Week 10: Social Networks

Week Ten • Manuel Castells, “Why Networks Matter.” • Connected: The Surprising Power of Out Social Networks and How They Shape our Lives Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler

(posted late…  sorry…  I was being lazy and waiting for our esteemed professor to publish the Castells’ article, instead of being proactive and searching for it myself..  😦 but alas, I found it, I think).

Connected reminded me of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and I believe reading this book has helped me define my paper topic for the conclusion of the class.

In Connected, the authors examine the effect of social networks on a variety of occurrences in societies.  They look at obesity, loneliness/happiness, smoking/ non-smoking, sexual activity, suicide and other various traits that people in a society possess and how those people are affected by their social network and their position in their network.

In the first part of the book, they declare five rules to a social network:

• Rule 1:  We Shape Our Network
• Rule 2: Our Network Shapes Us
• Rule 3:  Our Friends Shape Us
• Rule 4:  Our Friends’ Friends’ Friends Shape Us
• Rule 5:  The Network Has a Life of Its Own

In addition, they identify two parts of a network – the connections and the contagion.  The connections are what binds you to others and the contagion is what travels around the network – whether that is a STD or the emotion of happiness.

The part I was especially interested in is on p. 26, where they discuss Six Degrees of Separation and Three Degrees of Influence.  The writers recall Stanley Migram’s experiment that shows that all people are all connected to one another by an average of six degrees of separation.

Miligram’s experiment, conducted in the 1960’s, involved giving a few hundred people who lived in Nebraska a letter addressed to a businessman in Boston, more than a thousand miles away.  They were asked to send the letter to somebody they knew personally.  The goal was to get it to someone they thought would be more likely than they to have a personal relationship with the Boston businessman.  And the number of hops from person to person that the letter took to reach the target was tracked.  On average, six hops were required. 

I realize that everyone in America is now familar with the Six Degrees of Separation concept but I doubt most understand the social experiment behind it.  I am fascinated by the idea and have long been interested in the experiment when I first read about it in The Tipping Point.  Now, I also realize that The Tipping Point is more of a mass market, NYT best seller kind of book, and that many more people probably read that book than have read Connected.  It seems The Tipping Point however, was published first.   (?). 

The reason I am interested in this concept is not because everyone is connected to each other, or that I am somehow six degrees separated from someone like Prince William…  I am more interested in a concept Gladwell applied to this idea.  He mentioned in his work that the social experiment showed something else, (forgive me, but this is from memory…  I don’t have the book in front of me….and I read it many years ago).  Gladwell said the experiment showed that not only was everyone in the world connected by an average of six degrees but that there were people who held these social networks together.   I believe he called them “connectors”.  In the experiment, almost all of the hundreds of letters got to the Boston business man through five or six people, ultimately.  He claimed that in the social network infrastructure, there were some people who were better connected (had more connections, with better influence that were stronger).  These people were actually better at managing their relationships too.  They seemed to put more effort into knowing their connections.  They cared more about their welfare and had minds that were better equipped at remembering details of their friendships.  Joe is married to Martha and they have three kids and one son is on a full ride at an Ivy League university and the two others are girls and they like to figure skate and travel to Italy…  etc. 

I find this absolutely fascinating.  I liked the example of why Hushpuppie Shoes became trendy again in SoHo during the 90’s.  Gladwell claimed it was because of these “connectors”.  They knew more people.  The people they knew found them charismatic and had more equity in their friendship.  When they decided something was “cool” so did everyone else in their social circle. 

Now to my idea for my paper…  I am thinking that I am interested in this course of study for one main reason (currently)… I believe that technology is changing the way the world is fundamentally working… that we are now situated smack-dab in the center of a historical shift in how people relate to each other and their environment.  I also believe that because of this huge shift, the rules are now different.  I want to focus on how the rules are now different in corporate marketing.  I want to investigate the way in which social networks and the revolutionary change in which we now deal with each other, can be exploited for commercial gain.  I know it isn’t idealistic or pretty (corporate exploitation is the soft underbelly of our society anyway), but I think it is very interesting and would help me in articulating how the rules are changing for brand equity, public relations and product promotion.

Week 8: The Internet as a Social Sphere

Readings:   1. Habermas on the public sphere. 2. Mark Poster, “Cyberdemocracy” 3. Pieter Boeder, “Habermas Heritage: the future of the Public Sphere in the Networked Society”?

Issue:  What the Internet is to become — is greatly dependent on where you reside…

The other two readings are really just a response to Habermas’  The Public Sphere.  In this article, Habermas is speaking about how the nature of the public sphere has been weakened with the emergence of mass media and the social state.  He is arguing that citizens are becoming less “citizens” and more “consumers”.  This sentiment is echoed in the other works. 

We can outline his argument as such:

1.  He defines the ‘public sphere’ as

 By “the public sphere” we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed.  Access is guaranteed to all citizens. (Habermas, p.1.)

2.  He believes in the importance of the public sphere.  The existence allows us to shape consensus thought:

Central in Habermas’ thinking is the notion that the quality of society depends on our capacity to communicate, to debate and discuss: Reason is crucial to communication. (Broeder, Reason Crucial to Communication section).

3.  He believes that mass media publications and the creation of the welfare state are eroding the existence of the public sphere and that is making each one of us more consumer, and less citizen.

4.  Habermas wrote before the electronic digital media revolution.  He could not foresee this but his analysis of what was happening in his time, can be applied to the Internet age.

5.  Poster believes that “the Internet is currently being understood as an extension of or substitution for existing institutions.  He states that with that thinking that we will never full realize what the Internet could really be.  We are limited by our scope of understanding the world by that frame.  He asks us to then try to understand the Internet in relation to democracy “by risking or risk challenging our existing theoretical approaches and concepts as they concern these questions.”

6.  Boeder then “piles on” the discussion by purporting that Poster is radically changing the discourse on the topic to claim that we cannot understand the Internet it terms of democracy (the prevailing political and social system of our day) but that we must understand that perhaps the Internet makes it possible to have a new political order… one in which we cannot understand yet.  He questions…

Are there new kinds of power relations occurring between communicating individuals? In other words, is there a new politics on the Internet? Poster approaches this question by making a detour from the issue of technology and raising again the question of a public sphere: If there is a public sphere on the Internet, who populates it and how? What kinds of beings exchange information in this public sphere? What kind of community can there be in this space? What kind of disembodied politics are inscribed so evanescently in cyberspace? What constitutes communities in cyberspace and cyberdemocracy? (Poster, The Modern Delusion Section).

7.  Which brings me to my argument… Given where we are today…  as we sit here in the United States watching regimes and histories of multiple decades of “dicatorships” topple before our eyes (read: screens)…  and we do nothing to participate in this global social change.  Yes, we are interested.  Much like passers-by at a automobile wreck scene.  Yes, some of us have empathy for the atrocities that have been committed to the citizens of the countries of Egypt, Bahrain, and Libya.  We sit by and root them on in much the same way we are rooting for our March Madness bracket picks.  But haven’t we become consumers of the world events and their ramifications without participating in the process?  Yes, there are the few isolated incidents of geographic and country boundaries being “eliminated” by the use of the Internet.  I have seen Twitter conversations between American citizens and the protesters in Libya.  But is there anyone in their safe and comfortable western culture that is actively participating in the social movement.  I have not yet seen evidence of it.  Yes, I have seen our media representatives on television speaking on location in empathic terms regarding the citizens and their struggles.  But no, I have not yet seen any American citizen participating in the social revolution of these countries.  I have only seen them use the communication infrastructure of the Internet as a consumer.  It makes me wonder if the Internet is different to us — American citizens — then it is to the people in less developed cultures and more disparate political systems.  Are they using it for a higher, greater purpose, why we use it (and extract the most value from it) to comparison shop, look for jobs and record and publish our last pub crawl?  I thought we were supposed to be more sophisticated than that.

Week 7: Marx and Foucault: A Society of Survelliance

Reading:  Marx/Engel’s A Critique of German Ideology (Chapter 1) and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (section III. Discipline – Panopticism)

Issue:  Have we taken surveillance too far?

Marx and Engels are concerned with how the ruling class is able to rule society based on its possession of the tools of production.  Foucault explains how Bentham’s Panopticon becomes the architectural explanation of how we rule or in his case “discipline” society.  In both pieces the authors are dealing with how we control society.  Societies are considered successful or modern if they possess the ability to sustain themselves through commerce or production and if they are civilized, controlled or disciplined.  Both writers are correct, they just come to the issue from two different angles. 

I was most interested in Foucault’s idea of a society built on surveillance.  He creates an idea of an institution that is centered around a building which allows the person in “control” to constantly monitor the “people needing controlling” while separating them from each other and having continual surveillance of them without ever being seen:

Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.

He says that this architectural marvel will “induce the inmate to a state of conscience and permanent viability that assures the automatic functioning of power”.  He continues that the “real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation”.  The guard may never be looking at the “inmate” however the inmate, unsure of the surveillance, continues to subjected to the guard’s power, his control.  The guard has power even if he isn’t there. 

It is important to point out that this construct is not only important and for use in prisons, but could be used in hospitals, schools, and any other institution where you have many people who need surveillance.  Foucault even suggests this layout could be used in laboratory experiments as well.  So that the experiment manager could have constant surveillance of the subjects.

This idea seems to be the seed that grew into our modern need for constant surveillance of our citizens.  One only needs to look at how England has grown into a constant-surveillance state all under the premise that video cameras make people safe.  You can go to this site to find out more about the history of surveillance in England. In an article written in 2006, the BBC claims that “there are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain – about one for every 14 people – making it one of the most watched places on earth”.  In addition to video surveillance, one has to worry about facial recognition software, internet tracking, telephone surveillance, store loyalty cards, academic records, employment time systems and many other forms of surveillance that the government keeps on its citizens everyday.  At some point there has to be a balance between surveillance for protection and the civil rights that are violated by keeping tabs on its citizens.  Unfortunately, many citizens seem to think that if it keeps them safe, then it is a price they are willing to pay.  However, when you look at the government through the lens of the Panopticon, you have to wonder if all this surveillance isn’t just an extreme way to get its citizens under control.  At some point, the government (being corrupt and all), will take advantage of the technology and use it for its own purposes.  We have much to fear.

And, in order to be exercised, this power had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network…  And this unceasing observation had to be accumulated in a series of reports and registers; throughout the eighteenth century, an immense police text increasingly covered society by means of a complex documentary organization…And, unlike the methods of judicial or administrative writing, what was registered in this way were forms of behaviour, attitudes, possibilities, suspicions – a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour.