as reported on BBC.
it may be that the search engines are reflecting society’s own prejudices
emphasis added
a great-grandson discovers documents about his great grandfather. Creates a Facebook profile for him. Fascinating way to memorialise the past in the present.
HT @davidfg
"What mainly goes up… is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively"
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The Social Brain Hypothesis (Dunbar, 1998) tested on Facebook, using generic behavioural closeness metrics (number of friends who people a) post on their wall, status updates or photos; or b) message/chat with), by the social network’s in-house sociologist Cameron Marlow.
from The Economist (26 Feb 2009): Social networks: Primates on Facebook
from the readers’ editor at The Guardian
"People often wander around cemeteries and look at gravestones and wonder who that person was. By using the QR codes they can find out all they need to know"
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Interactive gravestones: how the dead live on, online
timely. just finished editing the chapter on death yesterday.
Deutsch, M., & Gerard, H. B. (1955). A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51(3), 629-636.
An overview on PsychWiki.
the original article’s abstract:
The effects of two different types of social influence upon individual judgment were investigated: normative and informational. Prior studies of ‘group’ influence were shown to involve only incidentally the type of influence most specifically associated with groups, normative influence. The role of normative influence in buttressing as well as undermining individual experience was also investigated.
And some background by Morton Deutsch, 25 years later.
an excellent and balanced assessment of the evidence. Well worth a listen.
Cameron, S. & Fox, M. (2011). Working from home: leisure gain or leisure loss? In Cameron, S. (ed.) Handbook on the Economics of Leisure: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd: 128-152.
Google Books link.
What I say about it in the work & leisure chapter:
when the world can be your workplace, and when a customer is now able to enter your shop at any time of day or night, if can impact life-work balance. “Broadly speaking,” wrote Samuel Cameron and Mark Fox in the Handbook on the Economics of Leisure in 2012, “we expect work to have an atmosphere of work and home to have an atmosphere of home.” People who work from home experience what Cameron and Fox call a time elasticity illusion, particularly amongst other people in the household who think that it’s possible to do the hoovering or fix the leaky pipe in between answering emails is not only not distracting, but viable and expected. Not to mention the attitudes of people back in the office who think that we home workers spend the day in our pyjamas watching daytime TV.
Their work describes how our web-supported home-working has had an observable impact on leisure time. We become harder on ourselves, and employers keep a closer eye on our output. As the hours we work from home increase, employees report more rather than less work-related stress. After all, it’s still a job and things have to be done.
Talamo, A. & Ligorio, B. (2001, Feb). Strategic identities in cyberspace. CyberPsychology and Behavior, 4(1): 109-22.
abstract only.
I leaned on this paper in my Masters in Social Psychology, focussing on the ways that kids use online systems in a similar way as offline systems to develop their sense of self.
abstract:
This paper aims at describing, according to the recent advances in social psychology and Computer Mediated Communication, how identities are perceived and constructed in cyberspace. All interactions analyzed in this study were performed within “Euroland,” a collaborative virtual environment. The interacting community was composed of students, teachers, and researchers working on a transnational educational project. Practices and dialogues within Euroland are analyzed using an ethnographic and conversational method. A sample of discourses and actions that occurred during 8 months of time, selected according to the research aims, was analyzed. During online connections, users were personified by an “Avatar.” Avatars are able to walk, fly, and look around the virtual world. They are also able to build and manipulate three-dimensional objects, perform virtual actions, and chat with other connected users. Results showed that “Eurolanders” showed and constructed their identities using strategic “positioning” depending on the interactive situation. Identities are thus dynamic and strongly related to the context, created and constantly recreated by the users. It is concluded that specific features offered by the Euroland environment are exploited by the users as resources to play with, while moving from one strategic positioning to another. Cyber identities involve resources given by specific technological tools and by community. The cyber-identity construction process seems to be highly congruent to the advances in the dialogical perspective in psychology, where identities are considered in their conceptualizations as multiple, “multivoiced,” “positioned,” and context-dependent.
emphasis added
