Richard Joyce
Sociology 022 – In the Facebook Age – Spring 2010 – Dhiraj Murthy

Digital divides are divisions manifested in the differential access to Internet , frequency of use, and types of online activities among different groups of people.  Pippa Norris puts digital divides into three categories: global divides, social divides, and democratic divides.

Although Internet use is growing rapidly worldwide and examples of Internet use in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa are often celebrated (consider the farmer in the documentary “The Virtual Revolution”), the reality is that in many countries lots of households do not have electricity and telephones, let alone computers and Internet service.  The big question is, will the Internet help to reduce this disparity or will it amplify the existing inequality.  ”Cyber-optimists” suggest that increasing access to ICTs in developing countries  will promote economic growth, “strengthen democracy”, and “foster international peace and stability” (Norris, 275).  Norris mentions China and Cuba as examples of non-democratic countries with governments that have felt threatened by the Internet.  Last semester, my quad-mate from Beijing explained to me that Facebook was censored in China because of its potential use for political organizing.

Norris says that, “Attempts to move beyond speculative theorizing about these questions face major challenges”.  Basically, it is too early to tell whether the cyber-optimists, the cyber-skeptics, or the cyber-pessimists are correct.

Norris mentions two laws that I find interesting.  Moore’s Law says that “every eighteen months, you can get twice as much power for the same cost”.  Basically, technology is progressing exponentially.  I had heard of Moore’s Law before, and I always wonder what limits it will encounter.  It also makes me think about all the electronic waste produced by developed countries that ends up in China or Ghana. (http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/toxics/electronics/where-does-e-waste-end-up).

The other law that Norris mentions is Metcalf’s law, which states that “the value of a network is proportional to the square number of people using it”.  I am curious how value is calculated or defined.  Do networks not reach a point where they become too big and cluttered to be useful? With search engines, it seems that this can be avoided.  However, what about the law of diminishing returns?

Witte and Mannon focus on the social digital divides within the United States.  The authors examined survey data and compared Internet access and use along lines of gender, age, race, education, employment status, and income level.  A worthwhile point was that these categories do not exist in isolation; they come in combinations.  The major digital divides in the US are associated with education and income.  Individuals with more education and higher incomes are the most likely to use the Internet, to use it on a daily basis, and to use it for activities such as email, work, and online banking.  The digital divide as determined by education and income is actually growing.  Although relatively recently more men than women were using the Internet, Witte and Mannon claim that, “gender is not a major digital divide in terms of Internet use”.  In terms of age, individuals older than sixty five are the least likely to use the Internet.  Whites in the US use the Internet significantly more than blacks do, and this gap remained fairly constant between 2000 and 2007.

Witte and Mannon suggest that in addition to being problems by themselves, “digital divides” are symptoms of inequalities that exist independently of the Internet.  These inequalities will not be fixed solely with technology, though Witte and Mannon do not propose any concrete solutions in this chapter.

One of the first images in the video was of the woman’s eyes, staring intently at a computer screen.  The absorption of human gaze by machines seems like relevant symbol.

“You can’t convey a tone of voice in writing.”  Can you?

Again and again, the issue of public vs private aries.  If you write about your thoughts on a public blog, get responses that inform your decisions,  and publish accounts of your actions, are the distinctions of private and public still worthwhile?

Representation of self.  Is it more true, or authentic online or offline? Well, it can go both ways.  People can be phony either way.

After the woman is notified that she has “three or four days”, there is a shot of her husband silently embracing her.  Could she receive that support and comforting through blog comments? Is there something to be said for the cliché, “there are no words”?

It is true that I have given and received favors through Facebook.  It has served as a mediator for social capital.  When I go home for spring break, I will be taking a package that my friends’s older brother (who is my Facebook Friend) ordered online and had sent to me.  Another Facebook Friend, a former teacher at my highschool, offered through Facebook to give me her old banjo.  This past fall, a highschool classmate taking a gap year before applying to colleges sent me a Facebook message with eighteen questions about Bowdoin and why I chose to go here.  Another time this fall, a classmate from a semester program I attended asked for a place to crash for the night in between Bar Harbor and Portland.

I do not interact regularly with any of these individuals through Facebook.  However, I think that requests for favors through Facebook probably feel less random or out of the blue than requests through email or phone.  They somehow have more of a presence in my life through their appearances in my Facebook newsfeed.  Ellison et al. would consider this to be an example of “maintained social capital”, where connections are sustained regardless of physical separation.

One could argue, however, that Facebook is simply an easy way to send messages with requests.  You don’t have to worry about having the person’s email address, and you are less likely to lose the reply amid spam emails.

Similarly to the Beehive study, the Ellison et al. study of Facebook Friends and social capital was able to establish a correlation but not a causality between Facebook use and three types of social capital, particularly bridging social capital.  In all cases, the the study was measuring perceived social capital, meaning that it depended on the accuracy of respondents’ answers.

I have mixed feelings about Facebook’s birthday feature.  On the one hand, it reminds me of upcoming birthdays of friends, and I often forget birthdays otherwise.  On the other hand, I dislike birthday greetings posted on Facebook walls.  They can seem insincere and impersonal, and they are often from acquaintances rather than from friends.

Steinfeld, DiMicco, Ellison, and Lampe conducted a study of the Beehive, a social network site for IBM employees, and its relation to social capital.  The authors defined social capital as “the resources that derive from the relationships among people in various contexts” (245).  This is a narrower definition than Portes’s who stated that social capital is made up of both the relationships between people and the resources that are made accessible through those resources (3).  The distinction is subtle, but it is important to note because the authors of the Beehive study perceive social capital to be an overall positive phenomenon, while Portes has a more neutral vision of social capital.

Steinfeld et al. make the distinction between individual social capital and public social capital (social capital held by social groups).  In their study, they emphasized the former.  Another differentiation was between bonding social capital (resources from close, trusting relationships) and bridging social capital (resources from weaker, more distant relationships, often in the form of information).

The authors hypothesized that users of Beehive would increase their bonding social capital by maintaining existing relationships and increase their bridging social capital by meeting other IBM employees who had information or perspectives to offer.  Their general hypothesis was that more intensive users of social network sites would have more social capital.

The great weakness of this study was that it was only able to demonstrate correlation, not causality.  Although the authors found that frequent users of the Beehive had higher social capital scores, there is no evidence that the social network site is the source of the social capital score.  It could be a reflection of social capital patterns offline.

Given the mean number of connections that Beehive users had (16.79) and the mean number of visits per month (1.03), I am somewhat doubtful of how much use of the site could increase individual social capital.  Beehive does, however, seem like a good move on the part of IBM.  A social network site would be a good way for a huge corporation with divisions on different continents to build a slightly more cohesive body of employees.

I was somewhat taken aback by the way the authors used the term “citizenship” to refer to dedication to the company and solidarity among employees.  The two measures of “citizenship” (willingness to work overtime and willingness to mentor fellow employees) seemed more like extra demands than resources.

I unFriended several people on Facebook this morning.  Honestly, I felt absolutely no sense of loss.  A few of them I had said hi to once or twice, but never had a conversation with.  Some I had seen in passing, but never even said hi to.  Many of my Facebook Friends are already off my radar screen because my Newsfeed is set to not show any notifications about them.  They exist in my Friend list in case I need to contact them for some reason, but I do not actively view their profiles or care about their statuses.

In the process of going through my Facebook Friends, I also realized that I receive Friends requests more often then I submit them.

I chose not to go on chat roulette.  I guess I was just viscerally uncomfortable with the idea, though I did find it interesting to look over other individuals’ shoulders while they were on chat roulette.  It wasn’t so much the notion of seeing some “depravataded” man’s genitals that made me uneasy as the thought of my image being on that “depravataded” man’s computer screen.

As for the widening of social horizons and the opening of new possibilities, I do not doubt that interesting conversations take place on Chatroulette and that fleeting connections form between individuals.  I just wonder at what cost to physical communities this occurs.  If you wanted to look at it from a zero-sum perspective, any time spent  talking to strangers online is time spent not getting to know your physical neighbors or deepening offline relationships.

Sometimes I think that Facebook makes the activity of gossiping rather obsolete. While the content of information that is shared is personalized by the person sharing, it is available to all your Friends uniformly. When you write on someone’s profile wall, you are directing it at her, but also sharing the message with dozens of other peope.

“SNSs are primarily organized around people, not interests” (Boyd & Ellison, 219). I doubt that there is any group of Facebook users that share the identical friend lists. This is where Facebook “groups” come into the picture. While it is probably liberating for individuals to have their own unique “egocentric” communities, I wonder what is lost with the shift away from group, interest, or place bases communities.

It appears that the military and the government is showing hostility towards social network sites. I know that Facebook is blocked by servers in China, but that individuals can access the site by using a proxy browser (or something like that).

Because my highschool did not have a Facebook network initially, I joined Facebook under the network of a different school. I wonder how many college students lost interest in Facebook after it opened up to non-college-age students.