As we engage with the web, we leave behind breadcrumbs of attention.
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shared by David McGavock on 30 Apr 11
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Power Law of Participation - Ross Mayfield's Weblog - 0 views
ross.typepad.com/...power_law_of_pa.html
participation collaboration community socialsoftware ross mayfield
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But reading alone isn't enough to fulfill our innate desire to remix our media, consumption is active for consumers turned users.
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Del.icio.us taps both personal and social incentives for participation through the low threshold activity of tagging.
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Sharing is the principal activity in these communities, but much of it occurs out of band (email still lives).
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We Network not only to connect, but leverage the social network as a filter to fend off information overload.
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To Refactor, Collaborate, Moderate and Lead requires a different level of engagement -- which makes up the core of a community.
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"Social software brings groups together to discover and create value. The problem is, users only have so much time for social software. The vast majority of users with not have a high level of engagement with a given group, and most tend to be free riders upon community value. But patterns have emerged where low threshold participation amounts to collective intelligence and high engagement provides a different form of collaborative intelligence. To illustrate this, lets explore the Power Law of Participation:"
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shared by David McGavock on 30 Apr 11
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How to hack RSS to Reduce Information Overload - 0 views
gigaom.com/...to-reduce-information-overload
RSS pipes hack collaboration Dawn Foster evaluate resources information_literacy
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The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don’t care about.
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The best thing about PostRank is that you can get an RSS feed of just the best posts from a particular publisher, and that feed then includes the PostRank score,
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Another technique that helps me to consume information more efficiently is to modify the format of many of my RSS feeds
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By bringing more details into the title, I can avoid spending time clicking to get more information.
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There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume (hundreds of exabytes of data), but most of that information is uninteresting, out of date, inaccurate, or not relevant for you. The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don't care about.
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Making Science by Serendipity. A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Tra... - 1 views
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It is worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and examining the sociological and philosophical implications of this idea.
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As Mario Bunge (1998: 232) remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession; his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”
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It is true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of science.
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Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)
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Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity, you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for hares.
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Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)
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“Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the psychological source of an idea.
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This descriptive model has many important implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the historian of science, but it raises further problems for research administrators.
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If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
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The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.
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Whitney supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking: “Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt, without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:
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If scientists are determined by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.
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shared by David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
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…My heart's in Accra » CHI keynote: Desperately Seeking Serendipity - 1 views
www.ethanzuckerman.com/...esperately-seeking-serendipity
filter bubble diversity bias cosmopolitan global local
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Cities embody political decisions make by their designers.
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It’s much harder to get the architects behind Facebook or Foursquare articulate the behaviors they’re trying to enable and the political assumptions that underly those decisions.
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An urban planner who wants to make changes to a city’s structure is held in check by a matrix of forces: a desire to preserve history, the needs and interests of businesses and residents in existing communities, the costs associated with executing new projects. Progress is slow,
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For those planning the future of Facebook, it’s hard to study what’s succeeded and failed for MySpace, in part because an exodus of users to Facebook is gradually turning MySpace into a ghost town.
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If we learn from real-world cities instead of abandoned digital ones, what lessons might we take?
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The Jacobs/Moses debate suggests we need to be cautious of architectures that offer convenience and charge isolation as a price of admission. This is the concern Eli Pariser articulates in his (excellent) new book, “The Filter Bubble“.
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He worries that between Google’s personalized search and the algorithmic decisions Facebook makes in displaying news from our friends, our online experience is an increasingly isolated one,
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A map of Vancouver overlaid with my friends’ recommendations is one thing; one that recommends restaurants based on paid advertisements and doesn’t reveal this practice is another entirely.
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The map I want is the one that lets me shuffle not just through my friends’ preferences but through annotations from different groups: first time visitors to the city; long-time Vancouverites; foodies; visitors from Japan, Korea or China.
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Online spaces are often so anxious to show me how my friends are using a space that they obscure how other audiences are using it.
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It’s possible to find out what’s popular on Facebook to an audience broader than that of your friends.
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One of the reasons curation is such a helpful strategy for wandering is that it reveals community maxima. It can be helpful to know that Times Square is the most popular tourist destination in New York if only so we can avoid it.
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knowing where Haitian taxi cab drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where the best Haitian food is to be found.
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If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from you in cultural terms and who’ve annotated their cities in their own ways.
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Geocaching is its own peculiar form of community annotation, where the immediate goal is leaving your signature on someone else’s logbook, but the deeper goal is encouraging you to explore in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.
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SF0, founded by a trio of Chicagoans transplanted to San Francisco, was designed to encourage players to discover things they’d never seen or done in the city, in a way that encouraged independence and exploration.
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Combining the insights we may find from studying the organization of cities with the ability to reshuffle and sort digitally may let us think about designing online spaces for serendipity in different and powerful ways.
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- How do we design physical spaces to encourage serendipity? - What lessons about serendipity in physical spaces can we bring into the virtual realm? - How can we annotate the physical world, digitally, in ways that expand our encounters with the world, rather than limiting them?
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We hope that cities are serendipity engines. By putting a diverse set of people and things together in a confined place, we increase the chances that we’re going to stumble onto the unexpected. It’s worth asking the question: do cities actually work this way?
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We hope for random encounter with a diverse citizenry to build a web of weak ties that increases our sense of involvement in the community, as Bob Putnam suggested in Bowling Alone. And we worry that we may instead isolate and cocoon ourselves when faced with a situation where we feel like outsiders, as Putnam’s recent research suggests.
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“Census data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling me how segregated my life is? Location data points in that direction.
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Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at MIT’s Media Lab on the idea of “reality mining”, digesting huge sets of data like mobile phone records, estimates that he can predict the location of “low-entropy individuals” with 90-95% accuracy based on this type of data
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We all filter the places we live into the places where we’re regulars and the ones we avoid, the parts of town where we feel familiar and where we feel foreign. We do this based on where we live, where we work, and who we like to spend time with.
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I’m less concerned about left-right polarization in the US, and more concerned about us/them polarization around the world
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through the design of the systems we use and our behavior with those systems, I see reasons to worry that our use of the internet may be less cosmopolitan and more isolated that we would hope.
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There were – and are – reasons to distrust curators, but there’s a critical aspect of their work I believe we need to preserve as we move towards new models for organizing news.
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Countries that have more than 40 million or more internet users generally have a very strong bias towards local sources – the mean is roughly 95%/5%, which makes Americans look (slightly) cosmopolitan in comparison.
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What’s striking to me about this preference data is that there’s so little effort required to access international news sources like BBC, the Times of India or the Mail and Guardian – they’re one click away and don’t require crossing a language barrier – and how strong the “local” bias for national news sources appears to be.
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on January 12th, I published “What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?“… and I got a lot of phone calls when Ben Ali fled the country two days later.
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The revolution in Tunisia caught intelligence and diplomatic services around the world flat-footed. It didn’t have to – there was a wealth of information being published on Tunisian Facebook pages
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I’m forced to admit that there’s no way I would have known about the revolution brewing if I didn’t have close Tunisian friends.
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I’m less interested in the ways in which we limit our paths through cities than in how we constrain what we do and don’t encounter online.
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We need mechanisms to ensure that search gets complemented with serendipity.
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Facebook offers a different answer to the question, “What do I need to know?” – “You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not.”
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The problem, of course, is that if your friends don’t know about a revolution in Tunisia or a great new Vietnamese restaurant, you may not know either.
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It’s worth asking whether that bubble is able to provide us with the serendipity we hope for from the web.
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Serendipity, at first glance, looks like the positive side of unintended consequences, the happy accident. But that’s not what the term meant, at least originally.
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A Google search turns up 11 million pages with the term, including restaurants, movies and gift shops named “serendipity”, but very few on unexpected discovery through sagacity.
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he refers to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the titular characters were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
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In “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity”, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric laboratory under the leadership of Willis Whitney, who encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as it did on discovery.
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If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we might start by learning from cities.
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Our loss, I believe, is that we’ve lost sight of the idea that we could prepare ourselves for serendipity, both personally and structurally.
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vibrancy comes from the ongoing chance encounter between people using a neighborhood for different purposes, encountering one another as their paths intersect and cross.
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The neighborhoods Jacobs celebrates are certainly not the most efficient in terms of an individual’s ability to move quickly and independently. Vibrancy and efficiency may not be diametrically opposed, but it’s likely that the forces are in tension.
Why New Media Literacy Is Vital for Quality Journalism - 2 views
The Future of, Well, Us: A Conversation with Howard Rheingold 10/13/2011 - 3 views
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shared by David McGavock on 24 Jul 14
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Multitasking, social media and distraction: Research review Journalist's Resource: Rese... - 0 views
journalistsresource.org/...raction-what-does-research-say
multitasking research Infotention learning culture
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researchers have tried to assess how humans are coping in this highly connected environment and how “chronic multitasking” may diminish our capacity to function effectively.
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Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: “The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking.”
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The researchers conclude that the experiments “suggest that heavy media multitaskers are distracted by the multiple streams of media they are consuming, or, alternatively, that those who infrequently multitask are more effective at volitionally allocating their attention in the face of distractions.”
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Members of the ‘Net Generation’ reported more multitasking than members of ‘Generation X,’ who reported more multitasking than members of the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. The choices of which tasks to combine for multitasking were highly correlated across generations, as were difficulty ratings of specific multitasking combinations.
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same time, these experts predicted that the impact of networked living on today’s young will drive them to thirst for instant gratification, settle for quick choices, and lack patience
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The educational implications include allowing students short ‘technology breaks’ to reduce distractions and teaching students metacognitive strategies regarding when interruptions negatively impact learning.”
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survey about the future of the Internet, technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020.
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said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the Internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.
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The data suggest that “using Facebook and texting while doing schoolwork were negatively predictive of overall GPA.” However, “emailing, talking on the phone, and using IM were not related to overall GPA.”
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Regression analyses revealed that increased media multitasking was associated with higher depression and social anxiety symptoms, even after controlling for overall media use and the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion.
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Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: "The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They're basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking." - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/social-media/multitasking-social-media-distraction-what-does-research-say#sthash.I21dv2wV.dpuf
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