Last week I had the opportunity to attend at a symposium held at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT) called ‘Privacy and Social Network Sites’. The keynote speaker of the day would be dr. danah boyd, who has joined many research groups in the past (‘way back’ to Friendster) and currently works at Microsoft’s Social Media research department. Much of her work as an ethnographer focusses on media use of American teenagers.

boyds keynote was divided in five sections, namely youth practices, networked publics, visibility, privacy and publicity. In the first section, boyd elaborated on how it came to be that youngster felt so attracted to online social networks. One of the driving forces behind this large-scale migration was ascribed to the fact that teenagers were both being pulled toward the commercialized public spaces (for example shopping malls and cinemas) while at the same time being obscured from these spaces due to the possibilities of shoplifting and the public discomforts of hanging groups. Together with an increasingly feeling of insecurity on the parent’s accounts (partly imposed by media and governments), they saw no other choice than to keep their offspring indoors. Thus hanging out simply ends up happening in Social Media.

According to boyd, hanging out in these (virtual) environments is just as crucial as it’s ever been, as it’s a social process of creating meaning of the world around you, and a way to learn about the social world. While the original network sites has been developed for goals other than just ‘meeting up’ (namely either for business networking or for dating), youngsters have developed their practices to create their own social space. What’s noticeable in their use, living double-lives and maintaining invisibility for unwanted audiences has been at times very successful (for example by by setting their age to 100).

In the second section, networked publics, boyd started out by outlining some of the intrinsic characteristics of digital networks. These aspects range from persistence (every expression is automatically recorded and archived), searchability (disclosed content can easily reach large publics through networks), scalability (blogs can be infinitely be indexed even if they’re not actually read) and invisible audiences (not all audiences might be visible or co-present at the moment of posting). According to boyd, these specifics together would’ve cause the social networks to represent a collapsed context since “the lack of spatial, social and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts”. Eventually, the coming of these fundamental different contexts would also demand a constant adjustment in our behavior.

In the next section, visibility, boyd elaborated on many case studies in which teenagers struggled with their double-lives. One of the named examples was a girl who posted the outcome of a quiz called ‘What drug are you?’, after her father was outraged after finding his daughter being involved in such practices. Fortunately, the conversation that followed turned up to be a valuable one after the daughter explained to him what it meant to participate in such a quiz in a social environment. In another example, a student (coming from Compton) was rejected from a scholarship after the board found his MySpace which was filled with hip-hop and gangster references. In the latter case the board had probably no idea that youngsters in suburbs like Compton have practically no other choice than to adopt these street culture to simply survive.

Thereafter privacy was covered, a term that boyd defined as “control over how information flows”, in social networks this would also mean conveying texts how it is meant, to the audiences it was meant for. In most cases, this privacy is not always just about hiding; the mantra of ‘security through obscurity’ is maybe not a weird start since people seek an audience all the time. Although teenagers acknowledge that their content might be watched by undesirable audiences, the ones that they most fear are the ones with ‘real’ power over them, such as their parents or teachers.

boyd continued that we often have certain expectations of the system’s architecture concerning privacy, and overlook for example the changes terms of use that were recently imposed by FaceBook that privileged publicity by default. In many cases though, people weigh their possible gains and losses while exposing themselves online. In one case, a girl put up very exhibitionistic pictures of herself to become a model in the same way Tila Tequila did. Additionally teenagers rely very much on social norms, meaning that because it’s just out there, it’s not meant for anyone.

In the last section, of publicity, boyd compared two networks (Twitter and FaceBook) in terms of their intended publicity. While on Twitter, people often want to reach a larger audience, FaceBook users tend to prefer a network of people they know, build on mutual relationships. As with the Tila Tequila case: teenagers want to become celebrities, but in many cases overlook the possible social consequences of such a status, for example paparazzi. However, this doesn’t mean that on Twitter people want to bluntly reach the largest possible audience, but more often expand it to the level of “comfort with public”.

Concluding, many teenagers approach social networks as an opportunity to express themselves in disclosed online environments (‘disclosed’ as in amongst friends online), which doesn’t mean the content is meant for anyone. Consequently, parents’ fears of this publicity lies in the fact that they might encounter things they wouldn’t want to see (bullying for example). Noticing these gaps call for education that goes beyond just parents and youngsters, as anticipating to online behavior needs different approaches and insights. With the four intertwining areas that Lawrence Lessig introduced in ‘Code’ – namely market, law, social norms and architecture – we constantly need to reshape the role and place of policy in these networks, and try to understand the profound implications these technologies can have.

• Why wasn’t there a proper overview of who would be participating in this debate? If anythings essential for being able to discuss it’s knowing your opposition and the positions of each participant.
• Deriving from that: Where did all the representatives go? I didn’t notice any politician or entertainment industry spokesman contributing to the debate, why bother to have a discussion with just consumers? (Of course, consumers plea FOR Net Neutrality).
• Why Twitter? It has so many inappropriate aspects in respect to a proper debate. Real dialogue is nearly impossible due to several factors: (1) asynchronous messaging (2) following behavior: every user’s timeline differs, unless everyone knows how to find the #downloaddebat timeline, and (3) moderation is undoable because of lack of orientation.

Also, why would it be a good idea to discuss by using limited amounts of words? Of course, aphorism could be considered a poetic format in which people could express themselves, but is it useful in a debate? I don’t want to sound as a nostalgist, but aren’t nuance and elaboration two key features that mainly come to their right in a traditional debate? Maybe by using the communication platform, the Consumentenbond thinks it’s okay to have debates through mere oneliners? Or maybe they just wanted to get an estimation of the opinions across Twitter? (Why entitling it a ‘debate’ then?). It leaves me wondering what the initial intentions were with the discussion, and why Twitter would be considered a suitable platform for it.

Nowadays, many of the popular social network sites are advanced platforms that more or less evolved from simple community platforms or fora. Where Myspace, Friendster and The WELL (later the Dutch De Digitale Stad popped up as a similar landmark) took off during the 90′s, Facebook, Hyves and hybrids (Morgan Currie earlier elaborated on this subject) like Last.fm emerged. These latter cases did benefit from the post-bubble internet revival that was presented as Web 2.0. As the 2.0 philosophy was fundamentally always present in the social network configuration, the emphasis for the new branch of services is much more on the facilitation of vast networks of interconnectivity. In practice, this results in tools which enable users to ‘network’ more effectively. The systems’ algorithms, along with its databases, needed to be revised to give new users a kind of starting-point for this manifestation. This is made clear by the directed recommendation-systems that basically scans and compares the different user-profiles. However, as of today this often results in plain and predictive references that depend on singular data. By saying this I’d like to exclude the Last.fm ‘neighbours’-technique, as it focuses not on the personal data, but rather on the capturing over time that generates a more accurate listening-profile.

As the current network sites streamline this connectivity of nodes differently, there’s a devious (though popular) network in the uprise: Twitter. Often described as a ‘microblog tool’, I find this case to be evenly (or more) a networking tool, since it (according to the Wiktionary definition) somewhat facilititates “the act of meeting new people in a business or social context”. I use the word ‘somewhat’ because the software is never genuinely transparant on the interconnectivity of its users, and doesn’t recommend similar users as on the other network sites. The system could easily be critized for the usage threshold, since the many of the real successors seem to be already established celebrities or people who tend to work in marketing or networking-reliant sectors. There also are numberous of blogs and books dedicated to the subject of effective networking on Twitter, this tendency also underlines the difficulty of positioning and maintaining accounts properly. Then again, this does not in any way exclude other low-end usage from being capable within the network, though it does identify the system as not very accesible in terms of communication.

Another obstacle in this efficient way of networking is formed by the active mode the platform demands from its users. The user’s networking strategies (consisting of medium literacy) fully determine for the succes or lack of it, this entirely breaks with the passive profiling tradition that encompasses filling in profile endless webforms or by protocological input. On Twitter, profiling is much more inferior to the actual (140-character) microblogging it facilitates. In this sense, the user profile becomes less of a static ‘personal branding poster’, but rather a representation over time. No longer is the user’s profile fixed on just one conception, it could be stated the Twitter microblog is inherently positioning the users more as a organic – being able to adept or adjust thoughts over time in the form of updates.

This character of real-time (or real-life) streams of data causes new challanges in terms of the abilities for sustainable networks to develop. This is partially why the previously mentioned marketeers are so eagering to develop efficient networking-tools, as their business largely consists of consultancy and services. Sites like Mr. Tweet have already begun on programming toolsets, although they rely too on the old tradition of comparing biographical information instead of the actual messages. One of the current tools to plow through the information masses is by using Twitter’s search function. Although this search engine offers some advanced features, it again demands dito query input. One might impose that this is an effective way to find anyone regardless of the updating behaviour, but the fact is high-end users obviously dominate pushing more passive users below the surface.

Another option is to index your the followers of the people you already follow, which again can turn out to be a arbitrary task. This method again pushes the super-connectors forward, leaving the incidental encounters as the network’s structure remains more or less hidden.

In conclusion maybe Twitter could (or should) be seen as a more hybrid network, as it mainly connects users on the basis of their updating behaviour (leaving out the super-connectors) that leads to the unpredictable network dynamic. Ironically, the system doesn’t connect anyone to anything by itself and simply eludes the term ‘friends’ in the node-to-node relation in contrast to ‘old’ networking-sites, which makes it all more confusing for low-end users. In future research, the actual relations between the user’s productivity and the criteria for emerging interconnectivity should be outlined more clear, as well as an outline of the obstacles in the development of networking tools, as those would have to rely more on the language than on profiling in the case of Twitter.