Too Bad You Never Knew Ace Hanna

This trip to the archives digs up the paper Digital channels, the change in community structures and its consequences for social participation. I presented this paper in Belfast at the ISEA 2009.

For a short glance at the argument have a look at the presentation. The full paper can be found here.

Andreas Jungherr (2009) ‘Digital channels, the change in community structures and its consequences for social participation’. Paper presented at the ISEA 2009: International Symposium for the Electronic Arts, University of Ulster, Belfast, UK on 23 August – 1 September 2009.

Recently I started reading Václav Havel’s memoirs To the Castle and Back which he wrote in 2005. In his State of the World 2010 Bruce Sterling mentioned Havel’s memoirs as a good illustration of the imp of the perverse:

People don’t need what they want, and don’t want what they need. My intuitions about this have been sharpened by reading Vaclav Havel’s new memoirs TO THE CASTLE AND BACK.

[...]

There’s a lot of stuff in there about people being surprised and even flummoxed by the spectacular glee of being given what they want — great things that are clearly good for them. They’re better off by almost every objective measure, and they’d never go back, but somehow they seem to live less.

inkwell.vue.373: Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #46 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Tue 5 Jan 10 07:21

While this is definetely an element of Havel’s memoirs. Still, after reading the first pages Havel’s memoirs made me think of something else. I’m reminded of the Red Queen’s race out of Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking-Glass:

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass. 1872.

Havel writes his memoirs in the year 2005 looking back on his presidency. These short reflective vignettes are interspersed with excerpts from Havel’s memos to his staff which he wrote during his time in The Castle. These memos offer a detailed view on the minutiae of the day to day life of a president and his staff. What is especially poignant are the plethora of mundane details that fill these memos. As Havel puts it himself:

When I think of all those thousands of meetings I held as president, of how many worries and preparations were necessary for every one of them and how many things I had to answer – from the very basic ones concerning the future organization of the world to the most petty ones concerning, for instance, the placement of cutlery or the seating arrangements for some official dinner – it occurs to me that not only will no one ever be able to fully appreciate all that but that today, practically no one knows about it anymore.

How wonderful it is, by comparison, to be a writer! You write something in a couple of weeks, and it’s here for the ages. What will remain when presidents and ministers are gone? Some references to them in textbooks, most likely inaccurate.

Václav Havel: To the Castle and Back. Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson. 2008. p. 35.

From this perspective Carrol’s Red Queen’s Race finds an uncanny likeness in political life. Good or Bad? Well, this judgement will have to wait.

In his inaugural lecture “The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods” Richard Rogers who holds the Chair of New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam proposes a shift in internet research:

“The issue no longer is how much of society and culture is online, but rather how to diagnose cultural change and societal conditions using the Internet.”
Rogers: The End of the Virtual. p. 8

For Rogers too much of research focuses on the differences between on- and offline culture. He sees the reason for this in the methods with which researchers from the humanities and the social sciences approach the internet. Rogers’ critiques the use of surveys, interviews and other approaches that proved succesfull in offline research. He collects these methods under the term virtual methods. To him the exclusive use of these virtual methods leads to an unnessary concentration of research on just a few topics and would even mislead in the quest to advance our understanding the internet.

“The argument advanced here is that virtual methods and user studies in the social sciences and the humanities have shifted the attention away from the data of the medium, and the opportunities for study of far more than online culture.”
Rogers: The End of the Virtual. p. 6

To remedy this situation Rogers advances the notion of methods based on online groundedness. Instead of imposing research approaches from differenct context on internet research he proposes a research approach that uses the epistemology of the internet as methodological basis. Rogers calls these methods digital methods:

“For the third era of Internet research, the digital methods program introduces the term online groundedness, in an effor t to conceptualize research which follows the medium, captures its dynamics, and makes grounded claims about cultural and societal change. Indeed, the broader theoretical goal of digital methods is to rethink the relationship between the Web and the ground.”
Rogers: The End of the Virtual. p. 8

Rogers suggests that through the use of digital methods we will be able to use the internet as a data source that informs on social processes offline that until now remained hidden.

“The conceptual point of departure for the research program is the recognition that the Internet is not only an object of study, but also a source. Knowledge claims may be made on the basis of data collected and analyzed by devices such as search engines. [...] It thereby challenges existing methods of data collection [...], and reopens the discussion of the Web as anticipatory medium, far closer to the ground than one might expect.”
Rogers: The End of the Virtual. p. 8

Rogers then moves on and discusses a group of epistemological elements of the interent that can serve as basis for research using digital methods. These elements are The Link, The Website, The Search Engines & the Spheres, The Webs, Social Networking Sites & Post-demographics, and Wikipedia & Networked Content. For each element he discusses recent research and further research possibilities.

Rogers’ text is a welcome addition to the developing debate about computational social science. While the manifesto Computational Social Science by the luminaries of the field David Lazer, Alex Pentland, Lada Adamic, Sinan Aral, Albert-László Barabási, Devon Brewer, Nicholas Christakis, Noshir Contractor, James Fowler, Myron Gutmann, Tony Jebara, Gary King, Michael Macy, Deb Roy, and Marshall Van Alstyne opens up a promising research field there are also real dangers lurking. Be it data driven web sience, digital methods, analysis of social networks, or computational social science, these field are blessed by an ever increasing amount of data. While the best research in these fields does not forget theory, the more data we get the louder the voices become that proclaim the end of theory: All theory has become obsolete. The truth is in the data all apparent to mighty algorithms. For an example of such an argument see Chris Anderson’s unfortunate essay The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Rogers’ text offers a welcome example how to combine theory and data.

Rogers’ text is also a timely reminder that there is more to a science of the web than just the analysis of opportunity data sets. The richness of data collected on Twitter or Facebook can serve as basis for original research (for an example of an analysis based on data sets collected on Twitter see for example Drew Conway’ s post “SNA in R Talk, Updated with [Better] Video “; for research based on Facebook data sets see “How to split up the US” by Pete Warden). In the short term analyses like these can provide original and valuable insights. Still, if this research is not conducted in a larger research context we risk losing sight of the bigger picture.

But Roger’s text does not only offer interesting perspectives to researchers coming from a data perspective. “The End of the Virtual” also offers an interesting advancement to researchers coming from the humanties or the social sciences. Rogers directs their focus away from shiny “new” phenomena on the web towards the data structure behind these phenomena. This might curb the enthusiasm of some research but at the same time advance our knowlegde about the web at large and the conditions of social action online.

The End of the Virtual can be found either in bookform here or a pre-print of the lecture as pdf on Richard Rogers’ website.

Disclaimer: Richard Rogers sent me a free copy of his “The End of the Virtual”.

The third trip to the archives leads to the paper The Interplay of Theory and Observation: A Proposition for Structured Research on Human Behavior on the Web which I cowrote with Pascal Jürgens and Benjamin Heitmann in early 2009.

The interplay of theory and observation: a proposition for structured research on human behavior on the web

The paper makes for a nice change of pace since it’s neither concerned with Twitter nor with agent-based modeling. Instead we used the chance of the first Web Science conference to try our hands in a bit of computational social science methodology. Be it only to escape the claim of our dear friends from the theory department we would only be a group of empiricistic heathens. Have a look at the paper at the online proceedings of the WebSci’09: Society On-Line and judge if we succeeded.

For a second trip to the back catalogue have a look at Twittering Dissent: Social Web Data Streams as Basis for Agent Based Models of Opinion Dynamics. A paper that Pascal Jürgens presented in Vienna, Austria in early 2009.

For the gist of the paper have a look at the presentation:

In this paper we build on the work we presented in Modeling Small-Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels: New Influence on Public Opinion’. In contrast to the earlier work in this paper we focused on the potential agent-based modeling holds for the social sciences in general.

Pascal Jürgens and Andreas Jungherr (2009) ‘Twittering Dissent: Social Web Data Streams as Basis for Agent Based Models of Opinion Dynamics’, in: Martin Welker, Holger Geißler, Lars Kaczmirek, Olaf Wenzel (eds.), 11th General Online Research Conference, GOR 09: Proceedings, Vienna.

The quiet days at the end of any semester are great for side projects. So for this semester I decided to go through my back catalogue of presentations and publications and make some of them available on this site. Today I’ll start with a poster from 2008 which Pascal Jürgens and I presented at the International Workshop on Challenges and Visions in the Social Sciences in Zurich, Switzerland.

Modeling Small Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels

In this poster we used the big Lacy/Zuckerberg dustup at the SXSW 2008 to gain some deeper understanding in the dynamics of communication via Twitter. To this end agent based modeling proved to be a very promising research tool.

The Lacy/Zuckerberg session gave a first glimpse on the negative effects of a communication backchannel running wild. Since then other incidents proved the relevance of more research into that phenomenon.

For a closer look at our poster check out the pdf on the publication page for Modeling Small-Group Interaction on Pervasive Digital Channels on this blog.

A Story Without Love by Hugh MacLeod
(cc) Hugh MacLeod

And so this story goes:

This morning I found the gapingvoid daily cartoon #7 (The new incarnation of Hugh MacLeod’s Crazy Deranged Fools Newsletter) in my inbox.

This little cartoon immediately put a smile on my face and reminded me of one of my favorite quotes on storytelling. A quote which, until recently, I always attributed to the manic mind of screenwriter David Milch:

Every story that works is a story of great distances and starlight which takes place in a moment of mania and is of deep delight.

Milch said this during a series of lectures on “The Idea of the Writer” which he held over the course of five days at the WGA theatre. To me this short quote collects all the pleasures of storytelling, be it as an author or listener.

Little did I know that Milch paraphrased the American poet, novelist and scholar Robert Penn Warren. In his poem “Tell me a Story” Robert Penn Warren wrote:

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

And allthough I do not see starlight just yet, this travel (from a cartoon of blogger Hugh MacLeod in 2010 to the lecture of screenwriter David Milch in 2007 to the poem of Robert Penn Warren in 1969) surely was of deep delight.

This feels a bit like old news. But who says information has a sell-by-date?

In November Christoph Bieber, Martin Eifert, Thomas Groß and Jörn Lamla published the book “Soziale Netze in der digitalen Welt” to which I contributed a chapter on the political uses of Twitter. And the first reviews are in:

Jochen Zenthöfer for politik-digital.de: Wer archiviert eigentlich Twitter?

Christian Jung at Homo Politicus: Nachindustrielle Politik

[Update: 2010/01/11]
Stefan Anderssohn at socialnet: Rezension vom 07.01.2010 zu: Christoph Bieber, Martin Eifert, Thomas Groß u.a. (Hrsg.): Soziale Netze in der digitalen Welt. Campus Verlag (Frankfurt) 2009.

My chapter is called “Twitterende Politiker: Zwischem buntem Rauschen und Bürgernähe 2.0″. In that chapter I describe how German politicians use Twitter-Feeds. I also attempt to form preliminary usage-categories. SInce the chapter has been written in April of 2009 some of the examples seem a bit dated. Still it seems the categories hold up quite nicely to the test of time. I’m very much looking forward to early 2010 when Pascal Jürgens and I will quantitavely test these categories on a large data-set. So as always, the best is yet to come.

Drinking from the Firehose: Why Obama Should Stay the Hell Off Twitter

Colin Delany [@epolitics] gives an interesting perspective on the question whether leading politicians should use Twitter:

But I’d also argue that Twitter is fundamentally a bad match for a Chief Executive, for exactly the same reasons that so many other people are drawn to it. Like the rest of the social media universe, Twitter is effectively unfiltered, with a low wheat-to-chaff ratio even if you’re careful whom you follow. In many ways this is a strength, since part of the fun of the service is that you get access to so much information and opinion coming in from so many directions.

This argument focuses on the value of unfiltered vs filtered information for politicians:

While unfiltered information is valuable for bloggers, journalists and those of us with short attention spans, it’s not usually the best thing with which to fill your time when your actions have real-world consequences for, well, the entire world.

This argument does not address the elements of mediated intimacy, access or public conversations that are quite useful to politicians using Twitter. Still this argument is probably a reason for the social media “glass ceiling” which the Belgian blogger Clo Willaerts [@bnox] identified last month in her talk at the Personal Democracy Forum Europe. Her term describes the phenomenon that even social media savvy politicians stop using social media channels once they reach a certain level of responsibility.

Maybe Delany’s argument will give some pause to the All-Politicians-Online-All-The-Time Pundits.

An Internet Politics Index to David Plouffe’s The Audacity to Win

Colin Delany once again: In this post Delany gives a very useful index of passages that deal with the internet and politics in David Plouffe’s account of the Obama campaign The Audacity to Win, a book that I’ll address in more detail later this month.

Tom Peters: Cool Friends Interview with Garrison Keillor

As a nice diversion from politics I’d suggest this interview with Garrison Keillor. In this piece he talks among other things about his writing and editing process:

[...] as you get older, you learn how to throw it out without much thought, without much pity. You look at a piece that you’ve written, and you take those first three paragraphs, and you dump them. You just rip them out. Usually, that’s the part that needs to be thrown out, the big windup, the big introduction. The first page almost always can go. You learn to do that without regret. I edit myself much more quickly and mercilessly now than I ever could have 20, 30 years ago.

Other topics are his show The Prairie Home Companion, the director Robert Altman, public speaking and the durability of sonnets.

If by any cruel twist of fate the name Garrison Keillor means nothing to you have a look at Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes or listen to his News from Lake Wobegon.

From Cool Hunters to Chief Culture Officers: An Interview with Grant McCracken

While preparing a talk on the role of convergence in the online campaigns of various German parties in the run up to the German Bundestagswahl 2009 I turned once again to the work and blog of Henry Jenkins. There I stumbled on this great talk by Grant McCracken at the Futures of Entertainment 4 Conference. In this presentation McCracken introduces his concept of the Chief Culture Officer and its potential for companies:

Corporations have been notoriously bad at reckoning with culture. They manage the “problem of culture” with ad hocery of many kinds. They call on ad agencies, consultants, gurus and cool hunters and, when all else fails, the intern down the hall. But there is no single person and, worse, there is no senior manager. Even as culture grows ever more dynamic, various, demanding, and participatory. So that’s my argument: there ought to be someone in the C-Suite who’s job it is to reckon with culture and to spot the opportunities and dangers it represents.

McCracken’s book just made it on my to-read list.

It’s been a while since I’m back from the Personal Democracy Forum Europe. For a post-mortem of the conference I suggest these posts by other participants.

Micah L. Sifry: Hackers and Hacks: A Post-Mortem on PdF Europe in Barcelona
Markus Beckedahl: Erster Tag PdF-Europe

[Update]
Anna Ebbesen: PDF Europe – Day one round up
Astrid Haug: PdF Europe – Day 2 round up

Barcelona in November is stunning. Especially if you are flying in fresh from the Amsterdam drizzle. I didn’t find much time for sight-seeing, but there was the time for some photography:

Images cc Andreas Jungherr.