Social networking—the impact

This could be a little dated considering the speed of change on the internet.  It was published in January 2014, but updated in September 2014. About 50% of people over 65 use a social networking site—and at the time of the survey, the preference was Facebook. Pew Internet Project

“Do social networking sites isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way? In November 2010, we examined SNS in a survey that explored people’s overall social networks and how use of these technologies is related to trust, tolerance, social support, community, and political engagement, and found:

• Social networking sites are increasingly used to keep up with close social ties
• The average user of a social networking site has more close ties and is half as likely to be socially isolated as the average American
• Facebook users are more trusting than others
• Facebook users have more close relationships
• Internet users get more support from their social ties and Facebook users get the most support
• Facebook users are much more politically engaged than most people
• Facebook revives “dormant” relationships
• MySpace users are more likely to be open to opposing points of view

Classmates dot com settlement--it isn't a hoax--apparently

Today I received an e-mail notice about a settlement ($10.00, woot!) in the Classmates.com class action law suit. Although I've never heard of "hoax-slayer" I think this information is interesting if you want to pursue this. For $10, I won't, but it always pays to be careful and not jump into the viral/virtual mess of "free money" which requires some personal information. Since it wasn't offering $10 million and only $10.00 I thought it might be legit.

Bullying on social networking sites

Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the history of shaming--from the scarlet letter, to names of tax delinquents in newspapers to publicly charging for plastic bags at the grocery store to "encourage" responsible behavior. But the story lead is one of the most interesting. It involves rich, socially advantaged, well-educated young adults--the senior class at Dartmouth attempting to shame their classmates into donating for the class gift, using blogs, social networking sites, names, photos, and personal slurs. Techno-rats without a moral clue.

Oh yes, the names came from the school administration. Link.

The Pope wants to hear from you

Pope Benedict XVI says priests should start using web sites and blogs, Facebook and YouTube. At Pope2You.net you can go on Facebook and send the Pope a message. Since I'm a Lutheran, I probably won't do that, but it sure is a jazzy web page. And you can choose from 5 languages.

I'm not an early adopter

That's why I only recently joined Facebook. It sounded like junior high school to me--asking people to be your friend. Besides, with 12 blogs, who needed more on-line time? But, sign up I did, found lots of relatives, have put faces with names of church members, started a fan page, linked to news sources, and today I even tried to add the little widget thingy.

In 2009 Facebook went from about 54 million registered users to 110 million. And it wasn't just registered users. Unique visitors, page views, and total time spent all increased by at least double. That's big. It's experiencing Zuckerberg's law.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in November 2008, Facebook founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously remarked “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before. That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.” In other words, once the network is in place and people are active and engaged, the dynamics of the social interaction taking place incentivize participants to share information about themselves more regularly, which in turn solicits more engagement from others, creating a virtuous cycle of interaction. With increased interaction comes newer and fresher content, which helps feeds the addiction to consume information about what’s happening with the lives of people in one’s social network. ComScore

2009 Digital Year in Review



Who knows, in a few years, I might Twitter!

Facebook--again

Don't blame the Secret Service. They are non-political. Political appointees are not.

"People familiar with the inquiry into how the Salahis were able to attend Tuesday's gala, even though they weren't on the official guest list, said the Salahis exchanged e-mails with Michele S. Jones, special assistant to the secretary of defense and the Pentagon-based liaison to the White House. It was unclear how well the Salahis know Jones, but Jones includes the Salahis' lawyer, Paul W. Gardner, as one of her 50 friends on Facebook.

Several people familiar with the Jones-Salahi correspondence, including some who requested anonymity because it's part of an ongoing investigation, said the e-mails support the Salahis' case that they were cleared to attend Tuesday night's gala." WaPo

I've talked to Columbus school teachers who've told me they are not allowed to have Facebook accounts. Sounds like a good idea for anyone in public education, academe, or government. Why do you want to tell nosy people who your friends and associates are? Especially reporters from the Washington Post who are good at gossip but not tracking down global warming myths and document screw ups? I looked up Michele S. Jones. She's another "first," and a two-fer, and maybe she just wasn't carefully vetted or wasn't given enough instruction and training on security and the importance of protecting the president from friends of friends. Or then again, perhaps she had nothing at all to do with this and the e-mails to her went nowhere.

Incidentally, far removed from this story but about social networks, have you heard of the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler (Little, Brown, 352 pp., $25.99). It's reviewed at City Journal--go take a look. It's not about electronic social networks but the old fashioned type--like the brother-in-law of your best friend.

"Controlling for environmental factors and the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together—happy people prefer hanging out with other happy people—Christakis and Fowler found that we really do emulate those we care about, whether we mean to or not. Being connected to a happy person, for instance, makes you 15 percent more likely to be happy yourself. “And the spread of happiness doesn’t stop there,” they note. It radiates out for three degrees of separation, so that, say, your sister’s best friend’s husband’s mood exerts a greater influence on your personal happiness than an extra $10,000 in income would. If he gains 50 pounds, it will be that much harder for you to stay slim, as the frame of reference for what’s “normal” changes through your network. Or, on the positive side, if he quits smoking, your chances of kicking the habit improve, too, even if you’ve never met him."

Sounds like a title for next year's book club, and that maybe I've put on 10 lbs because my friend's husband can't lose weight.

Don't be offended, but. . .

I don't Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin. I rarely "exchange" links--if I like a blog, I just add the link and don't tell them. So if I haven't responded to your request--it isn't you, it's me. According to this article at CNN, people feel rejected when turned down in cyberspace. That's probably why I don't do this social networking thing--I remember junior high school girls' cliques.

CNN) -- If you harbor a bit of angst over Facebook friend requests gone unanswered, a surprise "defriending" or being deserted by your Twitter followers, you're not alone. . .

"People tend to think that these relationships are trivial and not very deep, but this is what we're moving towards, having a lot of our communications play out over the Internet," Purdue University social psychologist Kip Williams said. "That's the way it's becoming; this is how we interpret our worth. People care how many [online] friends they have."

Or, increasingly, how many Twitter followers they have. This year, a third-party service launched Qwitter, which allows Twitter users to determine who's stopped following them and which tweet may have turned them off.

Experts say rejection on social networks can hurt worse than an in-person snub because people are usually more polite face-to-face than they are online."

My blog has been "delinked" by a number of followers--usually I know the reason--and that's bad enough. Why would I want more of that? In a moment of weakness I did sign up for Classmates dot come, and now I get pestered from the website to pay money. No thanks. If there's anything that hasn't changed about me over the years of a hundred hair styles, and wide ranging political views, it's that I'm frugal. Blogger dot com is free and doesn't ask for anything from me. Not even undying friendship.

Google and social networks

Thanks, but no thanks

I'm not joining Facebook, Smackaroony dot org or Huggme dot inc or any other social networking group. (Two of those I made up.) I'm all techno'd out. I've forgotten more passwords than I remember. I just got an invite from Helen who has more friends than any one person I know. She can walk through a strange city, in a country where she doesn't speak the language, and the next summer, people she met in a restaurant or bookstore are flying to the USA for a 2 week visit! The woman is amazing. She's never met a stranger. And now she invites me to be her Facebook friend! Well, I'm her friend in "for-real life," when I can get an appointment to see her, and even then there will be 4 or 5 others waiting in line, sitting on the porch or calling. I just checked her account and she's already signed on 20+ and just started! And I think Sally (England) has started up on Facebook, too. It reminds me of junior high cliques; been there done that, no thanks. My experience on the net and in real life is that if people don't agree with your politics or religion, they get hurt, then nasty and soon they de-link you.

In real life friendships we will soon be going to a Robert Burns 250th birthday party. How cool is that? I'm trying to learn that poem about the louse in a lady's hair. "O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!" And our Holy Land cruise group is going to have a pot luck (I'm taking a main dish because that's how the alphabet crumbles). If our friend recovers from his bronchitis, we'll be going out for dinner on Friday. I think he's been sick since New Year's. There's some 168 Film Project festivities this week-end we should take in. I'm planning a little luncheon for retirees in February--soup and salad. And then there's the usual activities like exercise class, watercolor class, serving lunch at the senior center, gathering with church friends for Bible study, praying for Obama every day, sending notes to shut-ins, new parents, and grieving families. But Facebook can be useful. I found my first grade piano teacher that way. Of course, what I'll do with her, I don't know.

Today my husband hooked up the digital converter box to the 1988 TV at our summer cottage (he watched our daughter do it here). He says we can now get 14 stations. And no pipes were frozen, which is good news. It's much colder on Lake Erie than here.

Today's new word is TWITTERSQUATTING

New word of the day--twittersquat--a verb. I don’t Twitter, could never say anything in 140 words or less, and I can’t think of anyone who is that hyper about staying connected to me. I started this digital revolution in communication in the early 90s with e-mail, then learned HTML and wrote my own web page back when you had to know code and how to FTP. I actually remember the first time I saw the World Wide Web demonstrated in a workshop and asked, "What would you do with it?" I can remember when a vet librarian from Tennessee suggested that the rest of us try out a new search tool called GOOGLE. Yes, I'm an old timer. Early on I joined a group on Usenet which was only text, discovered mean nasty people who would insult me for no reason, so I switched to blogging (writing a diary) in 2003 so I could throw them off my cyber-property. But that's about where I stopped. No Facebook or social networks. Hey, I remember junior high school--who wants that on the internet? Therefore, I was unaware of "twittersquating." Here’s the definition from Erik which I noticed at Techmeme.

“Twittersquatting, like cybersquatting, is when somebody registers a company's trademark (or a famous person's name) as a Twitter username with the intent of profiting or causing confusion. Other possible names for this practice include username squatting, usernamesquatting, squitting, usersquatting, and brandsquatting.”

So, just add it to the catalog of sins for which Jesus died, or your list of CW "somebody done me wrong" songs. You know what people do when they squat.

More young Dems seek love on the internet

According to a story yesterday in TechNewsWorld,

Twenty-four percent of respondents to an online poll said the Internet could serve as a temporary replacement for a significant other. "Some view the Internet as their new best friend, others as an increasingly powerful tool that can infect our youth with harmful images and thoughts and therefore must be controlled," said Tom Galvin, a partner in 463 Communications, which conducted the poll with Zogby International.

Wow. I like the Internet, but it's not "my best friend," it's an information source and a place to write into a template which then publishes itself. It seems Democrats are even more sucked in than Republicans (who are probably a bit less emotional and fuzzy/wuzzy). I know the left has far more wacked-out blogs than the right, and they love those social networking sites, according to this poll.

"Among the poll's other findings was that more than a quarter of Americans currently have a profile on a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook . That varied widely, though, depending on age -- a full 78 percent of those aged 18 to 24 have profiles -- and political tendencies, with Democrats outpacing Republicans by 10 percentage points."