on—the Digital Commons can be imagined as shared immaterial resources. These are wildly proliferating nodes of electronic spaces, social technologies, intellectual goods, and cooperative labour processes enabled by, and manifested through, the Internet. The voluntary labour driving this phenomenon is occurring on an unprecedented scale, generating demonstrable effects on both knowledge generation and social organisation. Chronicles of software as corporate culture abound, revealing the light and shadow of the giants, from IBM to Amazon to Google. Similarly, the rise of the free software movement, the open source software (OSS) participatory programming model, and the evolution of the Internet and then the World Wide Web, are well documented.3 Less visible are the histories of the pixies, those nimble social technologies arising from the nexus of the free software movement, cultural activism, and new hybrid forms of peer production. Where documentation does exist, it is more likely to be within the fields of new media art, tactical media, and the emerging academic interdisciplinary field of software studies, or in project Wikis and blogs.4 This chapter places collaborative software

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development within the context of software as culture. Specifically, I examine some instances of software-assisted peer production in the cultural expression of social activism. The first part of the chapter draws attention to some sociopolitical factors that shaped the development of computing, giving an historical context to my proposition that software and culture are intrinsically interconnected. This is followed by a brief sketch of current theoretical propositions about some relationships between capitalism, computing technologies, knowledge-based labour, and network society. In the second part of this chapter, I will identify distinguishing features of the Digital Commons, outlining the cooperative processes which enliven it. Moving from theory to practice, I will highlight three exemplary projects to illustrate the kinds of content, processes, and social relations contributing to the Digital Commons. I will introduce the Dyne:bolic distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system, and the Streamtime network for producing content in crisis areas. The Container Project, an open access digital media hub in Jamaica, will then be introduced. Speculation on future trends will signpost efforts to contain the circulation of knowledge and cultural material via systems of “digital enclosures.” I will conclude by speculating on possible directions for social technologies, as network nodes proliferate globally, thereby increasing public spaces for creative cooperation. Increased peer participation and cultural diversification give rise to a concept of a multitude of interlinked Digital Commons. Such networked imaginative productive spaces not only could meet the challenges thrown down by the socially elite proponents of the new digital enclosures, but also prefigure possibilities for new global democratic sociopolitical forms.

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BACKGROUND The evolution of computing is woven through with histories of power, capital, and social control. Each major innovation benefited from a rich accretion of ideas and inventions, sometimes spanning centuries, cultures, and continents. Specific political imperatives (serving national or imperial interests) and wider societal forces shaped the development pathways of computing. From cog to code, information technologies have never been neutral.

The politics of Invention Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s construction of the automated punch card loom, a proto-information technology, illustrates both strategic government patronage, and the collective, cumulative processes of invention.5 The loom benefited from government intervention and financial support, as Napoleon recognised that the new loom could play a crucial role in achieving post-revolutionary France’s economic goal to rival the industrial giant Britain. This same Jacquard loom directly inspired the English inventor Charles Babbage (himself assisted by the visionary mathematician Ada Lovelace), who made a series of conceptual and engineering breakthroughs in two mechanical systems for automated arithmetic calculation, the difference engine and the analytical engine.6 Babbage was influenced by the ideas of the 18th century moral philosopher Adam Smith, the Scottish anti-mercantile proponent of laissez-faire economic liberalism, who proposed the idea of the systematic division of labour. Babbage envisaged his mechanical cog-and-card machines as furthering Britain’s national economic interests, as trade and taxation would benefit from mathematical precision and reduced labour costs. Punch cards reappeared in the electro-mechanical binary punch card calculating machines developed by engineer Herman Hollerith in the late nineteenth century in the United States. The

role of IBM in the programming of punch cards for customised demographic data collection by the Nazi regime throughout the 1930s-1940s, demonstrates what Christian Parenti (2003) terms the “informatics of genocide.”7 In the twentieth century, information technology played a dominant role in determining material and ideological power, within and between nations. On the eve of World War II both Axis and Allies were thirsting for new mathematical engines. The English and French needed information to decrypt the codes of Germany’s Enigma machine;8 the Americans needed information in the form of ballistic firing tables in order to accurately instruct their gunners which way to point their guns in their new generation of fast war planes;9 and the Germans needed a machine which could rapidly process stacks of simultaneous equations to ensure that the frameworks of their new planes could withstand the stress of increased speed.10 Each of these national objectives was answered by the injection of substantial government and corporate support for the boffins in the engine rooms; technological innovation in computing was sculpted by powerful external influences. Network Society and Immaterial Labour How did humanity reach what historian Paul Ceruzzi (2003) describes as “an age transformed by computing”?11 Attempts to commercialise computers were made in the late 1940s; later the creation of small systems in the 1960s was followed by personal computing in the 1970s, and the rise of networked systems in the mid 1980s. The “deep recession” of the 1970s consolidated socioindustrial changes in the West so profound that they constituted a new regime of accumulation, termed late capitalism.12 The markers were privatisation, deregulation, the growing power of transnational corporations, and globalisation―of markets, labour, finance, and communications. Globalisation itself required specific technological developments, including automation and computerisation of production processes, and the growth of networked communications (Castells, 2000; Webster, 2000).

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In his three-volume opus The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Manuel Castells (2000) describes the emergence of a network society around the end of the 20th century, characterised by the centrality of information and knowledge to the economy, and the rise of communication networks.13The Rise of the Network Society proposes that a “new social order” arises from a global system of “informational capitalism” (Castells, 2000, pp. 409, 508). The “revolutionary” era’s distinguishing feature is the “action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity” (Castells, 2000, p. 17), creating a “cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation,” with “the human mind [as] a direct productive force” (Castells, 2000, p. 31). “Critical cultural battles for the new society” are played out in this “new historical environment” (Castells, 2000, p. 405). The central role played by “immaterial labour” within this network society was first articulated by Italian theorists.14 In the essay Immaterial Labour, sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) describes a “great transformation” (Lazzarato, 1996) starting in the 1970s, which blurred the manual and mental binary framing of labour. He defines immaterial labour as “the labour that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (Lazzarato, 1996). The commodity’s informational content indicates “the changes taking place in workers’ labour processes ..., where the skills [increasingly] involve ... cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication)” (Lazzarato, 1996). For “the activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity, immaterial labour involves activities ... not normally recognized as ‘work’ [...] activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion” (Lazzarato, 1996). No longer the privilege of a social elite, these activities have “become the domain of what we have come to define as ‘mass intellectuality’” (Lazzarato, 1996). Immaterial labour is consti-

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tuted “in forms that are immediately collective,” (Lazzarato, 1996) existing “only in the form of networks and flows” (Lazzarato, 1996). In Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, Tiziana Terranova (2004) takes the idea of flows to examine the productive relations flowing between the “thriving and hyperactive” Internet, an “outernet” of social, cultural and economic networks, the “digital economy,” and “free” labour. Terranova focuses on the critical role of the Internet, arguing that it “functions as a channel through which ‘human intelligence’ renews its capacity to produce” (Terranova, 2004, pp. 73-79). The Internet “highlights the existence of networks of immaterial labour and speeds up their accretion into a collective entity.” Commodities become “increasingly ephemeral” and turn into “translucent objects,” a transparency which reveals their “reliance on the labour which produces and sustains them”; it is this “spectacle of labour”—“creative, continuous, innovative”— that attracts users/consumers of these commodities (Terranova, 2004, p. 90).

mAIN fOCUS Of The ChApTeR: KNOWleDGe, CReATIvITy, AND SOCIAl ChANGe ON The DIGITAl COmmONS The fields of sociology and cultural theory are not alone in advancing theories about the social relations of information technology. Perspectives from the free software movement, media arts, the sciences, and the law are also contributing to new notions of the commons.15 In his essay Three Proposals for a Real Democracy: InformationSharing to a Different Tune, Brian Holmes (2005, p. 218) proposes: the constitution of a cultural and informational commons, whose contents are freely usable and protected from privatization, using forms such as the General Public License for software (copyleft),

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the Creative Commons license for artistic and literary works, and the open-access journals for scientific and scholarly publications. This cultural and informational commons would run directly counter to WIPO/WTO treaties on intellectual property and would represent a clear alternative to the paradigm of cognitive capitalism, by conceiving human knowledge and expression as something essentially common, to be shared and made available as a virtual resource for future creation, both semiotic and embodied, material and immaterial. In Piratology: The Deep Seas of Open Code and Free Culture, theorist Armin Medosch (2003) unpicks the labour processes creating the commons. He explains that the point-to-point communications principle on which the Internet is based “aids the creation of new transversal structures—communities, movements, interest groups, campaigns, discussion boards, file-sharing communities ... ” (Medosch, 2003, p. 13). These autonomous groupings produce a “social dynamism, based on new types of technologicallysupported collectivisations” (Medosch, 2003, p. 13). Medosch describes “commons-based peer production,” which he defines as as “the production of goods and services based on resources that are held in a commons and organised by peers,” as now having reached a “critical mass” (Medosch, 2003, p. 15). Crucially, this has occurred “right in the centre of Western societies, within the most advanced areas of production” (Medosch, 2003, p. 15). As evidenced by pan-continental gatherings; the activity on free software lists in Latin America, India, Asia, and Africa; the blogging movements in Iran and Iraq; and the adoption of free software by various governments, I would argue that concurrent swells of participatory media are also forming in non-Western societies spanning various stages of industrialisation.16 Medosch proposes that “without explicitly formulating itself as oppositional, this nondescript movement of

movements slowly but inevitably changes society from within” (Medosch, 2003, p. 15). The historical importance of this trend is echoed by other commentators. James Boyle (2002) describes the Internet as “one big experiment in distributed cultural production.” For Free Software Foundation legal counsel Eben Moglen (2003), “the movement for free information announces the arrival of a new social structure, born of the transformation of bourgeois industrial society by the digital technology of its own invention.” Castells (2000) views the technological transformation of media participation as being of “historic dimensions,” likening it to the “new alphabetic order” of the ancient Greeks, which “provided the mental infrastructure for cumulative, knowledge-based communication.” Hypertext and a “meta-language” integrate oral, textual, aural and visual modalities into one system of communication, which reunites the human spirit in “a new interaction between the two sides of the brain, machines, and social contexts” (Castells, 2000, pp. 355-356). Knowledge work “is inherently collective, it is always the result of a collective and social production of knowledge,” according to Terranova (2004, p. 80). The General Public License (GPL) conceived by Richard Stallman17 and taken up widely by free/libre open source software (FLOSS) developers, is a legal mechanism ensuring that information about software source codes remains open and unprivatised. The Free Software Foundation explains that: The GPL builds upon the ethical and scientific principle of free, open and collaborative improvement of human knowledge, which was central to the rapid evolution of areas like mathematics, physics, or biology, and adapts it to the area of information technology.18 The GPL was later applied to other kinds of cultural goods, providing a framework for discussions around the role of knowledge in information

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society. It also inspired the open content licensing system, Creative Commons (CC).19 Creative Commons offers a spectrum of copyright or copyleft protections which can be assigned to a wide range of content types such as film, music, and texts before they enter the public realm.20 Internet-assisted systems of knowledge exchange recall the ideas of educator Ivan Illich (1971) in his prescient book Deschooling Society. Decades before the Internet became a popular medium, Illich proposed that the “unhampered participation” of individual active subjects informing and empowering themselves “in a meaningful setting” via mechanisms such as autonomously organised learning webs, skill exchanges and networks of peers was fundamental to societal transformation (Illich, 1996, p. 39, pp. 76-97). Twenty years later, by conceiving and then crafting the ingenious marriage of hypertext and computer networks, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, thereby gifting the Internet with a user-friendly means of creating self-managed electronic learning webs.21 Scalability—the virtually infinite capacity of the Internet to add interconnected nodes of communicable content to itself—means that the Digital Commons is potentially boundless. It is constrained mainly by technical issues, such as bandwidth availability, and economic factors such as access costs. Limits to the constitution of the commons are more likely to be social in nature. Common land is bounded by hedges, fences, or historical memory, and its resources cooperatively accessed and managed by agreed upon rules. Similarly, the Digital Commons is a self-managed web of systems that follows protocols “defined by the shared values of the community sharing these resources” (Kluitenberg, 2003).22 Kluitenberg (2003, p. 50) stresses the hybrid and fluid qualities of the democratic media systems created by “artistic and subversive media producers.” According to him, the:

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Successful mediator needs to be platform independent, ... able to switch between media forms, cross-connect and rewire all platforms to find new communication spaces ... they become tools to break out of the marginalised ghetto of seldomly visited websites and unnoticeable live streams. An example of this approach is the Media Shed project by the acclaimed art group Mongrel.23 Operating from a light industrial shed in the economically impoverished city of Southend, England, Mongrel collaborated with the local Linux Users Group to run software training sessions, assist community-generated digital art projects, and establish an Internet radio station. All projects used recycled electronic hardware, free and artist-made multimedia, and social softwares. The Media Shed charter reflects Mongrel’s long history of making “socially engaged culture,” and resonates with the ideals expressed by similar hybridised collaborations on the Digital Commons. It aims: To research, create and promote communication through free-media technologies outside the monetary and licensing control of proprietary systems, to assist the free flow of information, self education and opinions, to encourage creative expression and to contribute to and explore the issues that are important to the everyday lives of individuals, communities and diverse cultures in a pluralist society. (Mongrel 2006) Some discourses foreground the radical cultural potential of the Digital Commons, and the social agency of its “immaterial labourers.” The Delhi Declaration of a New Context for New Media (World Information Cities, 2005) speaks of a “vigorous cluster of practices of ongoing cultural transaction within and outside formal commodity relations” which guarantees cultural diversity. Medosch (2003a) depicts artist/coders as being “at the heart of a cultural struggle” because they “carry forward the cultural politics

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of code by supporting the foundations for the preservation and renewal of culture” (Medosch, 2003a, p. 16). With the digital tools they make, “the artist/coders liberate culture from the grips of the culture industries … creat[ing] platforms for social experimentation” (Medosch, 2003a, p. 16). A related set of practices can be grouped under the umbrella of electronic civil disobedience. Jordan and Taylor (2004) describe practitioners of “hacktivism” as seeking to “re-engineer systems in order to ... confront the overarching institutions of twenty-first-century societies” (Jordan & Taylor, 2004, p. 29).24 Brian Holmes (2003) identifies the progressive re-engineering of public knowledge and the social imaginary in his text Cartography of Excess, referencing Internet-based mapping projects such as TheyRule, a detailed investigation into American corporate boardroom power relations.25 Holmes opines that: Far beyond the computer logic of open source, the great alternative project of the last decade has been mapping the transnational space invested primarily by corporations, and distributing that knowledge for free. This is the real power of “spontaneous cooperation” in a global information project like Indymedia. (p. 65) Such projects are valuable because they make the rules of the neoliberal economy visible to a point where “we can start imagining—or exploring—a radically different map of the planet again.” (Holmes, 2003, p. 65)

Social Softwares as Social Technologies: Dyne:bolic, Streamtime, and the Container project Creating the material circumstances to enable the democratic exchange of imagination and information is a driving factor in numerous projects on the Digital Commons. Dyne:bolic, Streamtime and

the Container Project are three such examples, employing free and social softwares as tools for creative expression, social activism, and cultural transformation. If we consider the Digital Commons to be the macrostructure, then social software can be thought of a set of microsystems within this framework.26 Matthew Fuller describes social software as: Primarily ... built by and for those of us locked out of the narrowly engineered subjectivity of mainstream software. It is software which asks itself what kind of currents, what kinds of machine, numerical, social, and other dynamics, it feeds in and out of, and what others can be brought into being. … It is ... directly born, changed, and developed as the result of an ongoing sociability between users and programmers in which demands are made on the practices of coding that exceed their easy fit into standardised social relations. (Fuller, 2003, p. 24) Dyne:bolic, a live bootable distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system, is a good example of Fuller’s model of social software. Released under the GPL, it has the bonus of “a vast range of software for multimedia production […] ready for being employed at home, in classrooms and in media centers” which have been made by “hundreds of programmers all around the world” (Jaromil 2006).27 In order to ensure the widest spectrum of people and machines can access Dyne:bolic, it has been optimised to run on older machines. Compare this with the OS releases from the proprietary vendors—could an Apple SE circa 1995 run OS10 for example? Completely rewritten in 2005 as the “DHORUBA” release, lead developer Jaromil (2006) announces that the project is already planning its next stage, which will be “a cross-platform build environment to cover all kinds of hardware around.” In an undated text entitled This is Rasta Software, Jaromil links Dyne:bolic with revolutionary social movements, proclaiming:

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This software is for all those who cannot afford to have the latest expensive hardware to speak out their words of consciousness and good will. This software has a full range of applications for the production and not only the fruition of information, it’s a full multimedia studio ... because freedom and shar[ing] of knowledge are solid principles for evolution and that’s where this software comes from ... This software is free as of speech and is one step in the struggle for Redemption and Freedom. ... (Jaromil, 2005)

Streamtime uses old and new media for the production of content and networks in the fields of media, arts, culture and activism in crisis areas, like Iraq. Streamtime offers a diffuse environment for developing do-it-yourself media. We focus on a cultural sense of finding your own way in the quagmire that is Iraq, and its representation in the global media. We should not try to change politics in order to foster cultural change; we should support cultural manifestation in order to force political change.

Dyne:bolic and many other free software has arisen out of the Italian autonomous hackmeeting and hack labs scene.28 Whilst “trying to recover the essence of the first hackers from MIT,” these are outcomes of a significantly different cultural context to that of the liberal and libertarian interpretations of freedom characterised by American discourse (Nmada & Boix, 2003). The social and communal end uses and empowering possibilities of the software are valorised, more than the individual’s right to examine and share source code. This is cooperatively-made software to “let people be Free to Create” (Jaromil 2006).29 The Streamtime project, a collaboration between Radio Reedflute and Rastasoft, applies this principle, gathering up free software such as Dyne:bolic from the Digital Commons, to assist the building of “autonomous networks in extreme conditions.”30 Streamtime describes itself as “a handshake in cyberspace, a hanging garden for dialogue and cooperation, generated by a sense of solidarity, hospitality and a desire to communicate and relate.” An initiative of Dutch media activist Jo van der Spek, the communication platform enables self-production of media, such as low-tech wireless radio networks to stream local content. It hosts a meta-blog linking to multi-lingual chronicles of life in wartime situations in Iraq and Lebanon, audio archives (poetry and interviews), and links to other DIY media resources. Streamtime’s Mission Statement explains:

The Container Project, initiated by Jamaican artist Mervin Jarman, is a more localised example of cultural intervention using social technologies.31 Mervin wanted to take “creative computer technology to ghetto people and deep rural communities in the Caribbean,” so that “kids growing up in the ghettos of Jamaica [could] realize they can ‘fulfill their wildest dreams’” (de Silva). The project of “technological repatriation” was inspired by Mervin’s own youthful experiences of poverty, his later journeys into video making, and his participation in a digital media training program for the socially disadvantaged at ARTEC in London. He sees the Container as a “revolutionary project” that challenges the existing social order of endemic poverty, by using under-recognised rich local cultural traditions and talent to generate new entrepreneurial systems of reciprocal exchange and opportunity (Fuller, 1999). In 2003 a volunteer team came to the Jamaican village of Palmers Cross to help realise Mervin’s vision. The group converted a shipping container into a media lab housing sixteen networked computers running three operating systems (GNU/Linux, Mac, and Windows), all connected to a Linux server. The lab included a purpose-designed dedicated multimedia suite, and machines hosting a mix of proprietary and free software programs, including artist-made social softwares. Mervin used his intimate knowledge of his community’s dynamics when designing the Container’s architecture. The bright yellow

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structure was opened up with large kiosk-style windows, inviting people to get to know what was happening at their own pace. The Container Project fulfilled a community need for a social hub. Originally envisaged as a mobile lab, the local people have been reluctant to let it leave their village. Its educational and cultural exchange programs addressed a range of needs, from general computer skills to the sharing of creative talents with a world audience. Mervin views this community empowerment as a global issue, explaining: That’s why I think the Container is such an incredible and revolutionary project because it allows street-level emergence into what would be an otherwise unchallenged consortium of global culturalisation and then where would we be? What would happen to our dynamics as it relates to production, be that in the Music, Art and Craft, in the way we conduct businesses, and develop our own customized software to satisfy our specifics? ... No system should impose its will and/ or cultural identity on another, the only way for software and technology to be truly dynamic is to decentralize the decision making process, open up the formats to customization on a more transculture and gender context. (Fuller, 1999) In 2004, a broadband connection linked the Container Project to the wider world, and its electronic Post Office Box (e-POB) was an immediate success, tapping into fundamental communication needs. In June 2005 the young musicians and singers of the village participated in the SkintStream project, a network connecting “audiences and cultural spaces previously separated by economic, geographical, and political factors.” A temporary “Poor-to-Poor” streaming radio channel was established, linking creative communities in Palmers Cross, a shanty town in Johannesburg, a diaspora Congolese community in London, a public housing community in Toronto, and young musicians in Southend.32 It was the first

time that most of the participants had performed their creative works to outside audiences, and the level of excitement with the experience was reportedly very high. SkintStream embodies one of the goals around cultural empowerment stated on the Container Project Web site―to demonstrate to people in remote and isolated communities that they too “can contribute to the future, that they will have a place in the millennium.” In March 2006, the Container Project hosted a Community Multimedia Centre Management Workshop.33 The three week event included a Digital Storytelling Workshop, and the creation of a temporary recording studio. Based on a knowledge-sharing model, guest artists and teachers passed on technical, creative, leadership, and training skills to ten workshop participants, giving the students the ability to replicate the program themselves in other communities. The Container Project team are now working closely with local organisation ICT4D Jamaica to deliver workshops under the “community without borders” concept.34 As Mervin explained, this “fulfills the Container mobility needs, only we move people into Palmers Cross so they get the whole ambient of what it feels like to be part of the Container family.”35 Two projects in the planning stage are the creation of a community Internet radio portal for the region, and mongrelStreet lab, a portable lab made out of wheelie bins. Like Dyne:bolic and Streamtime, the Container Project harnesses social technologies with creative expertise to create a platform for cultural expression and exchange for disenfranchised communities. These are just three of a multitude of similar projects occurring around the world. Visible social change is happening on grassroots local levels, and ideas and project-generated content are feeding back into a multiplicity of interconnected Digital Commons. This emergent phenomenon could herald widespread social change based on the new shared social imaginaries which are being generated.

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fUTURe TReNDS Mongrel (2004) proposes that when “new common cultural spaces open up in the public domain as they did with the Internet in the 1990s, those with the proprietary right or economic might, usually attempt enclosure.” Commodification and privatisation of natural and public resources and spaces present a significant challenge to the commons, earthly and electronic.36 The various processes through which attempts are made to privatise the Digital Commons are termed the “digital enclosures.” In response, new alliances of free software developers, legal and cultural activists are gathering to protect, and extend, the freedom of the commons. Two recent examples of the digital enclosures include the failed legislative bid by the European Parliament to impose software patents,37 and the impositions of the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).38 Battles on the contested ground of intellectual property are intensifying as the United States pressures its trading partners to “adopt laws modelled on the DMCA as part of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements” (von Lohmann, 2004). James Boyle (2002) warns that intellectual property rights (IPR) threaten the “commons of mind,” stating that “things ... formerly thought to be uncommodifiable, essentially common, or outside the market altogether are being turned into private possessions under a new kind of property regime. But this time the property ... is intangible, existing in databases, business methods, and gene sequences.” He notes that, unlike a common tract of land which can be overexploited,39 the “digitized and networked commons of the mind” is not depleted or destroyed by being mutually shared. Due to the fragmentary nature of information products, all fragments “can function as raw material for future innovation” (Boyle, 2002). Despite the threat of the enclosures the Digital Commons is expanding, as peer production of democratic media projects, cultural activism, and art proliferate. The Internet is the key enabling

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technology underpinning the commons, and all figures point to the exponential growth of the net, especially in the global South.40 This creates a more culturally-diverse, socially inclusive, and globalised network society, and it is unlikely that the new swarms of activity will recede or wither. These nonlinear clusters of social technologies and projects resonate with fundamental human desires to communicate, to create, to work cooperatively and collectively, and to exchange elements of ourselves and our cultures. Empirical research is needed to analyse these new phenomena. Comprehensive documentation of a spectrum of projects energising the Digital Commons will contribute to an understanding of what is common (and different) about these projects’ cooperative labour processes, their technological innovation, the new systems of cultural and social exchange developing, and the challenges faced by participants. Multiple-language translations of project documentation and case studies would offer important cross-cultural perspectives. Qualitative research would ground more speculative work, such as considerations about the shifts in social imaginaries resulting from these experiments in production and social relations. Indeed, learning how such imaginative shifts are being played out in material projects and networks could reveal unfolding global patterns and flows.

CONClUSION The idea that all humanity is living in a global age of advanced neoliberal capitalism, with its interconnected communicative flows of data, finances and labour is no longer new; Marshall McLuhan and others were channelling the information revolution spirits some 40 years ago.41 In contrast, discourses around network society, knowledge work, immaterial labour, and software as culture, are still in their infancy, and the language is sometimes esoteric, or opaque. Fortunately practice outstrips

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theory on the Digital Commons, as new hybrid collaborations of peer production and social activism are creating democratic public spaces for communication and creativity, and generating new systems of exchange. In these contexts, far away from the Google campus, cooperation displaces competition, and the creation of shared frameworks of knowledge and action provides traction for local, regional, and transnational social change. There is no unitary or abstract Digital Commons, but rather a multiplicity of Digital Commons across the North-South power axis. In this new millennium voices from the “Fourth World” or “Global South” are entering the network flows, forming new autonomous networks and creative laboratories, further transforming the praxis. Their discourses emphasise software freedom as being intrinsically related to free culture,42 community empowerment, traditional indigenous knowledge43 and social rights. The decision by the Brazilian government to use only open source software, and to establish 1,000 free software and free culture centres in the poorest parts of the country, is directly linked to a radical social vision which is challenging knowledge ownership laws from pharmaceutical patents to file sharing. In the words of Brazilian Minister of Culture and acclaimed musician Gilberto Gil, “if law doesn’t fit reality anymore, law has to be changed. ... That’s civilisation as usual” (Burkeman, 2005). And just beneath civilisation lies the unknown, the realm of spectres and magic and transformation. What is a spell if not a set of programmed instructions to create change? Open code is transforming society subtly, as social technologies are being cooperatively built, shared, and used in a deeply networked, informatised, immaterial, cultural space—the “collective subjectivity” of the Digital Commons (Dafermos, 2005).44 The Free Software Movement has provided the impetus for the evolution of numerous thriving ecosystems, and rich hybridised sites of cultural production. The enthusiastic embrace by the “Fourth World”

of free software is one sign, amongst many others, that social change on an unprecedented scale is afoot. The immaterial spaces created by networked imaginations could offer us all vital keys to comprehending such change.

RefeReNCeS Agar, J. (2001). Turing and the universal machine: The making of the modern computer. Cambridge: Icon Books UK. Berners-Lee, T., & Fischetti, M. (1999). Weaving the Web. London: Orion Business Books. Black, E. (2001). IBM and the holocaust: The strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s most Powerful corporation. New York: Crown Publishers. Bollier, D. (2002). Silent theft: The private plunder of our common wealth. New York: Routledge. Bosma, J., Van Mourik Broekman, P., Byfield, T., Fuller, M., Lovink, G., McCarty, D., et al. (Eds.). (1999). Readme! filtered by Nettime: ASCII culture and the revenge of knowledge. New York: Autonomedia. Boyle, J. (2002). Fencing off ideas: Enclosure and the disappearance of the public domain. Retrieved August 18, 2005, from http://centomag. org/essays/boyle Boyle, J., Brindley, L., Cornish, W., Correa, C., Cuplinskas, D., Deere, C., et al. (2005). Adelphi Charter on creativity, innovation and intellectual property. Retrieved November 8, 2005, from http://www. adelphicharter.org Burkeman, O. (2005, October 14). Minister of counterculture. The Guardian. Retrieved March 28, 2007, from http://technology.guardian.co.uk/ news/story/0,16559,00.html Castells, M. (1998). End of millenium (2nd ed., Vol. 3). Oxford: Blackwell.

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Castells, M. (2000). The rise of the network society (2nd ed., Vol. 1). Oxford: Blackwell. Ceruzzi, P. E. (2003). A history of modern computing (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Critical Art Ensemble. (1994). The electronic disturbance. New York: Autonomedia. da Rimini, F. (2005). Grazing the Digital Commons: Artist-made social softwares, politicised technologies and the creation of new generative realms. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Dafermos, G. N. (2005). Five theses on informational—Cognitive capitalism. Retrieved November 28, 2005, from http://www.nettime.org/ Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0511/msg00103.html Davis, M. (2000). The universal computer: The road from Leibniz to Turing. New York: W. W. Norton. de Silva, S. (n.d.). Desperately seeking Mervin. Retrieved March 14, 2005, from http://www. thepaper.org.au/024/024desperatelyseekingmer vin.html Essinger, J. (2004). Jacquard’s Web: How a hand loom led to the birth of the information age. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Fitzpatrick, A. (1998). Teller’s technical nemeses: The American hydrogen bomb and its development within a technological infrastructure. Society for Philosophy and Technology, 3(3). Fuller, M. (1999). Mervin Jarman - The Container. Retrieved January 2005, from http:// www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9906/ msg00138.html Fuller, M. (2003). Behind the blip: Essays on the culture of software. New York: Autonomedia.

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Grattan-Guinness, I. (1990). Work for the hairdressers: The production of de Prony’s logarithmic and trigonometric tables. Annals of the History of Computing, 12(3), 177–185. doi:10.1109/ MAHC.1990.10029 Hauben, M., & Hauben, R. (1995). Netizens: On the history and impact of the Net. Retrieved November 7, 2005, from http://www.columbia. edu/~hauben/netbook/ Hauben, R. (n.d.). History of UNIX: On the evolution of Unix and the automation of telephone support operations (i.e., of computer automation). Retrieved November 7, 2005, from http://www. dei.isep.ipp.pt/docs/unix.html Holmes, B. (2003). Cartography of excess. In T. Comiotto, E. Kluitenberg, D. Garcia, & M. Grootveld (Eds.), Reader of the 4th edition of next 5 minutes (pp. 63-68). Amsterdam: Next 5 Minutes. Holmes, B. (2005). Three proposals for a real democracy: Information-sharing to a different tune. In M. Narula, S. Sengupta, J. Bagchi, & G. Lovink (Eds.), Sarai Reader 2005: Bare acts. Delhi: Sarai. Illich, I. (1971, 1996). Deschooling society. London: Marion Boyars. Jaromil. (2005) This is rasta software. Retrieved November 13, 2005, from http://dynebolic.org/ manual-in-development/dynebolic-x44.en.html Jaromil. (2006). Dyne:bolic 2.1 codename DHORUBA. Retrieved July 13, 2006, from http:// nettime.org Jordan, T., & Taylor, P. A. (2004). Hacktivism and cyberwars: Rebels with a cause? London: Routledge.

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Kluitenberg, E. (2003). Constructing the Digital Commons. In T. Comiotto, E. Kluitenberg, D. Garcia, & M. Grootveld (Eds.), Reader of the 4th edition of next 5 minutes (pp. 46-53). Amsterdam: Next 5 Minutes. Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial labor. Retrieved August 11, 2005, from http://www.generationonline.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm Lessig, L. (2004). Free culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. London: Penguin. Liang, L. (2004). Guide to open content licenses. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute. Linebaugh, P., & Rediker, M. (2001). The manyheaded hydra: Sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press. Lovink, G. (2002). Dark fiber. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Mantoux, P. (1905, 1983). The industrial revolution in the eighteenth century: An outline of the beginning of the modern factory system in England (rev. ed.). Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Medosch, A. (2003). Piratology: The deep seas of open code and free culture. In A. Medosch (Ed.), Dive. London: Fact. Medosch, A. (2005). Roots culture: Free software vibrations “inna Babylon.” In M. Narula, S. Sengupta, J. Bagchi, & G. Lovink (Eds.), Sarai Reader 2005: Bare acts. Delhi: Sarai.

Moglen, E. (2003). The dotCommunist Manifesto. Retrieved June, 2005, from http://moglen.law. columbia.edu/ Mongrel. (2004a). BIT_COMMON <=> CODE_OF_WAR. Retrieved November 30, 2005, from http://www.scotoma.org/notes/index. cgi?MonsterUpdate3 Mongrel. (2004b). About Mongrel. Retrieved August 15, 2005, from http://www.mongrelx.org/ home/index.cgi?About Mongrel. (2006). Free-media. Retrieved July 22, 2006, from http://dev.mediashed. org/?q=freemedia Moody, G. (2001). Rebel code: Linux and the open source revolution. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. Nmada, & Boix, M. (2003). Hacklabs, from digital to analog. Retrieved February 2, 2006, from http://wiki.hacklab.org.uk/index.php/Hacklabs_from_digital_to_analog Parenti, C. (2003). The soft cage: Surveillance in America from slave passes to the war on terror. New York: Basic Books. Plant, S. (1997). Zeroes + Ones: Digital women + the new technoculture. London: Fourth Estate. Rheingold, H. (2000). Tools for thought: The history and future of mind-expanding technology (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Stallman, R. (2005, June 20). Patent absurdity. The Guardian.

Meikle, G. (2002). Future active: Media activism and the Internet. Sydney, Australia: Pluto Press.

Swade, D. (2000). The cogwheel brain: Charles Babbage and the quest to build the first computer. London: Little, Brown and Company.

Midnight Notes Collective. (1990). The new enclosures. Midnight Notes, 10.

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Moglen, E. (1999). Anarchism triumphant: Free software and the death of copyright. First Monday, 4(8).

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Toner,A. (2003). The problem with WSIS. Retrieved November 8, 2005, from http://world-information. org/wio/readme/992006691/1078414568/print Toole, B. A. (Ed.). (1992). Ada, the enchantress of numbers: A selection from the letters of Lord Byron’s daughter and her description of the first computer. Mill Valley, CA: Strawberry Press. von Lohmann, F. (2004). Measuring the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against the Darknet: Implications for the regulation of technological protection measures. Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review, 24, 635–650. Weber, S. (2004). The success of open source. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Webster, F. (2002). Theories of the information society (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Williams, S. (2002). Free as in freedom: Richard Stallman’s crusade for free software. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates. World Information Cities. (2005). The Delhi declaration of a new context for new media. In IP and the City: Restricted Lifescapes and the Wealth of the Commons (p. 15). Vienna: WorldInformation City.

Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Digital Commons: A conceptual framework for considering the common wealth of intellectual goods, knowledge products, creative works, free software tools, shared ideas, information, and so on which are freely and democratically shared, and possibly further developed, via the Internet Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS): A convenient acronym for “free libre open source software.” It neatly bundles the revolutionary associations of “free (libré) as in freedom” together with the more technical and neutral connotations of “open source.” The term implicitly acknowledges

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that differences between the two camps exist, but they are operational in the same field. Free Software (FS): Software in which the underlying code is available to be inspected, modified, shared, with the proviso that it remains open, even following modification. To ensure it remains open, free software is distributed under the General Public License (GPL) or similar legal agreements. Free Software Movement: The philosophical and political context underpinning the creation of free software, and the subjective sense of community shared by developers and users. Immaterial Labour: A theoretical framing of knowledge work, labour processes, and social relations in information society, initially articulated by Italian theorists including Maurizio Lazzarato and Christian Marazzi. Open Source Software (OSS): A strategic business-friendly “rebranding” of free software emphasising the practical benefits of the model of participatory software development and open code, and downplaying the original ideological and philosophical positions. Peer Production: A horizontal, distributed method of cooperative, creative labour, generally facilitated by high levels of communication, information, and file sharing via the Internet. Social Software: The term came out of the nexus between cultural and social activism, art and tactical media, and was originally used to designate software that came into being through an extended dialogue between programmers and communities of users, ensuring that the software was responsive to user needs. The phrase no longer carries the same import, as it is now applied to software-assisted social networking platforms such as MySpace. Social Technologies: An umbrella term which could include free software, social software, recycled electronic equipment in free media labs, and so on. Technology put to use by the people, for the people.

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eNDNOTeS 1

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In his seminal book Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software, Matthew Fuller (2003) proposed that computers are “assemblages,” combining technical, mathematical, conceptual and social layers. Through a process of critical examination we can better understand “the wider assemblages which they form and are formed by” (Fuller, 2003, p. 21). According to Fuller, software creates sensoriums, “ways of seeing, knowing and doing in the world that at once contain a model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to, and that also shape it every time it is used” (Fuller, 2003, p. 19). The Digital Commons is often discussed with reference to the changing of common land usage since medieval times. For example, eighteenth century England was “marked by the co-existence and close association between small agricultural production and small industrial production,” and “the commons” referred to bounded parcels of land which were available to be used by the local yeomanry and tenants (gleaned and gathered, cultivated, hunted, and traversed for reaching other destinations) under agreed upon protocols (Mantoux, 1983, pp. 137-139; Linebaugh & Rediker, 2000, pp. 22-26). Collective ownership and usage rights of land underlies “the clachan, the sept, the rundale, the West African village, and the indigenous tradition of long-fallow agriculture of Native Americans—in other words, it encompassed all those parts of the Earth that remained unprivatised, unenclosed, a noncommodity, a support for the manifold human values of mutuality” (Linebaugh & Rediker, 2000, p. 26). The emergence of unwelcome proprietorial directives at MIT in the early 1980s inspired hacker Richard Stallman to begin work on a system enabling the free circulation of

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technical knowledge in the field of software. Thus began the GNU (a recursive shortening of “Gnu’s Not Unix”) project, which eventually resulted in the GNU/Linux operating system. The subjective sense of belonging to a global programming community which grew up around the various free software projects was fostered by an early social software—the newsgroup medium, a free, bandwidth-light, subject-based communication environment. The participatory programming method that benefited the GNU/ Linux development model was enabled by the Internet, a medium in which everyone could communicate, and exchange software modules, with no geographical or timezone barriers. A comprehensive history of FLOSS (free, libré open sourcesoftware) has been documented by Glyn Moody (2001) in Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. Sam Williams (2002) provides a detailed account the birth of the Free Software Movement in Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software. Steven Weber’s (2005). The Success of Open Source posits open source as a “political economy,” and provides perspectives on how the phenomenon functions on micro and macro levels. The website and community around www.slashdot.org is a central Anglophone forum for technically-focused discussion. FirstMonday is a refereed online journal focusing on FLOSS and associated cultural issues www.firstmonday.org. Documentation and critique of more culturally focused software projects can be found in anthologies such as Readme! (1999), Dark Fiber (2002), Anarchitexts: Voices from the Global Digital Resistance (2003) and the annual Sarai Reader (2001-2005); and in mailing lists such as www.nettime.org. See also Fuller, 2003; Medosch 2005; da Rimini, 2005.

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The punch card was the “software,” a selffeeding set of pattern instructions, which was fed into, and controlled, the fixed loom “hardware.” Different sets of punch cards could be fed into the same loom, resulting in different “outputs,” patterned lengths of material. The automation of weaving processes caused the disappearance of certain jobs; specifically, the punch card completely replaced the work of the draw boy. See Essinger’s (2004) fascinating account. For various reasons Babbage’s machines were never built beyond prototype stage in his lifetime. Illuminating histories of Babbage, Lovelace, and the Engines are to be found in Toole, 1992; Plant, 1997; Swade, 2000; and Essinger, 2004. Swade also documents the recent building of a Babbage engine from original plans. See the authoritative account by Edwin Black (2004). In 1937, the young English mathematics student, Alan Turing, “imagined a machine that could be used to generate complex numbers ... a symbol-manipulating machine” (Agar, 2001, pp. 8889, italics in original). These thought experiments generated the concept of a Universal Turing Machine, that is, “any stored-program computer [which] can be programmed to act as if it were another” (Ceruzzi, 2003, p. 149). See Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Turing, 1950) at www.cse.msu.edu/~cse841/papers/Turing. html. During World War II, Turing worked as a code-breaker at the Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, the centre of the Allies’ efforts to decrypt Germany’s Enigma machines. Later Turing worked with the first general purpose electronic computer, the “experimental monster” nicknamed the “Blue Pig,” built in 1948 at Manchester University. The Atlas, a later version built in 1962, used a “hierarchy of memories, each slower but larger than the one below it,” that “gave

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the user the illusion of a single-level fast memory of large capacity.” This beast was “one of the most influential on successive generations” of computers (Davis, 2000, pp. 177-197; Agar, 2001, pp. 120-122; Ceruzzi, 2003, p. 245). In the build-up to the United States’ entry to World War II, American mathematician Howard Aitken was funded by the U.S. Navy, and supported by IBM’s machines and expertise, to construct a modern version of Babbage’s Difference Engine. The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, renamed Harvard Mark 1, “churn[ed] out numbers for naval weapon design.” Simultaneously, “a second monster was under construction ... the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer—the ENIAC ... also born of speed and conflict.” ENIAC’s creators, physicist John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, were funded by the U.S. Army to build a “monster calculator.” The army “was desperate” for a machine which would be able to rapidly process the complex simultaneous equations needed to produce ballistic tables for the new anti-aircraft guns. Finished in 1945 the ENIAC missed the war, but was soon employed for other military tasks, including thermonuclear bomb calculations for the nascent science of nuclear physics (Fitzpatrick, 1998; Agar, 2001, pp. 53-61). Engineer Konrad Zuse was employed by the Henschel aircraft company during the rearmament of Germany in the mid 1930s. Pressured to hasten production of its new, fast military planes, Henschel was hampered by the time needed for vital mathematical calculations to ensure fuselage and wing stability. Because there were up to thirty unknowns in these calculations, they were best solved by simultaneous equations, taking a team of mathematicians weeks of labour. Zuse realised that these complex

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processes could be mechanised, if there was a calculator which could read a “plan” or script giving the order of the equations to be sequentially calculated. Zuse’s great intellectual contribution was to conceive of using binary numbers for the plan, machinic memory and calculations. In 1938 Zuse built a prototype, the Z3, at home with the help of friends, including Helmut Schreyer, a Nazi and hobbyist projectionist. The binary plan was punched into celluloid film reels. (Rheingold, 2000; Agar, 2001, pp. 41-52; Ceruzzi, 2003, pp. 83-84). See also The Life and Work of Konrad Zuse, by Professor Horst Zuse, online at www.epemag.com/zuse. This phrase is borrowed from Paul Ceruzzi’s meticulous account of computing in the United States between 19452001 in A History of Modern Computing (2003, p. 2). This phase of capitalism is also framed as “post-Fordism,” “late capitalism,” and most commonly, “neoliberalism.” The policies of the triumvirate of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organisation, are acknowledged as determining the way this stage of capitalism is manifested in the Global North and Global South. Manuel Castells is a leading theorist on the relationships between information and society (Webster, 2001, p. 97). In The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture,Castells (1998, 2000) combines empirical evidence with personal cross-cultural research to analyse the material features of informational societies, social movements arising out of network society, macropolitical affairs, and processes of social transformation. Notable theorists include sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato, the economist Christian Marazzi, Paolo Virno, and philosopher Antonio Negri. With many texts now translated into English, the concept permeates debates from free software to “precarious labour.”

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Quotations in this paragraph are drawn from Lazzarato’s 1996 essay, Immaterial Labour, using the English translation by Paul Colilli and Ed Emory at www.generation-online. org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm. A version of the essay is in Hardt, M. & Virno, P. (Eds.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (pp. 133-147). Interrelated concepts of a knowledge commons, science commons, genetic commons, and creative commons are emerging from these dialogues. The Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) is a portal into an extensive collection of literature at dlc.dlib.indiana. edu. Other resources include: onthecommons.org; science.creativecommons.org; creativecommons.org; www.ukabc.org/ genetic_commons_treaty.htm. Some representative examples follow. The Free Software Foundation Latin America (FSFLA) was founded in 2005. See http:// mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/fsflaanuncio. Africa Linux Chix is a lively Pan-African mailing list launched in 2004, active in promoting the benefits of FLOSS via conferences, networking and workshops. Blogging has driven the democratic media movement in the Middle East. Bloggers with the nicks of Salaam Pax, Raed, and Riverbend provided unique perspectives from Baghdad on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with two collections of these chronicles later published in book form. See Pax, S. (2003), Baghdad Blogger, Penguin, London, and, Riverbend (2005), Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq, Marion Boyars, London. See also Alavi N. (2005), We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs, Soft Skull Press, New York. Complementing bloggers’ personal accounts are two independently-produced major websites, electroniciraq.net and www. iraqbodycount.org, providing information to English-speaking audiences. In East

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Asia the Interlocals project formed in 2006 as “a platform for facilitating cross-border dialogue on critical issues related to culture, gender, environment, social justice, peace, global/local politics, media movement, social movement and transformation, etc.” Currently hosted by In-Media Hong Kong, content is created by a community of media activists around East Asia. See www.interlocals.net. In South Asia the Bytes for All initiative of Frederick Norhona and Parha Pratim Sarker is a platform showcasing innovative “IT for social changes practices.” The Web site, e-zine, and mailing lists cover projects ranging from knowledge pipelines to rural areas to net portals for “slum-kids” to GNU/Linux rewritten in local languages. See bytesforall.org. Computing histories generally agree that the Free Software Movement—as a social movement—was initiated and steered by one individual, Richard M. Stallman (Moody, 2001; Williams, 2002; Ceruzzi, 2003). His achievements include the seminal GNU Project (Gnu’s Not Unix, the heart of what became the GNU/Linux free operating system), the GPL (General Public License), and the establishment of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Source: mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/pressrelease/2005q3/000116.html. The General Public License (GPL) is online at www.gnu. org/copyleft/gpl.html The organization was founded in 2001, with the first set of CC licenses released in December 2002. See creativecommons.org. In Guide to Open Content Licenses, researcher Lawrence Liang (2004) argues that the open content paradigm is a serious alternative to traditional copyright regimes that typically favour the interests of giant media conglomerates over both independent creators and the public.

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The World Wide Web, or WWW, is a cluster of communication protocols (HTTP), a programming language (HTML), and a universal addressing system (URL), that facilitates the exchange and display of documents on the Internet (via browser software), regardless of hardware platforms and operating systems. Developed by Tim Berners-Lee, the WWW was launched in March 1991 at the CERN facility in Switzerland (Berners-Lee & Fischetti, 1999). Berners-Lee had envisaged a “single, global information space” in 1980, unaware of key earlier projects. Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, and Ted Nelson, and Doug Engelbart, in the 1960s, are visionaries who made conceptual leaps in software, hardware interface and connectivity. Such self-management is explicit in the “softwiring” of collaborative authoring systems like WIKI. An example of “trustbased” software, WIKI is an open source database software for the shared authoring and “open editing” of Web pages. In the mid 1990s Ward Cunningham coded “the simplest online database that could possibly work.” The WIKI developers state that “allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users” (Source: wiki.org). Content Management Systems (CMS) like WIKI, Dada, and Drupal offer features such as reversion to earlier instances of a document (useful when social boundaries have been transgressed by troublemaking “trolls”). These social softwares are designed with an awareness of human use (and abuse) of public space. Mongrel is an art group and a network, which formed in London in 199596. The original group comprised Graham Harwood, Matsuko Yokokoji, Mervin Jarman and Richard Pierre-Davis. Documentation of Mongrel’s

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many acclaimed software art projects can be found at mongrelx.org. Mongrel describe themselves as: “... a mixed bunch of people, machines and intelligences working to celebrate the methods of a motley culture. We make socially engaged culture, which sometimes means making art, sometimes software, sometimes setting up workshops, or helping other mongrels to set things up. We do this by employing any and all technological advantage that we can lay our hands on. Some of us have dedicated ourselves to learning technological methods of engagement, which means we pride ourselves on our ability to programme, engineer and build our own software, while others of us have dedicated ourselves to learning how to work with people” (Mongrel, 2004b). The neologism “hacktivism” (reportedly coined by a journalist) denotes “electronic civil disobedience” or “ECD,” a concept first enunciated by Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) in 1994. ECD employs tools developed by programmers and cultural activists. In their book Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause?Jordan and Taylor (2004) describe hacktivism as “the emergence of popular political action ... in cyberspace [...] a combination of grassroots political protest with computer hacking” (Jordan & Taylor, 2004, p. 1). An example is the Floodnet program which enables non-destructive virtual sit-ins on government or corporate websites to draw attention to social issues (see analyses in Meikle, 2002; Jordan & Taylor, 2004). TheyRule, an award-winning research project in the form of a dynamic website mapping the tangled web of U.S. corporate power relations, was created by Josh On and Futurefarmers at www.theyrule.net. Other projects mentioned by Holmes include the influential diagrammatic work by the late Mark Lombardi piecing together various

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banking and other scandals; and Bureau d’etudes Planet of the Apes, “a synoptic view of the world money game.” See related texts at ut.yt.t0.or.at/site. Due to the enormous take-up of web-based social networking platforms such as Friendster, MySpace and online dating sites the term “social software” has lost its original political edge. However, it remains a useful way of framing the social relations of software created by programmers and cultural activists. First released in 2001, according to its makers Dyne:bolic was the first CD distribution of GNU/Linux operating system which did not require the user to install it permanently on their computer. Instead, the user would load the CD and it would open up into a user-friendly temporary GNU/Linux system, with additional media-making tools. See: dyne.org and dynebolic.org/manual-indevelopment/dynebolic-x44.en.html As Dyne:bolic grew out of the Italian “Hackmeeting” movement, it is linked closely to the praxis of auto-gestation, or radical DoIt-Yourself (DIY). Many socially-driven cultural projects have arisen from the large Italian network of centri sociali or squatted social centres. See a history of Hackmeetings at wiki.hacklab.org.uk/index.php/Hacklabs_from_digital_to_analog. Dyne:bolic belongs to a vision of integrated software and communication systems. For example, videos made with the free software tools on Dyne:bolic can then be distributed via online archives like New Global Vision, entering the Digital Commons. International video archives maintained by cultural activists include ngvision.org originating in Italy, and the video syndication network v2v.cc/ from Germany. The Indymedia video portal at www.indymedia.org/projects.php3 focuses on documentary material. A mammoth cultural archiving project is archive.org.

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Quote from the Streamtime portal at streamtime.org. Interviews with key project facilitators online at wiki.whatthehack.org/index. php/Streamtime_and_Iraqi_Linux. The Container Project Web site is a repository of material documenting the history of the project and links to its current activities. www.container-project.net/. Photo documentation of the process of converting the Container is online at www.containerproject.net/C-Document/Album/page1. html. Skint Stream was an initiative of ICA Cape Town, Mongrel and radioqualia. Find details of Skint Stream, and the participating communities, at www.jelliedeel.org/skinstream. See workshop reports at www.cnh.on.ca/ container.html, www.cyear01.com/containerproject/archives/blog.html and www. ict4djamaica.org/content/home/detail.asp?i Data=504&iCat=292&iChannel=2&nChan nel=Articles. See www.ict4djamaica.org/content/home/ index.htm. Mervin Jarman, personal communication, September 12, 2006. The “Old Enclosures” in England were carried out by thousands of Acts of Parliament between 1702 and 1810. Hunger and terror for the dispossessed multitudes accompanied the old enclosures, as capital wealth piled up for a minority. Expropriated peasants, daylabourers, and artisans throughout Europe did not capitulate meekly to the new rule of waged work, with fierce resistance during feudal times and throughout the Middle Ages (Federici 2004, pp. 133138). Silvia Federici argues that a new set of “enclosures”—from thefts of agricultural land through government expropriation, to the creation of vast masses of criminalised poor from the newly or generationally dispossessed—are accompanying “the new global expansion of

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capitalist relations” (Federici, 2004, p. 11). David Bollier (2002) documents the enclosures of various contemporary commons, including the Internet, in Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth. See www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/intro/index.html and www.ffii.org/ for summaries of this battle, and lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/ patents.html for historical background on earlier bids to impose patents on software. The controversial and “questionably constitutional” Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into United States law on October 28, 1998. The main objections to this law are that it is unreasonably weighted in favour of the top end of town in terms of copyright holders (the record, film, and publishing industries), criminalises very widespread social applications of communications technologies, and stifles innovation by small players. It also holds Internet Service Providers liable for the actions of their clients, which is similar to holding the postal service liable for the contents of a private letter. The law focuses on technological aspects of copy protection instead of the actual works themselves. For example, the law “creates two new prohibitions in Title 17 of the U.S. Code—one on circumvention of technological measures used by copyright owners to protect their works and one on tampering with copyright management information—and adds civil remedies and criminal penalties for violating the prohibitions” www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf. A number of prosecutions have ensued, often targeting young users of peer-to-peer file sharing programs. Also prosecuted was the developer of a program that can “crack” video compression software (making it easier for people to potentially watch downloaded movies). Under this law even makers of DVD copying software have been prosecuted. The Electronic Frontier

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Foundation’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Archive contains a listing of many of the cases brought to trial or underway, and counter suits by lobby groups challenging the validity of the law. See www.eff. org/IP/DMCA/ and www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/ DMCA_against_the_darknet.pdf. Over-exploitation supposedly leads to what ecologist Garrett Hardin depicted as the “tragedy of the commons” in his classic text of the same name published in Science in 1968. One of the arguments supporting privatisation proposes that the “commons-ers” will always ruin the land through over use. See essay and responses online at www.sciencemag.org/sciext/sotp/commons.shtml. Paul Ceruzzi asserts that by “strict technical measures, the Internet has not come close to approaching this point of overpopulation ... [passing through] challenges like the 1988 worm, viruses, the Y2K crisis, the dot.com collapse, and the terrorists’ attacks of September 11, 2001, with hardly a hiccup. It is based on robust design. As for the content and quality of information that the Internet conveys, however, it has indeed been tragic” (Ceruzzi, 2003, p. 330). Statistics breaking down internet usage on a continental basis at www.internetworldstats. com/stats.html point to the enormous take up on the net in Africa (424%), the Middle East (454%), and Latin America (353%), in the period 2000-2005. In contrast, North America had the lowest take up (110%). Detailed internet statistics are available at leading research Nielson Net Ratings at www.nielson-netratings.com. See McLuhan, M. (1967). The Medium is the Massage. London: Penguin Books. See, for example, Lawrence Lessig’s blog describing the poetry slam on free culture by Brazilian Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil. Lessig also notes the visionary “Thousand points of culture project—to build a

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thousand places around Brazil where free software tools exist for people to make, and remix, culture” (Source: www.lessig.org/ blog/archives/2005_01.shtml). In The Problem with WSIS, Alan Toner (2003) critiques the colonial relations between “information society” and “intellectual property” with reference to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). It could be argued that this new form of colonial domination is strengthening the political resolve in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa to use free software as a central platform for social transformation. “Where once corpses accumulated to the advance of colonialism or the indifference of commodity capital, now they hang in the profit and loss scales of Big Pharma, actuarially accounted for and calculated against licensing and royalty revenue. With the aid of stringent IP law, companies are able to exercise a biopolitical control that takes to new extremes the tendency to liberate capital by restricting individual and collective freedoms and rights even the right to life itself” (Toner, 2003, para. 1). “In 1986, with the Uruguay Round of the GATT negotiations on the horizonthe Intellectual Property Committee (IPC) determined to ensure that corporate IP concerns be inserted into the negotiation agenda and fully integrated into any ultimate agreement. It was the IPC’s efforts to orchestrate business lobbying efforts on a global basis which culminated in TRIPS, now administered by the WTO. TRIPS will transfer an estimated 40 billion dollars from the poorest states over the next ten years, according to the World Bank, via patented medicines and seeds, and net rent transfers through royalties and licenses” (Toner, 2003, para. 10). In Five Theses on Informational-Cognitive Capitalism, George N. Dafermos (2005) states: “The realm of such networks of co-

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operative development is underpinned by the pleasure principle ... they re-discover the joy ... that accompanies creative work ... collective subjectivity is impregnated with the sperm of radicality, as people are suddenly becoming aware of the reversal of perspective that lies in the shadows: a production setting ... [which] exposes the poverty of production effectuated for the

sake of profit. A direct confrontation stretching from the terrain of ideas to the very institutional nucleus of capitalist society is underway. On the one side stands the beast of living labour organised independently of the capitalist demand, and, [on the other], the imaginary of intellectual property law ...”

This work was previously published in Handbook on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives, edited by K. St.Amant and B. Still, pp. 47-67, copyright 2007 by Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global).

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Chapter 53

Virtual Constructivism Avatars in Action Laura M. Nicosia Montclair State University, USA

ABSTRACT Contemporary educators have been reassessing pedagogical frameworks and reevaluating accepted epistemologies and ontologies of learning. The age-old debate whether knowledge is gained or constructed seems drawn to a consensus in the 21st Century: those who seek knowledge are active participants in the learning process and they have uniquely 21st Century attributes. Web 2.0+ technologies, various social media (Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, YouTube) and online virtual reality environments (Second Life, World of Warcraft, Sims) have influenced today’s students in ways that constructivists should explore, embrace and exploit. This essay explores how Second Life (SL) effectively employs and distills the principles of educational constructivism. SL offers endless opportunities for immersion within user-constructed environments and activities. Educational use of SL may facilitate learner-led activities and yield learning that is prompted by desire and curiosity rather than learning for learning’s sake. By exploiting these qualities with constructivist pedagogies, educators create environments that challenge and enable students to engage in the deepest kinds of learning.

INTRODUCTION Teaching within Second Life—one of the most successful three-dimensional online virtual worlds—characteristically enables the deployment,

application and distillation of several key principles of educational constructivism. Second Life (SL) offers its participants virtually endless opportunities for immersive experiences within user-constructed environments, communities and quests. By exploiting these qualities inherent within the SL platform, educators may create

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch053

Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

Virtual Constructivism

mediated, distributed learning scenarios and environs that challenge and enable students (as 3-D graphical avatars) to participate in their own learning. Such learning is motivated by curiosity and may provoke deep thinking and the construction of new knowledge. The use of SL as a constructivist milieu ultimately rouses learner-led and learnercentered activities. My experiences inworld have shown that hands-on learning (even virtual hands-on) is constructivist at its core due to the intense engagement of immersive cognitive responses and the application of scaffolded learning from user-participants. Utilization of such pedagogical practices is promising, especially considering how many neomillennials seem to live their wired lives. The advent of Web 2.0+ technologies, various social media (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, YouTube) and online virtual reality environments (e.g. Second Life, World of Warcraft, Webkinz) have appealed to and acted upon today’s youths in ways that constructivists should explore, embrace and exploit for educational purposes—across the disciplines. We have all seen our students juggle hypertexts, collaborate on synchronous and asynchronous storytelling, produce PowerPoint presentations and iMovies, send photos via their cell phones, update their romantic status on their web pages, while they simultaneously text and instant message each other. Despite questions of access and the injustices of the economic and digital divides, this generation of students—in general—is comfortable in the digital world. Consequently, as SL and other virtual environments continue to grow in their capabilities, and as their technologies become more elegant and more ubiquitous, the academy may find itself on the wrong side of the educational digital divide. Unless academicians learn to appropriate, adopt and adapt various digital and virtual reality environments to our special disciplinary needs and to our students’

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multi-modal, multi-tasking learning styles, we may lose this opportunity to stay on or ahead of the technological curve. We must do so however, with pedagogical authenticity and constructivist validity. Based on the work of several foundational pedagogical theorists and educational technologists (such as Dede, Gee, Kuhn, Vygotsky and Yee, among others) this essay discusses how educators may exploit these constructivist characteristics of SL and enable avatars to: • • • •

• • • • • •

journey through the learning environment’s unfolding episodes and processes foster and nurture community between and among classmates and the instructor engage in collaborative knowledgebuilding distribute cognitive capital among and between the engaged groups and individuals forge identity formation strategies communicate with each other strengthen their own sense of agency engage with digital and virtual artifacts construct and learn content in context and in application activate meaning-making strategies

While theoretical in principle, this essay is the outgrowth of nearly two years’ worth of personal and academic, inworld experiences and gleanings from my time within SL exploring ways to supplement my upper-level university literature courses.

BACKGROUND This is the age of millennial and neomillennial learners, two subsets of digital natives whose learning styles have affected shifts in the skills and knowledge that our contemporary society

Virtual Constructivism

prizes and which higher education demands. While we educators are well aware of these multitasking, collaborative, SMS-sending students who populate our classes, there are distinctions between millennials and neomillennials. At the risk of sounding reductive, it is desirable to distinguish between these students since the premise of this chapter is founded upon the argument that SL is a pedagogically valid constructivist tool for today’s and tomorrow’s student population. Chris Dede of Harvard identifies several key characteristics that distinguish these two groups of students. Millennials typically use a limited number of media that are comfortably familiar and that appeal to users’ individual learning styles. Additionally, millennials have found success with using Internet searches and various software programs and juggle these tools nimbly. Neomillennials, on the other hand, have a fluency and comfort with numerous media and deploy all for the empowerment they offer both individually and collectively. They manipulate media and cobble together various data from these deployments in collaboration with their peers and via a process of accumulation (Dede, 2005, p. 7). Consequently, we have students in our classes who are as facile with certain technologies as we are, if not more so. In addition to being introduced to the skills, dispositions and contents of our disciplines, today’s students expect to acquire skills and tools that are innovative, challenging, relevant, and useful. These learners are in our college courses now; we must, therefore, find and utilize appropriate pedagogies to produce deep thinking and to foster respect for both the content of our respective disciplines and how we go about doing our disciplinary work in this wired era. To learn effectively and deeply, today’s students expect cutting-edge technologies and hands-on experiences to engage their learning strengths and styles. Dede asserts that these

styles and skills are a form of “mediated immersion,” which include, virtual settings, communal learning, distributed knowledge, “experiential learning, guided mentoring, and collective reflection,” and “co-design of learning experiences personalized to individual needs and preferences,” among other traits (2005, p. 7). As a corollary to this list of immersive learning styles and skills, I offer that virtual reality environments (VREs) such as SL, create, foster, and engage those very immersive traits that Dede exhorts us to address. These environments become virtual learning environments (VLEs) in the process. The proliferation of these VLEs has prompted numerous researchers and educators to investigate whether they are an optimal medium for constructivist pedagogies. Educators may embed constructivist activities within SL to instigate an educational techtonic shift—drawing students away from the passive to the active construction of new knowledge via engagement with digital and virtual artifacts, and by the scaffolding of prior knowledge. Such SL praxis is limited by only an instructor’s imagination, willingness to experiment, and the time required to create such environments.

WhAT IS SeCOND lIfe? In short, SL “is a 3-D virtual world created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe” (www.secondlife.com/whatis/). It started with the equivalent of 64 acres of virtual land and stands now at 65,000 acres and is growing still. Residents may buy virtual plots or islands of land, own buildings and furnishings, and customize their avatars to suit their tastes and whims. The servers that house SL are managed by Linden Lab Corporation, but the virtual environ “is owned and built by its resident participants” (www.secondlife.com). Most important, while

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people sometimes say they “play” SL (referring to being inworld), SL is not a game—there are no rules or pre-established goals as there would be for a true game and no points to gather along predetermined courses of action. There may be games within SL, but the grid itself is userconstructed to be what the resident creators desire their environment to be. Renting space or purchasing virtual land in SL is akin to renting space on a server for web hosting. The website creator builds the site, but pays for the maintenance and upkeep of the web space. All costs are, however, optional; SL offers free accounts and owning virtual property is not required to be inworld. It is only when an avatar opts to own land that payments are made for the maintenance of space on Linden Lab’s servers. Each SL parcel of virtual land is a blank canvas awaiting the touch of a creator. M.D. Dickey (2005) points out that SL does offer “at least three things: (1) a 3D space or environment; (2) avatars that represent the individual user; and (3) interactive chat, either using text or voice or both” (as cited in Berge, 2008, p. 27). These conditions bear out why SL is not a game and why some first time visitors become either quickly overwhelmed with the sense of expansive openness or quickly bored with what appears to be so little “to do.”

CONTeXTUAlIZING leARNING WITh vIRTUAl CONNeCTIONS AND lINKeD NARRATIveS Humans love narratives; we may best be described, perhaps, as homo narrans, or in SL, avatar narrans. We thrive on stories, yearn for contextualizations, and are most comfortable when we sense causality. This is so, whether the stimulus is a piece of literature, an object, an idea, an image, or a digital artifact. The linkages we create form a narrative. Any time we verbalize or describe conceptualizations

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and relationships between objects, even digital objects, a narrative is created and we become homo or avatar digitalis. For instance, when I am teaching a traditional face-to-face course in American literary fiction at my university, Montclair State in New Jersey, I strive to establish a sense of historicity, provide a literary dialog between texts and/or authors, and examine the myriad anxieties of influence from which texts spring. These connections lead to more than a chronology of literary linearity when students realize that art and artistic movements are not solely or always cause/effect—but very well may be synchronous or parallel with other art and movements. Such temporal and spatial understandings are exciting, and when students take preexisting knowledge and synthesize it with new knowledge, the creation of this linked narrative is deep learning. In fact, powerful scholarship occurs when my students understand that, for example, Jean Toomer’s Cane was written in both metaphoric and literal dialog with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, or that some of Willa Cather’s and Flannery O’Connor’s works may be discussed as sharing several stylistic devices. This type of lesson is the basis for many English major courses, delivered traditionally and supported by taking notes and lists. Consider how effective class discussions would be if students could also encounter images, documents, and sites from the texts by also experiencing them? What would happen if they could take a field trip to visit a representation of Anderson’s city of Winesburg and move through the locale he created? How powerful would it be to have students engage with artifacts from and about the stories? What kinds of learning would occur if our college readers could recreate or simulate a character’s home (or other key site from the text) in three dimensions to enable others to walk into and through the space? Bryan Carter (2006) suggests that teaching in VREs “addresses several important learning

Virtual Constructivism

objectives . . . active learning (versus passive learning), interactivity with the subject matter, assisting visual learners who may find lecture formats difficult, and contextualizing the information resources” (p. 52). Such “eyes-on” experiences and vigorous connections with the “stuff” of novels is one of the key components of constructivist pedagogies. In real life (RL) this kind of activity, however, is not always possible or even desirable (taking students to tour the setting for Dante’s Inferno, is impossible and highly undesirable, for instance). In SL, however, such field trips and immersions are likely. Inworld, avatars engage with objects that are selected, designed and mediated by the educator to provide a virtual sense of place and space for a particular text or specific concept that is deemed integral to the content. This is what Sosnoski and Portlock (2006) refer to as “narrative architecture” (p. 67). As such, avatars are immersed in the text as they move through key scenes and experience, visualize and even hear events (mediated by the educator) to evoke comprehension, provoke deep thinking and foster collective reflection. In all honesty, however, the following must be addressed: there is a steep learning curve to acquire the basic skills an avatar requires to successfully navigate within the SL metaverse (for example, walking, flying, chatting, teleporting, IM-ing, searching and using aerial maps). Skills such as these are transferable, however. If these college students have ever played computer or console video games such as Madden NFL, Tomb Raider, The Legend of Zelda, Mario Brothers, Grand Theft Auto, and so on, they are used to navigating through threedimensions and understand the vagaries of using both joysticks and arrow keys. However, even students who have never engaged with video, computer or Massively Multi-User Online RolePlaying Games (MMORPGs) will acquire those basic skills of navigation and maneuverability,

albeit at varying speeds and levels of success. The acquisition of these start up skills are necessary for students (as avatars) to achieve success and enjoyment within SL. In my undergraduate-level English elective, The Art of Fiction, students read novels, short stories and collateral critical and theoretical readings over a traditional 15-week semester. Students read Gloria Naylor’s novel, Mama Day, and while doing so, worked on their SL skills and abilities. To augment our face-to-face class meetings with traditional large and small discussions, one of their assignments was to pay particular attention to the extended members of the Day family as recorded in the Family Tree (provided as a paratext at the start of the novel). This record of family births and deaths is a key element to understanding the central mysteries of the novel and my students were assigned to keep track of these records. They gathered information for each family member and recorded events for that character throughout the course of the narrative. Then, they entered SL and found a gravesite for the original founder of the island community, Bascombe Wade, that I hid within a forest; quests and scavenger hunts are popular tools within SL. Wade had been murdered by one of his slaves (the founding matriarch of the Day clan). Her subsequent flight after the murder and her seemingly absolute disappearance inform the central mysteries of Willow Springs. Death and the graveyard are central to the plot, mysteries and conflicts within this novel. Once they found the grave, each student “touched” the tombstone with his or her cursor and received the formal task and the next step in the hunt through the novel’s setting. They were next sent to a well, where they were each given the name of a character. They were to write an epitaph for that character with the salient information culled from their reading. Once they wrote the epitaph, they built, purchased or traded for a headstone, inscribed

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the character’s name on it, placed the headstone within the graveyard and embedded their epitaphs into each grave. This, by the way, is done with click-and-drag techniques, akin to copying or moving folders from within a word processing program. By interacting with their environments, creating new knowledge and leaving a virtual footprint or artifact behind—in this case a virtual annotation—they grew active in their learning, “thus making meaningful connections both between prior knowledge, and new knowledge and among disciplines” (Carter, 2006, p. 53). This graveyard exercise helped students concretize their understanding of the content of this novel rife with mysterious deaths and births of ex-slaves and their progeny. This assignment poses several high-level, intellectual challenges. First, students must understand the content of the novel. That is, learning about the various characters, their sometimes mysterious deaths, and the sociocultural events of the novel becomes primary among other conditions. Second, they must write an acceptable epitaph (a sample was provided for modeling). Third, they must acquire a headstone or create one using SL’s basic building tools. In short, to successfully complete this task avatars needed to: read and comprehend the text, implement social strategies, engage with other avatars, and create a digital artifact embedded with new knowledge and appropriate to the geographic and chronologic specifications constructed by the author, Naylor. Additionally, what is pertinent to this study, these avatars actively cooperate with others within small- and large-group collaborations, build content and engage with the virtual environment based on the novel. These avatars are immersed within the text in ways that utilize group strategies and engage in what Sosnoski calls “configuring…a cognitive process whereby persons understand other persons by recalling analogous past experiences” (p. 35). Working with other

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avatars and joining together to a common end, lead to the establishment of community between and amongst the participants. Concomitantly, students’ emotional investment to the assignment is heightened. While it may appear that these avatars are playing a role-playing game, they are not simply pretending. Nicolas Yee discusses the depth of user engagement within virtual environments: “The emotional investment that these environments derive from users is one way of countering that assumption. Users in fact take these environments very seriously” (2006, p. 14). In what may seem paradoxical, student avatars learn while having fun and while seriously engaged to accomplish a task. Learning within SL is serious play or rather, playful work. These avatars are active—not passive. They build knowledge and immerse themselves within the text in ways that utilize constructivist pedagogies in authentic methods.

fOSTeRING COmmUNITy AND COllABORATIve TIeS As a VRE, SL is a social medium—there is no evading this point. There is a strong social element to the SL experience. Without it, the metaverse would be devoid of meaning—no different than sitting in a warehouse with only boxes lining the walls. It would be like going to a theme park with no one else in the park and no one to run the rides. SL is meant to be a shared, collaborative experience. The most effective class tasks and assignments take advantage of the social nature of the medium and exploit it by constructing challenges that necessitate collaboration, foster community-building, and the distribute cognitive capital among and between groups. When inworld, I teleport the avatars to my location— my home or one of my university’s islands—and have them landmark the location as a “home base.” Once they are with me, I give them

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objects they can use inworld (clothes, shoes, household objects, furnishings and landmarks of interest). Additionally, I distribute a few Linden dollars (the inworld currency which at the time of this writing is 264L = $1.00 US) to each avatar for the purchase of incidentals—like tombstones, for instance. Generally, 20L per student avatar is sufficient for the entire semester. My total outlay costs me under $2.50 US for the whole dispersal to 30 avatars. My objective is to get student avatars accustomed to sharing with each other and to fostering a sense of generosity—I model the behaviors I want to see manifested. Avatars, in general, are very willing to share with each other when they realize that the cost is non-existent to minimal and when the payoff is so high. Friendships develop, and avatars have fun sharing their Gucci bags and Porsches. While SL is a for-profit platform much of what is inworld is free and open access. Over time, students develop an attachment to their avatars and invest much of their real life personalities into the graphical representations they have created for themselves. However, when a person first creates an avatar (a representation of his or her choice—humanoid or not) several default physiques are available. The user may choose from among skin colors, and may select any body weight, height, hair style, eye color, and so on—all of which are modifiable. Choices for one’s body are only as limited as one’s willingness to experiment with appearance. Once the user is satisfied with the avatar’s appearance, the avatar ventures out into the SL metaverse and engages with other avatars. This is especially so at Orientation Island—SL’s designated way station for skills development— though other orientation sites are proliferating. Avatars traverse an island, learning how to perform basic functions such as walking, turning corners, navigating stairs and ramps, flying, and so on. In order to succeed at these oftentimes

awkward maneuvers, avatars read interactive signs, ask questions of other avatars, and rely on social interactions for answers to their queries: “How do I pick up that item? How do I teleport to CHSS Island?” and so on. The best way to steer one’s avatar through this metaverse is by building relationships and working collaboratively. In RL, when I assign a task, I direct my students to work either independently or in groups; I create the task to be appropriate to the content and skills I want them to develop, and toward the specific learning outcomes I have identified as desirable for this unit or text. In face-to-face class assignments student achievement can be affected by: the length of the class session before the next class takes use of the room (generally 75 minutes); attendance issues for absent group members who missed the bus or are stuck in traffic; pre-conceived ideas and biases about a classmate based on appearances, among other variables. These factors are ameliorated when using SL. Student avatars can (and tend to) remain inworld as long as they can sit at their keyboards; they are not limited by the end of a class period or constrained by room furnishings. While I can cite anecdotal data about how many hours my college students spent inworld, and about how many hours I spend in SL, Yee reports that avatars “spend on average 22.72 hours (n = 5471, SD = 14.98) each week [inworld]. The lower quartile and upper quartile boundaries were 11 and 30 respectively. The distribution showed that about 8% of users spend 40 hours per week or more in these environments” (2006. p. 18). These numbers point to the attraction such VREs have for a large slice of technology-oriented learners. Students inhabit their avatars even when they are tired or not feeling well enough to drive to campus. Additionally, avatars cannot see the person behind the keyboard when they interact with other graphical representations. Their inworld relationships are based on performance

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and intrinsic value—not preconceived notions about a fellow student. In a face-to-face class setting, when groups self-select, it is common to see students gravitate to those they feel are peer members from similar backgrounds and ages. Despite this real-life tendency, Yee’s research has determined that “seemingly disparate demographic groups would oftentimes be collaborating and working together to achieve the same goals…. This finding is particularly striking given that these disparate demographic groups seldom collaborate in any real life situation” (2006, p. 9). Avatars engage in heterogeneous interactions and forge bonds across boundaries rather than remain within their real-world comfort zones. This exposure to other avatars leads to an increasing comfort level when encountering an “Other,” and facilitates building community and fostering collaboration. It is common to have humanoids, furries, cyborgs and fantastic creatures populating an inworld group (in any number of combinations). This lack of cultural baggage or back-story is termed “null experience” by Sosnoski (2006, p. 36) and it is a position of pure possibility and liminality. Berge (2008) acknowledges that SL “is very culturally diverse, with people found from around the world, and avatars that expand culture to other levels…. With such cultural diversity in an environment where anything is possible, the impossible sometimes happens. Discovery and exploration are encouraged” (p. 29). However, as with any group project, the level of success is directly related to a number of factors. Among these are: the delicate social interactions between group members; the varying levels of skills among members; the work ethic of individual group members; and the effectiveness of the instructor to encourage members in unity toward one goal—the triumphant completion of the assignment or task. Through the process of creating an avatar, experiencing a willing sense of disbelief in the

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immersive qualities of the act, and engaging with other avatars, the human behind the keyboard may choose to project an aspect of his or her personality that he or she wishes to develop. The level of anonymity provided by inhabiting an avatar may activate the development of agency and may facilitate the progress of social skills that might otherwise be hampered by face-toface experiences.

fORGING IDeNTITy fORmATION STRATeGIeS AND STReNGTheNING AGeNCy Creating an avatar may be an invitation to roleplay or to take on a new personality. Despite this opportunity, avatars tend to be an extension of one’s real-life personality—although enhanced and perhaps more freely wielded. Recent research has shown that since identity is unfixed, we (and our avatars) may change and transform in myriad ways when we feel secure enough to do so. Angela Thomas’ research (2007) has identified that in the cyber world there “are multiple layers through which we mediate the self and [those] include the words we speak, the graphical images we adopt as avatars to represent us, and the codes and other linguistic variations on language we use to create a full digital presence” (p. 5). Sherry Turkle’s research has pursued this avenue by elaborating upon and critiquing the “fluid and decentralized nature of identities” in virtual environments (as cited in Yee, 2006, p. 6). The lack of personal risk, the non-existent physical danger, the potential to interrupt the laws of physics and the curtain of anonymity are ingredients to cultivate avatar identity formation. Avatars often explain, albeit anecdotally, that they feel more free to assert themselves, to ask for help, to take risks inworld. Knowing that one may teleport from any perceived danger or

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discomfort with a simple keystroke or pull-down menu command, and knowing that mistakes are not fatal or irreversible, free many avatars from the tyrannies of embarrassment or fear. Being an avatar is empowering in ways that may become habitual. Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of self-mediation and of the psychological tool is applicable in this instance: students create avatars (the tools) as mental signs (projections) to represent themselves and the concepts for which they stand. These tools or avatars are then used to mediate their exchanges with others and with the environments within which they find themselves. The avatars observe themselves in action, and use or construct knowledge by assessing and evaluating their exchanges within those new relationships and relations. This is a strong tenet of both radical and social constructivism and it is inherent in the fabric of being in a VRE or in SL, in particular (Doolittle, 1999). What seems more important, perhaps, than acknowledging inworld personality development and the fostering of inworld agency is clarifying whether any such identity formation has real, empirical transference to the real world and whether these new forms of social interactions and personal projections have any lasting effects in one’s RL. Recent studies by Nakamura (2000), Bushman (2002), Anderson (2000), and Ferguson (2002) all critique the effects of video games, media and online role-playing; however, these studies focus on aspects of violence. Nakamura, however, is the exception; she has studied racial identity perception and formation in cyberspaces. What seems clear is that more scholarly social research needs to be done to examine the possible carryover of other derived experiences (both social and psychological) and content acquisition from virtual environments such as SL to RL.

COllABORATIve KNOWleDGe-BUIlDING AND The fRee DISTRIBUTION Of COGNITIve CApITAl In traditional learning environments, to provoke deep thinking and to engage active learning, instructors plan their class meetings ahead of time and work backward from their desired learning outcomes toward the process that is most likely to reach that goal. Similarly, in a non-face-to-face environment, if an instructor wishes to utilize constructivist pedagogies for activating avatar learning, there must be an effective application of procedures and tasks. Lessons must be planned, sites must be constructed and outcomes must be identified well ahead of the actual immersive encounter. Bain (2004) suggests that in order to prepare for meaning-making rather than knowledge-transmission, instructors should ask themselves the following: “How will I create a natural critical learning environment in which I embed the skills and information I wish to teach in assignments . . . that students will find fascinating—authentic tasks that will arouse curiosity, challenge students to rethink their assumptions and examine their mental models of reality?” (p. 60). Effective planning and narrative architecture are de rigueur in both RL and in SL. If an avatar enters a space where the lesson is not well conceived or where the virtual constructions are haphazard or poorly considered, then the learning outcomes will be as unsuccessful and inauthentic as any poorly designed traditional class. When avatars enter teacher-mediated learning spaces that are welldesigned and effectively deployed, however, the immersive qualities and sense of social presence intensify the engagement factor and increase learning in visceral and synesthetic ways. Assignments such as these deploy constructivist pedagogies in several ways—even in a virtual environment.

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While it can be safely assumed that Bruner (as cited in Huitt, 2003, ¶ 1) wrote about constructivist teaching and learning in faceto-face environments, the main principles of constructivism that he identified are applicable in the virtual realm, too. Three of Bruner’s principles speak to the kinds of experiences that avatars engage with whenever they enter the virtual realm. These acknowledge that “instruction must be concerned with the experiences and contexts that make the student willing and able to learn (readiness),” that it “must be structured so that it can be easily grasped by the student,” and that all teaching “should be designed to facilitate extrapolation and or fill in the gaps (going beyond the information given)”. (1990, p. 1) These qualities point to a mode of learning that is a dynamic process. Through using VLEs like SL, instructors make learning engaging (and I dare say, fun). Avatars create new knowledge, synthesize data by combining and scaffolding various schema, makes choices, and share that knowledge with others. Take for instance, another assignment I designed for my undergraduates while studying Mama Day. After they completed their epitaph task, avatars were to consult the map (found at the front of the novel) of the setting, Willow Springs, and to find the magical herb garden (located next to the graveyard). This garden provides the elixirs and herbals that the protagonist, Miranda “Mama” Day, uses to heal the sick, counter the evil spells cast by her nemesis (Ruby) and to cure her niece, Cocoa. This garden is the key geographical and thematic element to resolve the major conflict of the text. During their reading, students took notes regarding the ways that Mama used this herb garden. Avatars researched plants that the author mentioned and those that might be indigenous to an island off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Second, they were to identify several (3-4) of those plants that Mama could have used. As a corollary, no plants were to be duplicated within the entire

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class collection. Avatars had to cooperate with each other in order to avoid recurrence. Third, they were to find examples of those plants in SL (whether these were actual 3-D renderings of those plants or 2-D pictures) and “plant” them in the graveyard. They also had to write short, descriptive summaries of how each plant would be used and what ailments they would treat. Of course, they were required to cite their sources (using MLA formatting). Such writings, by the way, were delivered to me inworld via a simple note-card email process (similar to sending an email with an attachment in RL). Building upon their classroom discussions on the novel, the avatars were excited to teleport to other places in SL and rummage through inworld gardens or stores. Some avatars purchased their researched plants. Others bartered for desired flora. Still others received those plants as gifts from friendly avatars who were not students in our class. The goal for this task was to immerse students in one of the central geographic sources for Mama Day’s magical powers. Additionally, this assignment pushed avatars to go beyond the information given in the novel and to extrapolate from the text to fill in readerly gaps. To create an authentic, aesthetic, and useful medicine garden, the avatars created knowledge, shared that knowledge with each other, and actively built a virtual herb and plant patch. (As American poet Marianne Moore might have said, they built “virtual gardens with real herbs in them.”) Problem solving, collaboration and engagement became the norm. Most importantly, perhaps, is that such constructive meaning-making was distributed across the small groups and between classmates rather than delivered from the instructor to the avatars. The construction of knowledge from this exercise embraced the tenets of social constructivism—where avatars created learning from “the result of social interaction…. between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (Doolittle,

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1999, p. 4). Constructed truth becomes the product of a series of social negotiations that distribute knowledge between avatars. Such truths are not delivered or transmitted from the teacher. Rather, they are dispersed across and among peer groups.

AvATARS eNGAGING WITh DIGITAl AND vIRTUAl ARTIfACTS To complete their task for the above-mentioned garden assignment, avatars performed various research functions. They could have completed the task via any number of avenues: searching on the web with a browser to find images on Flickr or Google Images; drawing accurate images using tools within their word processor; taking a picture of an herb and either downloading it to their computer or scanning it; purchasing a virtual plant inworld, and so on. Regardless of the method they chose to use, they engaged with digital or virtual artifacts in an active and methodical manner. Ultimately, avatars built upon their own comfort and skill levels—if they were most comfortable with using a search engine to download and copy images, they chose that method. If they preferred taking photos with their digital cameras or cell phones, then that was their method of choice. Clearly, “in the modern world,” says James Paul Gee (2004) print literacy is not enough. “People need to be literate in a great variety of different semiotic domains . . . . the vast majority of domains involve semiotic (symbolic, representational) resources besides print and some don’t involve print as a resource at all” (p. 19). This inworld exercise requires student avatars to be literate in various domains and to use those domains to create new knowledge. In this age, students bring many skills and talents to their classes. When I allow them to use their pre-existing strengths to engage their own learning schema, I enable them to succeed.

By encouraging students to employ their own knowledge, to engage their technology-oriented skill sets and to tap into higher-order thinking and learning, they gain confidence in their abilities to do scholarly research and to acquire contextual information both in SL and in RL. Through such immersion, college students, even if they are not English majors, learn that novels can affect them in ways that are salient and pertinent. Most avatars enjoyed this task and found that researching herbalism and reading about Gullah agricultural practices was aesthetically pleasing and practically useful. Such learning becomes real to the student avatars because “the learning takes place within a meaningful…context. What you must learn is directly related to the environment in which you learn and demonstrate it; thus, the learning is not only relevant but applied and practiced within that context” (Van Eck 2007, p. 56). Even the most esoteric and aesthetic text may become visceral, understandable and real when avatars engage with and create digital artifacts in constructive and immersive situations. Additionally, engaging with digital media develops a set of transferable tech media skills that students deem useful in their lives and in their pursuits for a career. Such relevancy “is likely to lead to an increase in motivation… the individual comes to understand the need for certain knowledge” (Doolittle 1999. p. 5). Moreover, Thomas (2007) notes that engaging with digital media aids in the acquisition of new media literacies. She has asserted, “[o]ne of the most important factors is that with every new form of community, children are participating in new forms of literacy. Literacy is being transformed and is evolving with every new set of social practices” (p. 4). Student avatars recognize that learning how to import photos, to engage with data in both 2- and 3-D formats, and to navigate through alternate virtual environments are both useful and pleasurable.

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WhAT’S The hITCh? ISSUeS AND CONTROveRSIeS Teaching in SL is not a panacea for student disengagement or for a weak work ethic. It is neither simple to build sites, nor is it second nature to deploy constructivist activities inworld. Building requires a significant amount of time, training and a certain amount of funding for persistent land sites and plots. As for the activities, instructors must learn how to translate face-toface activities to the virtual world—recognizing that just as in RL, avatars require ample space within which to move and navigate. If space is not considered, avatars might very well bump into each other and chaos may ensue. Teaching in SL is not “quiet,” despite the ability to limit our conversations to textual chats and IMs if we choose to abandon the use of audible voice. Consequently, instructing in SL requires the teacher to juggle multiple chat boxes or long, scrolling dialogue screens. This may all seem cacophonous at first. However, this kind of multi-tasking becomes more comfortable over time and with practice. Look at our students. They talk to their friends, text others, and listen to their iPods all at the same time! So can we. It merely takes a sense of adventure and a willingness to practice. This speaks to the steep learning curve for using SL. It takes time to become facile with the interface. Using arrow keys, pull-down menus and right clicks are not the norm for many in the academy. Berge writes that “[n]othing seems very intuitive in-world” and that it took over ten hours for him to effectively navigate in the environment (2008, p. 30). All this is true. There is an intensive, immediate need to acquire specific skills in order to succeed inworld. Developing these skills takes time—valuable time that could be spent teaching content and disciplinary skills. The demand for up-front skill acquisition,

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however, might be offset by the intense immersive qualities that SL affords. Avatars tend to enjoy their time in SL and I can anecdotally offer that college students will oftentimes spend more hours inworld than they do in face-to-face class periods or doing homework in the traditional sense. Immersion yields increased engagement. And, once avatars become facile with the few skills needed inworld they are able to succeed at the tasks I assign. Some critics assert that teaching in “SL cannot accomplish anything that they could not accomplish in regular Websites” (Berge, 2008, p. 30). While this has merit, my point about taking students to see and maneuver through exotic, foreign or dangerous environs still holds true. While students may gain endless information and data about Dante’s Inferno by searching through web sites, scouring various scholarly indices, and perhaps flying to Italy to tour museums, I can take them to a 3-D rendering of the levels of Hell and have the avatars add content from the text and from their research. That cannot be accomplished in regular websites. Somewhere along our schooling years, we came to the understanding that learning should not be fun or pleasurable—that being engaged with materials and content in sensory and visceral ways is not appropriate. Using VLEs like SL provokes deep learning, promotes engagement and prompts the occasional laugh. While it may not be content rich to trade a designer-inspired pocketbook for a medicinal herb, and while disciplinary core content curriculum standards may not require collaboration and group work, these are useful and sound outcomes. I do not advocate the use of VLEs in place of content. Content and disciplinary skill building must always be primary and must always drive the lessons toward specific and clear learning outcomes. Lessons must be planned with both content and outcomes foremost in the instructor’s thoughts—working backward to the mechanics of the delivery inworld. This is, however, no

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different than traditional face-to-face teaching. An instructor who attends class unprepared or with no clear goals in mind creates a class bereft of meaning, purpose and validity, just as it would in SL. Likewise, using any technology for technology’s sake is unsound practice. This begs the question: just as in RL, issues of assessment must be addressed. How will instructors measure the successes, failures, and the achievements of each lesson inworld? Are students to be assessed on the level of their technology skills? What would happen if a student just does not become facile with the SL or VLE platform, but does understand the content of the course? Will the grade be affected? How will the avatars’ achievements be evaluated and measured? Will empirical data be gathered? And, how will the instructor be evaluated? Will peers and administration understand the vagaries of teaching in such a situated and mediated environment? These questions require serious consideration and further study. Additionally, there are other contentious topics regarding technology glitches and flubs. We know that servers go down and that the Internet access slows down always just when we need it. Teaching with the aid of any technology necessitates back-up plans B and C at all times— just in case. The use of Web 2.0+ technologies also brings into question issues regarding the technology gaps (between various economic haves and havenots, and between instructors who use outdated equipment despite the cutting-edge requirements for running some of these programs). Schools will need to designate specific labs for running SL (for both class sessions and for student body use) and/or will have to provide students with jump drives with the program installed. Access issues for economically or technologically challenged students are also important considerations, as are issues regarding students with visual disabilities. These students may not (at the time of this writing) be able to

use SL since it is a visual medium. Students with severe physical disabilities who may not be able to manipulate a keyboard, joystick or mouse may need extra support and modifications. Alternate methods of simulating immersion may have to be addressed for students who have legally recognizable disabilities and varying levels of abilities. Ultimately, administrative policies will need to be set in place for many of the aforementioned (and not mentioned) issues. It must also be acknowledged that virtual vandals and trouble-makers (called “griefers”) are present in SL (as are “hackers” in the webbased cyberworld). These avatars take pleasure in disrupting normal social engagements and while they are generally not violent, they play malicious pranks with viruses, may disrupt sites and may threaten an avatar’s sense of security. There are mechanisms to eject and prevent these griefers from entering educational (or private) sites. But these mechanisms are at the advanced level of skill acquisition. One must know a bit about how SL works and a bit about how to set certain scripts into action to use these inworld tools. There are surveillance tools inworld and there are methods to track and record avatar activity. Ultimately, there will always be griefers, just as there will always be real-life vandals and computer hackers. These inworld malcontents who disrupt discussions are annoying, angering and occasionally threatening, but their actions do not damage any real property or physically endanger any real humans. It is true that a griefer may cause a site to crash, But sites can be rebuilt or reset fairly easily—not like a building that has had a fire set in it. And, while it is possible that griefers may cause an avatar to become uncomfortable or frightened, an avatar always has the ability to teleport to a safe space (home or a class, or a campus) and can quit SL if the encounter is untenable. Very little is irreplaceable in SL, unlike in RL. Regardless, some educational institutions are exploring

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how to set policies into place that offer varying levels of protection to students and faculty (and the university from legal responsibility) as we venture into this brave new world. Finally, issues surrounding intellectual property ownership and rights, along with standards and procedures for copyright need to be clarified. If a faculty member uploads lessons, supporting materials and assignments to SL (or to any web-based server, for that matter, including Blackboard) who owns and controls the rights to those products? Do digital and virtual materials fall under the same scrutiny and regulations as print or visual documents? Additionally, administration, faculty and students need to be made aware of and to adhere to the regulations of Fair Educational Use and attribution (both from the standpoint of copyright and Creative Commons Licensing). These issues are pressing and there are no easy answers. Directors of Information Technology, librarians and media specialists, human resources, legal teams and perhaps even professional unions need to investigate policies and procedures for all web- and Internet-based technologies, whether they are generation 1.0 or 2.0+.

WheRe DO We GO fROm heRe? Second Life is growing rapidly and does not appear to be slowing down. In fact, it is expanding at a tremendous rate. In his article on SL in higher education, Kelton (2007) reports that from August 2006 to August 2007, the number of SL residents rose from 350,000 to over 8.5 million. Numbers like these are telling. It is unlikely that membership will continue to grow at such an exponential rate; however, SL is not going to simply go out with a whimper. Unless one works at the upper echelon of Linden Lab, one cannot predict whether SL will continue as is in perpetuity. The next step would be for

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SL to facilitate and encourage users to work across several platforms using various VREs. This cross-platform exchange has already been accomplished between SL and IBM’s OpenSim, successfully demonstrating virtual world interoperability. Increasing instances of free-flow between VREs would expand the possibilities for creating new learning environments and for more social interactions between larger numbers of avatars/learners. A recent article in Virtual World News (January 2008) reported that a cross platform educational grid is in the planning stages and would permit educational systems to work across various virtual world platforms. The article reported that the importance of the education grid “is not just that it’s a 3D environment, but that it’s a part of a larger system. The education grid is a repository. . . . Some of it will be premade for teachers to just use and some that they can create. It’s both a repository and the serverside architecture. It houses the servers that allow students and teachers and corporate learners to get together.” This means that a multi-platform server system, devoted to teaching and learning is in the works. Perhaps this will solve some of the aforementioned controversial issues and will signal a new evolution in VLEs. Recent research and development are even looking into creating an interface that will allow avatars to be controlled without the use of a mouse or keystrokes. Movements would be controlled by eye and/or body movements similar to the ways players engage with the Nintendo Wii. This would take SL into an entirely new type of immersive experience. The most recent Sun Services White Paper (2008) predicts that “a user experience similar to that of Nintendo Wii may become common for Internet users. And graphical realism will vary depending on the purpose and focus of the virtual world” (p. 3). What comes next insofar as the future for VREs and VLEs is limited by the human imagination and the human quest for technological experiences.

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fINAl ThOUGhTS

RefeReNCeS

It is apparent that virtual worlds are not going to go the way of the VHS tape—at least not for the foreseeable future. My experiences within Second Life have shown that students actively participate in the construction of their own learning as they co-journey with their avatars through mediated learning spaces and activities. In wending their way through these various sites, my students encounter artifacts placed there for them, explore websites, examine primary documents, synthesize their reflections on their experiences through writing, and become partners in the construction of their own learning, leaving virtual artifacts as proof of their accomplishments. This is constructivism at its core. I believe it holds promise for the future— not as a utopian teaching environment—but as an extension and an enhancement for my faceto-face class sessions. As Second Life and other virtual environments continue to grow in their capabilities, the technology will become more ingeniously neat and user-friendly. Millennials and neomillennials will rise up through the education system and will be in our college classes and in our workforce. Academicians and educators must continue to explore the possibilities for authentic constructivist learning using Virtual Learning Environments. These students, who are growing up playing Wii and Webkinz, will be fully familiar with having an avatar. They will be in our classes. We should adopt their tools and adapt their technologies to our ends—teach them using the skill sets and comfort zones they already possess. Then, we will speak to them in their own language, using their own tools, to create new knowledge, to foster active learning, and to nurture collaborative networking skills. This is the best kind of constructivist learning.

Bain, K. (2004). What the Best College Teachers Do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berge, Z. L. (May-June 2008). Multi-User Virtual Environments for Education and Training? A Critical Review of Second Life. Educational Technology (pp. 27-31). Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carter, Bryan. (2006). Virtual Harlem in the Beginning: Retrospective Reflections. In J. J. Sosnoski, P. Harkin, & B. Carter (Eds.), Configuring History: Teaching the Harlem Renaissance through Virtual Reality Cityscapes (pp. 47-57). New York: Peter Lang. Dede, C. (2005). Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles. Educause Quarterly, 28(1), 7-12. Dickey, M. D. (2005). Three-dimensional virtual worlds and distance learning: Two case studies of active worlds as a medium for distance education. British Journal of Educational Technology. 36(3), 439-451. Doolittle, P. E. (1999). Constructivism and Online Education. http://edpsychserver.ed.vt. edu/workshops/tohe1999/pedagogy.html Gee, J. P. (2004). What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Huitt, Caroline. (2003). Constructivism. Educational Psychology Interactive. Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University. http://chiron. valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/cogsys/construct.html. Interview: Media Grid to Take Education Across the Virtual World--and the XO. January 29, 2008. http://www.virtualworldsnews. com/2008/01/interview-media.html.

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Kelton, A. J. Second Life: Reaching into the Virtual World for Real World Learning.” EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research: Research Bulletin, 27(17), 1-13.

Sun Microsystems. (2008). Current Reality and Future Vision: Open Virtual Worlds. A Sun Services White Paper. http://www.sun.com/ service/projectdarkstar/index.jsp.

Second Life. http://www.secondlife.com

Thomas, Angela. (2007). Youth Online: Identity and Literacy in the Digital Age. New York: Peter Lang.

Second Life--North American User Statistics. SL Wikispaces. https://secondter.wikispaces. com/Second+Life--North+American+User+Sta tistics?responseToken=206937f26492c9a5fbe6 b2046cdc01f6 Sosnoski, J. J. (2006). Configuring AfricanAmerican Culture as Virtual Experiences of History. In J. J. Sosnoski, P. Harkin, & B. Carter (Eds.), Configuring History: Teaching the Harlem Renaissance through Virtual Reality Cityscapes (pp. 31-41). New York: Peter Lang. Sosnoski, J. J., & Portlock, T. (2006). Design for Narrating History in Virtual Reality Scenarios. In J. J. Sosnoski, P.Harkin, & B. Carter (Eds.), Configuring History: Teaching the Harlem Renaissance through Virtual Reality Cityscapes (pp. 61-68). New York: Peter Lang.

Van Eck, Richard. (2007). Digital Game-Based Learning: It’s Not Just the Digital Natives Who are Restless. In J. J. Hirschbuhl & J. Kelley, (Eds.), Annual Editions: Computers in Education. Twelfth Edition (pp. 55-63). Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yee, N. (2006). The Psychology of Massively Multi-User Online Role-Playing Games: Motivations, Emotional Investment, Relationships and Problematic Usage. In R. Schroeder & A. Axelsson (Eds.), Avatars at Work and Play: Collaboration and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments (pp. 187-207). London: Springer-Verlag.

This work was previously published in Information Technology and Constructivism in Higher Education: Progressive Learning Frameworks, edited by C. R. Payne, pp. 130-145, copyright 2009 by Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global).

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Chapter 54

Managing E-Relationships in a Supply Network Susanna Xin Xu National University of Ireland - Galway, Ireland Joe Nandhakumar University of Warwick, UK

ABSTRACT This chapter investigates the dynamics of the formation and transformation of electronic supply relationships (e-supply relationships) in the Chinese cultural, technological, and industrial network context. It focuses on a newly-formed large Chinese telecom company. The aim is to provide better insights into inter-organisational relationships (IORs) enabled by the application of newer types of Internet technology in different contexts, and to develop a new conceptual framework of e-supply relationships. In this research, the conceptualisation of the transformation process of e-supply relationships represents circuits of interactions between managerial actions and social structures, as well as the particular cultural and technological context within which the interactions take place.

INTRODUCTION According to Sain, Owens, and Hill (2004), eprocurement can be considered as “the electronic integration and management of all procurement activities, including purchase request, authorisation, ordering, delivery, and payment between a purchaser and a supplier.” E-procurement allows buyers to make their purchasing decisions while Internet technology enables suppliers to enjoy wider access to markets across the world (Dai & Kauffman, DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch054

2002). Therefore, the impact of emerging Internet technology on global competition is transforming the networked supply chain. It is claimed that supply chain management is becoming more important as a result of dynamic inter-organisational cooperation to maintain organisational global competitive advantages. Harland, Powell, Zheng, Caldwell, and Woerndl (2002) argue that the most critical partnerships to be developed and nurtured are those with suppliers and customers; the more a company can capitalise on its networks of suppliers and customers, the greater the chance it may gain a sustainable competitive advantage (Harland, 1996; Jarillo,

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Managing E-Relationships in a Supply Network

1993). However, technology is almost always seen as a “Western” concept (Shoib & Nandhakumar, 2003). Walsham (2000) argues that there is less emphasis on the process of globalisation and related development of Internet technology affecting the emerging economies in the world. Shoib and Nandhakumar (2003) state that global information systems (IS) are also new themes for research on emerging economies. It is widely recognised that the world is becoming increasingly interconnected in terms of its economic, political and cultural life (Walsham, 2000). Companies are required to work in global markets; however, they still need to deal with the uniqueness of local conditions. The idea that organisations do business differently as a result of their different cultures gives the reasons why the interactions and business relationships between organisations have different consequences. Therefore, this study aims to explore the cultural issues in managing e-supply relationships by presenting the findings from an in-depth case study researching the dynamics of e-relationships in a newly-formed large Chinese telecom enterprise— TelcoX (pseudonym). It explains the cultural differences between China and the UK, as well as how and why these differences are important in an electronic setting.

literature Review Since 1978, the Chinese government has maintained an “economic reform,” opening China to the outside world (She & Yu, 1993). In accordance with the requirement of the market and to facilitate its own development, China’s telecom industry has undergone a series of major reforms over the past two decades in terms of its development and transformation (Harwit, 1998). These reforms have enabled the industry to break centralised monopolisation, introduce competition in valueadded markets, and promote the rapid development of the entire industry. As seen, China is becoming more and more open to the outside world, and it

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has shown remarkable economic growth during the past few years. It is claimed that the Internet technologies present a great potential for network services in China. A new era of digital economy in China has led to a demand for telecom services (Chen, 1993; She & Yu, 1993). Thus, international business and electronic commerce (e-commerce) are the main driving forces for Internet technologies use in China. Increasingly more and more global organisations are forming business relationships with Chinese partners. These relationships enable the organisation to grow and develop, and are also a constraint on their development and activities (Ford, Berthon, Brown, Gadde, Hakansson, Naude, Ritter, & Snehota, 2002). However, the management of business relationships in Chinesebased business varies from Western practice (Pang, Roberts, & Sutton, 1998). Chinese cultural context is not represented well in the literature. This is a limitation for Western organisations to build business relationships with Chinese enterprises. A growing body of organisational studies with different perspectives has been contributed to the explanation and analysis of inter-organisational relationships (IORs) (Grandori & Soda, 1995; Oliver, 1990). Many of the earlier studies, from an economics view, are based on transaction cost economics (Williamson, 1975). Different conceptual models are developed and suggested as different ways for the management of business relationships (Cousins, 2001; Lamming, Cousins, & Notman, 1996). However, Cousins (2001) argues that a relationship should be viewed as an intra- and inter-organisational process which is referred to as a “quasi-firm” (Blois, 1972) sitting between two organisations (Ford et al., 2002; Lamming, 1993). Therefore, it is essential to develop a conceptual framework focusing on the dynamics of business relationship formation and transformation process. Moreover, there are only a few large-scale indepth case studies on Internet technology-enabled business relationships management (Kim, Lee, &

Managing E-Relationships in a Supply Network

Figure 1. Interaction model (Source: Håkansson, 1982)

Pan, 2002; Yao, Palmer, & Dresner, 2002). From an IS perspective, despite the recognition of the importance of the wider organisational and human issues associated with the IORs and Internet technology implementation, many of these studies still ignore aspects beyond the technological issues. These studies attempt to identify factors leading to the success or failure of enterprise-wide system implementation (Aladwani, 2001; Dong, 2000; Holland & Light, 1999a; Nah, Lau, & Kuang, 2001; Shanks, Parr, Hu, Corbitt, Thanasankit, & Seddon, 2000) or to propose new models to confirm Internet technology as one solution for organisational formation and transformation (AlMashari, 2000; Holland & Light, 1999b; Kelly, Holland, & Light, 1999). This chapter therefore seeks to address some of these limitations. This study focuses on the implementation of a customer service system (CSS), which is understood as a specific Internet technology enabling organisational relationships.

Theoretical foundation Due to the complexity and multidisciplinary nature of e-relationship as well as the wider network context, this research draws on a multiperspective theoretical foundation. As Boudreau and Robey (1999) argue the benefits of a multiperspective study of enterprise systems to develop a conceptual framework, in this study we adopt a similar approach by drawing on mixed theoretical perspectives: relationship, cultural, technological, and structurational perspectives. From a relationship perspective, the literature on Industrial Marketing and Purchasing group offers useful understandings on the nature of mutually-beneficial relationships by providing the interaction model (Håkansson, 1982) that characterised the short-term exchange episodes and long-term aspects of a relationship between buying and selling companies (see Figure 1). The interaction model is developed to understand the interaction process in dyadic relationships and the embeddedness of these in industrial networks that focus on long-term mutually-beneficial relationships and the adaptation processes

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that occur within them. It explains individuals involved in intra-organisational interactions which can radically change inter-organisational interactions. Organisational structures are modified by these interaction processes. In addition, the wider context including industrial and social environments influences a relationship. However, is there a lack of understanding on how individual interactions change the process of organisational interaction? How can the organisational structures be modified, and how can these wider contexts influence a relationship? From a cultural perspective, cultural influence on the management of business relationships is seen as a vital issue. Recently, there has been an increasing recognition that culture is playing a crucial role in the management of business relationship. It is claimed that different national cultures make different demands on organisations and offer them different opportunities (Gabriel, 1999). Walsham (2002) focuses on the link between structural contradiction and conflict, cultural heterogeneity, and the dynamic and emergent nature of culture. A deeper examination of cross-cultural working and IS context is provided in his study. In order to provide better insights into e-supply relationships in different cultural contexts, this study therefore draws on the cultural perspective to enrich the analysis in the specific context. From a technological perspective, there is no explanation on how technological issues influence the interaction process in the Interaction Model (Håkansson, 1982). However, technology context is another important perspective in studying Internet technology-enabled organisational relationships. There is a growing body of work which considers Internet technology as a social construction, designed and used by humans (e.g., Walsham, 1993). Orlikowski (2000) views technology in use as an emergent technological structure. These studies imply that it is very important to study the technological context in which the business relationships take place. In order to gain a better understanding on the

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interactions between humans and social structures (i.e., cultural and technological properties), analyse the detailed work patterns in different cultural contexts, and the dynamics and emergent nature of culture, this study draws on the theory of structuration. Structuration theory (Giddens, 1976, 1982, 1984) provides a meta-theoretical perspective to integrate the above views. Structuration theory can be viewed as a process-oriented theory that treats structures as both a product of and a medium of human action. Giddens (1982) emphasises that we actively shape the world we live in at the same time as it shapes us. This leads to the view that humans and the social structure are mutually interacting. Jones (1999) presents a comprehensive review of structuration theory in the IS literature contexts.

ReSeARCh AppROACh This study employed an interpretive case study approach (Klein & Myers, 1999; Orlikowski & Baroudi, 1991; Walsham, 1993). It mainly focused on the Customer Service Department (CSD) and also pursued some practices of national and TelcoX’s corporate cultures that have emerged under these particular circumstances. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews of key players, and observations of main customers and suppliers of TelcoX. Thirty-nine interviews of 60 to 90 minutes in length, in seven organisations, have been conducted with managers representing various processes including customer service management, information system management, and fulfilment and procurement management. The research commenced in the summer of 2002; most of the interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed, and then translated into English for analysis. The functions represented by those interviewed included customer service, service operation, network management, accounting, product development, and project procurement (see Table 1). They were the main actors and key members

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Table 1. Details of data collections (Semi-structured) Interviews Firms

Positions of Interviewees

Number of Interviews

TelcoX in China (including branch offices in big cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen)

Directors Senior Managers Managers GMs, Regional Office, CSSD Senior Manager, Regional Office, CSSD

10 9 6 3 1

Suppliers

Directors Senior Managers

23

In China

Directors

2

In the UK

Director Senior managers

12

Customers

Total

involved in the new system adoption and related business operation processes. Informal conversations and discussions with the interviewees and other staff of the companies were held during each visit. The lead researcher regularly visited TelcoX two to three times a week. These visits varied in duration; sometimes these lasted the entire day, and at the other times the visits were limited to two to four hours. The daily work and activities in the office were observed before, during, and/or after each interview. The lead researcher observed employees’ interactions and tried to “enter the world of organisational members” during their work as well as during breaks. She spent hours to observe employees’ communications via telephone, e-mail systems, CSS, as well as other IS. She also tried to make conversations and informal talks when observing employees who were talking to each other. Sometimes, she joined employees’ coffee and lunch breaks. Occasionally, she went to TelcoX’s office during weekends when employees needed to do some overtime work. We also use field notes (e.g., interview notes, observation notes, and conversation summaries), documents (e.g., e-mails, internal training materials, and internal operation documents) as well as related materials (e.g., posters, brochures, and news from Web sites) to verify the collected data, gain more details, and “behind the scenes” information in TelcoX’s wider network context.

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CASe DeSCRIpTION The Interaction environment According to the interaction model (Håkansson, 1982), one of the basic elements of this model is the environment within which interaction takes place. Market structure, dynamism, internationalisation, position in the manufacturing channel, and the social system are aspects in this wider context of an interaction environment. In this study, the interaction environment includes international, national, social, cultural, technological, industrial, and organisational structures. Internationally, increasing customer demand, complexity of services, e-business which is enabled by the application of newer type of ITs, outsourcing, and globalisation are key drivers for changing webs of relationships dynamically in the supply networks (Harland, Lamming, & Cousins, 1999). The rapid growth of China’s telecom, after its major reforms and restructuring since the late 1990’s, is also driven partly by the emergence of competition in the global telecom market. As a result, industrial innovations and implementations of new strategies in Chinese enterprises for gaining competitive advantages are required. The telecom enterprises have been developing new ideas on market competition through the innovations in customer service and cooperation between suppliers, customers, and competitors. An increasing number of enterprises are paying more attention to exploring new business oppor-

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tunities while meeting their existing customers’ needs; simultaneously, they are developing winwin business relationships with their business partners in order to effectively utilise the resources and investments, to develop national competitive advantages in this industry, and to implement strategies for competing globally. The turbulent environments are becoming more common. Terreberry (1968) concludes that the evolution of the organisational environments is characterised by a change in the important constituents of the environment. Along with the high market competition and the rapid changes of environment, the telecom enterprises begin to realise the importance of leverage in different functions through cooperation between and across business units and departments within an organisation. Some large Chinese telecom enterprises adopted new IS such as CRM, ERP that enabled quick responses to customers, and further strategy formulation. These traditional Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are transferring to the new type of enterprises that are enabled by the application of emerging ITs. Over time, new business models influence Chinese business behaviour, which has an effect on building relationships.

China’s Telecom Industry in the Global Competitive environment Since a supply push created by emerging ITs entering the marketplace, the introduction of local services competition and the explosion of newer types of ITs has led to heightened interests from investors. China’s telecom has become a highly dynamic industry during the two decades of reform and structural changes. As a result, the telecom industry has shown an economic growth rate in the mid-to-late 1990s that few other industries could match. The current situation about the fast-changing China telecom market offers exciting business opportunities, including China’s electronic IT industry, the Internet, and e-commerce in China.

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Despite this significant progress, there are a number of difficulties that China’s emerging large firms have encountered, such as: China’s telecom firms have the difficulty of a much less transparent and more bureaucratic background of the particular domestic environment in which they operated than their international, majority state-owned competitors (Nolan, 2001). The related policies and control standards must be further systematised in order to meet international requirements. In 2001, China’s World Trade Organisation (WTO) accession changed the scenario; the managing systems of telecom are still being perfected. WTO membership provides great opportunities for foreign operators to take part in the operation of basic and value-added telecom services in China. At the same time, China’s domestic telecom supervising and managing systems are confronted by more challenges along with opening to the outside world gradually. Even more importantly, the global business environment dramatically shapes the nature of Chinese enterprises’ corporate culture. The way of establishing supply relationships with Chinese firms both domestically and internationally are radically different from Western practices (Pang et al., 1998). The roots residing in traditional Chinese values, particularly Confucian (Alon & Lu, 2004; Leung, 2004), influence the way of doing business in China as well as pose even greater challenges for China’s aspiring global engagement. The young Chinese companies like TelcoX stand very much at the confluence of Western and traditional Chinese culture values. Their size, mode of operation, international exposure, and adoption of modern Western practices impel them away from their traditional cultural values. It is a newer organisational form that is becoming more prevalent across China as the forces of globalisation gather momentum.

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Organisational Context: TelcoX TelcoX is one of the largest telecom carriers in China which provides a full spectrum of services and solutions to meet the broadband telecom needs of both businesses and individuals. In mid 1999, TelcoX was founded by four bodies that are affiliated with the Chinese government. With regional offices in main cities such as Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, TelcoX was poised to benefit from the rapid growth of China’s telecom and Internet sectors. TelcoX merged with another large Chinese state-owned telecom company (Company A) in 2002. A subsidiary of TelcoX, providing comprehensive services to international carriers and enterprises outside China, was established in late 2003. As one of the major subsidiaries of TelcoX, this entity executed TelcoX’s national strategy of “global expansion” and formed joint ventures and partnerships with foreign companies. Its responsibilities mainly lay in the operation and management of the international network asset of TelcoX and the operation of all domestic and overseas international services targeted at international operators and corporate customers. It was the first and sole domestic telecom enterprise that was dedicated to the development of all international businesses, which was also a key step in institutional reforms in China’s telecom industry. Currently, business relationships with dozens of first-class operators throughout the world have been established by TelcoX. People educated in Western countries such as the United States of America, with the experience of working in multinational companies, formed the senior management team. There were no non-Chinese staff working in this organisation, but senior managers came from various backgrounds. A few of them had the experience of working in the West or in foreign enterprises. For those people, TelcoX emphasised “ownership” and adopted Western-like professional working styles. However, those who had

been working in Chinese SOEs for many years were used to following the typical Chinese working style, that is, members exist in a network of relationships and normally conduct work activities together, although individual work tasks are differentiated (Pang et al., 1998). They put an emphasis on collectivism that projects a preference for group decision-making and relationships. This working style reflects the willingness of subordinates to depend on the decisions and instructions of their superiors (Hofstede, 1991).

The Adaptation of the Customer Service System The Customer Service Department (CSD) was providing all of TelcoX’s product users with preand post-sale customer services. Adhering to the service idea of “at the speed of light,” and “leading in service,” TelcoX was following “customer first” as its guiding principle to provide customers with first-class and individualised services. In early 2001 the CSD director initiated the idea of a “distributed call centre” with the support of TelcoX’s vice president. The proposed system, then called CSS system, was developed for tracking customer calls and providing better services to all TelcoX’s product users. The new CSS system supported more than 30 call centres and sub-centres in China. There were about 200 customer service representatives (CSRs) and nearly 200 public switched telephone networks (PSTNs) to cover cities all over China. Through this system, not only could various local customer service demands be handled, but it also had a unified workload and standardised data management functions. During the new call centre development, CSD people collected many detailed cases of Western companies and kept developing those cases. The newly-developed call centre was operated with a practical workflow, strict service quality standards, and a comprehensive management system. There were about 70 people in the call centre, and with the exception of a small number of second line

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Figure 2. Emergence of supply relationships of TelcoX

support from CSD, most of them were the firstline CSRs that were outsourced and provided by Supplier 1 (see Figure 2). The call centre was divided into four teams: Customer calls went to the first team of CSRs who were rarely away from their desks and solved customer calls with brief responses on the spot. Their jobs typically involved customer inquiries, complaints handling, and call transfers to relevant functions. The second team was for general support. They helped to handle those customer inquiries and complaints transferred by the CSRs that needed coordination and solutions from related internal departments, and then delivered solutions to customers via phone and/or e-mail systems. The third team’s main responsibilities were for handling quality control of customer calls as well as customer satisfaction surveys. The fourth team was for the CSRs’ training and technical support.

Supply Relationships establishments With the increasing demands for services from customers, TelcoX came to realise that the existing customer service model should be replaced by a

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new one based on the idea of customer relationship management (CRM). As shown in Figure 2, two American enterprises, Supplier 2 and Supplier 3, were selected as the new call centre system providers. Besides system support, the CSRs who communicated with customers directly played a very important role in the call centre. It was believed that only qualified people with certain knowledge and quicker reactions as well as insights could meet these requirements differing from those in the former call centres. These CSRs were trained with the idea of CRM and the knowledge of advanced systems. Therefore, Supplier 1, an American joint venture (JV) company, was chosen for the call centre outsourcing service. With the CSS support, TelcoX could provide better services to their customers. Those enterprises with nationwide businesses in China such as banking, finance, stock market, and insurance sectors, and some international telecom carriers (e.g., Customer 1, see Figure 2) expanding their businesses in China treated TelcoX as an important business partner, rather than simply a service provider. The use of CSS and the needs of TelcoX’s customers also determined the internal work

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processes. The Service Delivery Department, through the cooperation with CSD, fulfilled a business requirement from the International Business Unit, which took care of large accounts and telecom carriers. The Network Management and Maintenance Department was responsible for information networks support and any technical problems. People who had clear job allocations and responsibilities built up communications in a process of cooperation, which was created for both internal and external customer services in TelcoX, as Figure 2 illustrates.

ANAlySIS AND DISCUSSION The above case description provides an overview of the emergence of e-supply relationships in TelcoX. In our analysis, we interpret the behaviours reported in the case study using the theoretical lens described above. The data analysis involved a critical examination of large amounts of qualitative data while simultaneously allowing the concepts to emerge from the empirical data.

Relationship perspective: Dynamics of Interactions From a relationship perspective, the interaction model (Hakansson, 1982) emphasises that the environment (wider context) must be considered when analysing the interaction between a buying and a selling firm (IMP, 1997). In the study of TelcoX, employees reflexively monitored their environment and acted accordingly. As seen, China’s telecom market increasingly consists of different types of organisations, for example, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), JVs, and multinational companies. They became important actors in this environment that was comprised of national resources, investments, increased economies of scale, and developments of Internet technologies. As reviewed earlier, in

order to achieve a high level performance, TelcoX’s leaders decided to implement IS, such as CSS, as their first step of strategy executions. To execute the CRM strategy, CSD people explored their surroundings and engaged in directed and undirected searches at the early stage of a new call centre establishment. The managers and team leaders overcame their frustration by exploring their understandings of their technical ability, their service patterns, and the characteristics of their resources. At the same time, they fully considered the company’s further developments in terms of system plan and product selection. This was critical for meeting increasing customers’ demands. Finally, they established a call centre with a national integration distributional customer service system in TelcoX. For example, to design a new call centre, CSD people were involved in customer surveys and knowledge search about how to set up a call centre. The CSD director expressed: We cannot copy the Western countries’ designs directly. We have our own special national conditions. China is broad and there are many different dialects and customs. The development of economy is imbalanced from place to place… Some Western companies’ successful experiences were good examples for them to increase their understanding. However, copies of other cases did not have any help in TelcoX’s own call centre setup. To implement the new system, job reallocation to a new call centre was needed. The CSD director explained: For the call centre, business units didn’t know this system very much at first, they thought customer inquiries should come to sales people directly (not business units). But, we know it’s impossible to work for 7 days, 24 hours by individuals; we must set up a system. Through a system, we can meet such requirements.

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At the same time, managers were concerned about the impact CSS might have in reallocating jobs and work processes in TelcoX. To manage the impact, CSD people did a “concrete” analysis of the current situation. They collected detailed cases from other companies and kept discussing these cases. Several months later, they worked closer with business units than before. The manager said: At first they (business units) doubt what the call centre will be? How can we set it up with nothing? …From ‘sit and watch’, then to ‘understand’ till ‘support’, we are recognised and highly expected now. In the past, sometimes, CSD lost customer inquiries or problems during their handling due to non-systematic follow-ups, which was called the “casual way” within TelcoX. In contrast, CSS with the functions of customer call handling, including customer inquiries, checking, fault reporting and customer complaints, and data recording, dispatching, and reporting, which was called “manageable co-handling,” helped CSD make progress with monitoring and coordinating. It was faster than before; cycle time came down from days to hours. It was seen as a more controlled way to handle customer issues and a more managed way for data reporting. Consequently, customers found it more convenient to reach TelcoX than before. Their business ability improved as a result of the changes in internal process that were based on customer survey. Finally, they came to know what they should do and why as well as what they would like to do instead of what they have to do. The CSD manager recalled: It was a nice memory. We worked very hard and blindly at first. Just like kids who try to write words nicely, but they put extra energy and great efforts into silly words. Like the beginners who play Shaolin Gongfu [a Chinese Kongfu, a form of boxing]… very hard, extra energy, great efforts…

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This experience led them to know that a “Chinese-characterised” call centre suitable in China’s conditions was required. Later, acceptance of others’experiences and a better understanding of their environment helped a new call centre design as well as development. The better understanding of their environment also helped employees to manipulate their environment and enabled them to acquire experience and then to take action for altering their environment. Clearly, in this study, the development of relationships between TelcoX and its business partners were mainly triggered by organisational problem-solving and new business opportunities exploring before, during, and after the implementation and use of CSS. The interactions between the human and their environment promoted these relationships within and across TelcoX. In this study, it can be seen that the improvement of TelcoX’s performance was partly because of the relationships with its business partners. These selected suppliers and cooperative customers were very experienced Western companies having professional working styles and advanced management IS. In addition, their corporate cultures were one of the main factors in influencing the way of doing business in TelcoX. Over time, TelcoX, a newly-formed Chinese company, was shaped by this environment. From a relationship perspective, the dynamics of organisational interactions as well as the interactions between organisational members and their environment, affected human intentions in developing their business relationships in different ways. Firstly, a closer relationship between organisational members (e.g., leaders and followers, suppliers and customers) created more opportunities to produce emerging context in which the short-term exchange episodes in a relationship and the long-term aspects of that relationship were embedded. In a wider context, this embeddedness of relationships increased the knowledge and experience for members to reproduce or change their existing context gradually. Secondly, in a dynamic environment, the degree

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of dynamism within a relationship and, in the wider context, influenced organisational members to take action in developing relationships. At the same time, these actions contributed to the dynamics of interactions. For instance, TelcoX’s people developed their understanding of the socio-cultural realities shaping their daily work and through which they would be increasingly able to transform those realities. Such interactions challenged their existing structures. Over time, TelcoX people changed their environment including social, cultural, industrial, and technological structures, both consciously and unconsciously. This process of dynamism also can be illustrated from the emergence of culture. From a cultural perspective, the next section will further explore this issue.

Cultural perspective: Dynamics of Culture TelcoX had a mix of traditional Chinese and Western cultures that made it different from the more typical Chinese SOEs. This unique cultural context seemed to have a positive influence on the evolution of e-relationships. TelcoX was founded by four bodies that are affiliated with the Chinese government, and its regional structure provided a degree of decentralisation for operating units that is not common in more typical Chinese businesses, as described by Redding (1984) and Whitley (1992). With the use of CSS and other IS within TelcoX, the process management and cross-functional business units began to show a degree of differentiation that was rare in traditional Chinese SOEs (Westwood & Kirkbride, 1998). In the traditional SOEs, Chinese management philosophy centres on people (Bond & Hwang, 1986; Bond, 1991). Much of the Chinese cultural values seem to have come from the teaching of Confucius (Alon & Lu, 2004; Leung, 2004). Use of the CSS and other IS helped TelcoX to provide quality services for meeting new requirements of customers, to lead cultural diversity,

and to form e-relationships. These relationships were different from traditional ones. Traditionally, Chinese people establish their relationships via “guanxi” (a Chinese term) that has become a familiar term among those involved with Chinese society. Guanxi refers to a special kind of relationship, characterised by implicit rules, both of obligation and reciprocity (Luo, 1997; Yeung & Tung, 1996). It is briefly translated as human relationships or personal connections on which an individual can draw to secure resources or advantages when doing business as well as in their social life (Davies, Leung, Luk, & Wong, 1995). With one fifth of the world’s population and complex society, Chinese people had developed guanxi to obtain everyday necessities, housing, and goods that were in shortage in the past and were also major factors motivating the efforts to form guanxi in China (Brunner & Wang, 1988; Buttery & Leung, 1998; Pye, 1986). More importantly, guanxi fulfilled the Confucian ideal of reciprocity (favour-exchanging) and helped to communicate and provide for assistance when problems arise (Pye, 1986). According to Pye (1986), with its philosophical and moral support from a Confucian ethic, the right guanxi helps to maintain harmony in the Chinese system of doing things. As Luo (1997) argues, guanxi are delicate fibres woven into every Chinese individual’s social life, and therefore, into many aspects of the Chinese society. Ahmed and Li (1996) explain guanxi as fundamental in directing social and personal behaviour in China, referring to it as the relationship between people or organisations which implicitly indicates assurance, understanding, and mutual obligation. In China, therefore, the use of guanxi is the quickest and surest route to accomplishment. “Who one knows matters, rather than what one knows” (Pang et al., 1998, p. 276). A traditional Chinese guanxi is built on interpersonal connections and particularistic criteria, which attach more importance to personal relationships. It refers to relationships between people and can be

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applied to family members, kinship, friendships, educational ties, bureaucratic linkages, and so forth relations. A direct particularistic criterion is the assumption that the two individuals share some common experiences or heritage, such as two classmates who were at the same university. Those relations may lead to business relationships as guanxi plays an important role in helping parties to gain a commercial foothold. Guanxi is dynamic and transferable (Luo, 1997, 2000; Pearce & Robinson, 2000). For instance, in this study, if Supplier 3 had guanxi with Supplier 2, and Supplier 2 had guanxi with TelcoX, then Supplier 3 could be introduced to TelcoX by Supplier 2. Thus, guanxi could be established by bridging the gaps of personal connections, which can bring potential partners for an organisation as well. The application of guanxi at the organisational level has become increasingly pervasive and intensive in China in the early 1980’s (Luo, 2000). It requires great effort to maintain a lifelong relationship once a guanxi has been achieved. However, a guanxi at an organisational level would be lost when an individual, who brought this guanxi connection, leaves. This largely explains the difference between guanxi and Westernised business relationships. Interviews on Western working style in this study reflected that no personal feeling or interest was involved in the Westernised business relationship. Western management culture seems to have a strong impact on the development of relationships; the establishment of business relationships is simply based on business needs in the West. As the interviewees from Western countries said: …It is purely working relationships…Personally, I think there is no such kind of personal relationship involved in business among English people. It is a friendship. I also try to manage selecting suppliers and balancing the business and personal relations during work very carefully…I make sure all suppliers are selected based on criteria (the Contract Negotiator of Customer 2, a UK company)

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We generally maintain very formal relationships with suppliers. We send them our formal contracts that are very clear, which are good for the suppliers. And then, when they complete their work to our satisfaction, we pay their invoices so they get their remuneration. We try to pay them on time; we don’t delay for a long time because that causes a bad relationship, especially for the small companies… we don’t want any work delay either… (The Logistics/Service Manager of Customer 2, a UK company) The interviewees from Western countries also expressed their concerns on the practices of personal relationships. If they accepted the invitations of social activities, they must make sure to keep their principles in balancing the personal and business relationships. Otherwise, it would cause unfair business handling, although sometimes they might not want to be involved in any social activities more than going out for a drink or a meal. Moreover, reports to their bosses about what they were going to do were needed. Since a guanxi is built up normally through social activities, such as inviting people to dinner or gift-giving which equals to corruption in the view of some Westerners, the establishment of guanxi is often portrayed as an old-fashioned way of doing business. I would argue that this overemphasis on the gift-giving element of guanxi is inaccurate and offensive to Chinese traditions. Although the legal system in China has not been well-developed historically, Chinese people usually use their guanxi to resolve disputes and conflicts instead of using China’s laws, rules, and regulations. While business relationships have developed in recent years, the new practices emerged through new experiences gained in business developments in some new Chinese enterprises such as TelcoX. While business relationships developed in recent years, the new practices emerged through new experiences gained in some new Chinese enterprises such as TelcoX, even though there were still some of TelcoX’s people who believed that this

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approach was a much more effective and efficient way to establish relationships. Therefore, guanxi, an important factor in relationships in the Chinese culture, attached importance to both personal and business relationships in China. It could not work if it was abolished completely. It was also not suitable to apply the foreign experiences in China without considering the cultural context.

emerging Concept of the Guanxi-platform The main actors who were interviewed, who were involved in the processes of implementation and use of CSS, indicated that the cultivation of “guanxi” at an individual or organisational level both within and between organisations was very important. As seen frequently, Western enterprises and JVs expanded their businesses in China, and some foreigners could speak Chinese fluently, but they could not understand Chinese culture very well and sometimes made wrong decisions and judgments. The director of Supplier 3 told an interesting story of his American boss: When my boss was in Singapore, he went to a Chinese school, hoping to learn something about China. But actually, the teacher did not know what had happened in China in recent years. My boss was told that to establish relations with Chinese you must invite them to a dinner. Therefore, my boss always asked me whether I had invited my customers to a dinner. I felt very funny and told him that this was very old traditional practice from many years ago. That was so-called ‘guanxi’. Now, it is different. We prefer providing customers with the best solutions, resources, and services to wasting time at the dinner table. It is essential for us to establish and develop the relations with customers by full support. Success achieved by customers will strengthen our relations with them. Customers’ satisfaction will help maintain the customer relationship.

This story reflects the idea of “sensation investment” in building a relationship. From the long-term strategic view, Chinese enterprises build up solid foundations with potential customers in order to gain business opportunities which are likely to emerge in the future. Therefore, to achieve this goal it is necessary to have various social activities and functions, through which people can make each other’s acquaintance, promote mutual understanding, and strengthen friendly connections. We found that the way to establish relationships was different from the traditional way of guanxi. In this research, we refer to the new way of practice as “guanxi-platform.” Guanxiplatform is “a scientific platform embodying value, equality, and respect.” It was invisible on both individual and organisational levels. Differing from the traditional practice of guanxi, the new practices are transparent of guanxi-platform above board. These new practices have ensured that the cooperation and competition among parties had “healthy” relationships with others, for example, equal opportunities and fair competition. These healthy relationships enabled parties to grow and develop, while at the same time constraining development and their activities. Although there were differences in the practices, there were also similarities. Instead of personal interests or favours that were the main concerns in building up guanxi, the directors from customer companies expressed their ideas in establishing guanxi-platform: …In today’s business environment, good products are essential for building up relationships (guanxiplatform)… (Director of Customer 1)

Companies operate in a continuously perfect system which is a prerequisite of the establishment of relationships (guanxi-platform). (Director of Customer 2)

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However, the value of personal feelings in the traditional concept of guanxi was not completely denied in the new understanding of guanxi-platform. Guanxi-platform could meet the individual’s requirements on personal relationships development. People held principles, and flexibilities were allowed only when it did not go against the principles, although all these relationships of guanxi-platform were restricted by the laws and regulations. That is to say, personal feelings cannot be ignored in both traditional guanxi and new guanxi-platform. Therefore, various cultures and working styles existed within TelcoX (although they were originally Chinese) and in its wider context, cultural diversity was likely to persist. It contributed to TelcoX’s corporate culture that integrated subcultures into the mainstream in a harmonious way and also reproduced the new organisational structure as well as network structure. In this particular cultural context, new practices emerged that represented the dynamic nature of culture. The emerging concept, guanxi-platform, is built on both personal connections and business needs. To establish a guanxi-platform, it was necessary for TelcoX and its business partners to have various social and business activities, through which new knowledge and experience could be gained. Besides these normal channels, systematic management was a new practice of a guanxi-platform in TelcoX, as well as organisations across China. Stripped of its emotional content, there are similarities between guanxi, guanxi-platform, and Westernised business relationships. The mutual interests or business needs of both parties to the relationships are the common elements. Thus, when dealing with English business people, Chinese people need to be aware that English people do not come over and try not to be influenced by giving and receiving gifts. English people are very careful and try to avoid involving deep personal relationships in business relationships. Also, they feel comfortable with the certainty that enforceable commitments place on them and their partners.

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From a cultural perspective, findings from this study indicate that relationships at both individual and organisational levels were crucial for developing and maintaining e-supply relationships. As the existing cultural context (e.g., a mix of traditional Chinese cultural values and Western management culture) influenced organisational members to form their relationships, these relationships enabled the organisation to develop, and also placed a constraint on that development. As a result, the existing cultural context is changing. Over time, the emerging cultural context (e.g., a fusion of Chinese and Western culture) is produced through mixed practices (e.g., guanxi, guanxi-platform, and Westernised business relationships). It can be seen that the formation and transformation of both personal and business relationships were enacted by the dynamics of the cultural context.

Technological perspective: Dynamics of InternetTechnology-in-Use With regard to Internet-technology-in-use, organisational members’ actions reinforced and redefined certain structures by using Internet technologies. It assumed that the existing technological structure was being shaped both within TelcoX and its wider context. In this case, the implementation of CSS and the development of the call centre were the results of coordinated departmental work. The technologicallyconstructed nature of CSS representing certain interpretative schemes of TelcoX’s departments was perceived as “manageable co-handling” by the CSD team. TelcoX’s leaders provided an impetus for change through the use of Internet technologies. Changes in the CSD’s job flow, TelcoX’s work process, and the resulting consequences were triggered by CSS implementation. Use of CSS and other IS in TelcoX provided new structures which were shaped by this change process. The emerging structure was the result of previous actions, which enabled and constrained

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managers’ actions for forming and transformation of e-supply relationships. In the process of collaboration between departments and business units, a number of discussions were involved in problem-solving. This iterative process of discussion drew attention to the elements of change in the mutual shaping of the technological structure. The constraints of working within the existing technological structure reflected actors’ understandings and interpretations of the use of Internet technologies. Changes in the existing structure were experienced in different ways by various individuals, groups, and organisations during the use of Internet technologies. It had shown different perceptions of Internet-technology-in-use over this process of collaboration. For TelcoX and its suppliers, it can be seen that promotion and the use of Internet technology could radically change TelcoX’s work process, provide quality customer services, as well as improve business effectiveness. It was also seen as an organisational strategic choice through introducing technological structural changes to improve their work environments. In this study, this was recognised as a work process or new channels of communications in which existing technological constraints were linked to the emerging structure. Over time, a new technological structure had emerged in TelcoX that represented the dominant view of the employees. Within the constraints some of the conflicting views had not been presented, because those views were not possible to further develop the consequence of previous actions that were often reconstructed to the existing structure. The emerging structure downplayed conflicts while simultaneously applauding success and emphasising collaboration. This ongoing dynamic process both enabled and constrained collaboration between and across TelcoX in its wider context. By engaging in this process, individuals and/or organisations redefined organisational structures and opened up new possibilities and options in the use of Internet technologies.

In this study, the formation and transformation of e-supply relationships were followed by a series of technological changes at TelcoX as well as its business partners. TelcoX seemed to be able to respond quickly to these changes. The results of this study show that managerial actions in developing and maintaining e-supply relationships were strongly linked to these changes. These e-supply relationships were enacted in the dynamic technological context by managerial actions that significantly changed the existing technological structure.

Structurational perspective: Structuring e-Supply Relationships As managerial actions on the use of Internet technologies reinforced the technological structure in TelcoX, from the point of view of the users, the adaptation of CSS and other IS in TelcoX was seen as partly driven by the advances of these Internet technologies. Orlikowski et al. (1995) argue that the explicit contextualisation of Internet technologies and the patterns of use of these technologies facilitate organisations to use these technologies in changing their organisational forms over time. This section, from a structurational perspective, continues to address the dynamics of Internettechnology-in-use during e-supply relationship formation and transformation in TelcoX. Giddens (1979, 1984) proposes the notion of structure (or structural properties of social systems) as the set of enacted rules and resources that mediate social action through three modalities: facilities, norms, and interpretive schemes. In this sense, TelcoX’s employees drew on their knowledge of their previous actions and the situation at hand, the available facilities (e.g., organisational resource, Internet technology), and the norms that informed their ongoing practices, and then applied such knowledge, facilities, and norms to structure their current actions. In doing so, they recursively reconstituted the rules and resources that structured their actions.

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In the early stage of the TelcoX establishment, CSD people were working on stand-alone PCs with simple applications to handle and record their customer calls. But those non-systematic follow-ups that were called the “casual way” within TelcoX did not help them to provide quality services. Senior managers decided to implement the new system of CSS. That was what they had experienced in call centre development. By using call centre and CSS, effective collaboration and communication, both internally and externally, were enabled. Since human interactions with Internet technologies are typically recurrent, so that even as users constitute a technology-in-use through their present use of a technology, their actions are, at the same time, shaped by the previous technologies-in-use that they have enacted in the past (Orlikowski, 2000). Employees’ knowledge and skills in the use of CSS had been exposed over the years, which influenced the construction of CSS in TelcoX’s branch offices all over China. This reflected the view of Orlikowski (2000, p. 410): “ongoing enactment of a technology-in-use reinforces it, so that it becomes regularised and reutilised, an expedient and habitual response to repeated use of a technology within the daily exigencies of organisational life.” TelcoX’s people also drew on their knowledge of and experiences with their institutional contexts, that is, cultural and technological, in which they were exchanging and interacting. In this way, employees’ use of Internet technologies became structured by these experiences, knowledge, meanings, norms, and relationships. In practice, such structuring enacted TelcoX’s emerging set of rules and resources, which then served to structure future use as employees continued to interact with the Internet technologies in their recurrent practices. Thus, over time, employees constituted and reconstituted a structure of Internet-technologyin-use in which e-supply relationships were formed and transformed.

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A Synthesised framework on e-Supply Relationships in the Network Context The analysis of the data from a relationship, a cultural, a technological, and a structurational perspective indicates that the implementation of CSS and other IS in TelcoX helped to form organisational business relationships. Two interacting elements that were shaping the transformation of e-supply relationships in the network context of TelcoX were identified: managerial actions and social structures. Managerial action was perceived as planned and unplanned actions taken by managers involved in their leadership behaviours and organisational interactions. The managerial actions and changes in communication patterns were particularly looked at with respect to, and in response by, the implementation and use of CSS, and corporate and wider cultural contexts of TelcoX. Social structures included both technologies in use (e.g., use of CSS and other emerging IS that enabled and constrained interactions) and social, cultural, and industrial contexts that were reinforced and transformed by such interactions. Changes in the CSD’s work process and the consequences were triggered by the new CSS system design and implementation. Use of CSS by employees and adoption of other IS in TelcoX provided a new set of features which both enable and constrain managers’ planned and unplanned actions for forming e-relationships. By drawing on Giddens (1984) and Orlikowski (2000), Figure 3 depicts this process of e-relationship formation that can be seen as circuits of interactions between human actions and social structures. As illustrated in Figure 3, the existing social structures (e.g., culture, technology, and relationships) influenced managerial actions in building relationships both within and across organisations; in turn, managerial actions reproduced existing social structures, or produced new social structures (e.g., new cultural context,

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Figure 3. Interaction between human actions and social structures

Internet technology, and e-relationships). As these e-relationships were enacted as emerging social structures by managerial actions, at the same time, these actions were shaped by these constituents. Figure 4 presents the links between the cultural and the technological perspectives by adopting structuration theory as a meta-theory. The linkage of the understandings from a relationship, a cultural, a technological, and a structurational perspective strengthens the theoretical foundation in this study. Firstly, the combination of the four bodies of knowledge helped to establish a broader view on organisational relationships development. These key themes represent an important contribution in influencing e-supply relationship formation and transformation. Secondly, the emerging concept of “guanxi-platform” emphasises the importance of the Chinese cultural norms in the dynamics of e-supply relationships. Thirdly, a number of ideas and views from previous studies have been confirmed in this study. The findings suggest that it is important to young Chinese companies such as TelcoX to improve organisational responsiveness to the environment. Fourthly, since this study has

been undertaken to examine the cultural issues associated with e-supply relationships formation and transformation in Chinese context, it contributes to the literature by offering an exploratory study and strengths cultural studies. In particular, this study pays attention to the socially-constructed reality, to the symbolic significance of some aspects of organisation, as well as to systems of meaning and interpretive schemes. The findings imply that the extent and effectiveness of the use of Internet technologies is the result of several issues, which can have both direct and indirect influences on e-supply relationship management. It suggests that organisations should consider its wider context when doing business in the competitive global market. The effective communications between suppliers and customers, both within and across organisations, are critical for the organisational development and the improvement of the performance of the entire supply chain, which reinforces the wider context structuring and restructuring. At the same time, the produced and reproduced contexts shape and are shaped by the human actions and interactions with the social structures.

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Figure 4. Links between four theoretical perspectives

CONClUSION China, a large emerging economy, is becoming one of the most attractive economic markets in the world. As seen, its future is closely tied to the developments of its key industries, such as telecom and information technology (IT), which are also considered the forces to sustain future economic growth. By joining the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Internet-related businesses allow more flexibility of foreign investments in China. These also create and foster China’s advantages in global competition. The emergence and employment of e-commerce emphasise the necessity of developing and maintaining international business relationships in China as well. This study focuses on the dynamics of e-supply relationships in a Chinese telecom enterprise by using an interpretive case study approach. The findings indicate that new Chinese telecom enterprises seem to have a higher tolerance for cultural differences and a willingness to accept alternative viewpoints, but when different national and industrial factors are taken into account, wide variations exist in developing and maintaining business relationships. In particular, the key variation with respect to e-supply relationships is rooted in the Chinese cultural norms of “guanxi”

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that have important impacts on the success of the telecom enterprises in the ever-changing Chinese environment. Through an illustrative example, this chapter presents collaborated and coordinated practices in TelcoX’s daily work that allow the dynamism of the e-supply relationships formation and transformation to be discovered. In this study, the effects of the dynamics of interactions, the dynamics of culture, as well as the dynamics of Internet-technology-in-use are investigated. Having drawn on structuration theory (Giddens, 1976, 1982, 1984) as a meta-theory, this data analysis of a conceptual synthesis is presented in Figure 3. The empirical understanding generated in this context has implications for both theories on relationship studies and managing organisational inter-dependency of IT-based business relations. In this research, the conceptualisation of the emergence of e-supply relationships in TelcoX represents circuits of interactions between managerial actions and social structures, and the particular cultural and technological context within which the interactions take place. The reciprocal interaction offers insights into the role of national and corporate cultures both inside and between organisations in shaping e-supply relationships in this specific context. It explains the cultural differ-

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ences between China and the UK in establishing relationships. Findings of this study emphasise that these cultural differences are very important issues for studies in an electronic setting. The empirical understanding generated in this context has implications for managing organisational inter-dependency of Internet technologyenabled business relations. For managers, these insights not only open up cultural aspects of IORs but also suggest that the emergence of different cultural norms may accompany the enactment of e-IORs. These insights would be particularly valuable for Western organisations which are forming alliances with Chinese enterprises (Xu & Nandhakumar, 2003a; Xu & Nandhakumar, 2003b; Xu, Harland, & Nandhakumar, 2004).

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This work was previously published in E-Procurement in Emerging Economies: Theory and Cases, edited by A. Pani and A. Agrahari, pp. 127-160, copyright 2007 by IGI Publishing (an imprint of IGI Global).

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Chapter 55

A Study of Friendship Networks and Blogosphere Nitin Agarwal Arizona State University, USA Huan Liu Arizona State University, USA Jianping Zhang MITRE Corporation, USA

ABSTRACT In Golbeck and Hendler (2006), authors consider those social friendship networking sites where users explicitly provide trust ratings to other members. However, for large social friendship networks it is infeasible to assign trust ratings to each and every member so they propose an inferring mechanism which would assign binary trust ratings (trustworthy/non-trustworthy) to those who have not been assigned one. They demonstrate the use of these trust values in e-mail filtering application domain and report encouraging results. Authors also assume three crucial properties of trust for their approach to work: transitivity, asymmetry, and personalization. These trust scores are often transitive, meaning, if Alice trusts Bob and Bob trusts Charles then Alice can trust Charles. Asymmetry says that for two people involved in a relationship, trust is not necessarily identical in both directions. This is contrary to what was proposed in Yu and Singh (2003). They assume symmetric trust values in the social friendship network. Social networks allow us to share experiences, thoughts, opinions, and ideas. Members of these networks, in return experience a sense of community, a feeling of belonging, a bonding that members matter to one another and their needs will be met through being together. Individuals expand their social networks, convene groups of like-minded individuals and nurture discussions. In recent years, computers and the World Wide Web technologies have pushed social networks to a whole new level. It has made possible for individuals to connect with each other beyond geographical barriers in a “flat” world. The widespread awareness and pervasive usability of the social networks can be partially attributed to Web 2.0. Representative interaction Web services of social networks are social DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch055

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A Study of Friendship Networks and Blogosphere

friendship networks, the blogosphere, social and collaborative annotation (aka “folksonomies”), and media sharing. In this work, we briefly introduce each of these with focus on social friendship networks and the blogosphere. We analyze and compare their varied characteristics, research issues, state-of-the-art approaches, and challenges these social networking services have posed in community formation, evolution and dynamics, emerging reputable experts and influential members of the community, information diffusion in social networks, community clustering into meaningful groups, collaboration recommendation, mining “collective wisdom” or “open source intelligence” from the exorbitantly available user-generated contents. We present a comparative study and put forth subtle yet essential differences of research in friendship networks and Blogosphere, and shed light on their potential research directions and on cross-pollination of the two fertile domains of ever expanding social networks on the Web.

INTRODUCTION For many years psychologists, anthropologists and behavioral scientists have studied the societal capabilities of humans. They present several studies and results that substantiate the fact that humans like engaging themselves in complex social relationships and admire being a part of social groups. People form communities and groups for the same reasons to quench the thirst for social interaction. Often these groups have like minded members or people with similar interests who discuss various issues including politics, economics, technology, life style, entertainment and what not. These discussions could be between two members of the group or involve several members. These social interactions also led researchers to hypothesize “Small World Phenomenon” (also known as “Small World Effect”) which states that everyone in this world can be contacted via a short chain of social acquaintances. A renowned experiment conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1967 to find the length of this short chain resulted in the discovery of very interesting observations. This finding gave rise to the famous concept, “six degrees 1 of separation” . Milgram asked his subjects to send mails through US Post and keep passing them until they reached the destination. A more

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recent experiment conducted in 2001 by Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University also concluded with similar results although on a worldwide scale including 157 countries using e-mails and internet as the medium for message passing. This “connectedness” aspect of social interactions between people have fascinated several researchers and results have been applied to fields as varied as genealogy studies. Several sociologists have pointed out subtle differences between society and community, community being a more cohesive entity that promotes a sense of security and freedom among its members. With continued communication, members develop emotional bonds, intellectual pathways, enhanced linguistic abilities, critical thinking and a knack for problem solving. Researchers in the field of psycho-analysis have studied how these interactions within a community proceed and how a group evolves over time. This line of research deals more with the group dynamics and social behavior of communities as a whole with respect to each individual. Several anthropologists are also interested in groups that are bound by cultural ties and try to study their differences from traditional groups in aspects like, communication styles, evolution patterns, participation and involvement, etc. For the past 15 years Computers and Internet have revolutionized the way people

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communicate. Internet has made possible for people to connect with each other beyond all geographical barriers. This has tremendously affected social interactions between people and communities. People not only participate in regional issues but also global issues. They can connect to people sitting on exactly the other side of the globe and discuss whatever they like, i.e., living in a flat world. Communities can be spread across several time zones. This humongous mesh of social interactions is termed as social network. Social networks encompass interactions between different people, members of a community or members across different communities. Each person in this social network is represented as node and the communications represent the links or edges among these nodes. A social network comprises of several focussed groups or communities that can be treated as subgraphs. These social networks and subgraphs are highly dynamic in nature which has fascinated several researchers to study the structural and temporal characteristics of social networks. These social interactions could take one of the following forms: friendship networks, blogosphere, media sharing and social and collaborative annotation or “folksonomy”. Next we explain each of these in detail. However, in this chapter we will focus on two special types of social networking phenomena: social friendship networks and blogosphere. Social friendship networks are friendship oriented social networks which are predominantly used to connect and stay in touch with colleagues. Members can search for other people, connect with them and grow their networks. They can send messages to each other, share experiences and opinions with their friends. Communities may evolve gradually over a long time period. A very first social friendship networking Web site was Classmates.com that helped people find and connect to their college or school peers. The advent of Web 2.0 has produced a flood of social networking sites since then. Web 2.0, a term

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coined by Tim O’Reilly , refers to a perceived second generation of Web based services which is a business revolution in computer industry using internet as a new business platform. Increased collaboration and desktop-like experience were some key features of Web 2.0. It simplified and enriched user experience on the Web and brought more people to join the wave of social networking through Internet. Within a short span of 3 years, there were many social friendship networking Web sites like, Orkut. com, Facebook.com, Myspace.com and more. 3 All of them are very similar to FOAF network, which creates a machine-readable profiles of 4 its members based on RDF schema (a W3C specification originally designed as a metadata model but often used as a method for modeling information) that helps in defining relationships between people, and various attributes such as name, gender, and interests. These services make it easier to share, use information about people and their activities. Social friendship networking Web sites make it relatively simple to analyze the complex structural and temporal behavior as compared to the traditional social networking experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram from data accessibility point of view. Researchers name this type of analysis, social network analysis (SNA) which is an network an interdisciplinary study including sociology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, geography, social psychology, information science and organizational studies. They study interpersonal and personal relations and how they are affected by the structure and composition of these ties. The shape and evolution of a social network helps in studying its usefulness to an individual or a community. Social network analysis focusses more on the relationship of the actors as compared to their attributes which was studied in traditional social experiments. SNA has been used to examine interactions not only between different actors but also between Webpages, organizations and its employees.

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Typical applications of social networks used by 5 mathematicians include Erdos Number which is the co-author index with Paul Erdos. People also treat this as a collaboration index. Web 2.0 services especially blogs have encouraged participatory journalism. Former information consumers are now the new producers. Web 2.0 has allowed mass to contribute and edit articles through wikis and blogs. Giving access to the mass to contribute or edit has also increased collaboration among the people unlike Web 1.0 where there was no collaboration as the access to the content was limited to a chosen few. Increased collaboration has developed enormous open source intelligence or collective wisdom on internet which was not there in Web 1.0. “We the media” (Gillmor, 2006), a phenomenon named by Dan Gillmor, a world in which “the former audience”, not a few people in the back room, decides what is important, transforming the lecture style of information consumption to conversation based assimilation. Such an interactive information delivery media hosts a perfect breeding ground for the virtual communities or communities that originate over the Internet. There has been a lot of ongoing research to mine knowledge from this pool of collective wisdom. Other forms of social interaction offered under the umbrella of Web 2.0 are wikis, social and collaborative annotations like del.icio.us that constitute “folksonomy”, media sharing including online photo and video sharing 6 7 like Flickr , Youtube . Web 2.0 could also be 8 considered as a “semantic Web” which uses the human knowledge to assign tags (metadata) to various resources including Webpages, images, videos etc. These tags create a human generated taxonomy that can make information increasingly easy to search, discover and navigate over time. This human generated taxonomy is termed as “folksonomy”. This has also created a plethora of open source intelligence or collective wisdom

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on Internet. People have liked the idea of Web 2.0 and social networking so much that a new social 9 Web browser was also released named “Flock” that combines most of these social interaction services offered under the hat of Web 2.0. Top 20 most visited Web sites around the globe released 10 by Alexa search engine, a network monitoring company owned by Amazon.com, clearly shows an increasing trend towards social networking Web sites. Out of 20 Web sites 12 are social networking Web sites including social friendship networks, blogs, wikis, social and collaborative annotations and media sharing. The percentage of social networking Web sites among top 20 most visited Web sites has been increasing over the years that can be easily observed from the statistics available at Alexa. These social networking structures have been studied in great deal in terms of information propagation and influential nodes. People have applied network and graph analysis to detect the information brokers and bellwethers of communities. Researchers have studied it from infectious disease propagation domain and its applications have been anticipated in viral marketing. Sociologists have studied the effects of influence in physical communities Keller and Berry (2003). Studying the propagation of influence and its effects has become an extremely prominent research area. In this work we will discuss various ongoing research in the field of social networks with a special focus on social friendship networks and blogosphere. We also discuss the impact and applications of this research and latest trends. We compare and contrast and point subtle differences between social friendship networks and internet publishing services like blogs. These differences act as the foundations for basic differences between various on-going research initiatives in social friendship networking sites and blog sites.

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BACKGROUND In this section we discuss necessary background concepts that will help in understanding the details of the ongoing research work in social friendship networking sites and online publishing media, blogs. These concepts will also make it easier to understand the subtleties between these two domains. 11 Social friendship network sites like Orkut 12 13 14 , Facebook , Myspace , LiveJournal , etc. provide an interface for people to connect online. People can add others to their list of friends, visit their profile, get details of other members of the social network, write messages to each other, join communities, take part in discussion and various other activities. The key concept of a social friendship network is the underlying social structure. All the members or actors in the social friendship network are treated as nodes and these connections also known as relations are treated as the links or edges. Combining these nodes and edges gives us a representation of a graph. Please note that this is an undirected graph and could contain cycles. Social friendship networks are much like the network topologies, however they are much more dynamic in nature. Information flow across a social friendship network may not follow the traditional network topology algorithms like shortest route. Information/messages might

actually travel through totally different and much longer paths before reaching the other nodes or members of the social friendship network. This requires a new field of study and research known as social network analysis (SNA) to model the complex relationships between actors of social friendship networks and information flow across the network. Social network analysis is a cross disciplinary science that tries to map and measure the relationships between different information processing entities like humans, groups, computers, organizations etc. and model the flow of this information across each of these entities represented by a social network. These entities act as nodes and the relationships between them act as the links of the network. Social network analysis has been used widely outside social network domain in organizations where it is called Organizational Network Analysis (ONA). Businesses use this methodology to analyze their clients and their interaction within themselves and with their business. Social network analysis is used to identify leaders, mavens, brokers, groups, connectors (bridges between groups), mavericks etc. Researchers have used several centrality measures to gauge the information flow across social network which could helps in identifying different roles of aforementioned nodes and groupings within them. Centrality measures

Table 1. Comparing individual and community blog sites

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help in studying the structural attributes of nodes in a network. They help in studying the structural location of a node in the network which could decide the importance, influence or prominence of a node in the network. Centrality measures help in estimating the extent to which the network revolves around a node. Different centrality measures include, degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality. Degree centrality refers to total connections or ties a node has in the network. This could be imagined as a “hubness” value of that node. Rows or column sums of an adjacency matrix would give the degree centrality for that node. Closeness centrality refers to the sum of all the geodesic distance of a node with all other nodes in the network. Betweenness centrality refers to the extent a node is directly connected to nodes that are not directly connected, or the number of geodesic paths that pass through this node. This evaluates how good a node can act as a “bridge” or intermediary between different sub-networks. High betweenness centrality node can become a “broker” between different subnetworks. Eigenvector centrality defines a node to be central if it is connected to those who are central. It is the principal eigenvector of the adjacency matrix of the network. Other SNA measures used for analyzing social networks are clustering coeffcient (to measure the likelihood that associates of a nodes are associates among themselves to ensure greater cliquishness), cohesion (extent to which the actors are connected directly to each other), density (proportion of ties of a node to the total number of ties this node’s friends have), radiality (extent to which an individuals network reaches out into the network and provides novel information), reach (extent to which any member of a network can reach other members of the network). The term “blog” is derived from the word “Web-log”, which means a Web site that displays in reverse chronological order the entries by one or more individuals and usually

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has links to comments on specific postings. Each of these entries are called blog posts. Blogosphere can be considered as the universe that contains all these blog sites. Blog sites often provide opinions, commentaries or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function more like personal online diaries. A typical blog can combine text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blog sites. All these are places where a group of users, known as bloggers, get together and share their opinions, views or personal experiences and form part of a wider network of social media. Blogs have become means through which many new ideas and information flow across the Web very rapidly. Blog posts are often associated with a permalink which is a static link to that particular blog post. There are several measures associated with blog posts that can be utilized besides network analysis to detect various roles of bloggers who could be treated as nodes. A blog post can be characterized by inlinks (number of blog posts or Webpages that cite this particular blog post), outlinks (number of blog posts or Webpages this particular blog post refers), number of comments, length of the blog post, rate of comments (rate at which people submit comments on this particular blog post). Besides these, often there is some metadata associated with the blog posts like, date and time of posting, category or annotation of blog post and blogger ID. All these measures are blog post level measures, but there could be some measures which are blogger level. Examples of such measure are number of blog posts submitted during a particular time window, number of comments submitted by a blogger. Blog sites can be categorized into individual blog sites or community blog sites. Individual blog sites are the ones owned and maintained by an individual. Usually individual blog sites

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do not have a lot of discussion. Examples of individual blogs could be Sifry’s Alerts: David 15 Sifry’s musings (Founder & CEO, Technorati), 16 Ratcliffe Blog–Mitch’s Open Notebook , The 17 Webquarters , etc. On the other hand community blog sites are owned and maintained by a group of like-minded users. As a result, more discussion and interaction could be observed in such blog sites. Examples of community 18 blogs could be Google’s Offcial Blog site , The 19 20 Unoffcial Apple Weblog , Engadget , Boing 21 Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things , etc. We summarize the differences in Table 1. Here we focus on community blogs as they provide abundant collective wisdom and open source intelligence. Henceforth, community blogs are referred as blogs.

SOCIAl fRIeNDShIp NeTWORKS AND BlOGOSpheRe In this section we study various ongoing research in social networks. We primarily focus on social friendship networks and blogosphere. Social networks provide means of visualizing existing and potential relationships and interaction in organizational setting. We try to categorize research based on the application domain and point out the latest techniques, validation methods and datasets utilized by these papers. This way we study the challenges involved in research in social friendship networks and blogosphere.

Social friendship Networks Here we study research with respect to social friendship networks. We try to compare and contrast different studies in or using social friendship networks in various domains. We already mentioned that social friendship networks are the best way to model interactions and relationships in an organization. Researchers

have borrowed the concepts from social friendship networks to various collaborative research initiatives. People have studied social friendship networks in great detail and sought its impact in modeling interactions in a community. Since social friendship networks have far reaching advantages in studying interactions and relations, various collaborative recommendation researchers have exploited its concepts and reported encouraging results. David McDonald proposed a social friendship network based collaboration recommendation approach in an organization (McDonald, 2003). He studied the problem of recommending an appropriate collaboration or an expert to an employee of an organization who is in need of one. In his approach he created two social friendship networks in the organization. One was called Work Group Graph (WGG) which was a context sensitive social friendship network. People working on similar things were a part of same community within this social friendship network. The basic assumption of forming such a social friendship network being, people usually have doubts in the things they are working and best expert would be the one who is also working on similar thing. Nodes within a community represent logical work similarity. This social friendship network was collected using qualitative approach. But a main disadvantage with this social friendship network was it does not effectively identify individuals who span contexts. The second social friendship network, Successive Pile Sort (SPS), was collected based on the prior knowledge of “who hangs out together”. The basis assumption of such a social friendship network based collaboration approach being, individuals who socialize frequently are more likely to collaborate. An important factor of information sharing in an organization is the sociability of various individuals. This social friendship network was collected using quantitative approach. This could possibly identify individuals who span

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contexts. But a significant disadvantage with SPS social friendship network based collaboration recommendation is that people would like the person who knows the most, not a “friend”. Considering pros and cons with each approach they developed an expertise recommender (ER) engine which would combine the knowledge of both these social friendship networks on an ondemand basis. Bonhard et al. (Bonhard et al., 2006) proposed a movie recommendation system by incorporating social friendship network data, demographics and rating overlap. Since people inherently know which of their friends to trust for a particular recommendation, recommendation systems should include such data. The basic assumption in embedding social friendship networking data in recommendation generation is decision makers tend to seek advise from familiar advisors because they know where their tastes overlap, they might have received good advice previously hence the risk of receiving bad advice is reduced and they can simply rely on it. Social friendship psychology has shown that people like others who are among other things familiar similar to themselves and with whom 22 they have a history of interaction. Netflix has also given their customers an option to establish a social friendship network and collaborate online to select and recommend movies to their friends. Demographics also play an important role in recommendation. Authors suggest and verify experimentally, that matching people according to their profiles in terms of hobbies and interests rather than just item ratings and explaining recommendations, would make it easier for users to judge appropriateness of a recommendation. People prefer to cooperate with others with a similar demographic background. They conducted experiments with three independent variables, viz., familiarity (social friendship networks), profile similarity (demographics based similarity), and rating overlap and did a 2 × 2 × 2 ANOVA analysis. Authors conducted a

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100 user study and reported that familiarity and profile similarity both have overwhelming effect on recommendation performance. McNee et al. (McNee et al., 2002) studied recommending related work and citations for a research. They treated different papers as the “users” of useritem matrix and the other papers this paper cite as the “items” in this matrix. They create a citation Web, similar to the social friendship network formed between different people. This constructs paper-paper relationships as opposed to author-paper or author-author relations in traditional citation recommender systems. This helps in solving the cold-start problem as every paper cites a good number of relevant papers. Sice these are genuine papers so there is no problem of “rogue” users as in traditional recommender systems. But the “social friendship network” of a paper is pretty much fixed as the number of citations are fixed once they are published. This is contrary to social friendship network research, as members of a social friendship network always evolve their networks. Although a lot of researchers promoted the use of social friendship networks in recommender systems since both of them exploit the principles of social collaboration, however Terveen and McDonald (2005) pointed out some significant differences between both the domains. Recommender systems assign a single rating to each item like movies or books. For instance, a movie could be assigned a rating between 1 and 5. On the contrary, a person could be judged in several different ways depending the context in which the person is judged. A person can be highly talented but may not be necessarily a good team worker. So assigning a single rating to a person might not be easily justifiable. So these ratings depend a lot on the context in social friendship network domain as compared to recommender systems domain. Social networks play a fundamental role as a medium to spread information, ideas and influence among its members. An excellent application of

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information flow through social network lies in the adoption studies of new ideas and innovations within the underlying social networks. This includes the extent to which people’s decisions are affected by their colleagues, family etc. Such network diffusion studies have a long history in social sciences in terms of “word-of-mouth” and “viral marketing”. Subramani and Rajagopalan related the effectiveness of viral marketing to the role of the influencer -whether the attempt to influence is passive or actively persuasive Subramani and Rajagopalan (2003). They also attributed the success of viral marketing to the network externalities -the advantages that come along when a community adopts the new idea or a product, like help and support, resource sharing; which again reinforces the need for good influential members. In social friendship networks the problem of influence spread is formulated as finding that subset of nodes/actors/ members of the social friendship network which can maximize the cascade of influence in the network. These nodes are called the “influential” members. These influential members could be used as the initial target for viral marketing. Several models have been studied to find such a subset of influential members of a social friendship network. The optimal solution is NP-hard for most models (Domingos and Richardson, 2001). On the other hand (Richardson and Domingos 2002) proposed a framework based on a simple linear model for identifying influential members and the optimization problem could be solved by solving a system of linear equations. Kempe et al (Kempe et al., 2003) proposed a framework that lies somewhere in between Domingos and Richardson (2001) and Richardson and Domingos (2002) in terms of model complexity by approximating the optimization problem within guaranteed bounds. Two diffusion models are generally used in modeling influence flow across a social friendship network: Linear Threshold Model and Independent Cascade Model. Linear threshold

model (Granovetter, 1978,Schelling, 1978) assumes a linear relation between influencing or active nodes and influenced or non-active nodes. It defines the influencing capacity and influence tolerance limits of each node. If the sum of influencing capacities of a node’s neighbors increase its tolerance then the node gets influenced and active. Independent cascade model (Durrett, 1988), (Liggett, 1985) assumes the process of influence flow as a cascade of events. An event here represents a node being influenced or “activated”. A system parameter is assigned to each node, v, which is its probability to influence its neighbor, w. If v succeeds in influencing w, then w gets activated in time t + 1, otherwise there are no successive attempts are made by v to influence w. This random process continues until no node is left un-activated. Kempe et al. (2003) proposed approximations to both linear threshold model and independent cascade model within guaranteed bounds and compared their approximated model with other social friendship network analysis based heuristics. In social friendship networks it is important not only to detect the influential members or experts in case of knowledge sharing communities but also to assess to what extent some of the members are recognized as experts by their colleagues in the community. This leads to the estimation of trust and reputation of these experts. Some social friendship networks like Orkut allow users to assign trust ratings implying a more explicit notion of trust. Whereas some Web sites have an implicit notion of trust where creating a link to a person on a Webpage implies some amount of business trust for the person. In other cases, Trust and reputation of experts could be typically assessed as a function of the quality of their response to other members’ knowledge solicitations. Pujol et al (Pujol et al., 2002) proposed a NodeMatching algorithm to compute the authority or reputation of a node based on its location in the social friendship network. A

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node’s authority depends upon the authority of the nodes that relate to this node and also on other nodes that this node relates to. The basic idea is to propagate the reputation of nodes in the social friendship network. This is very similar to the PageRank and HITS algorithms, famous for traditional Web search. However, authors point out the differences between their algorithm and Pagerank and HITS. For PageRank and HITS the transition probability matrix and variancecovariance matrix respectively have to be known previously, unlike NodeMatching algorithm. This becomes infeasible for very large graphs. Moreover, PageRank assumes a fixed graph topology by stratifying the range of transition probability which is different in NodeMatching which can automatically adapt to the topology since it depends upon the authority of the related nodes. While Pujol et al., (2002) proposed an approach to establish reputation based on the position of each member in the social friendship network, Yu and Singh (2003) developed a model for reputation management based on the Dampster-Shafer theory of evidence in the wake of spurious testimonies provided by malicious members of the social friendship network. Each member of a social friendship network is called an agent. Each agent has a set of acquaintances a subset of which forms its neighbors. Each agent builds a model for its acquaintances to quantify their expertise and sociability. These models are dynamic and change based on the agent’s direct interactions with the given acquaintance, interactions with agents referred to by the acquaintance, and on the ratings this acquaintance received from other agents. The authors point out a significant problem with this approach which arises if some acquaintances or other agents generate spurious ratings or exaggerate positive or negative ratings, or offer testimonies that are outright false. Yu and Singh (2003) study the problem of deception using the Dampster-Shafer belief functions so as to capture

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uncertainty in the rankings caused by malicious agents. A variant of majority weighted function is applied to belief functions and simple deception models were studied to detect deception in the ratings. Sabater and Sierra (2002) propose a combination of reputation scores on three different dimensions. They combined reputation scores not only through social relations governed by a social friendship network, termed as social dimension but also past experiences based on individual interactions, termed as individual dimension and reputation scores based on other dimensions, termed as ontological dimension. For large social friendship networks it is not always possible to get reputation scores based on just the individual dimension, so they can use the social dimension and ontological dimension would enhance the reputation estimation by considering different contexts. The ontological dimension is very similar to the work proposed in Terveen and McDonald (2005), where the authors recommend collaboration in social friendship networks based on several factors. They explain the importance of context in recommending a member of social friendship network for collaboration. between two members. Personalization of trust means that a member could have different trust values with respect to different members. Trust of a member is absolutely a personal opinion. Consolidating the trust scores for a member might not give a reasonable estimation, so authors propose trust propagation mechanism. Authors define source as the node which is seeking trust value of another node called sink. If there is a direct edge between source and sink then the value is directly transferred, otherwise the trust value is inferred based on the source’s neighbors. Source polls each of its neighbors whom it has given a positive trust rating. The neighbors also use this procedure to compute the trust rating of the sink. Hence gradually sink’s trust scores propagate to the source. They demonstrate the trust rating

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in filtering e-mails with the help of a prototype 23 TrustMail and using Enron e-mail dataset . Guha et al (Guha et al., 2004) proposed another trust propagation scheme in social friendship networks but they included the element of distrust along with the trust scores. Another ongoing line of research in social friendship network domain tries to study the characteristics of a community in a social friendship network. Several research papers study the characteristics of the social friendship network in terms of how communities can be inferred from the graph structure of social friendship networks. A lot of work has already been done in inferring communities of Web pages using link structures (Flake et al., 2000, Gibson et al., 1998, Kumar et al., 1999). However, some papers also talk about, once these communities are inferred or explicitly established, how they evolve what influences a member of the social friendship network to join or un-join some community and how does topic-drift influences the change in community or vice-versa. The problem of inferring community structures using unsupervised graph clustering has been presented in several research works listed in Flake et al. (2002), (2004), Girvan and Newman (2002), Hopcroft et al., (2003), Newman, (2004). Newman (Newman, 2004) summarizes different approaches for inferring communities from computer science and sociologists perspectives. They explain the traditional graph clustering algorithm like spectral bisection and Kernighan-Lin algorithm. But the principal disadvantage with these two methods is they split the graph in two subgraphs and repeated bisection does not always give satisfactory results, moreover, they do not give a stopping condition. Specifically, KernighanLin algorithm expects the user to specify the size of each of the subgraphs which is often not pragmatic in real world social friendship networks. They also mention hierarchical clustering as another alternative for graph

clustering by assigning similarity scores to pair of vertices and then using either single linkage or complete linkage to obtain the dendrogram. Although complete linkage has more desirable properties than single linkage, complete linkage still has some disadvantages like, finding cliques in a graph is a hard problem and cliques are not unique. More recent algorithms use a divisive method as opposed to the agglomerative method of hierarchical clustering. Girvan and Newman (Girvan and Newman, 2002) proposed a divisive graph clustering method based on edge removal. They use betweenness, a social friendship network analysis centrality measure to identify which edge to remove. They repeat the procedure until there is no edge left. At each iteration they form a dendrogram just like the hierarchical clustering approach. Horizontal cross-sections of the dendrogram represent possible community divisions with a larger or smaller number of communities depending on the position of the cut. Community identification research has been used in other application domains like identifying terrorist groups or communities on internet. This is also called the 24 Dark Web . Coffman and Marcus (Coffman and Marcus, 2004) studied the characteristics of such groups and extracted some commonly discovered patterns. They propose a “spoke-andhub” model to simulate the interaction patterns of terrorist groups. They identified certain states in their interaction patterns and trained a HMM to predict the possibility of terrorist groups based on the interaction patterns and how they evolve in a test group. Backstrom et al. (Backstrom et al., 2006) proposed a decision tree based approach to govern the membership, growth and change in an established community. They reported that a member of a social friendship network would join a new community depending on the number of friends (s)he already has in that community and also on the underlying social friendship network structure of his/her friends

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in the community. They also pointed out an interesting observation about the community growth. The number of triads (closed triangles of individuals) a community has decreases the community’s chances to grow. By closed triangles of individuals they mean the conversation/ interaction is limited within this clique. If there is a lot of “cliqueish ness” then it makes a community less interesting for new members to join and ultimately for that community to grow. They conducted some experiments to study the movement in a community. They studied whether topic changes induce author movement or author movement induce topic changes in overlapping communities. They concluded that topic changes induce a much faster author movement as compared to topic change induced by author movements, especially for conference data obtained from DBLP. Most of the research done so far in social friendship network domain assumes homogenous relations among its members, however, Cai et al., (2005) study the effect of heterogenous relations in a social friendship network. Based on the different relations inferred with the help of user queries on the data the proposed method is able to identify some “hidden” communities which otherwise are not possible by simply looking at the explicitly given relationships in the network. Social friendship network research has been applied to several other application domains like detecting conflict of interest (Aleman-Meza et al., 2006), Web appearance disambiguation (Bekkerman and McCallum, 2005). Online Web 25 sites like Kaboodle allow users to comment on their friends’ wishlists. People can discuss about different products, events, collections, even favorites with other users.

Blogosphere Till now we focused on one type of social networks, i.e., friendship networks that have explicit relationship information between

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individuals. Here we focus on a special class of social networks, i.e., Blogosphere, where we do not have explicit relationship information between individuals in the blogosphere. This forms a foundational difference in research carried out in both domains. There are other subtle differences between social friendship networks and the blogosphere. Friendship networks are predominantly used to create friends and to remain in touch with each other. Blogs are used in a different context. They are usually used for sharing ideas and opinions within a community. Blogosphere are not as focused as friendship networks. Research on the blogosphere is relatively fledgling as compared to social friendship networks. Several researchers have tried to transform the problem domain of Blogosphere to that of social friendship networks and then apply research from the social friendship network domain. We will discuss about these initiatives later in this section. Now we discuss various ongoing research in blogosphere domain characterized by the application areas. Blogosphere is a storehouse of several 26 publicly regulated media. Technorati reported that 175,000 blog posts were created daily which is 2 blog posts per second. This explosive growth makes it beyond human capabilities to look for interesting and relevant blog posts. Therefore a lot of research is going on to automatically characterize different blogs into meaningful groups, so readers can focus on interesting categories rather than filtering out relevant blogs from the whole jungle. Often blog sites allow their users to provide tags to the blog posts. The human labeled tag information forms the so-called “folksonomy”. Brooks and Montanez (Brooks and Montanez, 2006) presented a study where the human labeled tags are good for classifying the blog posts into broad categories while they were less effective in indicating the particular content of a blog post. They used tf-idf measure to pick top three most famous words in every blog post and computed the

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pairwise similarity among all the blog posts and clustered them. They compared the results with the clustering obtained using the human labeled tags and reported significant improvement. In another research Li et al. (2007) authors tried to cluster blog posts by assigning different weights to title, body and comments of a blog post. Clustering different blog posts would also help blog search engines like Technorati to focus and narrow the search space once the query context 27 is clear. Web sites like Blogcatalog organize several blog sites into a taxonomic structure that helps in focussed browsing of blog sites. Another important research which branched out from the blog-site clustering is determining and inferring communities. Members of these communities have a sense of community and experience a feeling of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and their needs will be met through their commitment to be together. Several studies have looked into identifying communities in blogs. One method that researchers commonly use is content analysis and text analysis of the blog posts to identify communities in blogosphere (Blanchard, 2004, Efimova and Hendrick, 2005, Kumar et al., 2003). Kleinberg (Kleinberg, 1998) used an alternative approach in identifying communities in blogs using hubs and authority based approach. They clustered all the expert communities together by identifying them as authorities. Kumar et al. (Kumar et al., 1999) extended the idea of hubs and authorities and included co-citation as a way to extract all communities on the Web and used graph theory algorithms to identify all instances of graph structures that reflect community characteristics. While Chin and Chignell (Chin and Chignell, 2006) proposed a model for finding communities taking the blogging behavior of bloggers into account. They aligned behavioral approaches in studying community with the network and link analysis approaches. They used a case study to first calibrate the measure

to evaluate a community based on behavioral aspects using a behavioral survey which could be generalized later on, pruning the need of such surveys. Several researchers have also studied community extraction and social network formation using news-boards and discussion boards. Although different from blogosphere we include these researches here because discussion boards and newsboards are also very similar to blogs in the sense that they also do not have an explicit link structure, and the communication is not “person-to-person”, rather it is more “persontogroup”. Blanchard and Markus (Blanchard and Markus, 2004) studied a virtual settlement Multiple Sport Newsgroup and analyzed the possibility of emerging virtual communities in it. They studied the characteristics of the newsgroup by conducting interviews with three different kinds of members: leaders (active and well respected), participants (active occasionally to events like triathlons) and lurkers (readers only). They reported that different virtual communities emerge between athletes and those who join the community to keep themselves informed of the latest developments. As communities evolve over time, so do the bellwethers or leaders of the communities who possess the power to influence the mainstream. According to studies in Keller and Berry (2003), 83% people prefer consulting family, friends or an expert over traditional advertising before trying a new restaurant, 71% people prefer to do so before buying a prescription drug or visiting a place, 61% of people prefer to do so before watching a movie. This style of marketing is known as “word-of-mouth”. “Word-of-mouth” has been found to be more effective than the traditional advertising in physical communities. Studies from Keller and Berry (2003) show that before people buy, they talk, and they listen. These experts can influence decisions of people. If we consider “word-of-mouth” as a broadcast of radio signal then these experts

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are the transmitters that amplify the signal and make it heard by more people. For this reason these experts are aptly termed, The Influentials. Influential bloggers tend to submit influential blog posts that affect other members’ decisions and opinions. They accrue respect in the community over time. Other members tend to listen to what the influentials say before making decisions. Identification of these influential bloggers (Agarwal et al., 2008) could lead to several interesting applications. The influentials can act as market-movers. Since they can influence buying decisions of mainstream, companies can promote them as latent brand ambassadors for their products. Being such a highly interactive media, blogs tend to host several vivid discussions on various issues including new products, services, marketing strategies and their comparative studies. Often this discussion also acts as “word-of-mouth” advertising of several products and services. A lot of advertising companies, approximately 64% Elkin have acknowledged this fact and are shifting their focus towards blog advertising and identifying these influentials. The influentials could sway opinions in political campaigns, elections and reactions to government policies (Drezner and Farrell, 2004). Because they know many people and soak up a large amount of information, Influentials stand out as smart, informed sources of advice and insight. Approximately, 84% of influentials in physical communities are interested in politics and are sought out by others for their perspectives on politics and government, 55% on a regular basis. The influentials could help in customer support and troubleshooting. A lot of companies these days host their own customer blogs, where people could discuss issues related to a product. Often influentials on these blogs troubleshoot the problems peer consumers are having, which could be trusted because of the sense of authority

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these influentials possess. Often influentials offer suggestions to improve their products. These invaluable comments could be really helpful for companies and customers. Instead of going through each member’s blog posts, companies can focus on the influentials’ blog posts. For 28 instance, Macromedia aggregates, categorizes and searches the blog posts of 500 people who write about Macromedia’s technology. This could also change the design of future market research surveys conducted by a lot of companies. Now instead of printing out the survey forms and passing it to regular consumers and potential ones, companies just need to release these forms in the blog communities and act on the feedbacks of influential bloggers. Recently, Apple Inc. announced its iPhone to be released in June 2007. They gave a full demonstration in January which marked a surge of blog posts across several blog sites. A lot of blog posts talk about its features and compliment it. There are some blog posts that point out potential limitations which could be helpful for Apple Inc. to consider before releasing the product in the market. Such kind of market research is also called “use the views”. Some recent numbers from Technorati show a 100% increase in the size of the blogosphere every six months. It has grown over 60 times during the past three years. Approximately 2 29 new blog posts appear every second . New blog posts being generated with such a blazing fast rate, it is impossible to keep track of what is going on in the blogosphere. Many blog readers/subscribers just want to know the most insightful and authoritative stories. Blog posts from influential bloggers would exactly serve this purpose by standing out as representative articles of a blog site. The influentials can be the showcases of a group on the blogosphere. These interesting applications have attracted a surge of research in identifying influential blog sites as well as influential bloggers. Some try to find influential blog sites (both individual and

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community blog sites), in the entire blogosphere and study how they influence the external world and within the blogosphere (Gill, 2004). Ranking a blog site seems similar to ranking a Web site. However, as pointed out in Kritikopoulos et al. (2006), blog sites in the blogosphere are very sparsely linked and it is not suitable to rank blog sites using Web ranking algorithms like PageRank (Page et al., 1998) and HITS (Kleinberg, 1998). Thus, the authors in Kritikopoulos et al. (2006) suggest to add implicit links to increase the density of link information based on topics. If two blogs are talking about the same topic, an edge can be added between these two blogs based on the topic similarity. A similar strategy adopted by Adar et al. (Adar et al., 2004) is to consider the implicit link structure of blog posts. In their iRank algorithm, a classifier is built to predict whether or not two blogs should be linked. The objective in this work is to find out the path of infection (how one piece of information is propagated). iRank tries to find the blogs which initiates the epidemics. Note that an initiator might not be an influential as they might affect only limited blogs. Influentials should be those which play a key role in the information epidemics. Given the nature of the blogosphere, influential blog sites are few with respect to the sheer number of blog sites. Non-influential sites belong to the long tail (Anderson, 2006) where abundant new business, marketing, and development opportunities can be explored. Gruhl et al (Gruhl et al., 2004) study information diffusion of various topics in the blogosphere from individual to individual, drawing on the theory of infectious diseases. A general cascade model (Goldenberg et al., 2001) is adopted. They derived their model from independent cascade model and generalized to the general cascade model by relaxing the independence assumption. They associate ‘read’ probability and ‘copy’ probability with each edge of the blogger graph indicating the

tendency to read one’s blog post and copy it, respectively. They also parameterize the stickiness of a topic which is analogous to the virulence of a disease. An interesting problem related to viral marketing (Richardson and Domingos, 2002, Kempe et al., 2003) is how to maximize the total influence among the nodes (blog sites) by selecting a fixed number of nodes in the network. A greedy approach can be adopted to select the most influential node in each iteration after removing the selected nodes. This greedy approach outperforms PageRank, HITS and ranking by number of citations, and is robust in filtering splogs (spam blogs) (Java et al., 2006). Agarwal et al. (Agarwal et al., 2007) studied and modeled the influence of a blogger on a community blog site. They modeled the blog site as a graph using inherent link structure, including inlinks and outlinks, as edges and treating different bloggers as nodes. Using the link structure the influence flow across different bloggers is observed, recursively. Other blog post level statistics like blog post quality and comments’ information were also used to achieve better results. The model used different weights to regulate the contribution of different statistics. These weights could be tuned to obtain different breeds of influential bloggers, top bloggers or top blog posts in some time frame (e.g., monthly). Those top lists are usually based on some traffic information (e.g., how many posts a blogger posted, or how many comments a blog post received) (Gill, 2004). With the speedy growth of the blogosphere, it is increasingly difficult, if at all possible, to manually track the development and happenings in the blogosphere, in particular, at many blog sites where many bloggers enthusiastically participate in discussions, getting information, inquiring and seeking answers, and voicing their complaints and needs. Since millions of people share their views and opinions on blogs, the blogosphere has become the perfect breeding ground for

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“participatory journalism”. This has made the blogosphere a much more dynamic environment than traditional Web pages. An announcement of a new product by a company may trigger several discussions around the world. These temporal trends are often very useful for businesses to track and observe the customer opinions. In one such research, Chi et al., (2006), authors use singular value decomposition to identify trends in the topics of the blogs. They use higher order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) to observe the structural trends in the blog sites.

SOCIAl fRIeNDShIp NeTWORKS vIS-A-vIS BlOGOSpheRe Social Friendship Networks and Blogosphere come under the umbrella of Social Networks, and they both share some commonalities like social collaboration, sense of community and experience sharing, yet there are some subtle differences. These nuances are worth

pointing out here as they shed light on different ongoing research activities. We summarize these research works for social friendship networks and the blogosphere in Tables 2 and 3, respectively. We list the research domains in social friendship networks and the blogosphere and some representative approaches along with the challenges of that domain. Clearly, there are some research areas that are specific to social friendship networks like collaborative recommendation, trust and reputation because they assume an explicit graph structure in the interaction among different members of the network. Similarly, some of the research areas are specific to blogosphere like blog post/blog site classification, spam blog identification because of the highly textual content nature of these articles. Unlike social friendship networks, the blogosphere does not have explicit links or edges between the nodes. These nodes could be friends in a social friendship network and bloggers in the blogosphere. We could still construct a graph

Table 2. Summarizing the research domains, representative pproaches and challenges in social friendship networks

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structure in the blogosphere by assuming an edge from one blogger to another if a blogger has commented on other blogger’s blog post. This way we can represent the blogosphere with an equivalent directed graph. Social friendship networks already have predefined links or edges between the members in the form of a 30 FOAF network, an undirected graph. This link/edge inference also poses major challenges in majority of research efforts going on in the blogosphere like identifying communities and influential bloggers. We list these and other challenges specific to various research domains in the blogosphere in Table 3. Although Adar et al. (Adar et al., 2004) proposed a model to infer links between different blog posts based on the propagation of the content in the blog posts, but applicability of such techniques is limited if not much information epidemics is found. Another significant difference between social friendship networks and the blogosphere lies in the way influential members are perceived. Bloggers submit blog posts which are the main source of their influence. Influence score could be computed using blog posts through several measures like inlinks, outlinks, comments, and blog post length. This could give us an actual

influential node based on the historical data of who influenced whom. Whereas members of a social friendship networks do not have such a medium through which they can assert their influence. The link information available on a social friendship network and other network centrality measures will just tell us the connectedness of a node which could be used to gauge the spread of influence rather than the influential node itself. Hence, there are works (Coffman and Marcus, 2004, Kempe et al., 2003, Richardson and Domingos, 2002) that measure the spread of influence through a node in social friendship networks. A node that maximizes the spread of influence or who has a higher degree of connectivity is chosen for viral marketing. It is entirely possible that this node is connected to a lot of people but may not be the one who could influence other members. Bloggers spread their influence through blog posts. This information source could be tapped to compute influence of a blogger using several measures like inlinks, outlinks, comments, and blog post length. These differences are summarized in Table 4. In a broader sense, influential nodes identified through the blogosphere are the ones who have “been influencing” fellow bloggers, whereas

Table 3. Summarizing the research domains, representative approaches and challenges in the blogosphere

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Table 4. Differences between social friendship networks and blogosphere

Figure 1. Social friendship networks and blogosphere constitute part of social networks

influential nodes identified through social friendship networks are the ones who “could influence” fellow members. The reason is trivial, in the blogosphere we have the history of who influenced whom through their blog posts, but in social friendship networks we don’t have such information. We only know who is linked to whom and the one who is the most linked could be used to spread the influence. But we don’t know whether he is the right person to do that job. There have been works like Java et al. (2006), where authors model the blogosphere as a social friendship network and then apply the existing works for mining influence in social friendship networks, but they lose essential statistics about the blog posts like inlinks, outlinks, comments, blog post quality, etc.

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A graph structure is strictly defined in social friendship networks whereas it is loosely defined in Blogosphere. Nodes are members or actors in a social friendship network but they could be bloggers, blog posts or blog sites. Social friendship networks are predominantly used for being in touch or making friends in society, while the main purpose of Blogosphere is to share ideas and opinions with other members of the community or other bloggers. This gives a more community experience to Blogosphere as compared to a more friendship oriented environment in social friendship networks. We could observe person-to-community interactions in the blogosphere, whereas one would observe person-to-person interactions in social friendship networks. Another significant difference between

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the blogosphere and social friendship networks is in estimating the reputation/trust of members. Member’s reputation/trust in the blogosphere is based on the response to other member’s knowledge solicitations. Member’s reputation/ trust in a social friendship network is based on the network connections and/or locations in the network. We illustrate the differences between social friendship networks and the blogosphere in Figure 1. The complete set of social interacting services can be represented by Social Networks of which Social Friendship Networks and Blogosphere are focal parts. There are certain social friendship networking Web sites like Orkut, Facebook, 31 LinkedIn , Classmates.com that strictly provide friendship networks. People join these networks to expand their social networks and keep in touch with colleagues. However, these Web sites enforce strict interaction patterns among friends and do not support flexible community structures as supported by blog sites. On the other hand 32 blog sites like TUAW, Blogger , Windows Live 33 Spaces allow members to express themselves and share ideas and opinions with other community members. However, these Web sites do not facilitate private friendship networks. Two members have to use other communication channels to communicate between themselves, privately. But Web sites like LiveJournal and MySpace provide both social friendship networks and blogging capabilities to their members. Clearly based on the characteristics of social interactions one could observe overlap between social friendship networks and the blogosphere as depicted in Figure 1.

lOOKING AheAD Humans have gregarious tendency to form groups and communities for sharing experiences, thoughts, ideas, and opinions with others. Through these social interactions, individuals

convene communities of like-minded people driven by similar interests and needs. Technologies like computers and the World Wide Web have made it possible for people to do so beyond geographical barriers, and facilitate and encourage more and more individuals to take part in these Web activities. The pervasive participation of increasing numbers of users has created a plethora of user-generated contents, collective wisdom, and open-source intelligence. Not only the individuals generate new contents they also enrich the existing contents by providing semantically meaningful labels or tags for easier discovery and retrieval of information and for better navigation over time. In this work we study and characterize these social interacting services offered under the umbrella of social networks, based on their underlying network structures, into four broad categories, viz., social friendship networks, the blogosphere, social and collaborative annotation (or folksonomies) and media sharing. We discuss each of them briefly and focus on social friendship networks and blogosphere which are the two most widely used social networks. The area of social networks has been extensively studied by researchers in different domains including psychology, social science, anthropology, information, and computer science. Various studied aspects of social networks include the formulation, evolution and dynamics of communities and groups in these social networks, emerging experts, leaders, bellwethers and the influentials in these communities, information diffusion and epidemics in social networks, community clustering, recommending collaboration to individuals and organizations, mining user-generated content for collective wisdom and open-source intelligence and other equally significant research opportunities. We comparatively study state-of-the-art research initiatives in social friendship networks and the blogosphere, and delineate subtle yet essential differences between the two domains.

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Recent statistics from Technorati have shown that the size of social networks especially the blogosphere doubles every six months. Such an enthusiastic involvement in social networks and the sense of connectedness to one another among members has accelerated the evolution of ubiquitous social networks and presented new opportunities for research and development of new services. For example, researchers experiment and analyze the feasibility of the current state of social networks on mobile devices. There is a huge potential in designing more intuitive and efficient interfaces to social networking services in constrained screen estates. Social interaction models could be used in other domains like computer networks, physical interacting particle systems for modeling the communication or interaction within the network. This can help in analyzing information flow, crucial or expert nodes, and trustworthy nodes. Potential research opportunities for social networks also lie in improving search engines. Social annotation systems facilitate manual tagging of various resources including Webpages, images, videos, enriching the content by adding metadata to these resources. These would ultimately help search engines to index these resources better, and consequently provide more precise search results. Besides using human labeled tags, we could also leverage human intelligence in providing the relevance feedback for search results. Such collaborative search engines rely on social networks to enhance search results for idiosyncratic user queries. Identifying influential bloggers can expand the ways of group representation such as using these influential bloggers to profile a group. Since these influential bloggers could be treated as representative members of a community’s blog site, their blog posts could be considered as an entry point to other representative posts of the blog site. Intelligent processing of such group profiles could help search engines to not only search the blog posts but also enable

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group search, resulting in promoting group collaboration. By incorporating their social network information coupled with demographic information, social networks research could also help in customer relationship management to provide compact and reliable recommendations. Community evolution studies can serve as an effective avenue for modern defense and homeland security (e.g., used in subject-based data mining).

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Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Blog: The term “blog” is derived from the word “Web-log”, which means a Web site that displays in reverse chronological order the entries by one or more individuals and usually has links to comments on specific postings. Blog Post: Web entries that are published on a blog site are called blog posts. Blogosphere: A special class of social networks that exhibit a flexible graph structure among members of the network, supporting public discussion and interaction among community members. These are person-togroup interaction structures. There is no concept of private interaction. These social networks are predominantly used for sharing opinions and ideas with a community rather than a single individual. It is also defined as the universe of all blog sites. Folksonomy: It is a collaboratively generated taxonomic structure of Web pages,

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media like hyperlinks, images and movies using open-ended labels called tags. Folksonomies make information increasingly easy to search, discover and navigate over time. The descriptive content of such a tagging process is considered better than automatic tagging because of the “collective wisdom” and better context handling capabilities of humans as compared to computing algorithms. Social Network: An association of entities like people, organizations drawn together by one or more specific types of relations, such as friendship, kinship, like or dislike, financial exchange, etc. Such a social structure is often modeled using graphs, where members or actors of social networks act as the nodes and their interactions or relationships form the edges.

Social networks encompass interactions between different people, members of a community or members across different communities. Social Network Analysis: An interdisciplinary study that involves sociology, anthropology, psychology, computer and information science to analyze complex relationships and model them in a social network. Social “Friendship” Network: A special class of social networks that enforces a more strict graph structure among members of the network, supporting more private social networks for each member. These are person-to-person(s) interaction structures. Examples include Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn, Classmates.com.

This work was previously published in E-Collaboration: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications, edited by N. Kock, pp. 1078-1100, copyright 2009 by Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global).

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Chapter 56

Blogs as a Social Networking Tool to Build Community Lisa Kervin University of Wollongong, Australia Jessica Mantei University of Wollongong, Australia Anthony Herrington University of Wollongong, Australia

ABSTRACT This chapter examines blogging as a social networking tool to engage final year preservice teachers in reflective processes. Using a developed Web site, the students post their own blogs and comment upon those of others. The authors argue that opportunity to engage with this networking experience provides avenue for the students to consider their emerging professional identity as teachers. The blogging mechanism brought together the physical university context and virtual online environment as students identified, examined and reflected upon the intricacies of what it means to be a teacher. The authors hope that examining the findings that emerged from this research will inform other educators as to the affordances of blogging as a social networking tool.

INTRODUCTION A recent US survey conducted by Pew Internet and American Life Project found that eight percent of internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog while thirty-nine percent of internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs (Lenhart & Fox, 2006). This social networking phenomenon is not confined to the pursuit of leisure but is also seen as a strategy for professional DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-368-5.ch056

learning through shared reflection on theory and practice. The professional identities of teachers and preservice teachers can potentially benefit from this experience. This chapter explores the use of blogging within the context of a final year university subject for teachers in the Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Using authentic learning (Herrington & Oliver, 2000) as a theoretical framework, the ‘Beginning and Establishing Successful Teachers’ (BEST) Website was created. Blogging opportunities were incorporated within the Website

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Blogs as a Social Networking Tool to Build Community

Figure 1. Blogging for professional identity

design to foster and support social networking amongst site users. The chapter describes how providing students with opportunities to interact within both the physical university and the virtual Website communities led to reflection, networking and identification of professional goals, all of which contributed to their identity as teachers. In particular we examine how blogging as a tool facilitated reflection for shared understandings as individuals moved between two spaces. The virtual community afforded students opportunities for articulation of their own understandings and engagement with the experiences of others. Supporting and enriching this was the physical context, where ‘theory’ and professional relationships were explored through the more structured environment of tutorial workshops. The interaction between the virtual and real contexts, captured through blogging activity, contributed to each individual’s professional identity. This is represented in Figure 1.

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TeACheR AS RefleCTIve pRACTITIONeR In describing teaching as a ‘profession of conscience’, where teachers are accountable to themselves, the students and their parents, Maarof (2007) identifies the practice of reflecting on one’s teaching as important in allowing teachers to better understand their philosophy of learning and to identify strengths and limitations of the decisions they make. Teachers who are reflective in their approach to teaching can make meaningful change within their classrooms, schools and broader communities because they use a critical approach to questioning what it is they do in their classrooms, why they have made such decisions and how their practice might be improved (Bintz & Dillard, 2007). Rather than a simple tool for thinking about teaching, reflection is defined as a complex and rigorous process that takes the practitioner in a ‘forward moving spiral’ linking theory with practice and practice with theory (Rodgers, 2002, p. 863). For teachers to be able to engage with such a cycle, they require sustained opportunities to explore both theory and practice within socially supported communities that deepen not only their

Blogs as a Social Networking Tool to Build Community

professional identity, but also their understanding of the skills required for reflection (McCormack, Gore & Thomas, 2004). For preservice and early career teachers in particular, opportunities for reflection on their own learning and the ways that they achieve new understanding are valuable in fostering active learners whose interest resides in pursuing ongoing professional growth (Bransford, Derry, Berliner & Hammerness, 2005; McCormack et.al., 2004). The period of transition from preservice to inservice teacher is identified in the literature as a time where support in developing the skills of reflection is crucial for the construction of professional knowledge (Griffin, 2003; Peters & LeCornu, 2006). It is through opportunities to ‘practice and reflect on teaching while enrolled in their preparation programs’ that teachers can develop the necessary reflective tools for interpreting their observations and experiences in the early years of teaching (Hammerness, DarlingHammond & Bransford, 2005, p. 375) and to build their professional identities.

TeACheR pROfeSSIONAl IDeNTITy The notion of professional stages within a career is acknowledged in the literature (for example, Guskey, 2002). Our experiences concur that a critical stage for teachers is when they move from being a preservice teacher in the university context to an early-career teacher in a school. Such change requires significant adjustments be made to one’s professional identity; adjustments that can be achieved through the development of reflective practices. Identity is a concept used in the field of social sciences to investigate human behaviour (Jepperson, Wendt & Katzenstein, 1996; Nicolosi, 1991; Turner, 1975) arguing a clear relationship between the way people behave and how this defines their identities (Burke & Reitzes, 1981;

Sparks & Shepherd, 1992; Stets & Burke, 2000). As people interact with each other within their environments, they learn about the norms, values and beliefs of the communities within which they operate. This knowledge forms identities as individuals come to know who they are, what they are, how they should behave and what they still need to know. Learning a profession means learning about the culture of the occupation (Lacey, 1995). Blackledge (2002) argues that each profession has its own disposition and learnt behaviour. Thus, a teacher as a professional needs specific knowledge and skills related to curriculum, pedagogical understandings and awareness of how children learn and their impact upon each of these. Sachs (1999) observes that professional identities include retrospective and prospective identities; retrospective identities use the past to explain the present within the profession, while prospective identities examine the future nature of the profession. Allen (2005) details that aspects of teacher professional identities are not taught; rather teachers’ past critical incidents including the workplace and an individual’s professional and social networks shape them. These perspectives need to be explored through reflection to consider how individual experiences can come together to create shared meanings and understandings. Connelly and Clandinin (1988) observe that teachers are not necessarily interested in what they know and what they can do when they reflect upon their role in the profession. Rather, they question their own identity within a situation. They argue teachers appear more interested in understanding their immediate professional situation in connection with their previous personal and professional experiences. Thus, instead of the question what do I know, or what can I do, for many teachers their interest is in the question who am I, what relationship do I have with the learner, what is my relationship with school leaders, and how have my personal experiences contributed to my development as a teacher. These questions demonstrate

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the role played by both the physical workplace and the individual’s networks in the development of a teacher’s professional identity. Professional identity theory indicates that teachers continually develop their own understandings of the teaching profession as they reshape and modify their understandings of their role. Their experiences in the classroom as teachers, the culture of the school of employment, and interactions with other teachers and key stakeholders all contribute to ongoing development of professional identity. Lockyer, Patterson, Rowland and Hearne (2007) describe: as teachers move from their preservice and induction stages through competency building and into enthusiastic and growing, they are eager to develop skills, support their peers, and investigate and implement new practices and innovations (p. 332). Given these understandings, it is necessary to consider how social software can be used to provide a forum through which teachers can reflect upon their own experiences, and engage in professional dialogue with others to develop shared community ontologies.

The NeeD fOR SOCIAl SUppORT Dewey (1937) has long argued the importance of social activity to support learning. Social activism theory promotes learning that emerges from students’ interests, an integrated approach and learning as a way of understanding the complexity of culture and individual roles within that culture (Krause, Bochner & Duchesne, 2003). Lankshear and Snyder (2000) concur in their definition of learning as “…becoming proficient in social practices” (p. 42). This is further reinforced by Gee (2004) who argues, “…people learn best when their learning is part of a highly motivated engagement with social practices they value”

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(p. 77). Teaching is a complex profession where much learning can occur through social engagement with others. Whilst the social nature of learning is acknowledged, so too is the notion of belonging to social groups while retaining individuality. This is seen as paramount to active engagement with learning. Gee (2003) names three key requirements for active learning: ‘experiencing the world in new ways, forming new affiliations, and preparation for future learning’ (p. 23). Burnett (2002) describes ‘learning comes about when we understand what motivates us or attracts us to a particular set of ideas or practices’ (p. 142). Such perspectives can help to explain what happens when people interact within virtual communities as formal and informal educational spaces. For early career teachers, the opportunity to engage with others helps to establish networks to identify and achieve learning goals. The possibilities for social software to facilitate and support such networks are enormous. For some time, a wide body of research has focused on the value of ‘Communities of Practice’ (for example, Gee, 2004; Lave & Wenger, 1991). The notion of apprentices working and learning within a group who share the same vision, practices and goals characterises this research. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) caution about the relationship between definitions of Communities of Practice and how these may actually transpire in individual settings has characterised the research presented within the chapter. While we acknowledge the fundamentals within theories surrounding the social nature of learning, and consider how these might look as individuals participate in both physical and virtual communities of practice, using these to create shared community ontologies remains our focus.

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SOCIAl NeTWORKING TO ‘UNleASh’ pROfeSSIONAl IDeNTITy ThROUGh RefleCTION Computer Supported Social Networks (CSSN) have been examined for some time. Wellman, Salaff, Dimitrova, Garton, Gulia and Haythornthwaite (1996) identify that such networks began in the 1960s with the US Government’s use of an Electronic Information Exchange System to connect users with large university computers. Since this time, there has been exponential growth in the number and range of social networks. Sites such as Facebook, Classmates.com, Flickr, Fotolog and MySpace have re-shaped our understandings of what it means to belong to a “group” and interact with others within those spaces. Gee (2003) describes that interaction within the ‘contemporary high-tech global world’ poses a range of challenges to one’s identity (p. 3-4). To meet such challenges it is necessary to consider contexts, issues and dilemmas associated with the complexity of the profession. The membership of social networks contributes significantly to the interaction that occurs within them. For there to be a sense of affiliation and support within the group participants need to be aware of and support the founding philosophies of the group to establish a sense of common goals to shape interactions (Donath, 1999). Blanchard and Horan (1998) observe that virtual communities are most powerful when they develop around physically-based communities and expand upon needs and interests. Notions of identity appear integral within virtual communities. Gee (2003) notes that ‘We are fluid creatures in the making, since we make ourselves socially through participation with others in various groups’ (p. 4). As such, awareness of oneself and other members within the community become paramount as interactions are assessed according to judgements about reliability, accuracy and trustworthiness of the source. Donath (1999) suggests that the experiences offered within virtual

communities and their ‘claims of real-world expertise or history’ are closely connected with how individual participants are received and valued within the community. It is important to carefully consider the rationale for social software and its goals in bringing together community around issues and problems that are relevant to the real or authentic world of that community.

AUTheNTIC leARNING AS A TheOReTICAl fRAmeWORK Research has identified the traditional learning environment of educational institutions as insufficient in meeting the needs of the modern student (Harste, 2003; Jonassen, 2003; Oblinger, 2005; Anstey & Bull, 2006; Herrington & Herrington, 2006; Leu, Mallette, Karchmer & Kara-Soteriou, 2005). A principal criticism of traditional teaching approaches is the reliance on delivery of knowledge by ‘discipline experts’ and passive reception and retention of content by learners in an environment that separates theory from practice (Herrington & Herrington, 2006). Compounding the issue, Lombardi (2007) argues that many university students operate within a dualistic learning model – the notion that there is a single ‘right’ answer and it is the obligation of the teacher to reveal it and therefore such learners prefer traditional teaching methods. Although ‘ambiguity and conflicting perspectives’ are identified as important in the development of critical thinkers and problem solvers, such a state is uncomfortable for many learners interested in discovering a single truth (Lombardi, 2007, p. 10). The challenge then, is for educators to maintain the supportive learning environment, while modifying the way they operate in order to facilitate connected learning experiences that more accurately reflect the expectations placed on learners in the community today – authentic learning experiences. Authentic learning tasks are defined as the ordinary practices of a culture (Brown, Collins &

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Figure 2. The BEST site

Duguid, 1989) simulated in real world contexts to support learners’ development of ‘survival skills they…need in the 21st century’ (Jonassen, 1995, p. 60). Authentic learning tasks are identified as a teaching approach better suited to the needs of the modern learner because of the potential for incorporating the typical problems and challenges present in the real community in the learning experiences of the student (Herrington & Herrington, 2006; Jonassen, 2003). Herrington and Oliver (2000) argue that authentic learning experiences: • • • • • • • •

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reflect the way knowledge will be used in real life offer opportunities for exploration of problems provide access to expert modelling of real life processes allow for engagement with multiple roles and perspectives throughout the process provide opportunities for the collaborative construction of knowledge encourage reflection on learning and articulation of growing understandings offer coaching and scaffolding, from teachers and other learners employ authentic assessment of the learning

Authentic learning experiences encourage learners to reflect on their learning in relation to the effect this new understanding will have on their personal outlooks and actions (Bonnet, 1997) and the ways they can move toward expert practice (Teal, Leu, Labbo & Kinzer, 2002). For students in the late stages of their tertiary study and the early stages of their teaching careers, this move toward expert practice is crucial. A learning community intersected by both physical and virtual interactions provides authenticity for these students’ learning experiences as they reflect on the theory learned throughout their study in light of their initial teaching experiences.

Description of the BeST Website An online community of learners called the “BEST site: Beginning and Establishing Successful Teachers” was developed specifically for primary and early childhood students in the Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong. A theoretical framework of authentic learning underpins the content and structure of the site by drawing on the principles of authentic learning experiences identified by Herrington and Oliver (2000) in its design. A Weblog feature within the site provides space where students can post blogs about their teaching experiences. Here, the users can not

Blogs as a Social Networking Tool to Build Community

Table 1. Connections between principles for authentic learning and the blogging component of BEST Principles of authentic learning environments (Herrington & Oliver, 2000)

Affordances of the BEST site for blogging

Authentic learning environments:

Structure and blogging affordances of the BEST site:

- reflect the way knowledge will be used in real life

- problems explored through blogs are identified by undergraduate students and early career teachers from their experiences in classrooms - problems are shared through story and dialogue

- offer opportunities for exploration of problems

- others within the community can respond to stories shared through blogs ‘anytime’ access to the site for exploration of the problems shared by others affords community members the time necessary for exploration of the problems shared

- provide access to expert modelling of real life processes

- access to blogs is given to mentors and subject tutors who are experienced classroom practitioners, available to respond to complex problems with deeper understandings - links are provided on the site to authoritative sources such as policy documents, trusted websites and experienced teachers who act as mentors to inform the blogger’s reflections

- offer coaching and scaffolding, from teachers and other learners - allow for engagement with multiple roles and perspectives throughout the process

- sharing of knowledge within the community allows members to adopt different roles as they respond to problems according to their level of experience and expertise

- provide opportunities for the collaborative construction of knowledge

- sharing experiences through publicly posted blogs allows for negotiation of understandings through collaboration

- encourage reflection on learning and articulation of growing understandings

- communication tools enable and support reflection on both personal blogs and the blogs of others

- employ authentic assessment of the learning

- learners within the community identify themes emerging from analysis of their blog postings, identifying areas of growth and learning over time

only reflect critically on their own experiences and developing expertise, but also compare and comment on the experiences of others (Herrington, Herrington, Kervin & Ferry, 2006). Figure 2 depicts the home page for the BEST site. Blogging is identified as a valuable social practice as opportunities are afforded to reflect on the teaching profession, to learn about oneself and to engage with others for professional learning (Cleine & Darcy, 2006). In this research, blogging was identified as an appropriate medium for facilitating and documenting the development of reflective practice for these early career teachers for a number of reasons. The blogs create a chronological record of the postings of the blog entries and subsequent postings from others within the community. These not only serve as a record of engagement and interaction, but also a text for further reflection. The opportunity to revisit blogs and to build on the posting in response to new understandings gathered from within the

virtual or physical community of the classroom allows the blogger to reflect and think critically about their professional identity in response to the stories they have shared. The genre of blogs was also considered to add unique qualities other virtual mediums (such as forums) may not have enabled. The flexiblility of blogs – they can mimic print based journals in content and layout or they can adopt multiple modes such as sound, movement and links to other sites (Lankshear & Knobel, 2005) - allow the blogger to engage with the reflective process at a level commensurate with their computer skills. Further, bloggers retain control over their learning because they choose the content for discussion, the layout of the text and they can accept or delete comments posted by others. Finally, bloggers can access their own and others’ blogs at anytime, providing the type of ‘on the go’ learning identified as important for learners today (Beldarrain, 2006; Lombardi, 2007; Anstey & Bull, 2006).

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Links between the principles of authentic learning environments and the affordances offered by the BEST site for blogging are identified in Table 1. The Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong has an approximate enrolment of fourteen hundred undergraduate and postgraduate students. The areas of preservice teacher education include Early Childhood, Primary, Secondary and Physical & Health Education. A Bachelor of Teaching degree can be completed over a threeyear period (full time). Each year two semesters are offered (Autumn and Spring); a full time student can study up to four subjects per semester. Successful completion of the three-year degree qualifies the participant to teach in primary schools within the state of New South Wales. Upon completion of a Bachelor of Teaching degree, participants are eligible to apply for a fourth year of study to complete the Bachelor of Education (Primary) or apply for Bachelor of Education (Honours) degree. This qualification enables the participant to teach in most other Australian states and overseas. These students are engaged with the field as they are already qualified teachers. Their part-time mode of study and demands on time are catered for with a mixture of on campus and virtual networking practices. Unlike many similar sites, the BEST site does not attempt to create communities from scratch. Instead, it builds on existing communities – those established at university among students. Study in the Faculty of Education is cohort-based, where students enrol full time and progress with their peers through the structured years of training. Generally students who enrol in the fourth year of study for the Bachelor of Education do so at a part-time level while working as either part-time or full-time teachers. During this fourth year of study there are compulsory subjects for students, one of which is entitled Reflective Practice and is the focus of this research.

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ReSeARCh meThODOlOGy In 2007, 60 students completed the Reflective Practice subject, posted blogs and provided a written report. The written report required students to consider different professional decisions, issues and challenges that they then describe in their blogs. Each student was required to consider: • •

• •

•

The underlying issues that contribute to their complexity; The moral, practical and other dilemmas that underlie the decisions, issues and challenges; The social and educational consequences of these; The social, institutional and political contexts these are located within and the impact of these upon the work of a teacher; Professional support that can be connected with to further explore the decisions, issues and challenges.

Each student provided significant text-based data for analysis through both their blog reflections, and their own analysis of these in the prepared report. This provided a foundation upon which we could examine their emerging professional identity. Through the analysis of collected data, the researchers were searching for answers to the following three questions: • • •

What happened when the students were encouraged to create blogs? How did the students engage with the blogging tool as authors and readers? How did the blogging experience intersect with the affordances of the tool for social networking?

Blog entries and synthesis tasks were examined in connection with the researchers’ own observations of students in the virtual and actual contexts using the following criteria:

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•

•

•

•

Frequency of student use of the BEST site through user log-in data, blog postings, comments made on other blogs and discussions of the blogging tool in university workshops Analysis of blog text ◦ ° Themes and issues explored within the blogs ◦ ° Language choices (such as modality of writing) ◦ ° Connections made between the theory of their university studies and the practical examples discussed ◦ ° Interaction between students through the blogs Analysis of synthesis task ◦ ° Themes and issues identified within the blogs ◦ ° Reflections as to why these themes and issues were prevalent Analysis of interaction during tutorials ◦ ° Students identifying ‘like’ minds and selecting them as study partners ◦ ° Contribution to class discussion on issues that were ‘blogged’

Initial analysis was focused on content where categories were developed and instances recorded (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). These categories were connected to the previously mentioned criteria. Once the content within the text was investigated, the researchers then focused on coding it into categories based on the emerging themes (Miles & Huberman, 1984). The analysis was comparative and interpretive. Conclusions were checked and discussed between the researchers.

ReSeARCh fINDINGS fROm ANAlySIS Of BlOGS Three key emerging themes were identified. •

Exploring the genre of a blog

• •

Student interactions with blogs and environment Examining the affordances of blogs Each is explored in connection with data.

exploring the Genre of a Blog The blog differed from other genre that the students traditionally use in the university setting. The journal aspect of the blog provided the students with a space to vent their feelings, ideas, anxieties and understandings without the pressure associated with academic writing. One student’s blog is representative of many of the students’ reports about the nature of blogging, ‘I liked that we could write using informal language. Because of this I did not have to worry about perfect grammar. Professional language is something I struggle with and something that I think loses marks for me in assignments… because we were only reflecting, I found it much easier to share my thoughts’. Another described blogging as ‘great being able to write freely without having to quote someone you agree with’. It would appear that the opportunity to blog provided students the forum for exploration of their profession and professional identity while reducing the burden associated with traditional academic writing. Although a blog is ‘published’ or ‘saved’ onto the site, the opportunity to edit the text remains available to the author. Analysis of the data indicated that some of the students revisited their blogs in response to new understandings emerging from discussions in tutorial workshops (both the Reflective Practice subject and others within the course), academic reading, casual teaching experiences or through the postings and comments of others. One student reported, ‘Blogging is a good way of reflecting – good way of recording your thoughts and going back to them…’, while

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another indicated the value of blogs in developing reflective practice, ‘… it was interesting to read what I had written over the course of the semester…what worked and didn’t etc. I can look back on it to improve my teaching practice’. The physical interactions occurring through the tutorial workshops were observed to provide students with new perspectives, deeper understandings or increased empathy with their colleagues. Blog entries included such comments as ‘I agree with…’, ‘In light of the readings this week…’, ‘I found myself taking a lot of what [tutor] had suggested onboard’, ‘As many people in the class today may have felt…’. The flexibility provided by the blog genre supported students as they made changes to existing entries or created new ones. No blog need be considered finished, its incomplete state allows the author to make tentative constructions of meaning in the face of ambiguous and complex perspectives. Further, their familiarity and comfort with the blog genre emphasised its connection to regular life activities.

Student Interactions with Blogs and environment The students and tutors met in both the physical environment of the University and the virtual community through the blogs on the BEST site. These connected interactions between community members were observed to foster genuine relationships and a trusting rapport. Analysis of the blogs revealed empathy between fellow teachers as they struggled with common issues such as classroom management and teacher expectations. For example, one student blogged about her ‘worst teaching experience’; ‘I found that it’s not until you’re on your own in the classroom as a casual teacher, with little knowledge of the students that you face the worst possible scenarios’. The student went on to describe a confrontation with a Year 6 child resulting in the child running away. Another student empathised, ‘I think you did all you could in that worst situation. I am yet to have

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an experience like that, but I’m sure I would find it rather confronting’. The physical environment further strengthened the connection these two students made through the virtual community as they later collaborated on a group assessment task for this subject. Comments posted in response to other blog entries provide further evidence of the growing rapport and sense of community felt by these members; ‘I have had exactly the same bad experience!’, ‘I can definitely relate to what you say…’, ‘Nice point, I hadn’t thought about [that] before’. Such comments provide example of the social nature of their learning as they moved between physical and virtual communities. The blogs allowed for spontaneous social networking within the community. Some students found the convenience of reflecting through blogs at times suitable to them was supportive of their developing reflections; one student, on returning from her first day of casual teaching, gushed, ‘I had to come home and blog straight away!’, while others reported being able to access the postings at any time was both convenient and helpful. Most students reported reading the postings of others for a variety of purposes. Some described the benefit as providing ideas for personal reflections and alternative perspectives from their own. Others reported that reading others blogs demonstrated that their peers were experiencing similar issues and feelings as their own, resulting in a developing empathetic rapport between students. The final reflection of one student summarises the reports of many, ‘A few times I read them before I wrote my own as sometimes I wasn’t sure where to go with my writing. A few times I read their blogs and just thought, I know exactly what you’re talking about, or, I’ve had that same experience which was good to know I wasn’t the only one out there with those same experiences’. Not all students found reading the blogs to be affirming, however, a small number reported that

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reading the blogs was ‘intimidating’, leaving them feeling inexperienced with much still to learn. This was a point of growth for one student, who said, ‘It was intimidating reading the blogs of others’, but I also learnt from their blogs’.

examining the Affordances of Blogs The blogs provided a ‘safe’ environment for the students to record their reflections. Analysis of the content of the blog reflections revealed that the students felt comfortable and secure within the virtual community, as though the barriers existing in physical interactions were removed providing some anonymity in sharing. Insights into these beginning teachers’ professional identity illustrated both insecurity and growing confidence. Reflections posted suggested a desire to share with the community that, although teaching was a challenge and many mistakes had been made, this teacher was coping and improving. For example, one teacher began a reflection about his final practicum experience; ‘I made every mistake possible to even think about writing in blogs’. However, he finished the posting with the observation, ‘By the end of the practicum, I had begun to crawl out of the deep hole I had dug for myself… with lessons being taught that I will never forget and mistakes I will endeavour never to make again!!!!’. Another student described having to ‘get over fear and apprehension and take charge’ of a class which included students with special needs. Although the student described a difficult beginning, she finished her blog reflection, ‘Throughout the day we had our ups and downs but I found that I managed quite well… If I was to have this day over, I would go in with more control and not as scared and not worry about how the students would react to my being there’. The safe environment of the blogs also afforded the students the opportunity to explore relationships between themselves and the more experienced teachers they met through casual teaching. Still, the reflections revealed the at-

titude that although the early years of teaching are difficult, they can cope. A student observed that many of the teachers at her regular casual teaching school ‘pretend I am not there because I am a casual teacher’. She described the ways she had tried to build a relationship with these teachers (so far unsuccessfully), but concluded, ‘I guess it takes a while to “fit in” to a school, especially as a casual teacher’. Responding to observations such as these, a student within this community who was somewhat older with more teaching experience offered support through a blog entitled ‘Casual teaching tips’ encouraging others to ‘have a quick glance and see if you can get anything from it’. Although the blog was posted on the BEST site, there was no compulsion for any student to follow the advice; the power to accept or reject remained with each person. The opportunity to read the reflections of others within the virtual community allowed for exploration of a range of solutions to problems around professional identity. Data analysis revealed that reading alone (without posting a comment) was sufficient in building the social network within the community, as it allowed for identification of likeminded students who could be sought out in person for further professional networking. ‘It was good to read other people’s blogs and gain ideas or see that others were encountering similar issues and problems as well as successes’. Most students described feeling initially anxious or vulnerable when authoring their own reflections because of their peer audience, but that this feeling subsided over time and with the understanding that there were many similarities between all members. ‘I found this [writing to an audience] intimidating at first, but didn’t give it much thought as the subject progressed’. Blogs as a social networking tool afforded the students opportunities to make personal explorations into the complex nature of professional identity and the way it grows and changes over time. The students reported feeling less isolated and better supported as they identified

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their experiences within the blogs, responded to the reflections of others and reflected on their shaping identities. Although reflecting through blogs was challenging and initially uncomfortable for many students, most identified it as beneficial. Blogging was initially described as ‘intimidating’, ‘challenging’, ‘forced’, ‘daunting’ and ‘difficult’, but also as ‘worthwhile’, ‘useful’ and ‘providing a new outlook after deeper thinking’. One student who at first described blogging as ‘scary knowing that others were going to read it’ concluded her reflection saying ‘the blogging really helped me to reflect on the choices and decisions I had made during my teaching’. This finding would suggest that the nature of blogging is akin to many things in life, such as eating muesli or going to the dentist; no one likes it, but they do it because they know it’s good for them! Evidence of the value of blogging as a social networking tool lies in the identification of reflection as a worthwhile professional activity for teachers and also in the increased confidence of these students as beginning teachers. The power of networking and reflection are evident in the final blog made by one student who had struggled with the theoretical and academic nature of university study, ‘I really enjoyed reflecting, but had it not been for the blogs, I probably wouldn’t have done it. From writing and reading my blogs over again, I realise that I have skills that I didn’t know. I would dismiss myself as a teacher that wasn’t that fantastic – but after reading my blogs I actually do have some desirable skills’.

CONClUDING COmmeNTS Participating in the process of creating and posting blogs appeared to provide avenue for these students to reflect on their emerging professional identity as teachers. Opportunity to share both similar and

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unique issues that arose provided scope to reflect individually and collaboratively as they examined the culture of their profession (Lacey, 1995). Our research revealed that these students were continually developing their understandings of their role as a teacher as they examined and reflected upon their role through their blogs. The blogging mechanism enabled the physical and virtual contexts to come together in two key ways. As teachers of the Reflective Practice subject it gave us avenue to explore the reflections of the students, which then fed into subsequent teaching experiences. This enabled the ‘forward moving spiral’ described by Rodgers (2002) to come into play. For the students, it provided a virtual space where they could share the decisions, issues and challenges they faced as early career teachers, while also presenting opportunities to engage with the experiences of others as immediate professional situations were examined (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988). This supports the affordances of blogs described by Cleine and Darcy (2006). What became critical throughout the entire experience was that the students set the parameters for blogging. While there was a requirement within the subject that they post blog entries, it was the students who determined what to share in each entry, the frequency of their postings and responses to others. The ability to edit their own text, and any text encapsulated as comment to their posting, meant that they retained ownership of the blogs. Further, the ability for the students to read other entries and/or respond to these, gave them more power as they made decisions about what to do with that information. For some students, this information fed into and stimulated their authorship of new blog entries; others made selections in the physical tutorial environment about who to sit next to, who to collaborate with on group tasks and the topics for conversation based on what they had read. We believe it is telling that from the sixty participants, only two selected not to read entries composed by others! These findings present example of ‘on the go’ learning essential

Blogs as a Social Networking Tool to Build Community

for contemporary learners (Beldarrain, 2006; Lombardi, 2007; Anstey & Bull, 2006). The networking opportunities that emerged from the blogging experience provided for focused and meaningful interactions to occur within both the physical and virtual environments. Students were able to explicate and articulate the different facets of their professional identity as they identified, examined and reflected upon the intricacies of what it means to be a teacher.

Bonnet, M. (1997). Computers in the classroom: Some values issues. In A. McFarlane (Ed.), Information technology and authentic learning (pp. 145-159). London: Routledge.

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Key TeRmS AND DefINITIONS Authentic Learning: Learning that is connected to knowledge that is required within a particular cultural setting. Blog: An online text that captures reflections. It may also contain pictures, hyperlinks and sound. Networking: The interaction of participants for shared knowledge and understandings. Physical Community: Actual interactions between participants, in this research this occurred through workshop sessions on the University campus.

Professional Identity: One’s conception and perception of themselves as a member of their selected profession. Reflection: Reflection is complex and rigorous, taking the practitioner through the process of linking theory with practice and practice with theory. Virtual Community: Online interactions between participants, in this research this occurred through engagement with the BEST site.

This work was previously published in Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, edited by S. Hatzipanagos and S. Warburton, pp. 238-253, copyright 2009 by Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global).

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About the Contributors

Tatyana Dumova (PhD, Bowling Green State University) is an Associate Professor of Communication at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Her research focuses on the social implications of information and communication technologies and the role of technology in teaching and learning. She has presented and published her research nationally and internationally. Richard Fiordo (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is a Professor of Communication and Director of the Graduate Program at the School of Communication at the University of North Dakota. He has published two books and numerous articles on various aspects of human communication. His recent research interests include instructional technologies and information literacy. Dr. Fiordo has worked in higher education in Canada and the United States.

*** Iiris Aaltio holds a PhD in Economics and is a Professor of Management in the School of Business and Economics at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research focuses on organizational culture and leadership, organizational entrepreneurship, and gender aspects of management. Her work has been published internationally in several edited books and a number of learned journals: Journal of Management Inquiry, Organizational Change Management, Scandinavian Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, and The Journal of Workplace Learning. She has recently co-edited Women Entrepreneurship and Social Capital: A Dialogue and Construction (2008). Dr. Aaltio has served as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of St. Mary’s, and Auckland University. June Abbas, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Abbas teaches courses in the organization of information and knowledge, cataloging and classification, information retrieval and user-centered design, digital libraries and collections. Her research focuses on the intersection of information technology and libraries in multiple contexts, including social software use, user-defined tagging, as well as pedagogical issues related to education in library and information science. Robert Agne is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Auburn University, Alabama. He holds a PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an MA from the University

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About the Contributors

of Dayton. As a language and social interaction scholar, Dr. Agne examines communication in crisis negotiation, patient-provider relationships, and social support among friends. His research appeared in Discourse and Society, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Southern Communication Journal, and Discourse Studies. Christopher J. Amelung holds a PhD in Information Science and Learning Technologies and is a Senior Developer in the Center for Media and Instructional Innovation at Yale University. Dr. Amelung leads the development of innovative educational courseware technologies, such as Open Yale Courses, which provide free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught at Yale. He is the author of the Context-aware Activity Notification System (CANS). His research interests focus on the social aspects of online learning, collaborative online learning systems, and technology innovations in education. Joshua Azriel has a PhD from the University of Florida and is an Assistant Professor of Communication in the Department of Communication at Kennesaw State University, Georgia. He teaches media law, news reporting, and writing. His research concentrates on the First Amendment and the Internet. Dr. Azriel has published his scholarly work in Communication Law and Policy, Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal, and The John Marshall Journal of Computer and Information Law. Lemi Baruh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising of the Faculty of Communications at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey. He received his PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Baruh’s research interests include marketing in interactive media, new media technologies, and the issues of privacy and surveillance on the Internet. He has presented his research at annual meetings of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, International Communication Association, National Communication Association and has published in Discourse and Communication, New Media and Society, University of Ottawa Law & Technology Journal, Communication Research, Knowledge Technology & Policy. Aaron Ben-Ze’ev is a Professor and President of the University of Haifa, Israel. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. His scholarship centers on philosophy and psychology of emotions. An internationally recognized expert Dr. Ben-Ze’ev publishes extensively on this subject. Among his recent books are: The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2000), Love Online: Emotions on the Internet (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and In the Name of Love: Romantic Ideology and its Victims (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Michelle Berzins holds a PhD in Management and is a Sessional Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra, Australia. She is a recipient of two Chancellor’s Commendations and an Australian Postgraduate Award. Her research focuses on competition law, white-collar crime, critical thinking, and the transfer of knowledge and learning. Dr. Berzins has presented her research internationally and published in Australian Journal of Adult Learning, The International Journal of Learning, International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management, International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Journal of the World Universities Forum, and The International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations.

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About the Contributors

Stefan Bitzer is a doctoral student in the Department of Information Systems and E-Business, and a research associate in the Institute of Information Systems at Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany. As a part of a research group known as “Knowledge and Education Management,” he participates in joint research efforts with industry partners (such as Volkswagen, Robert Bosch Ltd., and Mahr Ltd.) concentrating on knowledge management with Web 2.0 applications. Oliver Bohl, PhD, is a management consultant at Accenture, a global management, technology services, and outsourcing company. Dr. Bohl studied economics at the University of Kassel, Germany, where he later worked at the Research Centre for the Design of Information Systems. His professional interests include various aspects of corporate knowledge management and administering the complex organizational and workforce transitions. His research focuses on IT-based knowledge transfer. Christos J. Bouras, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Patras, Greece. His research interests include: e-learning, networked virtual environments, analysis of computer systems, computer networks and protocols, and telematics. A recognized expert in the field of computer technology, Dr. Bouras has co-authored eight books and published over 200 book chapters, articles, and papers in encyclopedias, journals and conference proceedings. He is a member of the team of experts with the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) and the Advisory Committee Member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); he also serves on the IEEE - CS Technical Committee on Learning Technologies and the IASTED Technical Committee on Education. John G. Breslin, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Department of Electronic Engineering and a Leader of the Social Software Unit at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland at Galway. He is co-founder and director of Ireland’s largest message board community portal and founder of the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) project. His research focuses on the Semantic Web, semantically enabled social networks, and community portals. Dr. Breslin is a member of Engineers Ireland, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He has received a number of commendations, including two Net Visionary Awards from the Irish Internet Association in 2005 and 2006. Ruth E. Brown, PhD, finds social media and the technologies that enable them valuable tools and worthy topics for research, as they push the boundaries of knowledge and mainstream thought. Dr. Brown teaches advertising courses at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, following fifteen years as Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Nebraska at Kearney. She has worked as a professional in mass media and with public relations before entering academia. Joseph E. Burns, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Communication at Southeastern Louisiana University. He teaches digital audio, broadcast news, copywriting, film history, criticism, and ethics. His current research interests include participatory journalism, social media, and podcasting. Dr. Burns has authored six books on web design and published his research in American Communication Journal, Louisiana Communication Journal, and New Jersey Journal of Communication.

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About the Contributors

Thorsten Caus is a doctoral student and research associate at the Department of Information Systems and E-Business, Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany. Previously, he completed his studies of business and computer science at Warwick Business School, Warwick University, UK and the University of Göttingen. His current research focuses on Internet economics, consumer applications, and business models of the mobile Internet including development of context-aware mobile services. Stefan Christmann is a doctoral student and research associate in the Department of Information Systems and E-Business, Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany. He has studied Business Information Systems at the University of Göttingen where he received a Hans Böckler Foundation (HansBöckler-Stiftung) scholarship. The topic of his Diploma thesis was “Conceptual design and prototypical implementation of a mobile application for personalized public transport guidance.” His current research examines the use of the mobile Internet and mobile applications in business. Scott L. Crabill holds a PhD from Wayne State University and is Director of the Integrative Studies program at Oakland University, Michigan where he teaches courses in group and interpersonal communication. His research concentrates on the intersection of computer-mediated and interpersonal communication with a quantitative methodological focus. Dr. Crabill has published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of the Wisconsin Communication Association, Florida Communication Journal, and the International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society. Stefan Decker received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and is a Professor and Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research interests include: the Semantic Web, metadata, ontologies and semi-structured data, web services and applications for digital libraries, knowledge management, and information integration. Currently, he is working on the development of a social semantic desktop, a next generation collaboration infrastructure. As one of the most widely cited Semantic Web scholars, Dr. Decker has published over 80 book chapters, articles and papers in journals, conference and workshop proceedings. He has co-organized 35 scientific workshops and conferences on the Semantic Web and has edited several special issues of scholarly journals. Helen Donelan earned her PhD at the University of Leeds in the UK after completing research on the design and development of sequences and codes for spread-spectrum communications systems; it has resulted in several research publications. She joined the Open University as a Research Fellow to undertake a project investigating women’s experiences of using online networks for career progression. She currently works in the Department of Communication and Systems at the Open University in the UK and continues to examine the online networking of women in science, engineering, and technology. Alan Eardley is a Principal Lecturer in the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Technology and an Associate Head of Postgraduate Research Studies at Staffordshire University, UK. Dr. Eardley has extensive experience in information management and systems analysis in a variety of industries. His research into knowledge management, action research methods, and strategic planning has appeared in numerous publications in international journals and conference proceedings. He has participated in a number of industrial collaborations and consultancy projects and has co-authored textbooks on information management in business.

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About the Contributors

Cassie A. Eno is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alabama where she works with Dr. Rosanna Guadagno in the Online Social Influence Laboratory conducting research on gender and self-presentation styles. Her Master’s thesis examined the influence of attitudes on film interpretation. Judith Gelernter holds a PhD in Information Science from Rutgers University and is presently a post-doctoral Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, she has taught in the Information and Library Science Master’s programs at Queens College and at Rutgers University. Dr. Gelernter’s research interests are in natural language processing, information visualization, digital libraries, human computer interaction, and geographic information systems. She has published on the subjects of social technology, tagging, and information search and retrieval. Kerri Gibson is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick, Canada and an analyst at the National Research Council Canada exploring the social aspects of information and communication technologies. Her research focuses on examination of the technology development in the authentic user communities and solutions that facilitate high-engagement participation for rural and remote end users. Joe Grimes is a Professor of Computer Science and Director of Faculty Professional Development at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He received his doctorate at Iowa State University. He has worked with government agencies and industry as a consultant to NASA, Bell Helicopter, Xerox, and as a computer science consultant to the U.S. Navy. Dr. Grimes is an active member of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network, the California State University (CSU) Faculty Development Council, has hosted three CSU faculty conferences, and has numerous refereed publications and presentations in the areas of computer science and scholarship of teaching. Rosanna Guadagno has a PhD in Social Psychology from Arizona State University and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama where she is the Director of the Online Social Interaction Lab. Her master’s and dissertation research examined persuasion via computer-mediated communication. To extend her knowledge of the impact of technology on social interaction, Dr. Guadagno spent three years as a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she studied persuasion and non-verbal behavior in immersive virtual environments. Her current research interests include investigating persuasion in computer-mediated contexts, social behavior in online games, gender differences in self-presentation style, and self-presentation in online contexts. Svenja Hagenhoff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Systems and EBusiness, Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany. She has studied information management and information systems at the University of Göttingen and worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Information Systems where she wrote her doctoral thesis focused on e-learning. Dr. Hagenhoff currently leads a research group studying Internet economics. Her research interests include mobile Internet, development of context-aware mobile services, and communication systems. She was a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006.

5

About the Contributors

Sirkku Kristiina Hellsten, PhD, is an Adjunct Professor of Moral and Social Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, Finland and Counsellor for Governance and Human Rights at the Embassy of Finland in Nairobi, Kenya. Previously, she has served as Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Ethics, School of Public Policy, University of Birmingham, UK, and Head of the Philosophy Unit at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. She has published extensively on the issues of egovernment and e-governance, development ethics, social justice, and human rights. Among her recent publications is a co-edited book, Women’s Citizenship and Political Rights (Macmillan, 2006). She was a Visiting Scholar at the Victoria University of Wellington and the University of South Florida. Clem Herman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at the Open University in the UK. Before joining the Open University, she was the Director of the Women’s Electronic Village Hall (WEVH) in Manchester, one of the first community ICT access centers in Europe. Her recent research includes documenting women’s experiences of “becoming digital” at community ICT centers, a three-year project on the lives and careers of women IT technicians, and a comparative study of women engineers and scientists in Latvia, Poland, and the UK. In 2005 she organized the 3rd European Gender and ICT Symposium in Manchester, UK. She received an Open University Teaching Award in 2006. Jiehua Huang is an Associate Professor of Applied Psychology at Guangzhou University, China with research interests focused on gender, women’s managerial careers in information technology, and the relationship between guanxi and social capital in cross-cultural contexts. She has presented her research at the International Conference on Management, International Congress of Psychology, and other scholarly forums and has published in the Journal of Guangzhou University, Journal of South China Normal University, International Journal of Psychology, Psychological Science, and Journal of Organizational Change Management. Lee Humphreys is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Cornell University. She received her PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in the investigation of the social uses and perceived effects of communication technology. Her research has explored mobile phone use in public spaces and emerging norms on mobile social networking systems in the U.S. and Indonesia. Using qualitative methods, she investigates how people integrate communication technology in their everyday lives to facilitate identity management and social interaction. Her research has appeared in New Media & Society and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. She co-edited the book, Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication (Peter Lang, 2006). Umit Isikdag is an Ankara-based consultant in the area of building information modeling. He holds an M.Sc. from the University of Greenwich and a PhD from the University of Salford, UK. His main professional and research interests focus on information technology and applied IT strategies. Dr. Isikdag is a co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Research on Building Information Modeling and Construction Informatics: Concepts and Technologies (IGI Global). Lorraine D. Jackson is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. She received her PhD from Pennsylvania State University. Dr.

6

About the Contributors

Jackson’s research interests are in health communication and communication technologies. Her scholarly work has appeared in books and such scholarly journals as Health Communication, Women’s Studies in Communication, Journal of Health Communication, and Communication Teacher. She published Health Communication Research: A Guide to Developments and Directions, co-edited with B. K. Duffy (Greenwood Press). Sooran Jo is a researcher in the Department of IT Business at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Her research interests concentrate on CASE tools for IS development, online game industry, knowledge sharing, and IS security. She has presented her research at KISS and KMIS and published in the Journal of Information Technology Management. Pankaj Kamthan teaches in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. His professional, teaching and research interests include: conceptual software engineering, semantic mobile applications, pragmatic quality of software specifications, and syntax and semantics of XML entities. He serves on program committees of international conferences and on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning and the International Journal of Teaching and Case Studies. Karen Kear, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology at the Open University, UK, where she teaches in the Communication and Systems Department. Her primary research area is distance education, online learning, and computer-mediated systems for education. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and was recently awarded a Teaching Fellowship in the Open University’s Centre for Excellence. Dr. Kear has many years of experience in specifying, designing, and creating interactive software for education, scientific research and industry. Her research publications have appeared in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, European Journal of Engineering Education, Computers and Education, Active Learning, and British Journal of Educational Technology. Todd Kelshaw holds a PhD from the University of Washington and is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Montclair State University, New Jersey. His scholarship addresses democratic interaction within and across various kinds of civic, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations, with particular care for how dialogic and deliberative discourses may foster stakeholder participation. This interest is shaped by broader concerns about contemporary organizational life as it is influenced by globalization, post-modernity, and democratization. His writings about democratic engagement have appeared in Communication Theory, The Journal of Communication, Partnership Perspectives, and The International Journal of Public Participation. His forthcoming co-edited book, Partnerships for Service-Learning: Impacts on Communities and Students, is to be published by Jossey-Bass. Hak-Lae Kim, PhD, is a researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute of the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research specialties include the Semantic Web technology and ontology, semantically enabled social spaces and social computing. Dr. Kim is the founder of the Social Semantic Cloud of Tags ontology project (SCOT) that aims to provide semantic relations for tagging data. He is a member of the Web 2.0 Working Group in South Korea.

7

About the Contributors

Hong-Gee Kim holds the rank of Professor and is a Director of the Biomedical Knowledge Engineering Laboratory at Seoul National University, South Korea. Dr. Hong-Gee Kim’s research interests include the Semantic Web, knowledge engineering, and knowledge representation. Gill Kirkup, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Educational Technology, Open University, UK and Head of Research, Data and Policy of the UK Resources Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a member of the Association of Learning Technologies. Her main research interests center on gender and lifelong learning, students’ use of learning technologies in their domestic and work environments, and educational technology innovations. She has published widely in these areas. Elizabeth Koh is a doctoral candidate at the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests focus on educational technology: in particular, the use of wikis for collaborative learning. She has presented her research at international conferences and contributed to the Encyclopedia of Multimedia Technology and Networking (Information Science Reference, 2008). James M. Laffey holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and is a Professor in the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri-Columbia. A former researcher and systems developer at Apple Computer, he teaches graduate courses on the design and development of computer-based educational systems. Dr. Laffey is internationally recognized as an expert in the area of human-computer interaction. He has received over $ 5 million in funding during the past ten years to advance the use of technology in education. He is the principal investigator for a grant from the Fund for Improving Post-Secondary Education being used to develop Context-aware Activity Notification System (CANS) and advance the use of notification systems in learning. Mark J. W. Lee is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer with the School of Education, Charles Sturt University, and an honorary Research Fellow with the School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, University of Ballarat, Australia. Previously, he worked in a variety of teaching, instructional design and managerial roles within the private, vocational, and higher education sectors. He has published extensively in the areas of educational technology, e-learning and innovative pedagogy in higher education. He is presently Chair of the New South Wales Chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Education Society, and serves on the editorial boards of a number of international journals. Christine A. Lemesianou holds a PhD from Rutgers University and is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey where she serves as the Coordinator for the Basic Communication Program. Much of her research has focused on critical pedagogy; she has published her scholarly work in edited books and journals. Her other research interests include communication and identity, new media and interactive technologies, and globalization and borders. John Lim is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore and the Head of the Information Systems Research Laboratory. Dr. Lim has graduated with First Class Honors in Electrical Engineering and received an M.Sc. from the National University of Singapore. His PhD is from the University of British Columbia, Canada. His current research interests include IT

8

About the Contributors

and education, collaborative technology, negotiation support, and media effects. He has published in Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Global Information Management, Decision Support Systems, International Journal of Human Computer Studies, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Behaviour and Information Technology, International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies, Journal of Database Management, and Small Group Research. Shakib Manouchehri is a researcher and project manager at the Research Centre for the Design of Information Systems, Kassel, Germany. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Information Systems, University of Kassel. Previously, he has worked for several years as a consultant in the field of information systems and corporate knowledge management. His current research focuses on business information and communication management, corporate knowledge management, Web 2.0, social software, and mobile services. Ronald Marsh holds a PhD in Computer Science and is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Dakota. He teaches courses in operating systems, computer architecture, scientific computing, and advanced computer graphics. Dr. Marsh’s research interests include high performance computing and advanced digital image processing. He has presented his research nationally and internationally. Catherine McLoughlin is an Associate Professor and Research Coordinator in the School of Education at the Australian Catholic University, Canberra. She also serves as the coordinator of the Australian Capital Territory branch of the Research Centre for Science, Information Technology and Mathematics Education for Rural and Regional Australia (SiMERR). With over twenty years experience in higher education in Europe, South East Asia, the Middle East and Australia, Dr. McLoughlin has worked with diverse students and across a wide range of cultural contexts. She serves as an editor of the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology and as editorial board member of several leading journals in the field, including The British Journal of Educational Technology. Heather Molyneaux is an analyst at the National Research Council Canada investigating the social aspects of information and communication technologies, including broadband visual communication. Her research involves partnerships with authentic user communities to investigate more effective ways for people to use and interact with information and communication technologies. Her M.A. is from the University of New Brunswick, Canada and her B.A. from the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Junghoon Moon, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of the Department of IT Business at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and an Associate Director of Auto-ID Labs Korea sponsored by EPCglobal. He received his PhD in Management Information Systems from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research interests include e-business, information technology management, e-government, and ubiquitous sensor networks. He has presented his work at the KMIS, IRMA, AMICS and HICSS conferences. At AMICS 2006, Dr. Moon received the Best Paper Award. He has published his research in the Journal of Information Technology Management, Online Information Review, Korean Management Science Review, e-Business Studies, and Information Systems Frontiers.

9

About the Contributors

Dhrubodhi Mukherjee received a PhD from the University of South Carolina and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Dr. Mukherjee’s research specialties cover the application of social network theory, social capital theory, and social network analysis in the context of international social development and civil society. Dr. Mukherjee has published and presented his research nationally and internationally. He worked with the World Bank as a consultant and held visiting and adjunct positions at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, the Mudra Institute of Communication and Advertisement, Ahmedabad, and the University of South Carolina. Julie Mulvany, PhD, is a Professor and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Life and Social Sciences at the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. She leads educational projects in the integration of communication skills in science programs and identification of early intervention strategies for students at risk of failure. Dr. Mulvany is the project manager of Swinburne’s ePortfolio project. Her recent research projects include investigating career destinations of social science graduates, examining the value of work based learning models, and identifying curriculum design and delivery implications in the context of an aging workforce. Dr. Mulvany has published in national and international journals. Susan O’Donnell is a Senior Researcher at the National Research Council Canada’s Institute for Information Technology and an Adjunct Professor at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Canada. She holds a PhD in Communications from Dublin City University, Ireland, an MA from Cardiff University, Wales, and a BA from the University of Ottawa, Canada. Dr. O’Donnell works as a member of a multi-disciplinary technology development team. She specializes in the social aspects of information and communication technologies. Broadband visual communication is currently the main focus of her research. Her research of broadband services in remote, rural, and northern indigenous communities involves identifying technology innovation for community adoption and development. Dr. O’Donnell is an elected member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology. Bradley M. Okdie received his MA from the University of Northern Iowa. His Master’s thesis examined social influence and computer-mediated communication. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Alabama where he works on research projects with Dr. Rosanna Guadagno in the Online Social Interaction Laboratory. Kenneth Owen is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Business Administration at Lakehead University in Canada where he received his BA and M.Mgt. He teaches courses in data communications, network administration, systems planning, and information security. His research interests include knowledge management, information systems, and the impact of technology on small businesses. Joowon Park is a researcher in the Department of IT Business at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. His research interests are in online consumer behavior, e-business, knowledge management, and information systems. He has presented papers at several international conferences, including KMIS and AMCIS. His work has been published in Information Systems Frontiers. Sarah Pedersen, PhD, teaches in the Department of Communication and Media at the Aberdeen Business School, The Robert Gordon University, UK. She serves as Chair of the United Kingdom As-

10

About the Contributors

sociation for Publishing Education. Her research interests focus on communication through a variety of media. In 2006, Dr. Pedersen was awarded a research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a project investigating women’s motivations for blogging. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Audience and Reception Research, The International Journal of the Book, International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Journal of Scholarly Publishing. Lina Pelliccione, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Curtin University of Technology in Australia. Her dissertation examined ICT adoption and implementation of educational innovations in the learning and teaching process at the tertiary level. Her research interests include enhancing learning through the use of technology, electronic portfolios, online learning environments, formative assessment, and mentoring. In 2006, Dr. Pelliccione received a prestigious Citations for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning award from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC). Isabella Peters is a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Information Science at Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany. She has studied linguistics and information science at the University of Düsseldorf where she obtained her Magister degree. Her research focuses on Web 2.0, particularly the use and characteristics of folksonomies in the context of indexing and information retrieval. Heather D. Pfeiffer is a College Assistant Professor in the Klipsch School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Mexico State University. Her research centers on knowledge engineering, database management, and modeling of heterogeneous architectures. Dr. Pfeiffer has presented at ICCS, KCAP, VL, ASIST, and other conferences on topics relating to knowledge databases, artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering. She has published papers in such journals as JETAI and JMMS. Dr. Pfeiffer holds a PhD in Computer Science from New Mexico State University, an M.S. in Computer Science from New Mexico State University, and a BS in Biology/Microbiology from the University of Washington. Catherine Pocknee is an academic coordinator of cooperative education programs in the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. With a strong background in educational research and educational technology, she is currently undertaking a PhD investigating institutional change and quality enhancement of classroom teaching practices. She has been an active participant in Swinburne’s ePortfolio project. Vassilis Poulopoulos is a computer and informatics engineer at the Computer Technology Institute, Patras, Greece. He obtained an MSc in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Patras. His professional and research interest entail: databases, web technologies, web page fetching and personalization, automatic text summarization and categorization. Angela T. Ragusa has a PhD from Virginia Tech and is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities & Social Sciences at Charles Sturt University in New South Wales, Australia. She has many years of teaching and research experience in the U.S. and Australia: Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, the University of New England, Queensland University of Technology, and Griffith University. Her publications include a forthcoming edited book, Interaction in Communication Technologies & Virtual

11

About the Contributors

Learning Environments (IGI Global) and book chapters and journal articles on teaching and learning, distance education, and media studies. Alan Rea, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Computer Information Systems at the Haworth College of Business, Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Dr. Rea teaches courses in computer programming, server administration, and information management. His research centers on artificial intelligence, social engineering, virtual reality security, and computing ethics. Dr. Rea is currently a Guest Editor for a special issue of the Journal of Information Systems Education on the Impacts of Web 2.0 and Virtual World Technologies on IS Education. He is also the editor of a forthcoming book, Security in Virtual Worlds and 3D Webs: Models for Development and Management, IGI Global. James D. Robinson is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Dayton. He earned his PhD from Purdue University under the tutelage of Carl Bybee and Ralph Webb. His scholarship focuses on the way things are portrayed in the media. Dr. Robinson has examined TV portrayals of a variety of themes and topics. His research has been published in numerous communication journals: Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Mass Communication Review, Communication Research Reports, Journalism Quarterly, Journal of Social & Personal Relationships, and Health Communication. Noemi Maria Sadowska, PhD, University of London, is a Senior Lecturer in the Regents Business School at Regent’s College, London, UK. Alongside teaching commitments in the area of design management, Dr. Sadowska has spent considerable time undertaking research into the relationship between design and gender. Her research has been published as part of Advances in Universal Web Design and Evaluation: Research, Trends and Opportunities (Idea Group Publishing, 2007) and is featured in the Encyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology (Idea Group Reference, 2006) as well as other publications. Matthias Schumann, PhD, is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Information Systems and E-Business; he is also Managing Director of the Institute of Information Systems at Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany. From April 2001 to March 2005, he served as Vice-President of the University of Göttingen. His scholarship interests include knowledge management, e-commerce, credit management of financial service providers, IT support of business webs, P2P systems and ubiquitous computing, innovative technologies and architectures, as well as converging markets with respect to internet economy. Dr. Schumann has authored and co-authored several books and numerous articles in these areas. He was a post-doctoral Fellow at the IBM Scientific Center-Los Angeles, CA. Francesco Sofo, PhD, is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra, Australia. His research interests address individual and team performance, leadership, innovation, and organizational learning. He is the author of several books and textbooks, including Human Resource Development: Paradigm, Role and Practice Choices (Business and Professional Publishers) and Open Your Mind: 7 Keys to Thinking Critically (Allen and Unwin). Dr. Sofo is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management and the Australian Human Resources Institute, as well as the Director of the Centre for Transnational Empowerment, Leadership and Performance within the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra. He has held Visiting Professor positions at the

12

About the Contributors

University of Milan and the University of Calabria in Italy, Hangzhou Normal University in China, ESADE University in Spain, University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, Warwick University in UK, and George Washington University in the U.S. Levent Soysal holds a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University. He is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Radio, Television and Cinema of the Faculty of Communications at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey. Dr. Soysal’s teaching and research interests include globalization, transnationalism, migration, theories of culture, representation, and media. Previously, he served as a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Free University of Berlin, and was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University. Robert D. Sprague is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Wyoming. He received his J.D. degree from the University of Denver and an MBA from the University of Southern California. Dr. Sprague’s current research interests derive from a convergence of law, business, and technology, with an emphasis on privacy and cyberspace issues. He has published over twenty papers on various topics including software copyrights, privacy, and the use of advanced technology in the delivery of legal services. Prior to joining academia on a full-time basis, Dr. Sprague provided legal counseling to small businesses, primarily in high-tech industries, and held senior management positions in various Internet start-up ventures in Silicon Valley. Wolfgang G. Stock, PhD, is a Professor of Information Science and the Head of the Information Science Department in the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany. His teaching and research cover the market of digital information, including information indexing and retrieval, informetrics, online information suppliers, and knowledge representation. He has authored information science textbooks for Oldenbourg Verlag and published over 200 articles and papers in journals and conference proceedings. Among his recent books is Information Retrieval (Oldenbourg, 2007). Currently, he is editing a book series Knowledge and Information for KG Saur Verlag. Zixue Tai received a PhD from the University of Minnesota and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. His research focuses on global communication with a special concentration on the transformation of Chinese media and the social impact of new media technologies. He is the author of the recently published book The Internet in China: Cyberspace and Civil Society (Routledge, 2006). Additionally, his research has been published in such journals as the International Communication Gazette, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, New Media & Society, and Journal of Communication. Lars Thoroe has studied business information systems at Georg August University of Göttingen in Germany and at Högskolan Dalarna in Sweden. He is currently a doctoral student and research associate in the Department of Information Systems and E-Business at the Institute of Information Systems, University of Göttingen. His research interests focus on e-business: in particular, on the issues connected with logistics and supply chain management. Tami K. Tomasello has a PhD from Florida State University and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, where she teaches

13

About the Contributors

courses in the media studies concentration. Her research interests include the history of computing and the Internet, comparisons between older and newer media, and technology accessibility issues. She has co-authored a book, Managing the Infosphere: Governance, Technology, and Cultural Practice in Motion (Temple University Press, 2008), and has published in the Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and Public Library Quarterly. Emma L. Tonkin is a research officer in UKOLN at the University of Bath, UK where she manages the Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry (IEMSR). Her research focuses on the applied aspects of information technologies. She also serves as a co-moderator of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative’s (DCMI) schema registry community and a member of the DCMI advisory board. She is currently pursuing a PhD degree in the area of wearable computing at the University of Bristol. Anna-Karin Tötterman is a PhD student and researcher in the Department of Information Studies at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Her research interests center on knowledge sharing in organizations. She is currently participating in a research project entitled The Individual and Organizational Key Skills in the Information Intensive Society funded by the Ministry of Education of Finland. Vassilis Tsogkas is a computer and informatics engineer at the Computer Technology Institute, Patras, Greece. He received an MSc in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Patras. His professional and research interest are: web technologies and web data integrating, dynamic processing of web content, information extraction, web content summarization and categorization. Lorna Uden, PhD, is a Professor in the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Technology at Staffordshire University, UK. Her research interests include web engineering, technology-based teaching and learning, human-computer interaction, the Semantic Web and online collaborative working environments. She has published over 140 chapters, articles and papers in edited books, journals, conference and workshop proceedings, and has recently co-authored the book, Technology and Problem-Based Learning (Information Science Publishing, 2006). Dr. Uden is a founder and editor of the International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology and the International Journal of Learning Technology. She has held Visiting Professor positions at universities in Australia, China, Finland, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, South Africa, and Taiwan. Güliz Uluç is an Associate Professor of the Faculty of Communications at Ege University, İzmir, Turkey. Dr. Uluç completed her MA and PhD degrees at Ege University’s Institute of Social Science, Department of Radio, Television and Cinema. She has authored several books and published numerous conference and journal papers in the area of international communication, communication law, and orientalism. Richard D. Waters received a PhD from the University of Florida and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University. His research interests include the fundraising process, relationship management in the nonprofit sector, and the use of technology by nonprofit organizations. Dr. Waters’ research has a strong applied focus given his previous public relations and fundraising experience and has been published in Public Relations Review, Journal of Health Communication, Nonprofit Management & Leadership, Journal of Communication Manage-

14

About the Contributors

ment, Teaching Public Relations, and Journal of Volunteer Administration. He was the recipient of the Chaffee-McLeod Top Communication and Theory Paper award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in 2007. Katrin Weller is a Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Information Science at Institute for Language and Information of Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany. She holds a Magister degree in Information Science and teaches courses in information science, knowledge representation, indexing, ontology engineering, and bibliometrics. Her research concentrates on collaborative efforts in knowledge representation and document indexing, ranging from collaborative ontology engineering to social tagging applications. Gunilla Widén-Wulff holds a PhD in Information Science and is a Professor of Information Studies at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. She is a Chair of the Finnish Association of Information Studies. Her areas of teaching specialization include knowledge organization, information seeking, and information management. Dr. Widén-Wulff’s research examines social capital, information management and knowledge sharing in groups and organizations. Among her recent books is The Challenges of Knowledge Sharing in Practice: A Social Approach (2007). In 2004–2005, she was a Visiting Researcher in the School of Computing, Napier University, Edinburgh. Dr. Widén-Wulff is currently leading two research projects funded by the Ministry of Education of Finland. One of the projects investigates the various aspects of Web 2.0 and social media. Robert Willis is a Professor in the Faculty of Management at Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. He received his BA at the University of Waterloo, MBA at the University of Alberta, and PhD at the University of Calgary. His research interests encompass technology and entrepreneurship/small business, the social impact of technology, and social informatics. His teaching areas include the foregoing as well as general management, strategy, international business, and entrepreneurship. Mehmet Yilmaz obtained his B.A. with Honors at the Faculty of Communication of Ege University, İzmir, Turkey. His MA and PhD degrees are from the Department of Radio, Television and Cinema at Ege University’s Institute of Social Science in the fields of political communication and communication in cyberspace. Dr. Yilmaz is the author of several research publications in the area of online political communication, media politics, television studies, and communication law. Zuopeng (Justin) Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the School of Business and Economics in the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. He earned his PhD in Business Administration from Pennsylvania State University. His research interests address economics in information systems, knowledge management, e-business, and workflow systems. His research has appeared in Knowledge and Process Management, International Journal of E-Business Research, Encyclopaedia of Portal Technology and Applications, Encyclopaedia of Mobile Computing and Commerce, and in the proceedings of major conferences in information systems.

15

1

Index

A Accommodation 312 Actor Network Theory 541 Actual Malice 371 Advanced Fee Fraud 573 Advanced Research Projects Agency (APRA) 5 Advertainment 472 Agreeableness 301 All-Hands Meeting 130 Annotation 169 ARPAnet 10 artificial intelligence 8 asynchronous communication 117, 130 Asynchronous Discussion Board 231 Asynchronous Forums 193 Audioblog/Audioblogger 66 authentic communication 121 Authentic Learning 700 Avatar 231 avatars 633

B Basemap 450 Big Five Factor Model 301 Blog 231, 290, 301, 700 BlogChina 70, 71, 73, 74, 78 BlogCN 78 Blog Entry 382 blogosphere 662, 666, 667, 672, 676, 678, 679, 681, 683, 709 Blogosphere 291, 301, 382, 683 Blogroll 291 Blog Service Provider (BSP) 78

Blook 291 Blooker Prize 291 Bluetooth 32 Boke 78 Boke Mingren 79 Broadband 541 Broadband Visual Communication (BVC) 541 Business Models 100 Buzz 55

C Capital Market Model 100 Career 269 Career-Based Social Network Site 279 Career Development 279 Carnival 416 Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 391 Children’s Television Act (CTA) 472 China Blog Contest 79 China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) 79 Citizen-Based Journalism 391 Citizen Journalism 55 Citizen Marketing 55 cognitive capital 631 Cognitive Response 313 collaborative knowledge-building 631 Collaborative Learning 219 Collaborative Tagging 157 Comments 382 Comment-to-Entry Ratio (CER) 382 Commercial Online Portal 256 Communication Accommodation Theory 313 Community Network 169 Community of Practice 219

Copyright © 2010, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

Index

Computer Facilitated Crime 573 Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) 326 Computer Network 10 Conscientiousness 301 Constructivism 559 Consumer-Generated Advertisements 55 content dimension 104 Content Variability 43 Context-Aware Activity Notification System (CANS) 180 Context Awareness 180 Contextual Integrity 402 contextualizing learning 626 Control 599 Convergence 313 Conversation Marketing 55 COSMOS 18, 20, 21, 783 Course Management System (CMS) 180 Crowdsourcing 391 Culture 269 Customer Evangelists 55 Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) 505 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 505 Cyberaffair 335 Cybercartography 450 Cyber-Crime 573 Cybering 335 Cyberlove 335 Cybersex 335 Cyber Targeting 371 Cybervolunteering 485

D Data Mining 43, 402 Dataveillance 402 Deep Profiling 599 Defamation 361, 371 Diffusion of Innovations 485 Digital Commons 614 digital computer 5 Digital Divide 85, 90 Disaster Fraud 573 Divergence 313 Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) 348 2

E Early Adopters 485 Early Majority 485 East African Community (EAC): 80, 90 Economists 114 E-Democracy 90 E-Development 90 E-Government 90 Electronic Numerical Integrator Analyzer and Computer (ENIAC) 2 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Analyzer (ENIAC) 10 Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) 55 Embedded Advertisements 66 Employment-at-Will Doctrine 361 Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) 13 Enterprise Tagging 157 E-Philanthropy 485 E-Portfolio 244 E-Portfolio Artifacts 244 Epsilen 244 E-Readiness 90 Etoys 426 Extensible Markup Language (XML) 57, 58, 66 Extraversion 301

F face-to-face environment 117 Feed Aggregator 66 Feminist Framework 256 Filter Blogs 291 folksonomy 683 Folksonomy 231, 517, 527, 683 Formal Discursive Control 416 Forum 382 fostering community 628 Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) 614 Free Software (FS) 614 Free Software Movement 614 Full Duplex 437

Index

G

J

Gemeinschaft 348 Gender 269, 301 Gendered Design Practice 256 General Radio Packet Service (GPRS) 13 Geocoding 450 Geographic Data Formats 450 globalization 87, 101 Global Positioning System (GPS) 32 Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) 13 Good Samaritan Rule 371 Guanxi 269 Guanxi Base 269 Guild 349

Jerk Swarm 391 Journal Blogs 291 Jurisprudence 371

K Self-Categorization 495 Knowledge 169 Knowledge Base 505 Knowledge Management (KM) 505 Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) 145 Knowledge work 105

L

hacking 8 Heuristic Evaluation 584 Hierarchies 517 Host Selling 472 Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 391

Laggards 485 Late Majority 485 Learning Management System (LMS) 231 Liability 371 Libel 391 Licklider’s vision 1, 4, 8, 9, 719 Logo 426 Ludology 349

I

M

identity formation strategies 630 Immaterial Labour 614 Individual Differences 301 Informal Discursive Control 416 Information Content Provider 371 Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) 5 Information Technology 559 Innovators 485 Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) 1 Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress 361 Interactive Computer Service 361, 371 Interactive Computing 10 Interactive Marketing 472 Interactive Media 43, 403 Interactivity 256 IPC Media 256 IP Multicast 437

Mailing List 279 Man-Computer Symbiosis 1, 10 Market Model 100 Mashup 527 Mash-Up 207 Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) 349 Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) 349 Matchmaking Websites 335 MediaWiki 219 Meeting Management Software 130 Mesh Network 426 Metadata 518 Meta-Scams 573 Micro-Blog 32 Micro-Content 207 Micro-Learning 207 Micropedia 219 Migration 100 Mind Map 559

H

3

Index

Mingren Boke 79 mobilecasting 61 mobile devices 11, 16, 17, 21 mobile Internet usage 11, 17 Mobile Social Service 32 Mobile Social Software 100 Mobile Social Software (or MoSoSo) 32 Mobile Social Web 11, 13, 16, 21 Mobility 21 Modern workplace 121 MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) 208 Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) 32 Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) 349 Multi-User Shared Hallucination (MuSH) 349 Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) 232

P

nanotechnology 8 Negligence 361, 371 Negligent Hiring Doctrine 362 Neogeography 450 Netizen 79 Network 279 Networking 279, 700 Network Society 193 Neuroticism 301 nmet, threaten its closure Feminist Framework 256

paradigm-catalogue 92 Parasocial Interaction 313 Parasocial Relationship 313 Peer-Based Collaborative Learning 193 Peer Production 614 Persistent World 349 Personality 301 personalization 670 Personal Learning Environment (PLE) 208 Personal Learning Environments (PLE) 244 phishing schemes 8 Physical Community 700 Podcast 232 Podcasting 56, 57, 703, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64 , 65, 66, 713, 714, 724, 745, 748, 74 9, 756, 757, 771, 791 Podcatcher 66 Point-to-Point (P2P) 437 Political Communication 382 Pragmatics 169 Pre-Roll Advertisements 66 Professional Identity 700 Prosumer 55, 100 Public Intimacy 403 Pull Transmission Model 437 punchcasting 61 Push Transmission Model 437

O

Q

Objectivism 559 Online Community 21 Online Dating 335 Online Democracy 416 Online Learning 180 Online Learning Culture 130 Online Network 279 Online Scams 573 Online Video Sharing 541 Ontology 169, 518, 527 OPAC 460 Openness to New Experience 301 Open Source Software 560 Open Source Software (OSS) 614

QwikiWiki 219

N

4

R Raster Map 450 Really Simple Syndication (RSS) 208 Reciprocal Communication 599 Reduced Cues 326 Reflection 700 relational dimension 104 requests for comments (RFCs) 7 Responsiveness 599 Role Playing Game (RPG) 349 Romantic Boundaries 335

Index

S Sakai 244 Screen Name 326 Second Life (SL) 623 Second Life, what is it? 625 Self Presentation 599 Semantic Web 518 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) 10 Semiotic Triangle 169 Short Messaging Service (SMS) 32 single loop learning 125 Situated Knowledges 193 SL 623, 624, 625, 626, 627, 628, 629, 63 0, 631, 632, 633, 634, 635, 636, 638 , 779 Social Ability 180 Social Bookmarking 460 social capital framework 102 Social Comparison 495 Social Computing 527 Social Computing Interactivity 599 social gfriendship h network 684 Social Identification 495 Social Identity 495 Social Identity Theory 326 Social Informatics 541 Social Interaction 193 Social interaction technologies 101, 110, 121 Socialization 495 Socialization Continuum 349 Social Media 403, 437 Social Navigation 180 Social Network 269, 684 social network analysis 684 Social Network Analysis 43, 684 Social Network Analysis (SNA) 269 Social Networking 460 Social Networking Services (SNS) 32 Social Networking Site 120, 362 Social Networks 518 Social Network Site 279 Social Network Sites 403 Social Place 180 Social Software 460, 505, 527, 614

Social Software Usability 584 Social Structure 416 Social Tagging 527 Social Tagging Services 169 Social Technologies 614 Social Web 120 Software Engineering 560 Software Process 560 Squeak 426 structural dimension 103 structural social scientists 114 Student Centered Learning 244 Sub-Forum 193 Sugar 426 symbiotic 5 Symbolic Interaction Theory 495 Synchronous Visual Communication 541

T Tag 145, 527 Tag Cloud 145, 157 Tag Distribution 145 Tagging 460, 527 Taxonomy 157, 527 Team Ware 130 Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) 541 Telecommuters 130 Telepathy Interface 426 Teleworkers 130 Thesauri 157 Thought Listing Procedure 314 Time-Sharing 10 Tortious Conduct 362 transactive memory systems (TMS) 124 TX-2 3

U Unconscious Manipulation 573 Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) 12, 13 Usability Evaluation 584 Usability Testing 584 User Datagram Protocol (UDP) 437 User Generated Content (UGC) 79

5

Index

V

W

Vector Map 450 Videoconferencing 541 Videoconferencing Bridge 541 Vigilante Marketing 55 Viral Marketing 43, 472 Virtual Community 700 virtual learning environments (VLEs) 625 Virtual Relationships 335 Virtual Team 130 virtual tools 101 virtual volunteering 112 Virtual World 349, 472 VLEs 625, 632, 634, 636 Vlogging 485 Vodcasting 208 Vodcasting/Vidcasting/Vlogging 66 VolunteerMatch 120 VRE 628, 631

Walkthrough 584 Web 2.0 460 Webcasting 437 Web Forum 279 Web Logging 314 White Supremacy 326 Wiki 232, 391, 460, 495 Wikis 109 Wikitorial 391 wireless access 11 Women’s Magazine Publishing Industry 256

6