Networks in the News

AAP Updates Guidelines on Kids and Social Media

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When you tell parents that you study kids and social media, they invariably complain about Facebook (or it’s pre-teen brethren, Club Penguin and Togetherville), and ask if all this social networking is good or bad for kids. As with many social science questions, the answer, of course, is “it depends.”

A new report in the April issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, weighs in on the issue and encourages pediatricians to talk about social media and online social networking with parents. Although the report doesn’t get deep into network science, it does allude to some of the common findings from our field. For instance, the authors cite studies suggesting that kids can benefit by expanding their networks online to include contacts that are more numerous and diverse than they may otherwise encounter in their offline networks, affording them access to information and resources they might not otherwise have. Likewise, kids may be able to find communities of practice online where they can build social skills and participate in collective action around a cause that matters to them.

The authors also warn of the potential downsides of online networks, including increased risk of cyberbullying, sexting, and something they call “Facebook depression,” which they imply (without the benefit of many peer-reviewed references) can arise when there is a mismatch between the perception of social support and acceptance from online networks, and the actual support and acceptance received from those networks.

The report concludes with a series of generalized warnings about online privacy, and recommends that pediatricians discuss online social networking with the parents of their patients, in light of the, “challenging social and health issues that online youth experience.”

Personally, I was happy to see that the AAP is talking about social media, even if the report was a bit alarmist for my tastes. I think the privacy risks were somewhat overstated, and I would have liked to see more emphasis on placed on the role that online media play in strengthening existing social ties, an important benefit of social media that was not noted in the report.

What do you think? Does the report do a good job informing parents and doctors about the benefits and risks of social networking? Has your pediatrician discussed social networking sites with you or your children?

Read the full report, here: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/peds.2011-0054v1

Or the press release from the AAP, here: http://aap.org/advocacy/releases/socialmedia2011.htm

 

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News

ICA Doctoral Consortium Acceptance

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Brooke Foucault Welles has been invited to participate in the Doctoral Consortium of the Communication and Technology (CAT) at the International Communication Association (ICA) conference in Boston, MA on May 26, 2011. Brooke will be presenting her dissertation research on friendship networks in Second Life for feedback from a panel of esteemed faculty from across the field of communication (including SONIC’s own Noshir Contractor).

Dissertation Project Overview:

Friendships are among the most important relationships in an individual’s life. Throughout adolescence and into adulthood, friends take on ever-increasing importance, becoming the locus of significant social, emotional, and functional support.  As online social media grow in popularity, the Internet is becoming increasingly involved in the formation and maintenance of friendships. Although research shows that individuals more frequently use the Internet to communicate with friends that they first met in the offline world, making new friends online is not uncommon. In a recent survey of adult Internet users in the US, 16% of respondents reported having made at least one friend online, amounting to approximately 25 million new Internet-based friendships in the US alone (Katz & Rice, 2009). Adolescents report having online friendships at similar rates, with approximately 14% of teens reporting having close friends that they know exclusively through online interactions (Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2003).

Despite a considerable amount of attention paid to online friendship in the Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) literature, prior studies have largely focused on friendship at the individual or dyad level, using surveys or in-depth interviews to discover how individual dispositions or preferences lead to the emergence of friendships online (i.e. Livingstone & Bober, 2004; Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2002 ; Wolak, et al., 2003). While such studies provide important foundational insight into the nature of online relationships, they only tell part of the story. Based on research conducted in the offline world, we know that friendship selection is not driven exclusively by individual preferences. Instead, individual preferences, dyadic pressures, and structural forces all work concurrently to shape and constrain how friendships emerge and develop over time (Cairns & Cairns, 1994).

The purpose of my dissertation research is to extend the existing body of literature by taking network analytic approach to understanding online friendship. I will apply Monge and Contractor’s (2003) multi-theoretical multilevel modeling approach to study the emergence of friendship ties between previously unacquainted users of the virtual world Second Life. In doing so, I will be able to compare the relative effects of individual, dyadic and structural-level forces on the processes of friendship selection online. Further, recognizing recent discussions about the inconsistencies between the way individuals understand online and offline friendship (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007), and because the limitations of quantitative network analysis do not allow for a deep understanding of why certain structural patterns emerge, I will supplement my quantitative studies with qualitative research conducted within Second Life with users of that virtual world. Together, these two approaches will offer a more complete picture of how and why online friendships form, and will lay the foundation for future discussions of the utility, stability and quality of these relationships.

 

 

 

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SONIC News

ICWSM Paper Acceptance

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Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, Brian Keegan, Dmitri Williams, Jaideep Srivastava, and Noshir Contractor had their paper “Trust Amongst Rogues? A Hypergraph Approach for Comparing Clandestine Trust Networks in MMOGs” accepted to the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). Notably, it is the authors’ first attempt and acceptance for a paper invoking a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I: “A plague upon’t when thieves cannot be true one to another!” – Falstaff, II.ii

Abstract:

Gold farming and real money trade refer to a set of illicit practices in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) whereby players accumulate virtual resources to sell for ―real world money. Prior work has examined trade relationships formed by gold farmers but not the trust relationships which exist between members of these organizations. We adopt a hypergraph approach to model the multi-modal relationships of gold farmers granting other players permission to use and modify objects they own. We argue these permissions reflect underlying trust relationships which can be analyzed using network analysis methods. We compare farmers’ trust networks to the trust networks of both unidentified farmers and typical players. Our results demonstrate that gold farmers’ networks are different from trust networks of normal players whereby farmers trust highly-central non-farmer players but not each other. These findings have implications for augmenting detection methods and re-evaluating theories of clandestine behavior.

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Networks in the News, News

Wikipedia articles affected by Tohoku earthquake

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Brian Keegan’s dissertation will use Wikipedia’s coverage of breaking news articles to examine the high-tempo and high-reliability coordination practices of emergent, self-assembling teams. Wikipedia’s response to and coverage of the tragic events over the past week in Japan continues to provide a fascinating corpus for analysis. Some factoids:

  • The English article about the earthquake with links to the relevant sites for the US Geological Survey and Integrated Tsunami Watch Service was started at 6:18 GMT, just over 32 minutes after the earthquake began. The bureaucratic editorial process of nominating it to appear on the front page of Wikipedia was begun at 6:29. The article appeared on the front page by 7:58 after being vetted by 12 editors and at least one administrator. As a point of comparison, The New York Times (the first to report according to Memeorandum) did not file a story until 7:35.
  • Between the start of the article and noon CDT on March 15 (~100 hours after the earthquake), 761 editors made 2,901 contributions. The average time between edits over this entire window was 2 minutes, 4 seconds. The median was 1:08.
  • At the time, 49 other articles had been categorized by Wikipedians as being affected by or related to the earthquake and tsunami. 1683 unique editors made 6,931 contributions to these articles, including the one above. In that 100 hour time window, the average interval between edits made to articles in this category was 56 seconds. The median was 37 seconds.

A (very crude) temporal visualization of how the activity among editors to these articles can be seen in the video below. The text is admittedly hard to read, try full-screening the video. The red nodes are the articles, the blue nodes are editors, and the links indicate which editors edited which articles.  The “halos” of small blue nodes around the articles are the editors who contributed only to that article and none of the other articles. The clump of larger blue nodes in the center are editors who contributed to many of the other articles. Be sure to pay attention to when they make the switch to only editing one article to editing others. Note the switch in “attention” from the article about the earthquake & tsunami to the nuclear reactor as well as the lag before the articles about the affected communities (located at approximately 1 o’clock) are updated. The article at approximately 3 o’clock is the “Fukushima I nuclear accidents” article which is created more than 48 hours after the earthquake itself.

100 Hours of Wikipedia activity for Sendai earthquake from Brian Keegan on Vimeo.

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Networks in the News

Social network analysis fights crime on Chicago’s west side

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Chicago Police Target Most Violent Gang in Harrison District
Social Network Analysis Aides Efforts to Dismantle Gang Network
Chicago Police Department press release , 2011-02-13

Superintentent Weis emphasized the utility of Social Network Analysis for identifying perpetrators of violence so that gang factions may be dismantled. The Analysis also reveals the relationships between victims and offenders in shooting and homicide incidents, highlighting that both parties often are known to each other through personal disputes, and that violence is not random but intentional. … Social Network Analysis effectively enables law enforcement to identify at-risk individuals and make appropriate outreach.

Weis: Gang crackdown led to crime decrease
Police met with gang leaders, focused on social network
February 13, 2011, Andy Grimm, Chicago Tribune

Weis said the department has built a social network database that combines gang, vice and patrol officers’ insights at the street level and arrest data to show links between gang members, helping the department to better target enforcement.

University of Massachusetts sociologist Andrew V. Papachristos, who has studied Chicago gangs for his graduate research at the University of Chicago, said social network analysis has been successful in crime reduction efforts in smaller cities such as Boston and Cincinnati.

“We use the words ‘crime epidemic.’ … Well, if it is an epidemic, it should follow certain rules as to how it spreads,” Papachristos said.

Chicago police fight crime in new ways
Paul Meincke, WLS-TV ABC7 News, Monday, February 14, 201

Police are using what they call social network analysis. It starts with what street cops know, then that gets analyzed by computer which compares crime patterns and arrests going back in time.

“One thing we know about crime is it’s a lot like sex: who you mess around with is going to get you into trouble,” said Harvard Professor Andrew Papachristos.

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News, SONIC News

Third International Workshop on Network Theory: Web Science Meets Network Science

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Annenberg Networks  Network, Northwestern’s SONIC lab, and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) hosted the Third International Workshop on Network Theory March 4th-6th, followed directly by the NICO Complexity Conference at Northwestern University’s Allen Center. Although the weather in Evanston turned surly, members of the SONIC lab, along with some of the most influential and brilliant scholars involved in network and web science, discussed the future of the field, major challenges, and opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. We’ll have photos available in the next couple of days (look out for a new slideshow on our homepage!) and video from the conference talks available by March 21st.

In the meantime, you can read an excellent blog post at the Complexity and Social Networks blog about a talk given by Stanley Wasserman and the discussion that followed by SONIC’s own Brian Keegan, a graduate student in the Media, Technology, and Society program.  There’s also a tweet-record of the official back channel of Third International at #webnetsci.

Our sincere thanks to everyone who participated in the conference!

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Events, News

Manuel Castells From WikiLeaks to Wiki-revolutions

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Manuel CastellsThe Media, Technology and Society Speaker Series presents:
From WikiLeaks to Wiki-Revolutions: Internet and the Culture of Freedom (video)
Manuel Castells, University of Southern California

Friday, March 4, 2011, 4-5pm
1-421 Frances Searle Building, Northwestern University

Manuel Castells is University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, as well as Professor of Sociology at the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona. He is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Technology and Society at MIT, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford University. He was Professor of Planning and of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley from 1979 to 2003. He has published 24 books including the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Blackwell, 1996-2000), translated into 22 languages, and The Internet Galaxy (OUP, 2001), translated into 17 languages. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, of the Academia Europea, of the British Academy, of the Mexican Academy, and of the Spanish Royal Academy of Economics. He has received 14 honorary doctorates. He was a founding member of the European Research Council. He is a member of the Board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) and a member of the Scholars’ Council at the U.S. Library of Congress.

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Networks in the News, News

Partner Knowledge Awareness: A Better Way to Learn?

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Just recently published this year in the Journal of Experimental Education, an article titled Partner Knowledge Awareness in Knowledge Communication: Learning by Adapting to the Partner sheds interesting new insight on educational methods.

First, Partner Knowledge Awareness (PKA) is defined to be a “phenomenon in which a person is aware of aspects of another group member’s knowledge. Awareness refers to an individual’s mental state, partner prefers to the target of the mental representation, and knowledge refers to the relevant characteristic of the target.”

This article primarily focuses on the effect of PKA on learning outcome and processes. For example, “during explanation, for instance, one collaborator can use PKA to adapt explanations toward the partner’s knowledge.”

Essentially, PKA induces a cognitive process when dealing with information, which is known as knowledge transforming. The authors explain, “adapting explanations to a partner is thought to foster one’s own understanding and learning to the extent that the explainer will clarify and reorganize the material in new ways to make it more understandable to others.” Although not the most complicated concept, it brings up the question how much of a beneficial educational impact this cognitive process can have.

Performed in Germany, the experiment involved about 49 native students. Each were given about 25 minutes to study extensive hypertexts about blood constituents and the immune system. Afterward, the subjects were randomly assigned into groups of three. One member, the explainer, of each group was given the responsibility to explain the material to the other two, the recipients.

The explainer was given a visualization tool before he or she had to begin:

You may be wondering, what exactly is this image? It is PKA! On paper!

After learning the material, every participant filled out a sheet of paper, like the one above, marking what he or she didn’t know. The explainer is now aware of the parameters of both of the recipients’ knowledge on the material; consequently, the visualization tool fosters and creates PKA for the explainer to adapt, improve, and specialize their explanations.

Afterwards, all the participants were tested on the material by taking a 36 multiple-choice exam. The results for the recipients, the subjects who had the material explained to them, were not surprising: they scored higher than those who had taken the exam without receiving explanations. However, the surprising result was that the explainers, who were given the PKA visualization tool, significantly scored much higher than the control group, explainers who did not receive the PKA. The explainers with PKA not only had the greatest improvement in scores but the highest scores overall. The authors explain, “Not only can other group members potentially benefit from these adaptations, but one of the major arguments here is that explainers using PKA information themselves are supported in their learning. The one adapting is the one benefiting.”

What this article suggests is neither groundbreaking nor very modern. The idea that “teaching is the best way to learn” has been around for ages. However, what this study does suggest is a simple method, which can be as simple as a piece of paper, that fosters huge learning benefits for everyone. In fact, the idea is so simple that it is rather striking that educators don’t implement this sort of knowledge communication more often.

So as I try to pay attention to the complicated jargon my professor is simultaneously mumbling and drawing on a dirty chalkboard, I can’t help myself asking the very questions this article brings up. Wouldn’t my professor explain the material more effectively if they were aware of what I do and do not know? Wouldn’t my understanding be taken to new heights if I were forced to try explaining the material in my own words rather than sitting in class writing and memorizing everything someone else says verbatim? Wouldn’t knowledge communication be more beneficial than knowledge memorization?

I shrug my shoulders, excommunicate myself in the library, and begin to cram for the next midterm, unaware of a better way to learn and understand the countless numbers, terms, and words that seem to dominate my life.

 

 

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