zerodraft

Small-world model: Also known as “the six degrees of separation,” this model explains the ways in which networks manifest redundancy or clustering, and that in spite of this clustering, networks still are able to connect individual nodes that are seemingly disconnected. Duncan Watts explains, “[t]he claim of the small-world phenomenon…states that I can get a message to anyone, even if they have absolutely nothing in common with me at all” (41). As sociologist Granovetter found in the 70s, it is often the connections made across clusters that are the most useful: “Paradoxically,…it is not your close friends who are of most use to you. Because they know many of the same people you do, and may often be exposed to similar information, they are rarely the ones who can help you leap into a new environment…it tends to be the casual acquaintances who are the useful ones because they can give you information you would never otherwise have received” (Watts 49). The connections across clusters are called weak ties (Granovetter).

Hubs and Connectors: Barabasi found that his work with the network of the World Wide Web did not always lend itself neatly to the combined small-world model/random graph theory that Watts and Strogatz developed. That is, the mathematics that drives the small-word/random graph theory constructs (or assumes) “a deeply egalitarian society, whose links are ruled by the throw of a dice” (Barabasi 54). In stark contrast, Barabasi’s research explodes the commonly held notion that the Web as a network is highly democratic. Essentially, Barabasi claims that the Web is NOT classless: “[t]he most intriguing result of our Web-mapping project was the complete absence of democracy, fairness, and egalitarian values on the Web” (56). Essentially, the Web is made up of a handful of “connectors,” which are exceptionally well-connected by countless incoming links, and an innumerable number of nodes that garner only a handful of incoming links. This fits nicely in with Pareto’s Law or the 80/20 rule, since 80 percent of the links on the Web only go to 15 percent of the pages (66).

Posted by madeline at 11:28 AM | Permalink

Oh, the sadness of disorganized bookshelves and the irrepresible urge to box untidy-looking books and put them in the attic! After yesterday's post, I realized that nobody-but-nobody should be talking about social capital without a nice dollop of Pierre Bourdieu for good measure.

But I can't find my _Language and Symbolic Power_ to save my life. Ugh. I must have ferreted it away... so I'll have to work from memory. But back to Putnam first.* He traces the first use of the phrase "social capital" to a man from, where else, good old West Virginia. This guy, L.J. Hanifan (state supervisor of rural schools at the time--1916) argued that connections and cooperationbetween neighbors might improve inividual students' chances at succeeding in school. Apparently, then, a whole slew of other scholars, in fields such as economics and sociology, took up the term independently at different parts of the 19th Century (Putnam 19).

What strikes me, here, when I consider social capital within the context network literacy, is that I have the inclination to somehow attribute network literacy to the explicit understanding and use of social capital. That is, much in the same way Bourdieu's work meant to uncover the unspoken structures in culture that dictated who has power and how that power is enacted, I'm driven to think about network literacy as being directly related to--or the result of--similar understanding about social capital, for instance: who *has* social capital, how it works, how it might be cultivated and maintained.

An easy example of the overt understanding of social capital might be the ways in which bloggers learn quickly that in order to get readers, a blogger must first be a reader and responder himself, making connections outward by leaving comments and trackbacks to other bloggers.

The problem with looking at network literacy simply as a function of one's ability to gauge and create social capital is that it reduces network literacy to what Selber (and Banks) would call "functional literacy." In other words, saying network literacy is simply social literacy via internet and software connections ignores those meta-moves that users make, doesn't allow for users to subvert conventions of social literacy, to make changes to the conventions, or to understand (and manipulate) the ways in which their actions shape and inform the network itself (these latter understandings might be filed under Selber's "critical literacy").

On the other hand, to understand and use essentially unacknowledged-yet-firmly-entrenched conventions indicates that a meta-understanding...

But not always, especially if we look at network operations in terms of symbolic power, in that understanding and using conventions doesn't always involve the ability to "buck the groove" as it were.

*sigh* I think this constitutes a paragraph. I have to go make pie.

*should have put this in the last post
Putnam, Robert D. _Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community._ New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

Posted by madeline at 08:31 AM | Permalink

(paragraph-per-day project)
(also: evidence of how much I can "get done" in one hour--not so much!)

This project will draw on texts that involve research in network studies, which emerges from disciplines ranging from anthropology, social science, and information science. Also, I’ll draw heavily from the field of rhetoric and technology, specifically those scholars and texts that deal with technology and literacy.

Key Terms:

Social capital: In Putnam: “I’ll do for you if you do for me” (20). See also reciprocity. Putnam offers two levels of social capital: bonding social capital, which creates exclusivity; and bridging social capital, which connects outward or creates inclusivity (22). Bonding social capital is created by “homogenous groups” such as ethnic fraternities or country clubs (22). Bridging connections “are outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages” like the civil rights movement (22). “To build bridging social capital requires that we transcend our social and political and professional identities to connect with people unlike ourselves” (411). “No sector of American society will have more influence on the future state of our social capital than the electronic mass media and especially the Internet…Let us foster new forms of electronic entertainment and communication that reinforce community rather than forestalling it” (410). Putnam’s concern is that “virtual community” is not as good as “real” or “face-to-face” community. His call is for us as a nation to return to making the civic connections of yesteryear, but that we must find ways that Internet technology can support the rebuilding of conventional communities (“place-based, face-to-face, enduring social networks” [411]) rather than replace them. Putnam would be pleased to find that blogging has already fostered these sorts of conventional networks. For instance BlogHer, originally a multi-authored Typepad blog [include history here from Elisa’s response], has evolved into a sizeable community of women writers who attend the yearly Blogher conference. The BlogHer conference is as much about seminars about feminism and workshops on using Photoshop as it is about reinforcing the virtual into the place-based. Another example of blog networks evolving (or succumbing?) to IRL meetings is that of the Chicago RBFers. The RBF (or “Running Blog Family”) is supported by completerunning.com, a site dedicated to issues of running and racing. Any blogger can join request his blog be added to the list (which numbers 1023 at the time of this writing). In the summer of 2006, a group of RBFers based in Chicago began monthly meet-ups at local eateries.

Posted by madeline at 10:29 PM | Permalink

Social Network Theory and Small-world Networks

In order to develop a network theory that allows us to describe networked writers and to think about how writers behave in highly connected environments, my initial work will be to narrow my subject-pool from the dangerously nebulous (and highly innumerable) “mommy-bloggers” into a field more approachable. In order to do so, I will be borrowing from social net work theory its data collection tools, as well as the small-world network model as described by Duncan Watts in Six Degrees. Each of these systems provides me with vocabulary to position mom blogs in relation to one another, and allow me to ground my subject pool selection on substantial network models rather than random searches.

Social network theory assumes that “small scale interaction becomes translated into large scale patterns” (Granovetter 1360) [better thumbnail here, from someone other than Granovetter], and provides a framework for me to narrow the subject pool. Granovetter, sociologist at Stanford and author of “The Strength of Weak Ties,” posits that “strong [interpersonal] ties” can be measured by “a…combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and…reciprocal services” (1361). Further, “mutual choice” can also be an indicator of a “strong tie” (1364). Clearly, the nature of the blog as a computer-mediated communication tool allows writers to develop these strong ties as Granovetter describes them; however, in trying to compile a useable collection of texts to study, to begin the kind of close textual analysis necessary to, for instance, determine whether “mutual confiding” exists would be prohibitively time-consuming. Therefore, I plan to initially use only two of Granovetter’s strong tie gauges; this will preserve the integrity of the assembly by assuring those blogs that remain in the subject pool are indeed highly connected to one another. Additionally, it will allow me to save the actual content analysis (more on that later) for once I’ve settled on a collection of writers for the study.

The two components from social network theory I’ll apply in assembling the collection of blogs are “reciprocal services” and “mutual choices.” One function of blogs is that writers are able to, and often do, link in two directions. Writers can post outward links to other writers; that is, in a blog entry or on the main index (front page) of the site, the blogger can create a direct path to another blogger that readers can easily follow by “clicking through.” Most often these outbound links appear in a semi-static “blogroll” or list of bloggers the writer endorses or reads regularly. In addition, some blog applications afford the added dimension of “trackbacks” or incoming links, where a blogger can essentially post a link to her own blog on someone else’s site. Bloggers often do this when they want to respond (on their own site) to what another writer has posted, and the trackback provides a link to that response.

These linking practices provide a map for me to trace the ways in which bloggers self-select in connecting to one another. That is, bloggers sometimes will construct and maintain their blogrolls based on who is linking to them. In other words, a link can be seen as a gesture of appreciation: “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” At the same time, however, links also operate in a more conventional manner, where many bloggers link to the same popular writers, who often do not use blogrolls or post many outbound links. Through Technorati (technorati.com), a service that tracks the links between blogs, I can search for blogs that self-describe using tags like “motherhood” or “parenting” and then rank them based on their “authority” or number of incoming links.

Once I gather the list of most popular mom blogs, I’ll begin to work through them to find the highest ranking of the group that also publishes a weblog, and this blog will serve as the starting point for the compilation of my pool. I will not begin with the most-linked blog (the search consistently returns Heather Armstrong’s dooce.com) because it has no semi-static list of outbound links. Therefore, while dooce certainly exhibits a “mutual choice” that other bloggers make, Armstrong does not offer the “reciprocal services” in terms of linking back to her readers. I cannot begin with her blog and follow her links to describe a small-world network; beginning with dooce would not produce a network with a significant “clustering coefficient” (Watts 77). In other words, while Armstrong’s blog might be heavily connected, those connections are, for the most part, only running in one direction: towards her. Though dooce is a hub with over 5,000 other bloggers providing links in, it doesn’t provide those readers with ways of connecting with or between one another.

The blog with the most incoming links as well as a public blogroll is Her Bad Mother, written by a university instructor based in Toronto. From here, I’ll copy and paste the titles of those blogs into a word-processing document. Then, I’ll follow the first link on her blogroll, and copy and paste the titles from that blogroll into the same document. I’ll return to Her Bad Mother, and follow the second link, copying and pasting the blogroll from that blog into the same document. This will continue until I have compiled a list of all the blogs with outgoing links (once removed) from the most linked-to blog.
Once the list is complete, I’ll use a spreadsheet to organize (probably by alphabetical order), count, and select the blogs I’ll include in the pool. Those blogs that appear the most will [or there might be some great mathematical formula, where I calculate the total number of initial blogs (nor repeats) in proportion to the largest number of repeats to decided how many blogs I’ll actually end up with for the pool itself…]

Actor-Network-Theory, Content Analysis, and Map Analysis
Once the subject pool is collected, I’ll approach the blogs-as-texts by drawing heavily from Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (ANT) as a driving theoretical methodology and by relying on content analysis for the systematic material coding of the blog posts. ANT requires that I approach my texts as performative traces of action—action which is the result of a network of people, objects, and ideas informing (or constitutes) a particular actor (here, a particular blogger); the blogger not only acts within the network but also as a product of the network (Latour 46). Further, ANT requires the researcher to allow the vocabulary of the actors be louder than that of the researcher; that is, “the concepts of the actors are allowed to be stronger than that of the analysts” (30).

[Must use content + map analysis so that I can not only characterize concepts but also trace their movement from one writer to another. Content analysis by itself does not specify movement or dynamism among or within the texts; it assumes texts are static and does not account for intertextuality...]

Posted by madeline at 09:58 AM | Permalink

It's time to admit I'm not a trained sociologist. Now, for Latour, this is probably a good thing, because then I don't have to UNlearn all of the conventions and categorizations that he's working against.

However.

While I am excited about ANT, how I think that the ideas that drive it are compelling and important to a construction of a networked-writers theory, I'm afraid that I can't use ANT.

Here's why. It's in the problem of groups. ANT has a problem with groups; specifically, it has a problem with externally-defined groups. Latour explains that in the naming or formation of groups, sociologists make the mistake of discrediting or ignoring that which may be part of that group or that which the group itself might include or exclude. Essentially, groups aren't what exist, it's their traces or their actions that do, and therefore the group only exists as long as a specific action happens. When the action ceases, the group is gone as well. Therefore, the business of ANT is to “follow the actors’ own ways and begin [with] the traces left behind by their activity of forming and dismantling groups” (29).

The trouble I have with this is that I am right now working to delimit the "group" or subject pool of my study. I am doing what Latour warns us against:

…the central intuition of sociology [is] that at any given moment actors are made to fit in a group—often more than one…they [sociologists] never seem to tire in designating one entity as real, solid, proven, or entrenched while others are … artificial, imaginary, transitional, illusory…(28)

In doing so, I get to pick "which grouping is preferable to start a social inquiry" (28); therefore, I am committing sin #1: Ordering stuff into neat boxes. Privileging certain connections over others. Pretending that "social" is the stuff that makes those groups stick together and not the shifting associations that appear and disappear between and among people, objects, and ideas.

There might be a way around this, though. If there was a way that I could argue that the "traces" left behind by bloggers were an indication of their own grouping--that is, I can argue that the texts are those of "spokespeople" who, by linking to others in blogrolls, are constructing the groups themselves.

Further, I can engage in the recent discussion about which writers declared themselves to be "mommy-bloggers" and those who explicitly eschewed that title.

Second, whenever some work has to be done to trace or retrace the boundary of a group, other groupings are designated as being empty, archaic, dangerous, obsolete, and so on. It is always by comparison with other competing ties that any tie is emphasized. So for every group to be defined, a list of anti-groups is set up as well. (32)

I'm not sure if such strategies on my part would be sufficient, however, if i were to claim to be deploying ANT as a method. As I talk through it, it kind of sounds as though I'm forcing things to fit. *sigh*

Posted by madeline at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

My Reassembling the Social came in the mail (good gravy--it took WEEKS) a few days ago.

I'm reading the whole thing. Here's why: Latour is a riot to read. For instance, he distinguishes between agency and figuration to show us that it is important to see how the ways in which we name actions (or the ways we figure them) does not take away from who (or what) is actually performing the action. ANT works to break from 'figurative sociology' (54) by using the term "actant" (54) so that anyTHING that spurs action is equal in its considerability.

Oh, I got away from myself. I started out wanting to show you a passage that explains why I'm having such a good time with Latour. In describing what figuration is, Latour explains, "To say 'culture forbids having kids out of wedlock' requires, in terms of figuration, exactly as much work as saying 'my future mother-in-law wants me to marry her daughter" (53). He's good with the examples.

And he's also good with the directives: "Recording not filtering out, describing not disciplining, these are the Laws and the Prophets" (55).

Posted by madeline at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Notes toward Purpose/Rationale:

In the November 2006 issue of College English, Jeff Rice argues that "college English should be new media" (127), that college English should be "the network" (133). He characterizes the network as "spaces...of connectivity" (128) that create opportunities for "information, people, [and] places" to intersect in ways that print and conventional methods of connection and communication cannot support.

The purpose of this project will be to examine one particular community of writers who embody and enact the network that Rice describes above. Those writers, self-described as "mommy-bloggers," gained the attention of the mainstream media early last year, with an article printed in The New York Times. This article, titled “Mommy (and Me),” served as the catalyst for a firestorm of discussion about what it means for moms (and dads) to write and share publicly their parenting experiences. Essentially, the Times article characterized writers of these blogs as self-absorbed, obscenely narcissistic, and “hand-wringing” (Hochman). Responses to the article were indignant, many of them appearing on the very blogs of those writers Hochman interviewed for his piece. As a rejoinder, MUBAR (Mothered Up Beyond All Recognition) wondered how writing about one’s children might be considered more self-absorbed than the other topics bloggers discuss, such as “one’s trip to the North Pole by dogsled.” Further, she posits that the act of writing, in itself, is an act of both self-absorption and exhibition, regardless of the issues taken up.

Not only is writing an act of exhibition, but it is one of connected exhibition. The advent of Web 2.0 (in which users are no longer either producers of media content or consumers of content but instead simultaneously both) makes this connected exhibition explicit. That is, the blog as an application renders the interactivity of writing materially obvious through specific affordances, such as reader-published comments and trackbacks. The blog itself becomes a point of entry for answering questions such as: How do explicitly networked writers negotiate the balance between the representation of self and the construction of meaning as it is taken up by their readers? How do the connections among these writers inform that balance? How does the network itself, the associations connecting the writers, work to shape how those writers make rhetorical choices? I hope to find that the writing that occurs in/among well-connected blogs is a function of the ways in which the new media of Web 2.0 constructs users’ roles as continuously shifting and dichotomous. That is, blogging is not only writing but also is equally reading. The act of “blogging” does not only include producing posts for one’s own site, but also encompasses the visiting, reading of, commenting on, and linking to others’ writing.

That writing is a social act is not a new argument, however, there are several modes in which we still tend to treat it as though it were not. Current debate on intellectual property, the event-model of the writing classroom [more examples of ways writing is still treated as author-in-garrett] all indicate systematic cultural tendencies to preserve conventional notions of authority. With this examination of bloggers, I hope to establish a working definition of network theory as it applies specifically to writers that draws on the simultaneous consume/produce model of Web 2.0. Further, I imagine the emerging theory to establish the networked writing that occurs in blog spaces cannot be considered in the same ways we consider print writing, which still is able to veil the sociality of writing and knowledge-creation.

Posted by madeline at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)