started by showing videos of folks interviewed about online social networks and tools

On the Culture of Participation - Michael Stephens

talked about The Cluetrain Manifesto and quoted some of the theses
showed the "Not-so-secret shopper" story about Kohl's
noted "Wikinomics" book
social = finding people like you
showed his tag cloud

what Michael uses:
- Facebook to connect with students
- shares books he reads on LibraryThing
- Flickr pictures
- last.fm songstream

Howard Rheingold

remembers when he was kicked out of a library for the first time (8-years old)
cyberspace is social
it's really not new that people communicate with each other online
had been typing in a room alone for ten years *until* he got online
has given this talk twice in Second Life while at home in his jammies
when his daughter was in middle school, noticed two things
first phenomenon: a new kind of critical reading skill is necessary in the era of the search engine

how the internet changed the authority of text
the locus of responsibility for determining the accuracy of text was no longer up to the publisher but to everybody
meant his daughter had to start asking questions about the author of text she was finding
he quickly discovered that school administrators regard critical thinking is viewed as something incites children to question authority
what kids need is diverging from kids' school learning
right now, new media literacy learning is taking place outside of schools and after school
schools are going to remain places where parents can put their kids while they're at work and that will continue to train 19th century industrial workers

second phenomenon: the big fuss about porn on the internet
talked about Childrens Online Protection Act and restricting what adults can say (on messy topics) just because children might view it (even though it's the kind of discussion the Constitution protects)
the answer now is the same as it was then - someone needs to educate kids about the necessity for critical thinking and their own knowledge about how to make moral choices
- the teachable skill is how to make decisions based on whatever moral values your parents teach you
these needs connect today's kids together

we teach our kids to deal with the dangers of the world ("look both ways before you cross the street")
knowing that your parents don't care is more damaging
have to teach them to develop a public voice about issues they care about - could be the most important citizenship skill we can teach them today

those that can afford it are taking to the web and social sites
price of entry is dropping rapidly, but who can have access because of price is still a digital divide
user- and youth-created content was punctuated by Google's purchase of YouTube

a significant number of texters, bloggers, and social networkers are having a major impact
- texters tipped an election in Spain
- mostly young readers and writers of a Korean website started a text campaign when exit polls showed their candidate was losing

notion of public voice and learning how to have one
news story about 15,000-20,000 students in L.A. who used MySpace to organize a walkout to join the immigration protests
cited Pew report on social networks
kids are no longer passive media consumers
internet is a feature of their lives that has always been there like water and electricity, rather than it being transformative
they learn by clicking around and just messing with it and then they teach each other (rather than reading the manual)

they need some guidance for how to be citizens
the internet isn't going to change how they view politics and political participation
participatory media, though, could help with this
none of those kids joined MySpace thinking they would become participants in political protests

making connections between the literacies kids pick up just by being young in the beginning of the 21st century is a good role for librarians today
his experience is that "voice" can be called upon to connect their identity formation with their potential engagement with their civic participation
moving from a private to a public voice can help students turn their self-expression into a form of public participation
public voice is learnable, engaging with an active public, rather than just broadcasting to an anonymous group
when public opinion has the power and freedom to affect policy, it can be an essential instrument of democratic self governance
getting what you want in democracy has a lot to do with connecting with others who want the same thing
to keep civic life healthy, we need to pay attention to how we - and our kids - are using new media
participatory culture could give them positive experiences that draw them into civic engagement
enables collective action

we've always been social networkers
what has changed is how far we can connect now
we now have capabilities to do what humans do best - amplify connections
shift in the way our culture operates (as described by Henry Jenkins)
- innovative, convergence, networked, global, generational, unequal
quoted from Jenkins' report for the MacArthur Foundation for what kids need
the new literacies are almost all social skills
- research, technical, analysis, etc.

has been experimenting with having students blog persuasive writing
extending participatory media literacy at http://www.socialtext.net/medialiteracy

if print literacies that sprang up when print affected the Reformation, etc., media literacies might shape the 21st century life
seeing how the institutions of libraries are going to help us teach civic engagement and citizenship may be the highest calling for librarians

question: question about generations
answer: speed of Gutenberg's impact was revolutionary; it took a century for the first newspaper to appear; things are moving much more quickly today

question: what are the top two things he'd ask librarians to do and to stop doing?
answer: tremendous opportunity to listen - what do those kids care about? from there, you can show them how they can use your library, RSS, etc. about what they care about and then they can use new media to advocate; DOPA is dead and it didn't become law - you don't have to do what they were going to tell you to do
question: how can I teach digital literacy skills when my library blocks sites like MySpace?
answer: your library doesn't have to block social sites because it didn't become law; why pre-empt what you should be doing because of a law that might be passed?

danah boyd

wants to talk about why social network sites can become so powerful for American youth
teenagers a hundred years ago were already working by the time they were 14-years old; weren't called "teenagers" - were called "young adults"
gave some history of labor unions and age segregation as related to young adults - these things gave us a demographic
1941 - literature starts talking about demographics

kids want a place where they can goof around and hang out, which is a way you figure out who you are, get some validation
where did you learn what the social behaviors are?
two populations who have an interest in what is going on:
1- those who hold power over them: bosses, parents, etc.
2- marketers

complicated tension going on
social life has changed dramatically
try to keep kids safe inside
then MySpace hit
the history of how it grew is interesting
"if you're not on myspace, you don't exist"
(also true of mobile phones everywhere except the U.S., soon here, too)
2002 - Friendster launched when creator gave it to his friends; three groups were early adopters
- almost all social technologies start with three groups: geeks (kind of like bloggers), freaks (BurningMan), and queers (mostly gay men living in NY; the only group to use Friendster for its intended purpose - dating)
Friendster didn't like any of these groups, so they started killing off profiles
Fakester
MySpace launched August 2003 with expressed purpose of being a better Friendster; just waited to see what would happen
one founder was into music, so he invited musicians to join; folks started using MS for music, which has a big teenage audience; worked its way down through siblings

world built on potential relationships
talked about:
- profiles
- friends (not necessarily accurate because of consequences at school)
- comments (what's powerful isn't the conversation but the signal that they know each other and it's being witnessed)

in myspace, have to decide who your bestest friends are

- persistence
- searchability
- replicability
- invisible audiences

teenagers today have a level of control over their lives that we don't remember and don't have (public versus private)

in the U.S., mobile has been introduced to kids as a leash
in the rest of the world, it's communication and socialization has grown around it
are we prepared for location technologies? are we ready to teach teenagers about this? not just safety, but what interactions you might find valuable

question:
answer: wealthy kids with access at home are using it to reach out to others beyond their schools; everyone else has been written out of this phenomenon entirely; rural kids are least likely to have access to these things; the first thing kids do when they are looking at a college is email someone in their social network who goes there to ask them about it; kids line up at the Apple store to get on MySpace

Marc Smith

presenting these phenomena from a sociological point of view
digital patterns left behind in social interactions - at high tide, they stick around (if you have a good backup policy)

would add capacity of "aggregatable" and "analyzability" to danah's list
what we are now in a position to do is gather all of those footprints/traces in computational media being left behind

scaffolds for collective action on the internet:
- they are widespread, popular, fertile (new ones pop out at a regular rate)
* email, email lists
* chat, buddy lists/instant messenger
* usenet, web boards, forums
* ebay
* blogs, wikis
* muds, moos
* graphical worlds, mmorpgs
* napster, kazaa, gnutella, bittorrent
* folksonomies

Mobile Social Software = MoSoSo (everything on the internet is now in your pocket) - it's a "thing" that has sensors

a good test of whether something is social is if you are wasting your time using it if you are the only person (Word versus Ebay)

annotation of everything is upon us, especially attaching it to other notes or locations
implicit annotation, too - you stood there for awhile; these things will be noticed about you by something else

information foraging in the patterns that are left behind

social network systems are novel in that they make ties durable and more visible
ties are authored by more granular actions (not just "reply"), i.e. making an item a favorite or simply viewing an object

the "we are all authors now" phenomenon
"pervasive inscription revolution"
there are as many people alive right now as have been alive in total before us
each of us would leave behind 3.5 terabytes behind

have to leverage all of the information that comes into us
we even have the insight into ourselves that others have
SNARF tool for Outlook email - "Social Network And Relationship Finder" - sorts your mail by strength of relationship with each sender, which it learns from watching your behavior

key transformation is coming - everything we've seen is prelude
*mobile social networks*
temple of information is now part of every place, take it with you

"interaction order" - realm of co-present interaction
spotme.com
nTAG People Network
AURA - allows your barcode-reading system on Windows Mobile phones to find information about objects by you scanning barcodes

slam = group-based communication; sharing pictures and your location with your friends

libraries are not the same as librarians
dead trees might not be the future, but information guides will be as important as ever
internet is causing an amateurization of information guides, so the challenge is for librarians to figure out how to move to higher ground
what advantage/guidance can you offer?

"accelerate or rendezvous with regret"
inevitable technology
what we have choices about is how we domesticate this force
what kinds of control do I have after I make the mistake of exposing something I shouldn't have?
the idea that there will be no privacy issues is impossible; the walls have melted away; there are people in this room that are not in this room
the social physics of the interaction order are in flux

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software generator of the tag cloud they used for this session will be available for free at oclc.org soon

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