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

Social Network Analysis

/pdf/online-communities-designing-usability-supporting-1rx78h3t04.pdf

Online communities – Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability

Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov New York: Public Affairs, 2011 409 pages $16.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In January 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a highly touted speech on Internet freedom in which she stated, "The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate. Once you're on the Internet, you don't need to be a tycoon or a rock star to have a huge impact on society." Evgeny Morozov, in his book The Net Delusion, takes great issue with the implication, however, that the so-called "Arab Spring" and "Twitter Revolution" were caused by unfettered access to the Internet. Instead, Morozov, a research academic, provides a cautionary tale about what he argues is any attempt to establish a monocausal relationship to meaningful political change (especially when that single focus is information technology). The book opens with a discussion of cyber-utopianism and Internet-centrism--mind-sets that focus on the positive "emancipatory" aspects of Internet communication while ignoring the downsides. The argument throughout centers on nation-state policy, or lack thereof, that attacks the "wicked" problem of authoritarianism by, as a colleague of mine has dubbed it, "wiring the world." Morozov, expectantly, but importantly, cites the hedonistic world portrayed by Huxley and the "Big Brother" world of Orwell to consider both the proactive and reactive approaches to Internet freedom by authoritarian regimes. Interestingly, he notes that there is often a mix of both. Such regimes certainly use the anonymity and openness of the Internet to spy on their people and shutdown undesirable sites. But there is also a subtle approach that belies the jackboot on the keyboard methodology. While China may be known more for suppressing the Internet and for employing the masses to counter antiregime rhetoric, Russia imposes no formal Internet censorship. It relies on entertainment (porn is specifically cited) to soothe the masses, assuming that given options for political discourse and anything else, most opt for "anything else." Hitler would understand. And in nations where freedom is not widely understood from a western perspective, any bit of additional mindless diversion may be viewed as liberty by the populace. Perhaps most importantly, Morozov rails against social media determinism as driving the end of authoritarianism, labeling it "an intellectually impoverished, lazy way to study the past, understand the present, and predict the future." He does not dismiss the value of Facebook and Twitter to quickly mobilize like-minded individuals. He notes as well that the development of that very like-mindedness is complex and potentially can be manipulated by authoritarian governments using the same Internet freedom. …

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

Large-scale online communities rely on computer-mediated communication between participants, enabling them to sustain interactions and exchange on a scale hitherto unknown. Yet little research has focused on how these online communities sustain themselves and how their interactions are structured. In this paper, we theorize and empirically measure the network exchange patterns of long-duration sustainable online communities. We propose that participation dynamics follow specific forms of social exchange: direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and preferential attachment. We integrate diverse findings about individual participation motivations by identifying how individual behavior manifests in network-level structures of online communities. We studied five online communities over 27 months and analyzed 38,483 interactions using exponential random graph (p*) models and mixed-effects analysis of covariance. In a test of competing models, we found that network exchange patterns in online community communication networks are characterized by direct reciprocity and indirect reciprocity patterns and, surprisingly, a tendency away from preferential attachment. Our findings undermine previous explanations that online exchange follows a power law distribution based on people wanting to connect to “popular” others in online communities. Our work contributes to theories of new organizational forms by identifying network exchange patterns that regulate participation and sustain online communities.

Network Exchange Patterns in Online Communities

Compared to traditional organizations, online community leadership processes and how leaders emerge are not well studied. Previous studies of online leadership have often identified leaders as those who administer forums or have high network centrality scores. Although communication in online communities occurs almost exclusively through written words, little research has addressed how the comparative use of language shapes community dynamics. Using participant surveys to identify leading online community members, this study analyzes a year of communication network history and message content to assess whether language use differentiates leaders from other core community participants. We contribute a novel use of textual analysis to develop a model of language use to evaluate the utterances of all participants in the community. We find that beyond communication network position-in terms of formal role, centrality, membership in the core, and boundary spanning-those viewed as leaders by other participants, post a large number of positive, concise posts with simple language familiar to other participants. This research provides a model to study online language use and points to the emergent and shared nature of online community leadership.

The Emergence of Online Community Leadership

Online communities bring together individuals with shared interest in joint action or sustained interaction. Power law distributions of user popularity appear ubiquitous in online communities but their formation mechanisms are not well understood. This study tests for the emergence of power law distributions via the mechanisms of preferential attachment, least efforts, direct reciprocity, and indirect reciprocity. Preferential attachment, where new entrants favor connections with already popular participants, is the predominant explanation suggested by prior literature. Yet, the attribution of preferential attachment or any other mechanism as a single unitary reason for the emergence of power law distributions runs contrary to the social nature of online communities and does not account for diversity of participants' motivation. Agent-based modeling is used to test if a single social mechanism alone or multiple mechanisms together can generate power law distributions observed in online communities. Data from 28 online communities is used to calibrate, validate, and analyze the simulation. Simulated communication networks are randomly generated according to parameters for each hypothesis. The fit of the power law distribution in the model testing subset is then compared against the fit for these simulated networks. The major finding is that, in contrast to research in more general network settings, neither preferential attachment nor any other single mechanism alone generates a power law distribution. Instead, a blended model of preferential attachment with other social network formation mechanisms was most consistent with power law distributions seen in online communities. This suggests the need to move away from stylized explanations of network emergence that rely on single theories toward more highly socialized and multitheoretic explanations of community development.

/pdf/emergence-of-power-laws-in-online-communities-the-role-of-247grjcjtl.pdf

Emergence of power laws in online communities: the role of social mechanisms and preferential attachment

This study evaluates the use of hyperlinks in audience discussions on the Facebook Pages of two partisan cable news organizations: the liberal-leaning Rachel Maddow Show and the conservative O'Reilly Factor, to investigate to what extent linking might intensify partisan political discussion or infuse a variety of perspectives into online communication. The results suggest that these Facebook audiences show a preference for a small group of information resources; furthermore, the two audiences shared an even smaller number of information resources in common. The findings support previous research that suggests a relatively small number of information resources receive most of the news audience traffic, and provide some support for other studies that indicate that partisan political discussions on social media are segregated by political orientation.

Open media or echo chamber: the use of links in audience discussions on the Facebook Pages of partisan news organizations

Despite the recognition of how important expertise coordination is to the performance of software development teams, understanding of how expertise is coordinated in practice is limited. We adopt a...

/pdf/a-configural-approach-to-coordinating-expertise-in-software-2u48fxyr3s.pdf

Steven L. Johnson

Papers

Network Exchange Patterns in Online Communities

The Emergence of Online Community Leadership

Emergence of power laws in online communities: the role of social mechanisms and preferential attachment

Open media or echo chamber: the use of links in audience discussions on the Facebook Pages of partisan news organizations

A Configural Approach to Coordinating Expertise in Software Development Teams