Week 8 Readings Reflection Paper

1. “Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking,” Dana Michele Boyd

University of California, Berkeley.

The article, “Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking,” by Dana Michele Boyd of the University of California, Berkeley, is an ethnographic study of users of Friendster, a social networking site. Boyd labors to investigate the forces that drive the building of social networks in Friendster.

Using social theory, she presents to readers the complexities of forming lasting social networks. “Friends of friends” is a phrase Bond repeatedly uses in this article to explain how Friendster users negotiate context when presenting themselves.

Friendster allows users to form friendship networks based on testimonials generated by other users of the site. This sounds pyramidal, where new users look upon established users to build their own social networks. This is a big plus for Friendster and might explain its unprecedented growth. At the time of this study, the site boasted 5 million members, but this has since ballooned to 40 million (http://www.friendster.com/info/index.php). One would rightly argue that people looking for real dates find it credible.

Because Friendster facilitates social networks “within four degrees” users, no doubt, tend to gravitate towards it, compared with other existing dating websites. It’s the nature of human beings to establish relationships with people who’re close to them.

Friendster, however, has found that it’s not always easy to make users adhere to the mission for which it was established. Some users, who Boyd variously describes as “Fakesters” and “Fraudsters”, for instance, set up fake profiles to confuse their fellow users. This poses a great challenge to the owners of Friendster because as Boyd puts it some users see value in Fakesters, especially their creativeness in a bid to mask their real identity, and wouldn’t entertain their removal from the system. The question this raises is, “Who has the upper hand in what goes on in social networking sites?”

2. “Leveraging Social Networks for Information Sharing,” Jeremy Goecks and Elizabeth D. Mynatt, Georgia Institute of Technology, GVU Center, College of Computing.

As I have noted above, social networking heavily relies on trust and familiarity. Users want to form social networks with people they know, trust and share common values. Given, users want greater leverage on social networks. They want to dictate membership and the way information is shared. The big question is whether the existing social networks allow for this.

Goecks and Mynatt, in their article, “Leveraging Social Networks for Information Sharing,” explain how Saori can help social networkers leverage their own social networks. Saori, as these two authors put it, “…enables users and end-user applications to leverage social networks to mediate information dissemination.”

Saori:

q Enables users to employ both technological and social methods to manage information sharing.

q Enables users to create policies that mediate sharing by exploiting social networks.

q Provides social data to users

Saori, just like Friendster, enables users exercise control over their social networks. Perhaps, more importantly, Saori enables users to track the movement of their information within their social networks. Goecks and Mynatt incorporated Saori in a Wiki, to allow users to dictate which pages to make public or private. Saori is a good idea, but I am concerned about the possibility of it trampling on the privacy of those taking part in social networks. Another concern is its application in Wikis? Doesn’t this amount to redefining the purpose of Wikis?

3. “Mapping Networks of Support for the Zapatista Movement,” by Maria Garrido and Alexander Halavis

Maria and Halavis discuss the power of social networks in the articulation of nationalistic causes. They studied the Zapatista movement, which in 1994 took up arms against the Mexican government. The movement charged that the central government ignored the southern state of Chiapas. These two authors’ attempted to establish whether mapping the Zapatista movement’s online-based social networks would shed light on the personalities of the people and groups that supported its cause. Principally, they argue that there exists cognitive, social, or structural relationship between websites.