Summary and Critique 

Imagination and alignment make contrasting use of participation and reification.  Imagination requires openness; you should be able to open to new interpretation of identities, histories, and reification. So a direction may not be pre-decided. On the other hand, it seems that a direction is often pre-decided for alignment so that a group can concentrate their energy on a common purpose.  However, imagination and alignment can coexist, and a mode can be seen differently depending on a perspective.  For instance, the leaders in 19 century tried to achieve nationalism (alignment) by appealing to imagination of people.  People could not have been able to go to the mode of alignment right away without going through the mode of imagination.  It was because the ideals of leaders were against/beyond their natural communities (i.g. engagement)  so they first needed to get out of their mode they were in through imagination.  While inviduals were in the mode of imagination; however, what drew their imagination was alignment leaders intended.  In other wors, the alignment qualified the space for the imagination.  Wenger also took a ritual as an example where engagement, imagination, and alignment coexist and bolster each other (p 183).  It seems that a leader or a coordinator of alignment should have a deep understanding abouth the phyche and desires of the group she or he tries to influence on.  Without a public acceptance, the leader or the coordinator may not acquire alignment he or she intended (the failure may be good though).

One interesting finding in this chapter is reification plays critical roles in imagination and alignment.  You freely explore reification in the mode of imagination while you carefully coordinate the use of reification for alignment.  I will think about the connection of this concept to the use of real names.

Summary and Critique

The concept of nonparticipation is important because it is inevitable that (1) you become outsiders to some (many) communities of practices, and (2) you come in contact with communities you do not belong to.  However, the consequence of non-participation in a community might be trivial unless you ever want to participate in that community.  Furthermore, participation and non-participation do not necessarily define each other and “merely have distinct effects on our identities” (p165). So in this case, participation and non participation sketch only a fuzzy spectrum for “who you are” and “who you are not.”  The spectrum is fuzzy because belonging to one group does not exclude the possibility of participation in the others in the past, now, or in the future.

However, there are cases in which participation defines non-participation and delineate clear the map of identities: They are races, nationalities, ethnicities, religions, social statuses in hierarchical systems (in a given time), and genders.  Writing them down, I realize that they are the major sources of conflicts in the world.  

Summary and Critique

Minow "explores issues of identity politics not as questions of tactics but instead as clues to collective social experiences in the United States as the twentieth century closes" (p22).

Minow starts her question about identity politics by showing the incidents of casting for Miss Saigon, hiring a professor at a law school, and policies in electoral politics. She tries to demonstrate that it is a challenging problem because choosing one value may mean losing another.  For instance, choosing diversity in academia may mean the loss of academic excellence, and limiting the authority of a theater director for political correctness (e.g. opposition to racial discrimination) may mean the loss of artistic freedom.

Also, there are pitfalls of grouping people according to their races, ethnicities, or sexual orientations because some people may not fall into any group. Nevertheless, Minow says identity politics may be unavoidable especially for those who have been under represented.  "Those who feel continually demeaned and excluded cannot trust calls for neutrally, universally, and the common good." (p. 21).

At the end, Minow seems to persuade readers to consider identity politics in the context of whole society rather than where the problem of under represented race or group is isolated.  It is because an identity is not solely defined in its own right but rather negotiated within the context of the society. So therefore, discussing identity politics of one group without considering the rest of people in the society is meaningless or misleading.  

Her argument nicely fits into feminism discussion.  I once saw that an article about the progress of malism (men’s study) that once had arisen against feminism converged to ideas of feminism.  What malists found was that the arguments of feminists were not about women but about human beings. It is not zero-sum game; on the contrary, men’s happiness is dependent women’s, and women's problems cannot be solved without the consideration of men.

Likewise, Minow seems to argue that the solving the problem of one race means the solving one problem of "our society" not just solving "their problem." Here, her argument points back to Rabbi Hillel's words:  "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?; If I am not for others, what am I?" (p25) .  She tries to convince that considering the issue of a race which you do not belog to "your problem" is not solely out of altruism but rather out of reciprocity; it might be you who will be in that position in the future.

Application

 Summary and Critique

Burkhalter’s article “Reading race online” was very surprising to me because I thought using pseudonyms were beneficial in that it would eliminate preconceptions and prejudices from the offline regarding races, genders, and ethnicities, but his study revealed it is not the case.  As I studied “real names” as identifiers, I felt that using real names might abolish “blinding” effect that could lead to nourishing environments for bridging (especially if members have chance to see other members offline later as Brian mentioned in class) – in Burkhalter’s term, “ambiguous social spaces” (p 62).

However, Burkhalter argued that racial identification does not lack online even though participants cannot see each other’s physical appearances. Furthermore, the experiences online rarely weakens one’s preconceptions toward races; on the contrary, participants often reinforce their points of views mainly because the lack of the physical appearances.  More specifically, an author’s racial identity is negotiated by readers’ interpretation of the author’s posts and the claim about his or her racial identity.  In other words, an author’s claim about his or her racial identification is not taken literally especially when the author acts differently from the racial stereotype readers have.  

When a reader faces the discrepancy between an author’s racial identification and the reader’s expectation toward the race, the reader tries to resolve the discrepancy by the followings:
1) The reader thinks that the author is dishonest about the racial identification or
2) The reader considers the author the anomaly of the race or
3) The reader gathers additional information (additional variable) that fills the gap without altering his or her preconception.

 In sum, Burkhalter’s study shows that online environments are not free from racial prejudices and preconceptions.  

Application

I’ve become to wonder whether using real names makes the differences in terms of changing preconceptions. One’s name often reveals his or her nationality and gender (even sometimes ethnicity). If you know that they are real names, and if you observe many “anomalies” of a particular group then you might accept that they are not anomalies after all.  You might alter your stereotypes towards those identifications for good.

Connections and Critique 

It seems Cummings et al.’s study gave an opposite conclusion to the McKenna’s study in that Cummings et al.’s study showed that relationships built online were not as stable and not as valuable as those offline. However, there is almost exactly same finding from both studies: if two persons meet in person then that couple is likely to have closer relationships than two persons who communicate only via emails (Cummings et al. p 104 Figure 2; McKenna et al. p19).  I think it is obvious, but it is nice to see two studies actually supported the intuition.
 
I found one of Cummings et al. study results particularly interesting: Frequency of communication is a positive predictor of close relationships offline, but it is not the case for the relationships online. They are mildly negatively correlated (-0.08).  Why is that?  My intuition tells me that you communicate more with someone you feel close and you like than someone you don’t even they are cyber-space friends...

Critique 

Overall, McKenna study sounds quite convincing to me (intuitively), and especially the darkened room experiment by George et al. (p24) seems to nicely support McKenna’s study assumptions about the relationships between “Real Me” and “Gates” and the ease of forming relationship online.

However, besides Jesse's  and Matt’s criticisms, I have questions regarding an assumption and reference in the study.

From Study 3, I would like to see whether receiving any kind of a message from someone itself evokes the feeling of liking.  I once heard that if you meet someone while playing sports, there is more chance you fall in love with her/him because your heart rate is much higher than normal, and your brain takes it as the signal of love.   Likewise, one might automatically link getting any kind of a message to the signal of liking or attraction by the sender.  My understanding is when you ask the phone number of someone, you express your attraction to him or her if it is not a work place.  I guess communicating with someone might have broken down the mental guards of the subjects regardless whether they revealed their Real Mes or not.   

The other question I have is about the Kraut et al. study (p29).   Their study shows that people who were more active online had also healthier relationships in their real life.  However, I believe that it will be much more meaningful if a study can show how one person’s social life has changed after she or he uses Internet a lot.   In other words, it might be the case that only 10 people’s social lives in the real world might have improved after extensive use of the Internet, and the remaining 90 people’s social lives might have become worse.  However, overall, all the subjects might have still had time for their families.   I thought about this possibility because as mentioned many times by many people, time is very limited for the most people. I am not quite convinced that the extensive use of Internet does not badly affect an individual's time with his/her family members.

Application

It seems if real names are used as user IDs in an online community, the community cannot have the "darkened room" effect anymore; therefore some people will not be able to reveal their Real Mes.  The use of real names is a powerful measure for the protection of a community; however it seems that designers should be extra cautious to use real names.   

In addition to Yong-mi’s key concepts (after reading other posts-- mine is addition to Ayca's as well): social capital is maximized when “generalized reciprocity” is the norm in the society.  The generalized reciprocity increases social capital within a given social network because one can rely on reciprocal donation from any members of the society without being confined to one-to-one reciprocal relationship.  This Golden Rule of generalized reciprocity will increase the trustworthiness and efficiency of the society.  

Individuals in a well connected society benefit more by the same of amount of the effort for generating social capital than people in a less connected society.  It is because well-connected society is more transparent, and therefore reputation spreads with more ease. In other words, members in a well-connected society have more incentives for better behavior than those in less connected societies.   

Reed seemed to predict the future trend on the Internet well—I am not sure whether this paper has affected the trend.   Even though I have not confirmed that whether his calculation was accurate, he made two important points: (1) he implied that trust would turn potential association or connectivity into real one, and (2) the group forming ability would add enormous value to the network on Internet.   I could easily agree with his argument that the substantially greater values will be generated as groups can be formed within a crowd than when they can not.  The argument that a potential for association and connectivity add values sounds intuitively persuasive.   My experiences tell me that new chemistry (value) is composed (1) when a distinct set of people forms a group for an existing task or (2) when a distinc set of people forms a group for a distinct purpose or (3) when an exisiting group forms another group for a distinct purpose.   A sub-grouping and merging two groups can be classified into either (1) or (2).  In addition, as there is less restriction to how a user or group is able to communicate/collaborate with others, the system should have more value because a user or a group will be able to choose the most efficient or pleasant mean.  

 Connection and Application

Schunk concluded that most theories of self-regulation emphasized its inherent link with goals. A big assumption here is that initially people have made a commitment to attain a goal. Without such commitment, there is no ground for people to be affected by their performance to attain the goal.

Ling et al. seemed to try to find out how to encourage people to make such commitment.  If I consider myself, the collective effort model should work in online communities.  As I have more confidence about my knowledge/feeling about “I like people in the communities (similarities)” and “I know how I can contribute (uniqueness)” then I would contribute more to the communities.  The main hindrance would be the conflictions among my multiple goals: for instance, I have to spend certain amount of time studying, and I want to contribute to the community. The reason that two goals conflict is that it takes time to learn my competence and uniqueness in the community.  In some communities, I might be ending up lurkers because I cannot spend enough time to learn my uniqueness (my unique competence) in those communities.  In some communities, it might be very difficult to know my uniqueness even after significant time investment in the communities (e.g. MovieLens).  Of course, I might eventually find out that I don’t like people there to make contribution.  

The online community designers might resolve the conflictions among my multiple goals by providing what is my uniqueness or uniqueness of the group I belong to in the community as Ling et al did in their study.  It does not have to be that explicit or individual. The community designers can make use of events of boosting participations.  For instance, MovieLens can announce an event of increasing ratings of independence films for a year with a reason: those lack ratings, and therefore good predictions cannot be made for them, and there are increasing popularity of those films. They might be able to provide month or week calendars which have sub-genres each month or week focuses.  And movie manias for each genre get to know their uniqueness without individual notice.  I guess that way participants have less physiological reactance or their intrinsic motivations are hurt less.  The community might benefit from goal properties such as specificity and proximity as well as the collective effort model.