kyounghee HAZEL KWON
"Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion" -Francis BaconArchive for Communication
e-fluentials
One of the projects that I’m involved these days is agent-based modeling (ABM) of difufsion of innovation. ABM is a new area to me. Diffusion of Innovation as well, although having heard of it and read several pieces about it superficially, is relatively new to me.
Our project is based on Valente ’s network diffusion model (1995), which not only became one of the recent classics of diffusion study but also is UNDERSTANDABLE from non-economist or non-mathematicia background. I have very supportive and credible captain and crew in this project, Frank, my beloved professor, and Ben, the computer genius. Myself? Hmmm, I’m just an endlessly desperate learner. The project is a small one, which will turn into a book chapter. Small project, but not trivial at all. Actually, this project is the hardest one I’ve ever participated so far…
The parts requiring computer programming skills and mathematical knowledge are way beyond my understanding so far. However, finding and reading the recent network-based diffusion studies, mostly dealiing with the effects of interpersonal networks and opinion leaders, are quite interesting. It is a relatively new field of knowledge to me, even though the issue of diffusion and opinion leaders have been a classical topic in communication area.
For a few days, I’m reading about how opinion leaders are operationalized from the netrwork perspective. Measurement is not very radical, something like, just counting the frequencies of peer nomination as an information couselor. However, the underlying theoretical ambiguousness on “what is an opinion leader?” is an interesting question. It has been inquired for decades, nonetheless, the clarity seems not achieved yet.
One ambiguity that I find from the readings is the distinction between opinion leaders and initiators (or early adopters). Some delinieate the diffferences between influentials and adoption times as two related but separate variables. However, some other studies seem to be based on the conceptualization that equalizes the two. Right now, i’m thinking about how to model the impacts of both leadership and adoption time, not interchaning the terms, in our project (sounds very grand!)
http://www.burson-marsteller.com/INNOVATION_AND_INSIGHTS/E-FLUENTIALS/Pages/default.aspx
This website is not something showing the “grand” speculation about modelling interpersonal influence. It is rather a soft report about opinion leadership online. Thought interesting, though. It introduces a memorable word “e-fluentials”. Well, reading the main body of the article, you’ll find very easily that e-fluentials is a convenient extention of traditional stuides of opinion leadership in contemporary context.
Crowdsourcing for civil society
Ushahidi.com
Crowdsourcing on web 2.0 is not just for business goals. The civil society sees a potential of the technology-empowered collaboration. Ushahidi is the example of crowdsourcing among citizen journlaists.
Since I have visited this website lasst time a year ago, Ushahidi project have attracted a good deal of advocaters. Currently, Ushahidi team supports several projects in different countries. Out of them, the kenya project, the initial mash-up that reports the history of violence occruing in Kenay in post-election period, is the prototype of political crowdsourcing.
This is an amazing case, in that the cause, processes, and the outcomes of the project are exactly mirroring the social construction of technologices. The converged media are appropriated by citizen journalists who are willing to report what is going on via camera, texting, or email. The volunteer engineers are also willing to support the project for technical updates. The product of the project is freely accessible to other parties who share the similar causes. The political crowdsourcing is only available when the technological advantages meet the culture of collaboration and the culture of democracy. It is a beautiful example.
Soft discussions on folksonomies
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-21.html?_r=1
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html
http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html
and what I found on the distribution of bookmarking frequency in Delicious regarding the torture-related issues….is consistent with their discussions!
the direction for social media-based community journalism
Community journalism has always been shaky regarding its financial model competing with commercial-based big media firms. The recent decline of the seeming formidable media companies, however, turns a new attention to the rebirth of community journalism. Particularly, online social media appears as a sturdy sponsor, allowing the new revenue models to be introduced.
While government subsidy and organizational sponsorship have been traditional sources of revenue for public media, the interactive media environment even shows the potential of audience-driven news making, where the audience themselves become donors for a certain news story which they consider worth of broadcasting.
I happen to encounter the last December’s article in Businessweek ( http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2008/tc20081223_783996.htm ), which deals with this intriguing phenomena.
Well, citizen journalism is not a new thing. However, for citizen journalism to be sustainable as a quality news source, it is a must-be to be taken as a part of credible community journalism. Financial infrastructure is a nonnegligent element of the future direction of citizen journalism or any new mode of community journalism, and in this sense, the experiments to find a desirable direction to chip-in financial sources are crucial trial-and-errors for the whole picture.
spot.us (www.spot.us), a San Fransisco based non-profit journalism, is one online journalism site introduced in the article. This site displays “testing” news articles. It is not an editor but audiences who assess the quality and importance of the news, which is actualized through the form of donation: If they think it as worthy of wider distribution, they donate for the designated news story. When the donation amounts to a certain point, the news story is published as an official news. I think this business model is very radical, in a sense that it requires a progressive transformation of conventional idea of what news is, what audience is, and what news industry is about, as well as a belief in the existence of generalized reciprocity in this community.
If the model becomes successful,I would say that it should be understood as a snapshot hinting the victory of citizen-driven public sphere over the invasion of market power, which Habermas used to criticize about the modern democracy. If this model shows a sustainability, then, I would darely say that the civic culture in the States is not dead yet~ 
Persian blogosphere
A recent project by Harvard Berkman center shows a wonderful visualization of Iran’s blogsphere. As observed in the current protest against the election, Iran has often been on the table when it comes to the political impact of web 2.0. This project not only nicely delineates the maps of blogosphere but also shows that not all of Iranian blogs are about opposite politics. They actually preset a mixture of different views and different genres of interests. As the project concludes, Iran’s blogosphere is one of the good examples how a variety of perspectives can spell out voices openly even under a relatively repressed political system. I love this website quite much, although I do have a question remaining regarding the process of data collection – Whenever I try to do something with hyperlinks, I face a difficulty of cut-off points. Also, in an attempt to extract Korean protest websites, I saw many were actually blocked to approach so that couldn’t extract the links. I can’t help asking how they deal with the ambiguity and barriers accompanied during data collection…
Link to the mapping: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2008/Mapping_Irans_Online_Public/interactive_blogosphere_map
Link to the description of the project:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2008/Mapping_Irans_Online_Public
Growing up Online
Preparing the course about the Internet next semester, I encountered this documentary, which I think very recommendatory. It includes balanced perspectives between the for and the against of youth being exposed to the Internet. The issues of social isolation, privacy, subculture, and virtual identity are reflected seriously yet without the pedantic attitude, which I like the most about this film. I’m thinking to show this one to my students this fall, the young adults who have been growing up online thus deserve at least a chance to reflect themselves with respect to this new tech environment.
One of my colleague gifted me a small book, G. Ritzer’s “The McDonaldization of Society” published in 1993. Such a well-known book, I saw numerous citations of this book but never had a chance to read it.
As a commtech scholar, it is refreshing to read about modern artifacts reflected by Weber’s rationality and bureaucracy especially in this so-called post-Fordism era. We talk so much about the difference of contemporary lifestyle along with new technologies, notably the Internet, and the life is changing definitely thanks to those tools. However, reading this book, I feel that much of the discussions in this book remains just solid today. The negative consequences of the rationality thus dominates our mundane life as well. Even more, our seeming revolutionary technologies often reinforce the irrationalities of rationalization.
At the same time, I read newspapers today talking about twitter’s power in the process of protest against Iranian election. Then, this time, twitter seems to be against the rationalized appratus….
Hum… the question whether the new techs are changing or subordinated to the system may be just unanswerable.
Anyway, here’s a short exerpt that I liked from Ritzer’s book:
“There are innumerable examples of the rationalization of recreational escape routes. The best is the rationalization of today’s vacation. Typically, a vacation involves an effort to flee the rationalized routines of our work lives. For those Americans who wish to escape to less rationalized European society, there is the package tour that rationalizes the process. People can efficiently see, in a rigidly controlled manner, many sights while traveling in conveyances, stying in hotels, and eating in fast-food restaurants that are predictably like those they are accustomed to at home. For those who wish to escape to the Caribbean, there are resorts such as Club Med that offer a large number of routinized activities and where one can stay in predictable settings without ever venturing out into the unpredictability of native life on a Caribbean island. For whose who wish to fell back to nature within the United States, there are rationalized campgrounds where one can have little or no contact with the unpredictabilities of nature. One can even remain within one’s camper and “enjoy” all of the rationalized forms of recreation available at home – TV, VCR, Nintendo, CD player…”(p. 23)
Craiglist’s murder: watching CBS 48 hours
One moment, a narrative goes something like this; this is not the problem of the Internet. The issue is about human psychology and behavior.
This recent sensational news gives me a lot of thoughts regarding the recurrent debate about online relationship and online crime. However, ultimately, as the narrative said, it is not the problem of the technology itself, I believe that negative consequences are a part of undeniable process for users to social lyconstruct the values and meanings of the technology. This incident is definitely a tragedy, yet at the same time, a bitter-sweet reality alludes that the issue could be “contributory” to guide the Internet culture into a safer way through un-coercive approaches such as rising citizen engagement to prevent the Internet from this sort of tragedy again or policy intervention under citizen’s realization and consensus about the necessity. So many social artifacts have double edges. Transportation, knives, guns, music…, all these products have helped improve human life condition, while it is also de facto that users have abused them in terrible ways. Going through both positive and negative subsequences, the artifacts have been shaped, I believe, to be best suitable into a particular society.
I believe that the Internet is no different in this sense. It’s been only a decade. Still, compared to the previous anxieties, concerns, and fear, the Internet, in general, has been mature not that badly. Craiglist incident is one of side products, and as other side effects have done, it may arise awareness and caution about the potential danger of the technology. With the autonomous awareness, our society is agile enough to put effort for intervention.
First time use of Netlogo
Thesedyas, I play with Netlogo, the basic program for ABM. As a novice in this area, I have a lot to learn. Netlogo is the one Dr. Tutzauer recommended me try. It is seemingly easy to manage, but in practice, you may want to spend quite a deal of time to be accustomed to this tool.
I wanted to model the diffusion of ideas within a network with this program, but couldn’t get it done in a way that I ultimately wanted to. Instead, I got the most basic outcome, which shows simply the effect of network density on difussion of ideas. The red node symbolizes those who are influenced by a proposed idea and the gray node indicates those influenced by a objectionist’s idea. Two visuals are the example showing the difference in diffusion rate when there were variations in network density. As seen below, even if the opinion leaders are many, the diffusion process is contrained if network is loosely connected. On the other hand, even if the opinion leaders are not many, the people who are influenced by the ideas increase more greatly if the network is denser. (Figure 1 is low density network, resulting less than 100 people influenced by each idea. Figure 2 is higher density, resulting almost twice more people influenced by each idea.)
Hi, I'm Hazel. I'm a PhD candidate in the dept. of Communication at the SUNY-Buffalo.
My heart moves when I appreciate an artwork that sheds the beauty of blanks. I'm also fascinated by what Mother Nature shows us.
However, what pounds on my heart the most is a scholar's wholehearted work that reflects his conscience, passion, and insight into the world we live in. That's why I chose to be a social scientist, neither an artist nor a park ranger.