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"I am not certain whether I like or dislike this emerging world. I think I am leaning towards dislike. The slogan, the world is small and life is long describes a tense and anxious world of constant social shadow-boxing. One where you must always be on, socially. A world where burning bridges is more dangerous, and open conflict becomes ever costlier, leading to less dissent and more stupidity.
It is a situation of false harmony. One where peace is less an indicator of increasing empathy and human connection, and more an indicator of increasing wariness. You never know which world your world will collide with next, with what consequences. You never know what missed opportunity or threat could decisively impact your life."
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But today, one of the effects of the breakdown of the middle class and trading-up is that status relationships become context-dependent. There is no default context.
Let’s say you’re an administrative assistant at a university, have an associate’s degree, and frequent a coffeeshop where the barista is a graduate student. You both shop at Whole Foods. She’s trading up, as far as dietary lifestyles go, to shop at Whole Foods, while it is normal for you because you have a higher household income.
In the coffeeshop, you’re higher status as customer. If you run into each other at Whole Foods, you’re equals. If you run into each other on campus, she’s the superior.
Short of becoming President, there is almost nothing you can do that will earn you a default status with everybody. It’s up in the air.
This isn’t social mobility. The whole idea of social mobility, at least in the sense of classes as separate, self-contained social worlds, is breaking down. Instead you have context-dependent status churn. Double-take moments don’t necessarily indicate that one party is a tourist outside their class. There are merely moments that highlight that class is a shaky construct today.
Worlds are mixing, so double-takes become more frequent. But what makes the increased frequency socially disruptive is that status relationships are different in the different contexts.
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This sort of thing doesn’t happen much anymore. We don’t catch up as much anymore because we never disconnect. Unexpected encounters are rare because online visibility never drops to zero. Truly serendipitous encounters turn into opportunistically planned ones via online early-warning signals.
One effect of this is that relationships can go up or down in strength over a lifetime, since they are continuously unstable and active. Once you’ve friended somebody on Facebook, and their activities keep showing up in your stream, you are more likely to look them up deliberately for a meeting or collaboration. Social situation awareness is not allowed to fade. The active and unstable double-take layer is constantly suggesting opportunities and ideas for deeper interaction.
It’s not that time doesn’t matter anymore, but that time does more complicated things to relationships. In the pre-Internet world, relationships behaved monotonically in the long term. You either lost touch, and the relationship weakened over time, or you stayed in touch and the relationship got stronger over time. Some relationships plateaued at a certain distance.
"The question of how such coded language emerges, spreads and evolves is a big one. I am interested in a very specific question: how do members of an emerging subculture recognize each other in public, especially on the Internet, using more specialized coded language?
The question is interesting because the Web is making traditional subcultures - historically illegible to governance mechanisms, and therefore hotbeds of subversion - increasingly visible and open to cheap, large-scale economic and political exploitation. This exploitation takes the form of attention mining, and is the end-game on the path to what I called Peak Attention a while back.
Does this mean the subversive potential of the Internet is an illusion, and that it will ultimately be domesticated? Possibly."
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Contrary to popular belief, subcultures are not vague constructs. They have a precise, if negative, definition: a subculture is a pattern of social order that is not worth codifying and institutionalizing for the purposes of governance or economic exploitation, under normal circumstances. So subcultures have historically relied on their obscurity, illegibility and unimportance to ensure autonomy and security.
The very existence of a subculture is only known to neighboring subcultures. This limited local visibility suggests that the world of subcultures is not a matrix, but a web. Classic Rock fans can tell Punk Rock apart from other kinds. It all sounds the same to a non Rock-fan. Imperceptible distinctions that make no difference in the larger scheme of things.
Under abnormal circumstances, when seditious sentiments are brewing in the subcultural web, the zero-sum game of power swings in its favor, causing a reaction from the class-culture matrix: increased and more visible action by the hidden institutional order to restore the balance.
When slums start to seethe, the secret police gets going in not-very-secret ways.
If the slums win, subversive subcultures become institutionalized, and displaced ones turn into subcultures. If the slums lose, things stay roughly the same. Either way, the scheme of social organization remains the same: a balance of power between an institutional class-culture matrix and a subcultural web.
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The Internet though, has changed all this. It has allowed subcultures to scale (by moving their secret-handshake institutions online), and become more valuable in the process. While mass-manufactured celebrity cultures have been weakening, we are not returning to pre-mass-media patterns of local culture. Instead, we’ve evolved to mega-subcultures that scale without developing institutions.
And at the same time, the visibility of subcultural behaviors has made governance and exploitation much cheaper and easier. You don’t have to go to a specific neighborhood, in specific clothes, and drop specific references. You can sit at your desk, dress any way you want, and fake your way into any subculture. Long enough to sell a whole lot of shoes.
It will not take long for businesses and politicians to completely master this game.
The outcome is inevitable. Subcultures will be comprehensively tamed. Institutional sociopaths within the class-culture matrix are now in a position to detect and take control of subcultures before they even come into existence. This will lead on to control over the very inception of subcultures.
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It is well known that people movement exhibits a high degree of repetition since people visit regular places and make regular contacts for their daily activities. This paper1 presents a novel framework named Jyotish,2 which constructs a predictive model by exploiting the regularity of people movement found in the real joint Wifi/Bluetooth trace. The constructed model is able to answer three fundamental questions: (1) where the person will stay, (2) how long she will stay at the location, and (3) who she will meet.
In order to construct the predictive model, Jyotish includes an efficient clustering algorithm to cluster Wifi access point information in the Wifi trace into locations. Then, we construct a Naive Bayesian classifier to assign these locations to records in the Bluetooth trace and obtain a fine granularity of people movement. Next, the fine grain movement trace is used to construct the predictive model including location predictor, stay duration predictor, and contact predictor to provide answers for three questions above. Finally, we evaluate the constructed predictive model over the real Wifi/Bluetooth trace collected by 50 participants in University of Illinois campus from March to August 2010. Evaluation results show that Jyotish successfully constructs a predictive model, which provides a considerably high prediction accuracy of people movement.
Questions have been raised about the social impact of widespread use of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter. Do these technologies isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way? The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project decided to examine social networking sites in a survey that explored people’s overall social networks and how use of these technologies is related to trust, tolerance, social support, and community and political engagement.
The findings presented here paint a rich and complex picture of the role that digital technology plays in people’s social worlds. Wherever possible, we seek to disentangle whether people’s varying social behaviors and attitudes are related to the different ways they use social networking sites, or to other relevant demographic characteristics, such as age, gender and social class.
the dead walk the earth and mathematicians race to get a lower Erdos number.
Objective To investigate whether "network effects" can be detected for health outcomes that are unlikely to be subject to network phenomena.
Design Statistical analysis common in network studies, such as logistic regression analysis, controlled for own and friend’s lagged health status. Analyses controlled for environmental confounders.
Setting Subsamples of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health).
Participants 4300 to 5400 male and female adolescents who nominated a friend in the dataset and who were both longitudinally surveyed.
Measurements Health outcomes, including headache severity, acne severity, and height self reported by respondents in 1994-5, 1995-6, and 2000-1.
Results Significant network effects were observed in the acquisition of acne, headaches, and height. A friend’s acne problems increased an individual’s odds of acne problems (odds ratio 1.62, 95% confidence interval 0.91 to 2.89). The likelihood that an individual had headaches also increased with the presence of a friend with headaches (1.47, 0.93 to 2.33); and an individual’s height increased by 20% of his or her friend’s height (0.18, 0.15 to 0.26). Each of these results was estimated by using standard methods found in several publications. After adjustment for environmental confounders, however, the results become uniformly smaller and insignificant.
Conclusions Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends to social network effects, especially when environmental confounders are not adequately controlled for in the analysis.
Metascope is specialist software for organisational network analysis (ONA) and social network analysis (SNA) of large networks
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The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air
map of popular social networking sites around the world
Duncan Watts dismantles the theory of 'connectors' or 'influentials' from Gladwell's Tipping Point and elsewhere.
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