People don’t trust company blogs. What you should do about it.: “This result comes from a survey we did in Q2 of 2008. Have a look at the data yourself. Not only do blogs rank below newspapers and portals, they rank below wikis, direct mail, company email, and message board posts. Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say they trust them.”

I thought this article was worth reading because it draws attention to the level of suspicion held for corporations. For me, it underpins just why businesses shouldn’t blog unless they’re willing to be genuinely engaged in a conversation and not booming out marketing speak.

Micro Persuasion: Social Networking Demographics: Boomers Jump In, Gen Y Plateaus

Rubel calls attention to an Accenture study which shows the social technology adoption rate is plateauing for GenY. Is this a sign they’re losing interest or that they’re already connected enough?

Pearson discusses performance and identity formation on social networking sites.

The Future of Reputation

Professionally produced and written e-book about reputation on the Internet.

Does the Internet weaken our social ties? Not according to research conducted by Pew in 2004. Based on the work of Barry Wellman this study shows that those who are active in a face-to-face setting are more likely to actively use the Internet to maintain their relationships.

Wellman argues that the Internet promotes “networked individualism” which allows  individuals to move beyond a small core of trusted friends and access more diverse advice from a network of contacts. While the ties between these individuals may not be strong ties, they nonetheless provide the support demanded by circumstances at the time of the contact.

But the report was conducted in 2004, before the success of Facebook and certainly before the launch of Twitter. Wellman’s study focussed on the use of emails in the maintenance of social networks. Since 2004 much has happened to reshape the way individuals participate on the Internet particularly as a result of the emergence of online social networking and bookmarking sites.

Too, the research was conducted in the US and takes no account of the way the Internet shapes social interactions in communities where net access is limited.

It’s easy for business people to be dragged into managerial speak. The jargon of an industry sucks us in to talking in the lingo of our “ist”. But all too often it’s a language that becomes, as Carolyne Lee, describes it, “turgid”. Words and phrases are emptied of meaning. Passion vanishes, swallowed by the carefully measured, lawyer-friendly, litigation-safe press release.

In Wordlings in a Web 2.0 World, Lee proposes that “word bytes” are memorable. They’re loaded with meaning and full of colour and life. They build images of subjects and events, ones that come to life and create emotion.

When I read Lee’s high praise for short, cleverly-crafted, meaning dense poetry I can’t help but reflect on the critisism heaped on Twitter by the uninformed and the intellectual alike. Twitter forces the writer to create meaning despite brevity. It is this Zen-like brevity which demands creativity, enforces discipline and has the potential to produce lasting word bytes.

Lee’s article is one that encourages me to write from the heart and to write with passion and soul. It urges me to write with brevity and purpose and to expose my humanity and imperfections.

What is a Journal?
http://www.pcc.edu/library/research/what_journal.html

Distinguishing Scholarly Journals from Other Periodicals
http://copia.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill20.html

What is a refereed journal?
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/lsx/tutorial/section2.html
 

With thanks to Cynthia for providing these links.

Tatum Lytle has produced an excellent article (subscription required for this link, but can also be found here) about the manner in which the US (and one would assume other administrations to have done the same) military has censored and stopped a number of US military personnel from blogging about their experiences in Iraq and other theatres of war. Such a move is hardly surprising. After all there are a number of unique reasons why giving too much information away. Placing too much information in the hands of the enemy can endanger lives and create unnecessary risks. However the military appear to have gone further than simply shutting down blogs that contain too much operational information. The article suggests that there are a number of instances where the rights of the individual of free speech has been violated; and this has often been with the support of the US judicial system.

What Lytle does well is build her case based on a very detailed understanding of the ways soldiers are using blogs and of the way the military and the courts are prosecuting adherence to rules and regulations. What would be of interest is to find out where she comes from in terms of philosophical underpinning. Lytle appears to accept that the US courts are the final umpire and the precedents they set therefore become the final arbiter of the issue. I think Lytle could have helped the issue further by addressing more fundamental issues of humanity and the rights to personal sovereignty. Does the US military, or a any corporation or organisation for that matter, have the right to control the free speech of a human. How does this control come about? These are matters probably not within the scope of Lytle’s article but would make for interesting research nonetheless.

A soldier’s blog: balancing service members’ personal rights vs. national security interests

Lytle, Tatum H. Federal Communications Law Journal • June, 2007

I’ve spent the last 4 hours defining a thesis statement for my final essay. I’ve come up with

“Does the Internet enable new means of creating economic value from information?”

I’m a slow writer, huh?

CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere

Poster claims that there has been more instances of human rights violations committed through the apparatus of US government than has been caused by terrorists. He states that terrorism is used as a propaganda exercise as a way to deflect attention away from the government abuse of a mainly imagined dangerous enemy. Possibilities for new forms of human empowerment are given up in order to retain existing power structures.

Commodification brings the questions of the possibility of democracy through the Internet down to already existing structures that do away with future possibilities. That is to say the interests of content providers and telecommunications companies become paramount rather than opening up possibilities of new forms of governance that might do away with existing structures.

Politics for this modern perspective is then the arduous extraction of an autonomous agent from the contingent obstacles imposed by the past. In its rush to ontologize freedom, the modern view of the subject hides the process of its historical construction.

What the fuck did that last sentence mean? Perhaps I’ll understand by the end of next decade.

The Internet is a decentralised communication system brought together by disparate and conflicting forces that now produce frictionless reproduction and dissemination of information. What will the effects of these be on society, Poster asks.

Wrong question he says. The Net dematerialises communication and transforms the position of the person engaging in the communication. The Internet is what Germany is to Germans – it makes them Germans. Unlike a hammer which doesn’t make people hammers but drives in nails.

Some people use the Internet like a hammer – as simply a way to get things done; to replace other forms of communication such as the post. Is there a new politics on the Internet, he asks. If there is a public sphere on the Internet who populates it and how? What interactions occur on this space that exists only in electrons (my word, not his).

The old public spaces, such as the Agora and the town hall have given away to TV which isolates people. Where then is the public space if television has become the medium of political influence? The public, he argues, has been replaced by publicity.

Quoting other scholars, Poster opines that the public space is everything which is not private. With the conception of private space now being confined to what is said inside the home, this poses problems.

For Poster, the Habermasian view of the public space where real people meet to have real dialogue and come to real consensus cannot stand against the new forms of communication presented through the Internet. The disembodiement of subjects and the manner in which machines play a crucial role in the line of communication poses too many problems for Poster to accept Habermas’ notion.

Poster observes that the Internet has created new forms of decentralised conversation, new collectives of people, new ways to undermine the power of the state, new ways to view property; and yet he notes that theory has not caught up with this development despite society creating this new form of democratic engagement.

“The “magic” of the Internet is that it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, filmmaking, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production.”

Poster believes that the creation of the subject and discourse on the Internet is part of the same dynamic process.

Politics will need to be re-thought to accommodate the disembodiment that occurs on the Internet. A new form of leader will necessarily need to emerge.