I haven’t participated in any #ds106 assignments for sometime. Lame, I know. Anyway, the Picturing Prufrock assignment caught my attention. The assignment asked that you choose an image from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” and illustrate it. This is my collage. All images were found through Creative Commons. I am fascinated by time and memory, so I chose to use image overlays of clocks to accompany the text.
I’ve been thinking about online communities and social networks since Google+ rolled out. Since I signed up for an account, I’ve been searching and sorting through contacts to enjoy the potential Google+ promises. This process has been time consuming. But it has forced me to rethink my use of online social communities. Like many, I have accounts with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Reditt, and now Google+. I am multiple. And yet, how my online communities have been formulated is self-limiting and regulative because I can to cherry pick those I want to include or exclude from my online communities.
The word community is peculiar, as its Latin root com means common and munis means defense. Community is then a common form of defense against others. Indeed the physical or online communities we belong to are closed systems, defensive to outsiders. With online communities we can forward the appearance of openness by adding a “friend” (Facebook), or including someone into a circle (Google+) but really it is a closed system. We can easily block, unfollow, or hide news feeds we don’t want to include in our communities.
The community circles in Google+ promises a way to negotiate and categorize the various communities we wish to belong. The platform makes it easier to place people into circles and then choose who views our posts. However,when you add a person to a specific circle and regulate the exchange, you have created a self-limiting system that doesn’t live up to the promise of the internet. The promise of a democratic exchange of ideas. This self-imposed closure guards against the outside–the other outside the community circle. This self-protective, guarded, and regulated system of online communities is something we need to think about more. Shouldn’t we try harder to welcome other voices, voices outside of our regulated communities.
What are your thoughts? How do you regulate your online communities?
So, I’ve been playing around with Gephi for a few weeks, following several examples from OUseful.Info, the blog and the Gephi tutorials page. I’ve been wanting to create visualizations of my social networks and until now I haven’t had much time.
Initially my wheels were spinning in place because I couldn’t grab my Facebook data in a format suitable for Gephi. The recommended application Netvizz for Facebook data wasn’t working. It took me some time to find an alternative But I did. I found an alternative called NameGenWeb. This app will let you download your Facebook connections data in Guess, UCINet, or GraphML for use in Gephi. It also gives you an option to delete the data. Though, if in fact the data is actually deleted we can’t know for sure.
From there I basically followed this tutorial. I played around with various Gephi layouts until I settled on one that was visually appealing AND representative of my data. This is a balancing act that needs further reflection. Still, what I realized during this process is that those on my network who are heavily connected are those that I interact with the least in person or on Facebook.
The dark blue clusters are essentially high school “friends.” They are the connections that I typically hide in my feed window because I don’t want to see their gaming scores, to-do lists, or what not. Though Facebook is essentially a lot of what not, isn’t it? Why don’t I delete? I don’t delete because it is too much trouble. Besides, deleting “friends,” even the artificial kind, can potentially lead to awkward social encounters. (yes, this happened to me).
In this visualization I also have outlier clusters. These clusters represent recent friends, students, or colleagues from various locations. Surprisingly, those outlier clusters are friends I tend to interact with on a regular basis.
What I like most about the exercise of visualizing my social network is that it creates a narrative of the relationships I have with “friends.” Relationships that I didn’t really think much of before capturing it within my visual field.
I make no effort to conceal my contempt for Flori-DUH in this playlist assignment. Here is my iTunes #ds106 playlist assignment.
