I wanted to carry on the discussion of how people create themselves online. There have been several fine blog entries on the subject, and I think it's been fairly well established that people self-consciously create a persona in their interactions with online social networks.

What I find interesting about this is that people often react to this self creation with skepticism. In reading forums for my final project, I have often run across people reacting to others' stories in an interrogative way, looking for holes in the information provided, and going so far as to check the details of the story in real life. For example, in one story that I read (which was admittedly somewhat outlandish), the teller claimed that it had been raining at the time, and provided information on the general area that the events took place in. One skeptical user actually looked up the weather reports for the area and found that it had been clear. However, other less incredulous users pointed out that the skeptic had not gotten the reports for exactly the right area. The whole discussion basically degenerated into an argument about the veracity of the story itself. Some people took the story at face value, and others acted on their doubts with a somewhat creepy zeal.

I sometimes wonder why I respond a certain way to different forms of social software and technology, and was wondering whether other people felt the same way.

Lots of posts have been floating around that talk about creating identities for oneself online. IM-ing, facebook-ing, and blogging are second nature to me; when I'm doing work on the computer, I'm always signed onto AIM because to not be signed on just seems unnatural to me. It feels normal and natural to have the buddy list open on the right side of my screen.

I read an article a few weeks ago on the New York Times website (which I can't accesss anymore because it's been archived and I don't want to spend $5.00 getting a copy) about the "overconnecteds." It refers to "Generation M" aka the generation of kids born between 1980 and 2000 who grow up accustomed to technology and the computer/internet world. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a relative judgment, and depends on what the internet is being used for. I definitely agree with marmalade about the sink of time and effort that one puts into developing, oftentimes, "fake" relationships, and for me, the amount of time I spend randomly browsing blogs or facebook or IMing is atrocious, and I should really learn to cut down this habit. On the other hand, we all realize how cheap, useful, and efficient software like AIM is if we have friends on the other side of the country or in other countries whom we otherwise wouldn't get a chance to talk to. For that, I'm grateful to social software.

I’ve been thinking about a question we posed in class last week but never really answered: Does the term “social software” encompass so many different programs and venues as to render it meaningless?

I kind of want to argue both ways on this one. First, it does seem that “social software” covers almost everything we do on the internet, from AIM to blogs to MMORPGs to wikis. So in one sense, no, the term isn’t a very useful one if our goal is to distinguish between the different ways in which we use the internet.

However, in another sense, the term “social software” helps identify the common thread between the seemingly disparate things we do on the internet. It’s really all about socializing and communicating, isn't it? Email and blogs and AIM? Obviously about communicating. But wikis? They spark intellectual (and not-so-intellectual, depending on what the entry is) discourse between strangers. Games? They set up characters through whom players communicate with each other. Hypertexts? They communicate an author’s creative vision to readers, who in turn interpret that vision and talk about it with others who have read the hypertext. This came as a revelation to me, although it sure sounds obvious now that I type it out.

and that I may have been thinking about, but maybe didn’t bring up because I wanted to post it on the blog. In its list of “tools for online communication," the wiki article that we read on Social Software devotes a brief paragraph to this thing called “virtual presence,” which does not, as yet, have its own wikipedia article (although one has been requested), and which creeps me out about as much as some people were creeped out by Shelley Jackson’s designation of people as words in her Skin project. The paragraph defining virtual presence really is brief, so I’m going to cite the whole thing here:

Virtual presence means being present at virtual locations. In particular, the term virtual presence denotes presence on World Wide Web locations pages and Web sites which are identified by URLs. People who are browsing a Web site are considered to be virtually present at Web locations. Virtual presence is a social software in the sense that people meet on the Web by chance or intentionally. The ubiqitous [sic] (in the Web space) communication transfers behavior patterns from the real world and Virtual worlds to the Web.

The expanding prevalance of social software makes me distinctly uncomfortable. I can't put into words exactly what I fear will happen, but there is something about the opportunity to manufacture and maintain a personality for oneself that I feel could affect society in unforseen and possibly adverse ways.

While I was initially resistant to social software devices, such as AIM and Facebook, they eventually seduced me. There is a reclamation of power that comes with the process of carefully controlling an image of oneself that will be disseminated to one's peers. On AIM I can take a few moments to run over possible witty responses and decide on the wittiest. I can actively decide whether I want the person I'm talking to to think I'm a jovial type, or a deep intellectual (how succesful I am is certaily questionable, but the process is there.) A Facebook profile is essentially a carefully chosen compilation of information designed to present an image you think will be attractive/endearing/popular/etc. Real tastes aren't even portrayed, let alone real personality.

As I explored the social software links we were supposed to read, I first thought how funny it is to read definitions of other social software sites. Does anyone else feel uneasy when they read definitions of AIM, Urban Dictionary, or even (and this is the weirdest of all) Wikipedia's definition of Wikipedia? I'm not sure I can pinpoint what gives me this uneasy feeling. Maybe it's the concept of a site is defining itself (do print encyclopedias have entries on what encyclopedias are?). Or maybe my uneasiness springs from a point that Lulu raised at the beginning of her post and that made me laugh because it's so true: what isn't social software these days? Faceook, AIM, blogging...sometimes I feel like these are my life. Social software seems like second nature to me and, in that sense, undefinable and unable to be analyzed.

I'm doing my project on internet forums, so I naturally read the wikipedia page about them that was linked from the social software article that we were assigned. The main example that I'll be drawing from is the forums at somethingawful.com. As I browsed through wikipedia, I came across this article about a former poster on that forum who killed two people and then himself over what most of us would deem a trivial slight. Apparently, he had posted on somethingawful and other forums about the incident and his plans for revenge, even asking for and receiving information about where to buy ammunition on the forums.

I'm still trying to find my way around social software, and I'm even wondering what isn't social software, because it seems like everything qualifies. To go along with this ubiquitous nature of social software, people are suggesting that forms of this software are becoming more prevalent in the academic sphere, which is of huge relevance to us.

if:book has many articles that talk about networked writing in academia. A few things that struck me as more interesting--

1) Google offers public domain downloads. These days, this isn't anything new, since public domain documents have always been available online, but we--or rather, I--keep forgetting that this wasn't always the case. The book publishing industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, and making texts available online won't significantly affect their earnings, but there are advantages for us, the consumers. These days, I don't buy all my books anymore. As an English major, there's lots of books to read, but I often either go to the library, or find downloadable versions online. As a consumer, I'm thankful that books are finally available for free. To me, the idea of putting books online in downloadable format refocuses the attention on the books as material to be read rather than commodities that make profit.

In class, we briefly discussed the problems involved with labeling oneself. While I believe the subject came up during our debate about skin, the concepts seem very relevant to a discussion of facebook and its brethren. Facebook makes an interesting case study of the limitations of self-description. It's funny that we can describe so much of ourselves in a profile, yet come up with an end result that is oddly generic. I once saw a facebook profile that filled in all of the fields with descriptions of categories that tend to make up a typical facebook profile. For instance, under music, it included entries like "something so obscure that I will be the only one on facebook to have heard of it" and "a cheesey 90's song that will serve as an inside joke with the rest of the facebook community." It was pretty amusing.

I've been thinking about Wikipedia lately, because, as an example of collaborative authorship, it's relevant to my final paper.

Many to Many has this post by Clay Shirky (the guy who wrote the article KF showed us about the "long tail" of blogs) applauding Wikipedia's evolving method of governance.

Shirky makes some interesting but (in my opinion) self-contradictory points in defense of Wikipedia's increasingly exclusive governing model. He basically claims that "Wikipedia is committed to effectiveness, and one of the things it has found to be effective is openess [sic], but where openess fails to provide the necessary defenses on it’s [sic] own, they’ll make changes to remain effective."