A viewpoint/lit review from Barry Wellman of the University of Toronto (social networking guru). Argues that the move from a group-based to a network-based social interaction model necessitates the use of social network concepts and tools in studying the Internet. At "the intersection of computer networks [and] ...networked society," Professor Wellman examines two new areas:

• "Community networks on- and offline"
• "Knowledge access"

Wellman’s point here is that social networks are more permeable, loosely connected, and topically dynamic than groups. Further, social networks are less hierarchical than groups, focusing more on a flat and broad connection between people instead of one based on seniority. It is a subtle disctinction, but I think I can see it. Groups are a private affair, while social networks are public and inclusive and (hopefully) welcoming. This made more sense after I read Oldenberg and started to think about the romantic notion of the neighborhood watering hole in which business man and postal worker come together to chat and drink and argue.

Wellman focuses significantly on how social networks affect people’s actions and exposure to ideas. Online social networks can either bring people closer together that share the same beliefs (thus limiting their exposure to new ideas) or can help people come in contact with more disperse views. Some people become depressed or secluded from heavy involvement in online community, while others become more involved in real-time community. The author agrees with Preece that online communities tie together the past and present by allowing us to maintain ties with our past connections as well as build new connections. The example of Netville is given as possibly a way to qualify Preece’s claim that online community should enhance social values—Netville members used the online space to collaborate on social issues in their physical neighborhood.

Further, online communication may displace other communication methods like telephone, but may also just supplement. My opinion is that online communication is just one of many options available, and that as people become more familiar with it, they begin to realize that it is better at some communication situations than other methods. For instance, if I want my mom to pass along the Schlotzhauer family secret bread recipe, I’d rather email and as for it than call and have to write down every detail in real-time. It doesn’t mean that I have stopped using the phone altogether, just that my communication methods have matured.

The author discusses advancement in information sharing through online communities, something that could not happen through merely online groups. By understanding “who knows what” and who the friends of your friends are, you can gain access to information previously unavailable. How do people find this out? The author mentions research in ways this is being understood through more classic groupware studies that harness technology to show who is in a room or to visualize conversations between groups. A modern problem is how to keep track of who knows what and who knows who; this is too much information for individuals to monitor, and difficult to find out simply by asking everyone. Again, technology can serve as an intermediary by keeping track of this network of people and information.

Critique and Connection
Wellman seems to draw a bit further upon Preece’s notion of online community as a valuable force in real-life community, using the example of Netville residents teaming together to mobilize against real estate development and to socialize in person. This helped me understand what Preece meant about online communities being able to influence their real worlds, but still left me feeling a bit concerned about the practicality and feasibility.

In my humble view, such activities would only happen within a neighborhood of social activists regardless of the presence of an online community; in other words, I don’t necessarily think that the online community of Netville did anything that the physical neighborhood wouldn’t have accomplished on its own, because the residents were probably already socially-minded enough to care about such issues prior to the introduction of the online community. My concern, therefore, is whether Wellman’s claim is going to hurt the future of ecommunity research by pushing people to believe that people can be changed, motivated, and empowered by online social networks more than is really possible.

Wellman argues in "Computer Networks as Social Networks" that because computers and computer use has move from solitary units and people to networks that first support groups (groupware) but eventually support social networks.

Wellman cites a few studies that show increased social networking online correlates with increased social networking in "real life" but that this leads to larger and larger groups of possible contacts. Wellman says that this creates issues with seeking knowledge because you quickyl become unable to "walk the hallways" and meet your social group.

Further, as the social networks are leveled and connection to anyone is your social network is made equally easy, how do you give precedence to contacts who, it the real world are, would deserve more attention?

This has been a major problem in my life lately. Sometimes I find it totally impossible to get work done give the barrage of emails, IMs, phone calls, and people stopping by. Just on the facebook, I'm connected to 7561. If I included all the people I've worked with at my job (where I employed 80 students each summer) and their connections, I would probably top out around 12,000 or so.

(BTW - head to facebook and add me as a friend!)

The relationship between between a group versus a network resembles that between an organization and a market in Simon's "Economic Rationality" chapter. (This parallel is probably very well-understood, but that book is where I came across it. I have no training in economics, so please excuse me if the following is way out in the weeds.)

Contrasting schemes

One of the things that Simon had to say about organizations and markets is that, as contrasting schemes for coordination, they act in concert: e.g. many actors in a given marketplace are going to be organizations which do not rely on internal marketplaces to keep themselves in working order.

Wellman: How do people work together in large, sprawling, networked organizations where they are simultaneously members of multiple, transitory, physically dispersed teams?

Within such a situation, some of an individual's connections are going to networked; others are going to be part of other kinds of group membership (physical proximity being the obvious example). How do these different kinds of connections interact?

In his entry, Trek alludes to the difficulty of distinguishing between connections of these types (and preferring "real" connections). This is an example of a situation wherein the group/network distinction is helpful.

Knowledge

One of the pluses of a market is that buyers and sellers don't really need a bunch of knowledge to clear the market. The system is supposed to be able to be smarter than its individual actors; also implying that participation in an organization is more complex than than participation in a market. To what extent does this distinction hold for group connections vs. networked connections?

Wellman looks at 'two developing areas' of the emerging network society: community networks and knowledge access.

Community networks are partial, in that people can 'cycle through different ones involving different people.' And they ramify through space, not being dependent on physical proximity. But he also notes that, while internet contact has had a great effect on long-distance contact (both family and friend), the highest rates of contact occur among people who live relatively close (within 50 miles). Online communication is a supplement to other forms of contact (telephone, F2F, etc.).

He also notes that fledgling internet users tend to experience a difficult six-month period in which they feel depressed and alienated. If they stick with it, however, these feelings give way to online contacts and membership in communities which will 'dispel' these feelings.

In his discussion of knowledge access, Wellman notes that organization theory is being rewritten as people try to find ways to use trusted relationships to find reliable information in networked communities.  The challenge is to establish contacts behind the first degree of separation, to find out what friends of friends know.

Critique

I shared lrickard's doubt that the rise of networked communities flattens traditional hierarchies, but Jina's reading of Wellman seems persuasive on that point. I was glad for her reading that Wellman is really talking about information flow, because my (admittedly anecdotal) impression is that corporations with traditional hierarchies remain far more common in America than the cubicle-free, open environments that tend to dominate SI discussions of the private sector.

Wellman's discussion of the six-month ordeal faced by internet newbies suggests that online communities who can find ways to reach out to these beginners might find them to be more grateful--and then loyal--than community designers realize.

Online communication as a supplement to RL contact is less surprising, but it nicely emphasizes the fluidity with which people can move between the two worlds.   

Wellman's discussion of the difference between groups and networks echoes Preece to some degree. One could possibly go farther than both of them by pointing out that not only do online communities bypass physical proximity, they may also flatten demographic distinctions (within limits), such as age or status.  Given one of Kim's 'topical' or 'activity-based' communities, this relative removal of demography may encourage knowledge access by lessening, at least somewhat, assumptions people may make about one another were they meeting in RL (for example, a shy but gifted carpenter).

According to Wellman (2001), community was once synonymous with densely knit, bounded neighborhood groups. This seems to correspond with Oldenburg's idea of community or "third place." The concept of community now has been expanded, and is seen as "a less bounded social network of relationships that provide sociability support, information, and a sense of belonging" (p. 2031)

Wellman reviews a number of studies and provides a good listing of Internet studies of community, such as the Pew Internet and American Life project. I agree with his critique of the debate on online communities being Manichean. His own study has shown that online communities can complement or extend physical communities.
The general impression I have of the studies he cites and this week's readings is that not enough fine-grained distinctions are being made, from people's behavioral and task standpoints. That is, online communities are still being studied too broadly. What people actually do and why deserves more study and construction of theoretical frameworks.

In closing, a quote from ”The Computer as a Communication
Device” by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor (1968): “life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.”

Wellman emphasizes that computer networks are inherently social in that they connect people and knowledge. He notes that HCI has evolved from an individual unit (person-computer relationship) to a group level (groupware, small group interaction), and finally to a social level that deals with people and knowledge linked by computer networks.

In his presentation about community networks online and offline, he seems to assume that community online and offline competes with each other. He notes the effect of the Internet on social interaction in terms of whether the Internet increases or decreases social capital. Here my position is neutral. I think that computer-mediated communication is not a substitute for face-to-face communication and does not compete with it. Rather, the Internet is another medium that supplements people’s communication just like a telephone. Nobody says that a phone decreases people’s engagement in real social interaction (extreme analogy, admittedly). As the Internet becomes neutralized and permeates one’s everyday life, it should be considered an aid for communities, not a destroyer.

He also notes the importance and difficulty of knowledge seeking in a networked society. It seems that he focuses on a network community as an information repository in which knowledge is distributed throughout people connected each other. Similar to his argument, I believe that the transition from a group-based to a networked society is expected and that it causes several problems in organizing and retrieving distributed knowledge. However, once it is addressed, it seems to be a huge information repository that benefits not only from strong ties but from weak ties.

Going along with Brian’s connection that

group: network :: organization : market

and Preece’s mention (citing Steve Jones) that the Web is a market-driven social space where “business dictates and shapes social interaction”, I’d like to draw another comparison. Wellman talks about the pressing need to prioritize communication amidst all of the noise and the important work being done “to establish rules for prioritizing computer-mediated contact, both deductively setting a priori rules and inductively watching which messages a person takes first” (emphasis mine), much like a planned versus unplanned economy.

I’m no economist either, but I appreciate the complex interplay between economics, politics and culture, and I am certain these factors play out in the virtual, just as much as in the physical, world. The thing I’d be interested in further exploring then, is the similarities and differences between online and offline cultures and economic systems. (I’m using ‘economy’ in a loose sense here, to encompass much more than the ‘capitalist / communist dichotomy’). Furthermore, I’d like to probe what implications these similarities and differences would have for knowledge access—for finding knowledge in a networked society.

If the design and evaluation of computer-mediated communication, and by relation of online communities, is truly a Simonian science of the artificial, then aren’t hierarchical levels all the more important (as units of analysis) rather than things which are quickly becoming obsolete as Wellman seems to suggest? Or am I misreading Simon with my limited, 504-based understanding?

[Description]
Wellman asserts that computer networks are facilitating connections between people and groups in ways that illustrate the "inherently social" nature of the technology.

Wellman discusses two ways in which the social nature of networking technology impacts the way people use computer technologies. First, he looks at community networks both online and off. Wellman delineates several forms of the debate as to whether the internet has enriched or damaged the notion of community. I plan to try to remember these four forms on p. 2032, as I think they're excellent descriptions of pitfalls to avoid when thinking about how the internet changes human behavior.

Wellman also devotes a section of his discussion to how networked technologies impact knowledge discovery and sharing. Some standard CSCW challenges are discussed: awareness, discovery, social loafing, and trust are all significant barriers to knowledge sharing on- and offline. Wellman cites a need to "prioritize communication" in the networked environment (p. 2034), in other words, research how people react to the wealth of information networked resources provide them. What is most important? How can Wellman's "inherently social" technologies anticipate users' priorities and lead to more effective knowledge discovery and sharing?

[Critique]
I liked Wellman's insistence that researchers think about computer networks as social institutions in and of themselves. It helps us break away from the notion that these networks are isolated, one-way modes of interaction. Rather, they are integrated heavily into our lives and thus demand us to think of computer networks as social institutions.

The distinction between "netware" and "groupware" was lost on me. Perhaps this is because I have a fairly good idea of what groupware is, but Wellman's semantic disctinction didn't provide me with any broader conception of "groupware."

According to Wellman, computer networks are inherently social networks since they link people, organizations, and knowledge. The advent and expansion of emails and Internet has made HCI socialized and requested to deal with the following questions: how two people relate to each other online, how small groups interact, and how large unbounded systems operate. Wellman suggests two issues that the interaction of computer networks with the emerging networked societies has shaped: first, community networks on- and offline worlds, and second, knowledge access in a networked society.  The first subject has invoked many controversies on whether online communities are the real communities, and whether the Internet has transformed the definition of communities. Wellman uses some survey results to support the claim that spending more time on online communities does not harm the life in the real world. The survey says that people who are frequently on line also participate more in their offline communities. However, I think there are some faults in this argument.  To make the argument persuasive, the study should have shown how one individual changes his or her behaviors after he or she spends more time on online communities not the correlation between the collection of time spent on online and the collection of time spent on offline community activities.  My guess is the time an individual is willing to spend for leisure is fixed. So as a person spends more time on online activities, he or she has less time for the other things including community participation.  I want to see the how the activities of an individual in online communities affect his or her offline world. Wellman also discusses how to locate retrieve the information by social network analysis. He also suggests the fast advance of Internet requests development of social networks concepts and invention of tools to deal with the coming challenges.

Wellman’s article argues that the mere existence of computer networks is social networks. He makes several very strong statements about how hardware is the foundation of social networks.

I disagree with his arguments due to the following points:

1. A computer can be fully connected to the internet without creating social capital. For example an office computer that uses basic word processing but is connected to the internet so it can get virus definitions updates.
2. There needs to exist an online community that follow Preece’s points to create social capital.
3. Arguing from a technology point of view, a network of computers can be meaningful with automated tasks. However, the network needs varied inputs (user interaction) in order to create added value.

Basically, you cannot just network a bunch of computers together and expect a social community to form. There has to be social value and meaning.

This article can be used to ponder about the technological aspects of hardware can impact an online community. For example, perhaps the stability / bandwidth of one web mail client over another will cause it to have a more developed community than the unstable web mail server.