Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

From the Publisher: 
A Question of Identity 
Life on the Screen is a fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the impact of computers and networking on society, peoples' perceptions of themselves, and the individual's relationship to machines. Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT and a licensed psychologist, uses Internet MUDs (multi-user domains, or in older gaming parlance multi-user dungeons) as a launching pad for explorations of software design, user interfaces, simulation, artificial intelligence, artificial life, agents, "bots," virtual reality, and "the on-line way of life." 
Turkle's discussion of postmodernism is particularly enlightening. She shows how postmodern concepts in art, architecture, and ethics are related to concrete topics much closer to home, for example AI research (Minsky's "Society of Mind") and even MUDs (exemplified by students with X-window terminals who are doing homework in one window and simultaneously playing out several different roles in the same MUD in other windows). Those of you who have (like me) been turned off by the shallow, pretentious, meaningless paintings and sculptures that litter our museums of modern art may have a different perspective after hearing what Turkle has to say. 
This is a psychoanalytical book, not a technical one. However, software developers and engineers will find it highly accessible because of the depth of the author's technical understanding and credibility. Unlike most other authors in this genre, Turkle does not constantly jar the technically-literate reader with blatant errors or bogus assertions about how things work. Although I personally don't have time or patience for MUDs,view most of AI as snake-oil, and abhor postmodern architecture, I thought the time spent reading this book was an extremely good investment.

스크린 위의 삶 = Life on the screen : identity in the age of the internet

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Online communities – Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability

This chapter reports authoritative insights into one of the most significant developments related to social interaction – social network sites – and offers an analytic framework for exploring these new sites, while underscoring the centrality of social interaction since the Internet's earliest days, such as through email. Social network sites (SNSs) presented several characteristics that made it possible for individuals to easily update their profiles. The implicit role of communication and information sharing has become the driving motivator for participation. The concept of ‘Web 2.0’ was an industry-driven phenomenon, hyped by the news media and by business analysts alike. Social network sites emerged out of the Web 2.0 and social media phenomena, mixing new technologies and older computer-mediated communication practices infused by tech industry ideals. Server-level data offer a unique opportunity to access elaborated behavioural data about what people are doing on SNSs.

Sociality Through Social Network Sites

This study evaluated Mind Reading, an interactive systematic guide to emotions, for its effectiveness in teaching adults with Asperger syndrome ~AS! and high-functioning autism ~HFA! to recognize complex emotions in faces and voices. Experiment 1 tested a group of adults diagnosed with AS0HFA ~n 19! who used the software at home for 10–15 weeks. Participants were tested on recognition of faces and voices at three different levels of generalization. A matched control group of adults with AS0HFA ~n 22! were assessed without any intervention. In addition, a third group of general population controls ~n 24! was tested. Experiment 2 repeated the design of Experiment 1 with a group of adults with AS0HFA who used the software at home and met in a group with a tutor on a weekly basis. They were matched to a control group of adults with AS0HFA attending social skills training and to a general population control group ~n 13 for all three groups!. In both experiments the intervention group improved significantly more than the control group on close, but not distant, generalization tasks. Verbal IQ had significant effects in Experiment 2. Using Mind Reading for a relatively short period of time allows users to learn to recognize a variety of complex emotions and mental states. However, additional methods are required to enhance generalization.

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Systemizing empathy: Teaching adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism to recognize complex emotions using interactive multimedia

Reviewed by Jonathan Bishop, Centre for Research into Online Communities and E-Learning Systems, European Parliament, Brussels, BelgiumNetworked: The New Social Operating SystemLee Raine and Barry Wellman©2012 by The MIT Press358 pp.$29.95ISBN 978-026-2017-19-0This book by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman aims to show how the large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals expand oppor-tunities for learning, problem solving, decision making, and personal interaction. It does this quite successfully, through providing a strong introduction to the authors’ research specialism of networked individualism. The purpose of the book appears to be to consolidate over 30 years’ of research on networked individualism into one volume, which makes it easier for people getting to grips with online social networking to understand this important yet abstract area. Even so, one might still ask whether it is worth buying a whole book dedicated to a concept with a very narrow research base beyond that of the authors. This review might provide the answer.The book is made up of 11 chapters split into three sections. Organisationally it is very well assembled. Each section has a chapter linking it to the next, which although helpful, raises the question whether this should have been an inbuilt feature. The authors discuss in the introduction whether they should have named the book ‘Networked Individualism’, saying that this would confuse readers who might not know what it means. But to anyone who has followed the authors’ extensive works on the subject previously, it would probably have made more sense to have done so, if only to differentiate it from the more technological books on the market implied in the title. The book follows an interesting and well docu-mented biographical account of the lives of online community moderators, Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz, who first appeared in Wellman’s work in the 1990s (Wellman & Gulia, 1999). This provides consistency in terms of making the examples given easy to relate to, yet one can’t help but feel that it is not in keeping with the era of “YOU” conceptualised by Time Magazine. With the very nature of networked individualism being about the joining of differ-ent people across different frontiers, first spoken about by David Kemp in his three-decades long study of electoral behaviour and social mobility in Australia (Kemp, 1978), most would have

Networked: The New Social Operating System

http://onemvweb.com/sources/sources/increasing_participation_online.pdf

Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human-computer interaction

There is a general trend amongst mass media organisations around the world towards concentration of the visual, written and audio packaging and of newspapers, websites and television as channels of information. These platforms are explored in detail in this paper in relation to the moral panics around 'internet trolling'. This paper discusses the history of trolling in the context of mass media, specifically 'classical trolling' and 'anonymous trolling'. A review of different media headlines finds that whether or not a story is portrayed in newspapers, online, or on television, the media will use a variety of ways to convey their messages. In the case of 'trolls', they show a darker, sinister and transgressive side of cyberspace in the form of abuse and vitriol i.e., anonymous trolling. The paper concludes that future research should look in detail at the different character types of internet troller and how these affect the way so called 'trolls' are represented in the media and the effect this has on the attitude towards young internet users and trollers in general.

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Representations of 'trolls' in mass media communication: a review of media-texts and moral panics relating to 'internet trolling'

Social impairments materialise in a number of forms, from developmental disabilities such as autistic spectrum disorder, to psychiatric conditions such as social phobia. The individuals diagnosed with these problems find it difficult to deal with social situations through either the inability to perform in these situations or the fear of not being able to do so. The study investigated the social and practical implications of using Mobile Internet technology to deliver information relating to a social situation in real-time to participants with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (n = 10) and General Social Phobia (n = 3) diagnosed using DSM-IV. The participants used the agent on their mobile phone to convert phrases they found offensive or confusing into more concise and understandable definitions. Analysing their attitudes revealed that the technology enables socially impaired individuals to learn the meaning of emotions and understand more about how they communicate with their peers. However, the study concludes that governmental organisations, education providers and society as a whole need to adopt a cohesive approach to communication to ensure socially impaired individuals are fully included in society

The Internet for educating individuals with social impairments

Web-based communities have been an interest of social science researchers since the dawn of the millennium. To date, much research into them has focused on the methods to enhance community building and understand those who do not participate in community life, known as lurkers. This paper explores web-based communities as a type of media, classifying types of web-based community such as message boards, chat groups and weblogs as genres. A methodology is proposed based on the Ecological Cognition Framework (ECF) for reading these web-based communities in order to determine their genre and subgenre. Utilising both quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the images, text and other artefacts in these web-based communities, two specific subgenres of the weblogs and directories genre emerge as the political blog and the mommy blog and these are compared with the significant differences that are found between them that make them solid subgenres.

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Jonathan Bishop

Papers

Networked: The New Social Operating System

Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human-computer interaction

Representations of 'trolls' in mass media communication: a review of media-texts and moral panics relating to 'internet trolling'

The Internet for educating individuals with social impairments

Enhancing the understanding of genres of web-based communities: the role of the ecological cognition framework