Is Self-Disclosure In Social Networks Like Masturbation?

Alina Turgend writes about bragging and the way it stimulates the part of our brains linked to stimulation from sex.

Alina Turgend,  The Etiquette of Celebrating or Bragging About Achievements

Last year, two Harvard neuroscientists published a paper, “Disclosing Information About the Self Is Intrinsically Rewarding,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They conducted brain imaging and behavioral experiments and found that when people talked about themselves, there was heightened activity in the same brain regions associated with rewards from food, money or sex.

Diana I. Tamir, co-author of the study and a doctoral student at Harvard, said the research focused not on bragging, but on answering neutral questions about one’s personality.

“When asked questions about themselves, there was more reward activity than when asked about someone else,” Ms. Tamir said. And there was even more activity when the participants could choose to share information, by pressing a button, with someone outside the scanner.

Another experiment found that people were willing to give up small amounts of money to reveal information about themselves, rather than talk about someone else.

“I think there is a natural human tendency” to talk about oneself, Ms. Tamir said. “The interesting question is why we are motivated to share.”

Another interesting question is when sharing turns into bragging — and the answer is often in the eye of the beholder. As one commenter wrote on the Canadian blogwondercafe.ca, “I wonder if it’s sharing if I do it and bragging if someone else does it.”

Although boasting may seem more acceptable now, Susan A. Speer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Manchester in England, has found that “self-praise” is still largely considered unacceptable.

Professor Speer, a conversation analyst, looked at a variety of data, from psychiatric interventions to everyday conversations, that involved self-praise. The information came from the United States and Britain.

In her study, published last year in the Social Psychology Quarterly, Professor Speer discovered that in almost every case, directly praising oneself seemed to violate social norms.

She said people responded to self-praise negatively or, more subtly, with a long silence or a roll of the eyes.

She found that the only way to really blow your own horn — or toot your own trumpet, as they say in Britain — without alienating someone was to repeat something positive someone else said about you.

It’s easier for a listener to respond to this kind of self-praise, Professor Speer said, by saying, for instance, “How nice someone said that.”

Even being self-deprecating about accomplishments doesn’t work. In fact, it can be even more irritating, and it has come to be known as “humblebragging” or “underbragging.”

Examples? Complaining about e-mail service from Cannes or about having to sign too many autographs. As Henry Alford wrote in The New York Times last November about his annoyance with this phenomenon: “Outright bragging expects to be met with awe, but humblebragging wants to be met with awe and sympathy.”

I’m all for masturbation — after all its been shown that having more orgasms prolongs life, not to mention the immediate benefits — but it’s one of those things that’s best done behind closed doors. So, let’s cut back on the bragging, especially underbragging.

I am personally trying a strategy for cutting back. I am retiring anecdotes: once I tell anyone an anecdote that could be construed as braggage, I then plan to not tell that anecdote again for at least a year. 

Did I ever tell you about the time I…?

12 January 2013 25 Permalink

‘Hashtag’ Is Selected As Word Of The Year By The American Dialect Society

I was involved in a twitter thread today with Ben Zimmer, who is a well-known lexicographer, and chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. He has been researching the Twitter hashtag, which was recently selected as Word Of The Year:

“Hashtag” is the 2012 Word of the Year American Dialect Society

In its 23rd annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted “hashtag” as the word of the year for 2012. Hashtag refers to the practice used on Twitter for marking topics or making commentary by means of a hash symbol (#) followed by a word or phrase.

Presiding at the Jan. 4 voting session were ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College, and Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. Zimmer is also a language columnist for the Boston Globe.

“This was the year when the hashtag became a ubiquitous phenomenon in online talk,” Zimmer said. “In the Twittersphere and elsewhere, hashtags have created instant social trends, spreading bite-sized viral messages on topics ranging from politics to pop culture.”

Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item” — not just words but phrases. The words or phrases do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year. The vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere, the only one not tied to commercial interests, and the word-of-the-year event up to which all others lead. It is fully informed by the members’ expertise in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion. Members in the 124-year-old organization include linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, editors, students, and independent scholars. In conducting the vote, they act in fun and do not pretend to be officially inducting words into the English language. Instead they are highlighting that language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining.

One interesting wrinkle is that Zimmer contends that I was the first to use the term ‘hashtag’ back in a post on 26 August 2007. My use was a response to Chris Messina’s proposal for so-called Twitter ‘channels’, which had the form of hashtags today (like ‘#hashtag’), but apparently I was the first to use the term hashtag to denote them. I also  coined the term ‘microsyntax’ to represent the developing use of symbols — like ‘@mentions’, ‘#hashtags’, ‘RT”, ‘$ticker’ — in Twitter and related apps. (I still haven’t been successful in getting ‘/geotags’ implemented.)

Wild. 

For @chrismessina @anildash @aral et al: Who first used the term “hashtag”/”hash tag”? @stoweboyd used it on 8/27/07: stoweboyd.com/post/972058051…

— Ben Zimmer (@bgzimmer) January 6, 2013

@bgzimmer @chrismessina @aral I think the usage “hashtag” predates Chris’ post, but @stoweboyd was first to apply that to twitter.

— Anil Dash (@anildash) January 7, 2013

I didn’t even have that post up on my blog. I moved my blog several times since 2007, from Typepad (where it was called /Message), to Squarespace, and then to Tumblr. And I hadn’t reposted all the older posts, since it has to be done manually. I reposted that piece today, copying the text from the Wayback Machine.

Source: americandialect.org

6 January 2013 18 Permalink

The Sum Of My Connections

In response to Roger Cohen’s recent Thanks For Not Sharing — a rant about the oversharing he sees on Twitter and Facebook — Alexis Madrigal skewers him:

Your Anti-Social Media Rant Reveals Too Much About Your Friends - Alexis C. Madrigal via The Atlantic

My diagnosis is simple, Roger: your friends and associates are terrible and boring. Being that you are a smart and interesting guy who would distill only the finest information from any social network, the problem is the garbage going into your feed, which can only come out as garbage in your column. And that garbage is being created by the people who you choose to follow and know. 

Madrigal is being a bit snarky, but it’s actually true. The best thing about open social networks is that they are open: you can follow whoever you want. And the most positive and life-affirming thing we each can do is move ourselves in the network by adding new connections, and possibly dropping old ones.

I am leaving aside — as did Madrigal — the question of what others may gain by following Cohen. Or not.

But the possibility exists to be enlarged by this, and to share that: I am made better by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections. But I think Cohen is missing that point, completely.

Source: The Atlantic

7 December 2012 65 Permalink

Machines Of Loving Grace

Yesterday, I was doing a dress rehearsal for a webinar that will be live tomorrow. I was talking with Fred McClimans, Geoffrey Colon, and Alan Dickenson about the future of cloud computing and how that intersects with big data. This morning something occurred to me regarding the application of social data in the future.

Imagine that the workings of human social networks are finally figured out by crunching real data from really large social networks. And at the same time, the the deep forces of social influence are revealed, and the mathematics lurking below our interactions is cracked. And in parallel, imagine that continued research into cognitive science has led to more understanding of how social interaction is linked to brain chemistry, and for the first time, effective techniques are developed to make the sad happy, and the lonely loved.

Ok, I know, but let me finish the thought experiment.

So, imagine that researchers are able to create algorithms that can actually — with real success — influence our behaviors. Through a society-spanning combination of content marketing, social media, and targeted social network strategies, researchers are able to decrease cigarette smoking, or increase bike riding. And the unscrupulous or avaricious would be able to get people to chew one kind of gum, or watch a particular TV series.

Alright, let me add the last ‘what if’ to the scenario, although it is starting to sound like a chapter of Daniel Suarez’s Daemon. So, imagine that some global non-profit, like the Gates Foundation, builds a software system that leverages all this new-found knowledge about social influence and social cognition, and sets about changing us.

This system — let’s call it Grace — has access to the world’s major datasets, which contain millions of petabytes of social data in this hypothetical future. Grace would work surreptitiously and guardedly, applying social math to each of our private social contexts, convincing us to brush more often, to read to our kids, to help others in need. Grace would reward us at the physiological level, by convincing one person to touch another, unleashing oxytocin and building trust where none existed before. Teams would work more efficiently. Friends would make that extra effort, families would settle old differences. Politicians would reach out to their opponents to find common cause and to put aside partisan division. Warring factions in dusty far-away lands would lay down their AK-47s and make peace where there had been decades or millennia of war.

Cue the harps.

And the reason I called this system Grace is a nod to Richard Brautigan’s All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace:

I'd like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
   (right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
   (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

In my version, Grace is operating behind the scenes, without our knowledge, nudging us to do good and make nice, an animatronic Jimminy Cricket, the invisible conscience we need to become more humane.

And the question is, if we could make such a thing happen, should we? There is no doubt that marketers will attempt to take our growing knowledge of social connection and neuroeconomics to try to sell baby food and sports cars. And dictators might use such mechanisms as mind control and hyper-efficient propaganda engines. But what if such tools could be used to make the world a better place?

Should we? Is it immoral to surreptitiously influence humanity, even if the result is a better place? Ultimately, the question becomes who gets to decide what better means, and so in my it-could-almost-be-a-novel scenario, it would likely be the choice of a solitary genius, as in Daemon, following personal convictions rather than some plebiscite.

What if it would only work if it was secret? What if the world could be bettered, famines averted, wars ended, climate change reversed, but only if the mechanism to do so was completely unknown to the world?

In my early morning musing, in the twilight stage between sleeping and waking, I envisioned Grace moving the world from exploitative, growth-at-all-costs hyper-capitalism toward a steady-state, sustainable economy and social compact, where we’d ramp down the population to a few billions over the next few decades, provide meaningful and interesting work rewilding the planet, building livable and beautiful cities, and growing healthy food and a smaller number of better-loved and better-fed babies. 

But I was dreaming, obviously.

5 September 2012 28 Permalink

Is The Social Network Disrupting Social Class?

Rob Horning at Marginal Utility noodles on our bonding too closely with the individualism of the ‘social graph’ (a term he dislikes at face value, just as I do). He suggests that we may have painted ourselves into a corner by rejecting a class consciousness:

Social graph vs. social class – Rob Horning via The New Inquiry

Social media support, obviously, a view of society as a network, in which individual “nodes” define themselves (and their worth) in terms of their difference from other nodes. Each individual’s value lies in developing and expressing that difference, finding comparative advantage relative to others. There has to be something unique that you provide to make you worth linking to, though that uniqueness may consist of the unique access you provide to a bunch of other people as well as the unique information you are in a position to supply. At any rate, establishing connections to others serves to spread awareness of that difference, meaning that the relations charted in that network (aka the social graph) draw lines of competition as well as of mere affiliation.

[…]

This interpretation of how society is organized — the one that anything labeled as “social” by the tech world helps sustain — precludes an interpretation that acknowledges the possibility of class, of concrete groups with shared interests that they work to construct and then use as the basis for forcing concessions from capital. In the network, you are on your own; its ideology suggests we are all equally points on the great social graph, no different from anyone else save for the labor we put in to establishing connections. This obviates the issues of pre-existing social capital and class habitus that facilitate the formation of better connections and the ability to reap their value instead of being exploited by them.

Since the social graph traces intricate constellations that are always becoming ever more complex, it requires massive computer power and elaborate algorithms to interpret and trace out underlying patterns of significance. Generally, only capital has the resources to summon such power, so the commonalities called into being through such analysis of network data are commercial ones. Retailers can figure out what demographic and lifestyle pattern you fit into, whther you know it or not, and then you with advertising that reinforces your belonging and takes advantage of it. (The third episode of Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self has a section on the roots of this in Values and Lifestyles analysis devised at Stanford in the 1970s.)

But to forge a social class, a different sort of work is required, called forth by a different conception of society, based on antagonisms between blocs (and ongoing fights that require long-term strategies), not antagonisms between individuals (whose spontaneous skirmishes require more or less ad hoc tactics). Think E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, which treats class not as a statistical artifact but as something that’s as much forged deliberately by members than ascribed by outside forces. The social graph purports to passively record social arrangements that emerge organically and thus reflect some sort of true and undistorted account of how society works. That conception discourages the possibility of those plotted on the graph from making a social class. Social media users don’t take advantage of their connectedness to undertake the work of finding the bases by which they can see their concerns as being shared, being in some way equivalent. Instead, their connectedness drives them to preen for attention and personal brand enhancement. One must work against social media’s grain to use it to develop lasting, convincing political groupings.

I buy some of what Horning is offering up, but not the fundamental conclusions.

First, I do agree that we are living precariously in the world today, as many — like Zygmunt Bauman — have spelled out. We are unable to find solidarity in our situation, and so, Horning’s analysis has weight: we cannot organize ourselves into the blocs that perhaps would allow us to push for change.

However, I don’t think it is our conscious affiliation into social networks — mediated by Twitter, Facebook, and so on — that is the root cause of our lack of solidarity. On the contrary, I believe that the increase in weak ties that social networks afford may be a way forward into a new-found awareness of our shared condition, and the creation of ways to work together to better our shared situation.

The are larger forces at work in the world — economic inequality, globalism, and misinformation at a massive scale — that have had decades to take root. The upward striving of Americans, most convinced they are soon-to-be millionaires living a middle class life, led to a rapid erosion in the past 50 years of the one-time working/middle/upper class identification. In fact, it is a defining characteristic of post-normal America.

Horning’s piece is an over-shuffled house of cards: he pulls together a smattering of political theory, and ends with a pile of worn out cardboard:

Like neoliberalist ideology and post-Fordist management techniques, social media work to “restore the salience of particularities” and “construct a world sensitive to differences,” to use Boltanski and Chiapello’s phrases. This yields a “confused, fragmented universe, composed solely of a juxtaposition of individual destinies.” We all flounder to get ahead personally but never unite in a meaningfully political way. The 99% dissolves and all that’s shared is statuses, photos, and tweets. And everything remains fucked up and bullshit.

People are actually made better by the sum of their connections, and so are their connections.

One truth buried in there: our identities are increasingly fragmented, based on the spectrum of social contexts we use, and we can become alienated by that.

Personally, my sense is that there are communities with social tools like Twitter, where people are doing something more than a world of one-upmanship, where people are actually made better by the sum of their connections, and so are their connections.

We may not have replaced social class with tranches of social networks, at least not yet. But there is an entire world rigged around the fading promises of class identity, telling us we are first and foremost middle class or upper class or working class. Our entire political debate is centered on that as the foundational ideology, that and the sovereignty of nation states based on geographic cultural inclusion, and exclusion.

We may someday get to a zeitgeist where these ‘givens’ are considered as anachronistic as the divine right of kings and the superiority of white males, but we aren’t there yet. Not by a long shot.

29 August 2012 37 Permalink

Ryan Holmes on Social Business Tools

Ryan Holmes does not do a great job unthreading externally-focused social media tools from internal work media tools, but maybe that’s to be expected since it’s not a neat and tidy world, but a mess of interconnected messes. One thing is clear though, it’s growing very quickly:

Ryan Holmes, What Is a Social Business App, Anyway? And Why Is the Market Booming?

Last year, 79 percent of 2,100 companies surveyed by Harvard Business Review reported that they use or plan to use social media. The average social media budget at enterprise-level businesses with more than 1,000 employees is $833,000, according to an already dated 2011 report from researcher Altimeter. In the next 5 years, marketers anticipate spending 19.5% of their budgets on social media, nearly three times the current level. And use of internal social networks [work media] in companies is up 50 percent from 2008, according to McKinsey and Co. After a slow start, big business has gone social in a big way.

Importantly, companies are using social media to do things that go way beyond just chatting up existing customers on Facebook. Sales departments use social to nurture leads and close sales. HR posts job openings and vets applicants. Community and support squads mine networks, blogs and forums with deep listening tools. Advertising departments get the word out on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And internal networks like Yammer let managers and employees engage in Facebook-like dialogue and collaboration behind the firewall.

Social media, in other words, has gone company-wide. It’s used not just to engage with customers but to connect employees, coordinate suppliers and streamline nearly every aspect of contemporary enterprise, writes USA Today’s Tim Mullaney. Not using social media in the workplace, in fact, is starting to make about as much sense as not using the phone or email.

No surprise that as companies have adopted social media en masse, demand for software and applications to manage and monitor social use has exploded. Enterprises are clamoring for one-stop, social solutions, explains Forbes’ Melissa Parrish: omnibus tools for pushing out content across multiple networks, listening, advertising, analyzing, managing customer relations and fostering internal dialogue.

And just as early Internet technologies slashed the cost of basic business tasks like mailing and filing, these social platforms promise to streamline more complex functions from R&D to design and project management. Take the example of SuperValu, the supermarket chain with thousands of stores around the world, which last year began using internal social network Yammer. So far, 11,000 of their executives and managers are on board, organized into 1,000 working groups. My favorite group: college town store managers, who recently came up with the brilliant idea of launching beer pong displays to draw in thirsty co-eds.

With such a clear use-case, social enterprise applications constitute one of tech’s fastest-growing sectors: expanding at a brisk clip of 61 percent per year and projected to become a $6.4 billion market by 2016. A recent industry report by Altimeter identified no fewer than 27 management systems targeted at big businesses. Plus, chief marketing officers — the main buyers of social enterprise apps — have seen their budgets expand dramatically in recent years. In fact, CMOs are expected to outspend CIOs on tech within five years, according to industry researcher Gartner.

Suddenly all those nine-digit acquisitions are starting to make a whole lot of sense.

It’s a social world, after all.

Source: The Huffington Post

7 June 2012 4 Permalink