Trust and Motivation

Though both the articles we chose were about trust, the things I found interesting were related more to the issue of motivation. Why Review? What is the motivation of putting in effort and time online?

“users who write product reviews are engaged in a variety of activities: promoting agendas, carrying out personal attacks, boosting their own and others’ reputations, building their own identities as reviewers, experiencing for the first time the empowerment of publication and so on.” (David & Pinch, 2006)

The most interesting of the motivations the authors reported were related to Identity and empowerment. I could relate to these two and thought I would share my experience of Yahoo Answers. answers.yahoo.com is Yahoo’s social networking website where you can ask and answer questions. I joined it just to see how it works and what exactly is happening. The status/structure of most active answerers is similar to that of best review writers so I thought it would be interesting to share my experience.

Since I joined, I have posted answers for various reasons. Initially, I used to find questions that really interested me, something about which I had information or an issue I was passionate about. I wrote lengthy answers for some of the questions, often rechecking the information I had by referring to books, online info etc. It was a good feeling of camaraderie, and a feeling that somebody reads/cares about my answers. One of my answers got selected as best answer. Some also got a good rating from multiple users. I got hooked at this point because it was more of ‘recognition’ that I was a useful person and my views were accepted by people around me.

Later, I discovered the point structure. Each level has various rights. I was falling short of 100 points to reach level two which allowed me to rate answers. I desperately wanted to rate answers, especially so that I could give ‘thumbs down’ to a nasty answer to one of my questions. At this point, I started to participate in a calculative manner - Give one liner answers to random questions to get 2 points for each answer and put in effort for answers that have a chance to be chosen as best answers giving me 10 points. It was fascinating to watch how my attitude, objective and level/quality of participation changed over time.

So I pretty much went through these transitions - curiosity, need to share information/views, recognition, calculated effort to get more points to get more power to participate in all forms of communication.

Proposal for Final Project

Before writing the proposal for the final project, I went back to see what I was thinking initially. I started taking interest in Orkut and its online communities with the following two objectives.
Firstly, to observe the process of formation of an informal learning community (informal because nobody designed it to be one as a part of any formal learning exercise). Secondly, to understand if and how the social networking sites like Orkut can be one of the tools for adults to engage in informal learning, knowledge building. Adults who are outside the framework of the formal education programmes available. I am nowhere close to thinking about the ‘learning’ part. At present I am focusing more on process of formation of the community, and how they interact with each other (group dynamics).

In my earlier post about questions I want to explore, I penned down a lot of things. Reading it again, I realized that I am thinking about too many things that are going to take too much effort and time. So I am taking Sarah’s advice ‘to use tools that are already out there’ and concentrating on getting my hands dirty.

So I thought of following Baym’s model where she looks at sources of influences on CMC, how they interact with each other and shape forms of expression, norms, and relationships in an emergent community.

I think Baym’s ethnographic study as a base model will be useful to follow as the goal of her study ‘systematic understanding of what happens in a community’ is very close to what I am trying to understand.

I plan to do this mini-study based primarily on data available on Orkut on community discussion boards as well as Member pages. I am also planning a short survey, if time permits, to better understand the participants and their motivations.

Clusters and Connectors

The following was the most interesting quote from one of the readings for this week:
"As networks are clustered, nodes that are linked only to nodes in their cluster could have a central role in that subculture or genre. Without links connecting them to the outside world, they can be quite far from nodes in other clusters."

It was interesting that while I was reading this Nitin shared news item about a new social networking website. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/technology/30poor.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin
This site named babajob.com is essentially forcing links between two clusters. The website is not really a hub but it is a bridge or if we look at it as an entity then it is a vary powerful connector?

(To be continued)

The biggest problem I have right now is defining the scope.

1. How much do I want to do as part of the class assignment –

- Do a lit review and define my questions, Create data gathering tools?

- Analyze the already existing data in form of the discussion board postings and what ever information is available on the community and personal pages as of now.

- In addition, do a generic survey for the population and focused interviews with some people.

I am not able to figure out how much I would be able to do given the time constraints.

2. Another set of confusion is related to the difficulties of observing members' interaction outside the space of the online community. The members can post scraps on each other's scrapbooks. It is humanly impossible to gather these posts. Especially because members are in different time zones, they can easily delete the scraps on their scrapbooks as well as the ones posted on other people's scrapbooks after they are read. Orkut has now added google chat inside orkut. I have no way of capturing this activity. I cannot access the emails they can send to each other through orkut internal messaging, neither do I have the information of how they are interacting face to face. I know for sure that these activities are happening as they mention it in their posts and scraps.

3. What all in that data am I going to look for.

The articles this week, especially the ethnographic study of Usenet has given me a better idea of what all I can look for but I am still fumbling. In a couple of days I plan to make a list of what all I can explore and may be, go ahead from there.

Also, I am a bit confused about where exploring one community in detail is going to lead me. It is interesting to explore but is it useful? I cannot extrapolate anything because the community is unique because of its subject, members, their physical location, the fact that some of them can and do meet outside the online space, the hierarchy that was formed initially and so on. Do I need to compare it with another community, may be with similar subject, and see how it is different/operated differently and why? As you can see I am pretty confused.

How can I get what I need?

• While writing this post I realized that it helped to write down all the questions. It is better than juggling all these in my head. So next step should be to write down all possible things I can do and then take up one direction and define the scope.
• I need to talk about it with somebody. Preferably with Sarah and also some of the class participants. I need to read other blogs and see who is thinking on similar lines and ask if we could brainstorm together.
• I definitely need to know more about ethnographic methods. The readings this week were step in that direction.
• I think defining the scope would also be easier if I define what I want out of this class. So may be I should do that in writing.

Questions I want to explore

My initial questions were in two directions -
1. What motivates people to share information, knowledge or their creations online in blogs, wikis, virtual worlds. The question arose as I was perplexed
2. W.r.t. a specific community online – What makes them a community? If they are a community how did they become one (process of formation)? How do they interact (group dynamics)?

I am more excited about the second question. Firstly, because it is exciting to observe a process of formation of an informal learning community (informal because nobody designed it to be one as a part of any formal learning exercise). Secondly, I am hoping to get insight on if and how the social networking sites like Orkut can be one of the tools for adults to engage in informal learning, knowledge building. Adults who are outside the framework of the formal education programmes available.

The articles for a couple of weeks (Identity & Place) are helping me formulate questions a bit differently. I am also redefining my way of looking at the community as online only and looking at their experience online and offline as separate entities. I still have to think about the authenticity of identity part of it. Especially since Orkut allows people to change their display names and images without any barriers.

CMC

I have been trying to figure out how to best use this blog. This week I decided to put down my scattered thoughts as I was reading each article rather than reading everything and then writing a well digested version of the intermediate thoughts. So here it is.

Second Life

One point that struck me after I watched the CBC news report on Second Life was, that people were building there life and identity in second life so as to escape the problems and constraints of the real life. The avatars as the comentator said were slim and tall (“Slimmer, taller, better equipped versions of us”). Simon could dance in spite of his cerebral palsy. The writer (Tim??) commented that second life allows conquering death and taxes … a commentary on the need to run away from constraints, pain, frustrations of real life. The first thought I had was that they were all running away from reality and pretending something else while the reality actually did not change. If I can run away from painful reality so easily then I would never try to change it, improve it, or accept it. How can that be good for a person’s development as a human being.

I do not have much experience in second life but I wonder if the pretending remains just a fun thing for a short time like we pretended being a king or a brigand or mothers and fathers, when we used to play as kids. Or the virtual identity continues and makes a difference in the real life? Yet again what is ‘real life’ and what is real me. To quote from Indian philosophers ‘This world is Maya’, it is all perception.


CMC – impersonal, interpersonal, hyperpersonal

Among many interesting things in the article one is worth a mention as it relates to the earlier thought process about second life vs real life. When talking about hyperpersonal interaction (on page 28) Walther writes ‘why would people be attracted to such distortion?’ The use of word ‘distortion’ was very interesting. It was how I thought of second life … not reality, distortion. Yet when I think about CMC (except second life kind of virtual world) I feel it allows me to show my real self and avoids distortion. I am not sure why I still stick to the feeling of second life like virtual realities as undesirable running away from reality and CMC generated hyperpersonal communication as good and taking people closer to ‘my’ reality and avoiding distortion. Is this a difference of degree? Quality? Or it is different because of the objective of the participant? I am not sure right now. This definitely gives something to think about/ consciously question about as I participate in both worlds.

A few other things caught my attention.
Firstly, the research studies mentioned in the beginning of the article that looked at task vs social communication. The tone of the studies seemed like task communication is desirable and the social communication was not desirable. Thus CMS being less interpersonal is good for task communication/ getting work done. This view does not take into account the group dynamics theories and the theories of group formation/development (FtF) in organizational context. It is a very industrial view of looking at work and work relationships.
Secondly, I was very excited reading the SIDE model. I was thinking about the implications to client-vendor relations when each is on a different continent. I could very much relate to effects of perception of being a part of the group vs perception of as individual players. I was working with a vendor in India working for clients in US. Clients were always perceived as trouble makers. I am sure vendors were also perceived the same way from the other side. Then the organization positioned itself as a learning consultant rather than a vendor and I positioned my team as a consulting partner rather than an outside / third party vendor. Over the time, how we interacted with each other and how we made sense of what other was saying changed drastically. When I was reading Walther’s comments on SIDE it all makes a lot of sense.

About ‘Real’ me

I was once again thinking about the real me and the virtual me. When reading Bugeja’s thoughts, I wasn’t much thinking about the legal implications to administrators but of implications of violence, harassment etc in second life to me. In the past I would have said that I know it is not real so it wouldn’t bother me. But I know better now. I have observed how racist, threatening and sexually explicit replies to my comments on discussion groups and wikis disturbs me and leaves me shaken to the core. It is very puzzling that physically-removed online interactions affect the real me so much.

When I was reading research findings by Snyder etc (mentioned by Walther) it made me think again about what is ‘real me’. To quote from the article “….When a male believed he was speaking to an attractive partner, it affected his communication; his communication, in turn, affected the female partner’s engagement in the conversation, leading her to, in essence, become more beautiful.” So I am not only what I perceive I am, but I am what others perceive I am and also how I react to that perception and infinite iterations of this process.

I have been observing myself as I write this blog. It is quite interesting that after seeing no comments for any of my blogs and feeling quite comfortable about being alone, unwatched, what I write has changed. As I have a different personality (identity ???) when I am in India, in US, in class, office or home alone, I also have a different personality (identity ???) when I think I am writing for an audience or writing alone unwatched.

Information Society

The readings for this week were very interesting, so were the class discussions. I especially spent time mulling over what Dyson and Webster had to say. I think I am more confused after reading the articles. Or to put it positively, the articles have forced me to think in various directions. Here are some scattered themes going on in my mind.

Market for Lemons
I was quite fascinated by Akerlof’s theory of ‘Market for lemons’. The asymmetry of information causing the market to revise average quality of goods and prices downward.
Now with the explosion of possibilities of getting information in time, with less and less effort one would think that the problem would be cured. But it seems in many examples we have a lot of choice and a lot of information about what choices we have but less and less information to judge the quality of goods/services we purchase.

How did we manage to cure the information asymmetry before? We knew our neighborhood vendor, we knew from our earlier experience the level of quality he provided. We knew brand names that had consistent quality attached to them, based on which we could judge the quality. The regulatory boards of various governments put a stamp saying what the packaging says is what is really inside. If we are thinking about a new free world like Dyson envisions, with decentralized control, end of mass culture, and endless and diverse choice, it increases the information asymmetry as we loose a lot of pegs from where we drew our information.
Are we inventing newer ways of getting information to suit the newfound freedom? Or without information, wanting to take lesser risk pushing the better goods out of the market?

What about ‘information’ as a good? As information is bombarded from everywhere, do we have the information to judge the quality of information we are getting? It is fascinating to think about the consequences of the market for information as a lemons market.