Social networks, "Small Worlds," code as law, and the "YASNS phenomenon" form the threads of Danah Boyd's notes from her recent E-Tech presentation, "Revenge of the User" at the February 2004 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Comments on Milgram's "Small Worlds," Larry Lessig, Mitch Kapor, Granovetter's "Strength of Weak Ties," Scott Feld and the power of foci. Her comments circle around the emergence of various constructed social networks like Friendster, orkut, LinkedIn and Tribe. She talks about "Fakesters," fake profiles created for fun ("Homer Simpson") or evil (Neo-Nazis).
Her biggest gun in this proto-essay is aimed at the efforts of the creators of such networks to "configure the user," to forcefully shape the way that the system is utilized, saying at one point: "When technologies are built, the creators often have a very limited scope of desired and acceptable behavior. They build the systems aimed at the people who will abide by their desires. Often, their users don't have the same views about how the technology should be used. They use it differently. Creators get aggravated. They don't understand why users won't behave. The demand behavior. First, the creator messages the user, telling them that this isn't what is expected of them. Then, the creator starts carrying a heavier and heavier stick. This is called configuring the user. And y'know what... it doesn't work."
She closes with the challenge that social software must recognize the disparate uses of various users, and must support a "live and let live environment." She closes saying that "You can't kill unwanted behavior without also killing desirable behavior. This is a design challenge, an architectural challenge and a social challenge. And, of course, a business challenge."
Danah Boyd is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley, researching articulated social networks. She did her Masters work at MIT Media Lab, and her undergraduate work in computer science at Brown. Her presentation notes have attracted many excellent comments and Trackbacks. A valuable piece to students of network theory, at: apophenia: my etech talk: revenge of the user
Posted by dougsimpson at February 23, 2004 05:04 AM | TrackBack