Watch Jonathan Zittrain on Colbert Report

Jonathan Zittrain is the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, a book on my “to buy” list. He is also a cofounder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, which is pretty freakin’ awesome. He appeared on the Colbert Report last night to talk about his book and why he thinks Web 2.0 and the Internet are headed in the wrong direction.

The Colbert video can be found on the front page of the Future of the Internet website (stupid Comedy Central video embedding isn’t working). If you’re so excited by Zittrain’s ideas, you can watch a presentation he gave at the Berkman Center about his book via YouTube (video below).

Giving in and getting even more social

I have already admitted my “problem” (aka obsession) with social media, especially via the Internet, and how I how decided to embrace the social aspect of the current trend in interaction. In the last 24 hours, I have taken two (one small, one big) steps to make myself even *more* social than I already am.

Yesterday, I finally caved to the combined strength of the many tech blogs I read and signed up for Plurk, the supposed “Twitter killer”/slightly different take on Twitter. It’s quite obvious that the site is still in the “we need more users!” phase, as you accumulate “karma” by posting more and especially by inviting your friends to join the site, and open up more page design options as your karma increases. So far, the jury is still out, but my immediate impression is, why do I need this when I have Twitter? Then again, I saw no use for Twitter eight months ago and now keep it open at all times in the coveted fourth tab of my browser (following two mail accounts and Facebook, in case you were wondering). As per usual, I am the first of my good friends to join the site, which dramatically decreases its use to me as a beneficial service. And, most likely, as with Twitter, it will become more useful as more friends join (if that happens — which, as Twitter has shown me, will most likely not happen, since I have less than 10 actual “friends” who use Twitter).

The much bigger step for me was finally purchasing a phone with all the fun internet goodies. As of this morning, I was officially able to upgrade to a new phone without paying retail prices. Being a very happy Verizon customer, I chose to stay with the company rather than switch to AT&T so I can get my hands on the new 3G iPhone. Instead, I chose to go with the current cream of the crop, the not-so-much “iPhone killer,” the LG Voyager. Now, I am well aware that this phone can still not compete with the iPhone and I will not try to convince myself otherwise, but the phone is a huge improvement over my two-year-old, toilet-soaked (gross, I know) Razr. The Voyager has a touch screen on front with a large clam shell screen (not touch) when you open it up. It also has a full QWERTY keyboard and navigates pretty easily. I tested it out last week in a Verizon store and found it rather intuitive, although many complain about Verizon’s wacky UI. After the discounts/rebates, I managed to snag the phone for just $100 — which is, surprisingly, the same price as the inferior Glyde — so I was very happy. My phone plan obviously had to be upgraded to support the mobile email/VZ Navigator/VCast, etc., but it’s not too big of an increase ($20).

Of course, the implications of me owning this type of phone are a little scary. If I’m the type of girl who loves being connected at all times, and is suddenly given the opportunity to do so, will my communication patterns change even further? Will I be a texting whore like some of my friends? Will I be checking my email at 3am, since I will now be able to do so without getting out of bed (yes, I sleep with my phone, and no, I see nothing wrong with that)? It will be interesting to see how much I get sucked into the phone, but I really think it will be more of a benefit than a detriment, especially with school beginning in the fall, and me being chained to desks and subject to the whims of my professors.

My master’s thesis is online, free for all to read!

I spent nearly eight months of my life researching and writing my master’s thesis on Facebook and identity, and now it has *finally* been posted online by Georgetown. Hooray! I know some of my fellow students would rather forget their theses now that they’ve graduated, but since I will be continuing this research (at least related research) for the next four to five years at Michigan State, I am happy to share my work with the world, especially since I am truly proud of the final project.

For those not familiar with my research, my thesis considered the evolving role of social networking sites in transforming users’ methods of communication with various members of their social network. I conducted a survey of 600+ Georgetown University undergraduates to try and get to the heart of why they use sites like Facebook and how social networking sites have changed the ways in which they form and maintain relationships.

The thesis can be accessed here.

And here is the full abstract to whet your appetite.

We live in an increasingly networked world. We are connected to each other through numerous types of ties, with social networking sites offering one of the most popular methods people currently employ to link themselves together. But do “old-fashioned” ways of developing and maintaining relationships suffer from the evolution of computer-mediated communication? Have we become too reliant on the instantaneous, answer-producing quality of the internet that can reveal others’ most intimate personal details before we even introduce ourselves?

This thesis examines social relationships online to see how they differ from traditional offline relationships, focusing on how people create an online identity and how that identity affects the formation and maintenance of “friendships” in the digital world. The thesis will then consider how the social networking site Facebook impacts relationships in the real world. This analysis will be based on a survey of 644 Georgetown University undergraduates regarding their uses of various technologies to interact with different members of their social networks, and especially their use of Facebook to form and maintain relationships.

Google may not have made us dumber, but it’s certainly changed the way we think

The cover story for the latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly considers the impact of the Internet generally, and Google specifically, on how people consume information. In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Nick Carr looks at the evolution of reading caused by the rise of the Internet. He references himself and others who say they can no longer read books, as they cannot keep their attention on a single piece of writing for more than a few moments. Sheer quantity has replaced quality of information in terms of importance. I become a social media expert because I have five different social networking accounts; really, I can become an expert on anything thanks to search engines and sites like Wikipedia. The fear of a generation of ADD adults seems inevitable, right?

Not necessarily. I admit I am an information addict, checking my email every few minutes and keeping it open in a tab in my browser 24/7, refreshing my Facebook and Twitter pages whenever my attention drifts from whatever I’m currently doing (which is usually about every five minutes), subscribing to 50+ blogs in my Google Reader…I could go on and on. I, like many others in the technology-driven 21st century, have become masters of what Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention.” This means that no matter what I’m doing on my computer, one eye is constantly twitching to my Gmail tab to see if I have a new email or IM. I mean, god forbid if I miss that email about a party in two weeks and don’t read it until 20 minutes after it comes in!

While I need this constant stimulation, I found that unlike the author and others cited in the Atlantic article, I have luckily not lost the joy of immersion reading. Even while writing my master’s thesis, a time during which I did little but research and write the thing, I made sure that I spent at least 20 minutes of “pleasure reading” before going to bed. Now that I have more free time, I am rarely without a book and can easily spend hours reading it (as long as my laptop doesn’t go to sleep and I can’t see Gmail!). While I do agree that I find myself skimming a lot more now when it comes to more “academic” reading, the pleasure reading I do is slow and extremely enjoyable.

I also know that while information overload is causing widespread ADD tendencies in terms of searching for information — and that this is obviously leading to problems related to the validity of information (what? are you saying that not everything on the Internet is true?) — we’re certainly not all slaves to our computers. One thing I’ve noticed among a significant number of friends that I can’t wrap my head around is how many of them have hundreds of unread emails in their email accounts. Now I am rather meticulous with my email, reading every email I get (unless it’s spam obviously), and labeling/cataloging/archiving it regularly. If there are more than 50 emails in my inbox, then I’ve been slacking. And I tend to keep everything. But then I look at some of my friends’ email inboxes and there are maybe 1000 emails in the inbox, 200 of which haven’t been read. WTF I ask? That would drive me crazy! Then again, I know whenever my roommate looks into my post-Chernobyl disaster of a bedroom, her skin probably crawls too. But at least that’s my room. When people allow their inboxes to get that cluttered, they’re not the only ones who suffer. How many times have I asked a friend, “Did you read that article I emailed you?” or “Are you coming to the barbeque tomorrow?” only to receive a puzzled look because they were too lazy to read my email.

Okay, now that I’m going off on quite the tangent, let me attempt to bring this back around to my point (assuming I have one). As Carr says in the article, conventional wisdom regarding our brains being “hard-wired” after a certain age can pretty much be disregarded now as it is obvious we can change the ways in which we think, learn, read, etc. So if you see yourself changing the way you process information and you don’t like it, you can change it. You could try what my friend Ashley is doing after she determined she’s too reliant on technology and separate yourself from it. There are other ways of finding out information, such as newspapers and phone books (you know, the big, heavy yellow and white books you keep under the bed on in the darkest recesses of your hall closet). You can try to slow down your information absorption rate — after all, as much as you enjoy entertaining your friends at parties with all the random bits of information you’ve collected over the years from random websites, it’s just taking up valuable space in your noggin. Or you can be like me and just come to terms with the fact that the Internet has officially laid claim to your soul and all you can do is hang on and enjoy the ride.

I’m sorry son, but you’ve got the SNAD, and I believe it’s incurable

WTF is the SNAD, you ask? Well, according to Nicole Ferraro over at the Internet Evolution blog, Social Networking Anxiety Disorder is similar to the better-known Social Anxiety Disorder, but rather than the anxiety being brought on via social encounters, it is brought on by the inherent “pressures” associated with social networking sites like Facebook.

Don’t laugh too hard though. In the spring, I gave a guest lecture on social media to an undergrad computer science class at Georgetown. During a vigorous discussion with students about Facebook, several students said that they never refused friend requests because they didn’t “want to be mean” to those making the requests, even if the requests were coming from people they didn’t know. I also came across this trend in my thesis research: in the survey I conducted on Georgetown undergraduates, I asked respondents questions related to how they initially met online-only friends, and a noteworthy number (I believe several dozen) replied that the other person had “randomly” friended them.

Another potential cause for anxiety comes from something as simple as the “Relationship Status” field in a person’s profile, and the News Feed’s annoying little habit of telling everyone in the whole world when that status changes (with a very sad broken heart icon for breakups…damn, Facebook is cruel). I know from my own friends and interactions with Facebook users that men are significantly less likely to change their status once they begin dating a new person, and if they do change it, it’s more likely to be to remove the status completely rather than add “In a Relationship.” Women, however, want to broadcast to the world that they are no longer that poor single girl, and the lack of reciprocation by their new man can be the source of many arguments. Another interesting finding from my thesis research showed that of those respondents who said their offline relationships had suffered negative consequences because of the content in their Facebook profile, nearly half (n=39) said that a boyfriend or girlfriend had ended a relationship. Admittedly, teenage relationships are much more fickle and fleeting than more adult relationships, but such concerns could certainly be anxiety-inducing in an 18-year-old.

Now, as a social media researcher, I find this to be a silly — and potentially dangerous — practice, most obviously because of the risks these users are opening themselves up to in terms of their privacy. After all, some Facebook users are dumb enough to include their addresses and phone numbers in their profiles for everyone to see. As someone who is 10 years older than most of these respondents, however, I can understand the desire to be part of the social media phenomenon and the belief that quantity exceeds quality (in terms of the number of friends). Recent Pew Internet research has also found that teens do take online privacy seriously, and are more educated about privacy and security on SNSs than their adult counterparts.

Personally, I see SNAD to be only slightly more ridiculous than the recently revitalized hype over Internet addiction. Sure, some people probably do get too involved in their social networking accounts and spend an unhealthy amount of time on these sites, just as there will always be gamers who spend too much time playing online games or kids who drink too much milk or jump off one too many ledges with their skateboards. These people will all experience negative consequences, whether it is the development of an aversion to sunlight, the loss of friends, a bad bout of nausea (I can tell you from personal experience that drinking too much milk, i.e., 3/4 of a gallon in five minutes, will make you mighty nauseous), or a broken arm. That’s why everything should be done in moderation! Don’t let Facebook take over your life, because that is a pretty boring life. The least you could do is move from the basement to the living room and play some Super Smash Bros. Brawl with some friends.

“World of Wifecraft” puts men in their place

In the spirit of such spoof videos as Facebook in Reality, here is a hilarious video about using World of Warcraft to help men better communicate with their wives.

My favorite quote: “Do you know what it’s like to be killed by a level 70 and then spend the next 20 minutes scrambling around looking for your dead body? No you don’t, because you are a level 70 and you’re powerful because you have tits and whatnot.”

Dear blog, sorry I’ve been neglecting you. Be back soon. Love, Vitak

Between the break I (more than) earned after completing my thesis and the subsequent arrival of my Wii (along with four new games to beat!), I have had little time or motivation to feed my blog beast. So I apologize to my *massive* viewing audience (cough cough), who hangs on my every word. I hope you haven’t been on a hunger strike since my last post.

Efforts are being renewed to make this a happier and busier blog soon. I promise! At least until I leave for Michigan in August. Who knows what’ll happen when I enter that desolate ice field. Do they even have Internet access that far north?

New blog post on Pew Internet Project site

My latest post is up on the Pew Internet website. This one considers my master’s thesis research in light of the Project’s recent report on the impact of technology on teens’ writing havits, which I have previously blogged about here. Check it out.

For my master’s thesis at Georgetown University, I was interested in how 21st century communication technologies are changing the ways in which people interact with members of their social networks. Specifically, I focused my research on how Facebook is altering the methods users employ to build and maintain a network of friends. This research was facilitated by a survey of 644 Georgetown undergraduates on their uses of various communication technologies, and especially the internet, in keeping connected with others.

I recently began thinking of my research in light of Pew’s recent Writing, Technology and Teens report, and saw several interesting connections between the two. Both studies focus on digital natives, or those users who have had access to many of these newer communication technologies since a young age: Pew’s report looks at 12-17 year olds, while my research was limited to college undergraduates ages 18-25. Furthermore, both studies consider the implications of technology on communication. Therefore, the question that arose in my mind was, do the trends we found in our Pew report among younger teens also apply to young adults? [More…]

Take that, master’s thesis, I totally kicked your ass

I have received the official Grad School signoff on my master’s thesis, which can mean only one thing: I am done! Done done DONE! Well, at least I’m done until August, when I begin my PhD studies at Michigan State.

Six long months of research; checking and rechecking out books from the library; creating, disseminating, collecting and coding 600+ surveys; and writing up a 140-page document all by my lonesome are OVER. Yay!

As soon as the Grad School posts a link to my thesis online, I will post it to the blog. However, if you are curious about my topic, here is the title and abstract:

Facebook “Friends”: How Online Identities Impact Offline Relationships

Abstract: We live in an increasingly networked world. We are connected to each other through numerous types of ties, with social networking sites offering one of the most popular methods people currently employ to link themselves together. But do “old-fashioned” ways of developing and maintaining relationships suffer from the evolution of computer-mediated communication? Have we become too reliant on the instantaneous, answer-producing quality of the internet that can reveal others’ most intimate personal details before we even introduce ourselves?

This thesis examines social relationships online to see how they differ from traditional offline relationships, focusing on how people create an online identity and how that identity affects the formation and maintenance of “friendships” in the digital world. The thesis will then consider how the social networking site Facebook impacts relationships in the real world. This analysis will be based on a survey of 644 Georgetown University undergraduates regarding their uses of various technologies to interact with different members of their social networks, and especially their use of Facebook to form and maintain relationships.

This summer, I’ll be repackaging the thesis to submit to journals, and hopefully getting some mileage out of my research on the tech blogs.

jessica vitak, phd

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