social networks – webmindset

Hyperconnected: Excerpts from The Connected Book (Chapter 8)

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sat, 17 Sep 2016 13:13:01 +0000

Book Title: Connected – The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

Written by: Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

Chapter Title: Hyperconnected

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Connected - Chapter 8 - Hyperconnected

For thousands of years, social interactions were built solely on face-to-face communication.

But technology changed this with the invention of ways of broadcasting information (church bells, signal fires, books, bullhorns, radio, television) and ways of communicating person-to-person at a distance (letters, telegrams, phone calls).

The invention of each new method of communication has contributed to a debate stretching back centuries about how technology affects community.

New technologies… Just realize our ancient propensity to connect to other humans, albeit with electrons flowing through cyberspace rather than conversation drifting through air.

While the social networks formed online may be abstract, large, complex, and supermodern, they also reflect universal and fundamental human tendencies that emerged in our prehistoric past when told stories to one another around campfires in the African savanna.

Even astonishing advances in communication technology like the printing press, the telephone, and the internet do not take us away from this past; the draw us closer to it.

One important way in which virtual worlds differ from the real world is our ability to control our own appearance… Our physical appearance also affects how we perceive ourselves and therefore how we act.

Virtual-world interactions can carry over to the real world.

After playing the game with randomly assigned avatars, people who had been assigned attractive avatars showed more confidence in the real world.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

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Chapter 2 Quotes: “Connected” by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sun, 14 Aug 2016 19:03:00 +0000

Book Title: Connected – The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

Written by: Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

Chapter Title: When You Smile, the World Smiles with You

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Connected - Chapter Two - When You Smile, the World Smiles with You

Emotions have a collective and not just an individual origin. How you feel depends on how those to whom you are closely and distantly connected feel.

Emotional contagion can even take place between strangers, after just ephemeral contact.

When waiters are trained to provide “service with smile”, their customers report feeling more satisfied, and they leave better tips.

Given the organization of early hominids, into social groups. the spread of emotions served as an evolutionary adaptive purpose.

Early humans had to rely on one another for survival.

The ability to read the emotions of others helped coordinate group activity by three means:

facilitating personal bonds
synchronizing behavior
communicating information

[…]If you are trying to coordinate a hunting party, it helps if members of the group are all upbeat and fired up.
Conversely, if you are part of a group and someone in it appears afraid, perhaps that person has seen a predator that you have not seen.
Quickly adopting his emotional state can enhance your prospects for survival.

Emotions may be a quicker way to convey information about the environment and its relative safety or danger than other forms of communication.

The affective afference or the facial feedback theory:

…the path of the signals is from the muscles (of the face) to the brain, rather than more usual, efferent pathway from the brain to the muscles…

… The telephone operators are trained to smile when they work, even though the person at the other end of the line cannot see them.

This theory also explains why it helps to smile when your heart is breaking.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Chapter 2 Quotes: “Connected” by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler appeared first on webmindset.

Chapter 1 Quotes: “Connected” by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sun, 14 Aug 2016 17:57:35 +0000

Book Title: Connected – The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

Written by: Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

Chapter Title: In the thick of it

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Connected - Chapter one - In the thick of it

Notions of collective guilt and collective revenge that underlie cascade of violence seem strange only when we regard responsibility as a personal attribute.

Perhaps the person-to-person spread of violence should not surprise us.

Just as it is often said that “the friend of my friend is my friend” and “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” so too the friend of my enemy is my enemy.

In the United States, 75 percent of all homicides involve people who knew each other, often intimately, prior to the murder.

If you want to know who might take your life, just look at the people around you.

Social-network ties can – and, as we will see, usually do – convey benefits that are the very opposite of violence.

Our connections do not end with the people we know.

Beyond our own social horizons, friends of friends of friends can start chain reactions that eventually reach us, like waves from distant lands that wash up on our shores.

Rules of life in the network:

We shape our network
Our network shapes us
Our friends affect us
Our friends’ friends’ friends affect us
The network has a life of its own

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Chapter 1 Quotes: “Connected” by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler appeared first on webmindset.

Preface Quotes: “Connected” by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 05:58:42 +0000

Book Title: Connected – The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

Written by: Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

Chapter Title: Scarcity and Abundance

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Connected - Preface

It seemed to me that if people are interconnected, their health must also be interconnected.

We realized that social influence does not end with the people we know.

If we affect our friends, and they affect their friends, then our actions can potentially affect people we have never met.

We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. We we discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend became happy, you became happy.

The key to understanding people is understanding the ties between them.

As we studied social networks more deeply, we began to think of them as a kind of human superorganism. They grow and evolve… This superorganism has it’s own structure and a function and we became obsessed with understanding both.

To know who we are, we must understand how we are connected.

Note: To comply with the requirements of the fair use, the excerpts here are not necessarily the most important or the core concepts or even summary of the book. They are just a few sentences and statements I have highlighted in the book for later reference, hoping that reading them encourage you to buy the book and read it.

The post Preface Quotes: “Connected” by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler appeared first on webmindset.

Book Review: Connected by Nicholas Christakis

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sat, 31 Oct 2015 13:31:22 +0000

Nicholas Christakis, Photo by Paul Schnaittacher

“The structure of the social licking network among cows is one of the best patterns for understanding and predicting the network structure of interaction among U.S. senators”.

Considering above fact and other similar researches reported by Nicholas Christakis in his book titled connected, would not be surprising when he tells us that the obesity or mood is a contagion property in human networks.

Christakis, a professor of social and natural science at Yale, was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the world in 2009.

If Christakis and James Fowler had to choose another title for their book, most probably they would choose Contagious instead of Connected. The whole book concentrates on the contagious effect of the human attributes, moods and behaviors in the networks.

According to their reports, a variety of individuals’ attributes like obesity, smoking, and happiness are not individualistic behaviors as we thought before and are seriously correlated – and even caused – by our connections with other people.

Contagious effect of the mood and behavior is not something new. However, social networks have provided a better means for transmitting these attributes compared to traditional traditional face-to-face and personal communications. Christakis calls this feature as the long-distance contagious property of the social networks.

At the early years of the web, the Six degrees of separation was the famous story everywhere. Reading the connected book, you would be convinced that the social networks have a more amazing story now: The three degrees of influence:

Our influence gradually dissipates and eases to have noticeable effect on people beyond the special frontier that lies at three degrees of separation. We are generally influenced by friends within 3 degree but general not by those beyond.

The book has an evolutionary point of view in describing the emotional contagion: I am happier when you are happy, and I feel sad because you are so. In the process of evolution, we have learned to mimic others’ emotions outwardly, and this outward mimicking have led us to adopt the others’ internal states.

Although this process helped us in the development of emotional empathy, the same capability has become a threat to us in today’s complicated network-rich hyperconnected world.

The book’s message is clear and important: We no longer dominate the territory of our feelings and emotions. Not only my direct friends in the network have a non-neglectable contribution in my mood, but also my friend’s friends have a great influence on my feeling and emotions.

In the age of hyperconnectedness, feeling lonely can be totally different from being alone, as the feeling of loneliness can be induced unconsciously by the people I am connected with. Therefore, the most control we have, is choosing the people we are connected, and this is the decision most of us have left to the random suggestions of the social applications!

Photo Source

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Social networks are not communities and they’ve never been!

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 17:48:22 +0000

The social presence is the buzzword of these days. It seems that presence in social networks is the inevitable part of living a modern life.

The terms Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, social networks and online communities are often used interchangeably by most of the people without any thinking about the attributes of each one and the subtle yet significant differences between them. By Overlooking these differences, we are in danger of living with the people we were not looking for or leaving the people we have been always craving.

It’s not possible to prepare a list of differences between Social Networks and Communities which everybody agrees on. However, I’ve made a list of the points that I believe are helpful in differentiating them:

Ties vs. Goals

Social networks are made of nodes and ties. Every person is a node, and every relationship is a tie. Social networks are designed in such a way that you feel the compulsion to promote yourself and make more ties.

So I’m connected to my friend and, therefore, have a connection to my friend’s friend, and sooner or later, the social platform will recommend me or my posts to the friend of my friend’s friend.

In contrast to social networks, communities are built around common goals, targets and values. So we can have a community of bookworms or an online community for freelancers. However, a social network is much more general and always takes a neutral position regarding goals and values: Facebook tries to provide the same space for book-haters as well as book-lovers and the same access for liberals as well as conservatives. This is the policy that a community will not tolerate.

More connections vs. Stronger Connections

Even if you claim that you have a private profile for close friends, still it makes you happier to have one more follower at least in your limited target space. Social networks are empires of numbers. Everything is finally translated into likes and follows. But a deeper and stronger relationship is preferred in communities.

Therefore, most of the people consider social networks as an opportunity for more friends and relationships but the communities for a few but deeper ones.

Commitment to the nodes vs. Commitment to the whole entity

Compare these two sentences:

I have a facebook profile vs. I am a member of our local health community.

The former is about ownership, but the latter is about identity. This is a difference that no one can ignore. In a social network, we are committed to our friends and in a community, we are committed to the community itself.

This is the reason that when you are deactivating your Facebook profile, you receive a message stating that your friends will miss you. Would be nonsense if the message says: Facebook will miss you.

The above list can be much longer, but it’s enough for the purpose I have in mind: Although there’s neither a pure social network nor a pure online community on the web, it’s too optimistic if we think one can be a perfect substitute for the other.

As being present in each of these spaces has different costs and benefits, every individual and every business has to make a tough decision about its online presence and considering this two different entities as one can be a fatal mistake for anyone who is considering the web as a part of its future.

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Information age, MIDA and the privacy challenge

Mohammadreza Shabanali — Sat, 09 May 2015 12:40:28 +0000

Last night, I decided to install Telegram on my phone. An over-the-top messaging application similar to Viber and WhatsApp. It was the easiest way in my mind to get rid of messages bombardment from thousands of people who have my phone number. People who believe having someone’s phone number gives them permission or privilege to text him or her whenever they wish.

I was full of hope and happiness. a little more privacy can make life sweeter and enjoyable. But my hope turned into despair just after a few minutes.

I received more than 100 welcome messages from people in my contact list just in 10 minutes. Then I learned that telegram informs everyone else that you have joined the network and even offers them to send you a welcome message.

Can I consider it a privacy infringement case? I don’t think so. Telegram has not announced my phone number in public TV or on outdoor billboards. This application has looked for the persons who already have my phone number and just informed them that I’ve also joined the network now.

Even without telegram message, everyone could be able to know whether I am on this network or not. It costs a few seconds of time to send me a message and check for delivery note.

This is not limited to Telegram. Similar cases happen with Viber and WhatsApp applications. WhatsApp encourages you to pull the curtains and receive more information from the others in return: If you give me permission to show your online status to the others, then I will tell you about real status of the others too! Or if you let me tell the others that you have read their messages, then I will tell you whether your recipient has read your message or not.

Seems kind of fair agreement. I can call it Mutual Information Disclosure Agreement or MIDA. But can we call every mutual and bidirectional agreement as a fair one? Can we call a duel game a fair agreement? As there’s a mutual agreement between parties and each one gave permission to the other one to kill him if he could?

Nowadays, privacy is a real concern for most of us. But it seems that the privacy concept is somehow limited to explicit information and not implicit information derived from our behavior.

If I hear that Google has sold the content of my mailbox to someone, sure I will file it as information abuse and privacy infringement. But what if google just makes it public that when I have checked my emails for the last time? I believe that most of us would not take the latter case as serious as the former case.

Facebook activity feed changes as fast as the closing credits scrolls at the end of a film. Instagram shows the behavior of the people you follow. Pages they have visited and photos they have liked. Even a very simple blog shows the last commentators.

Sure there are possibilities to limit this exposure. Although most of us don’t care so much and in many cases like WhatsApp taking any action to make your environment more private means a breach of MIDA. So you will also lose some of your privileges. Seems fair enough.

Besides all formal nice quotes and happy mission statements, digital applications and social networks are a business and not a charity. So they must have a feasible business plan.

Also in tight breath-taking competition between digital applications and service providers, there’s virtually no way to increase the price of the services or even hold them in future. Every digital service has to get cheaper or has to die in this zero marginal cost society.

But becoming cheaper or free, doesn’t mean that costs are vanished. It just means that there are other people or organizations who are ready to pay for the costs. As advertisers pay costs of the TV programs and we have privilege to watch them for free.

The same story holds true in the digital age. Amazon turns our behavior report into a valuable information. Facebook uses our behavior to customize advertisements for us. Everything seems fair. There’s no free lunch. I let you watch me and you give me money directly or indirectly by giving me permission to use your service for free. Just as a naked girl dances in front of the others in a peep show and gets paid for that. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem as bitter as prostitution!

It’s not easy to define a clear border between your explicit information and implicit information derived from your behavior. By the way, it’s not always costly or dangerous to share your behavior with others. Sometimes it even helps providers to render a customized service for you. Although I have already mentioned possible dangers in some cases like google blindness.

Sure I am not against digital technology and social networks. Bitter or sweet, it’s a fact that every advantage has a price to be paid. But it makes me worried that in my current point of view, the behavior of the users can never absolutely considered as private. Because behavior monitoring and even reporting is the core element of most online business models and the basic building block of gamification: the inevitable powerful technic behind most applications in the digital age.

Shall we omit the word privacy from our dictionaries within ten or twenty years? Will it be limited to bed activities? I am even more pessimistic. Sooner or later, apple will promote an application for its famous smartwatch which suggests you the best time for intercourse based on your tossing and turnings in the bed!

Let’s wait and see.

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