Online social networks as activism tools

[eldan]

Last week I went to an interesting event hosted by ONE/Northwest, about the potential usefulness of online social networks to activist groups. Jon Stahl liveblogged the occasion, and his post functions as a handy minutes of the meetingI hadn't really taken the idea seriously before hearing these speakers. I mean, unlike about a third of the

Comments

[eldan]

Firstly, thanks!

I don't think online social networks are as bad an echo chamber as things like blogs or LJ. Of course there is filtering that goes on, but if I'm any guide then a person's facebook contacts are less homogeneous than LJ friends, perhaps in turn because it takes less effort to maintain that connection than to actually read someone's LJ.

There's certainly still some self-sorting, but I'm not sure it matters for purposes of mainstreaming an idea. The necessary contacts for that are not the people who are steadfastly opposed, but those who either aren't sure or don't really care.

[maarten]

Thanks for the discussion and the live blog link, good stuff to hear about and think about.

[eldan]

Glad to be of assistance!

I think it's very much in the spirit of the original event to be writing about and spreading the ideas further - in fact this seems to be ONE/NW's general approach to things, and it makes me like them rather a lot.

[eldan]

Interesting. I'm not familiar with Christopher Buckley, but it sounds like perhaps I ought to be.

[trochee]

I think this is fascinating. So would Shelly, I'm pretty sure -- if she wasn't already there.

I see a similarity between, say, (1) using del.icio.us tag clouds to determine IR-relevance and (2) using Facebook/LinkedIn to expose mass opinion on political matters. In both cases, aggregate data may uncover trends that wouldn't be spearheaded by any one source.

Wikipedia's success in some ways attributable to the power of microdecision -- who would appoint a Pokemon editor in a standard encyclopedia?

[eldan]

Shelly was there, as it happens. It hadn't occurred to me before that evening, but of course it's a tight fit with the work she does.

The idea of exposing mass opinion is interesting, but that's an area where it would become really important to work out how the make-up of a given network is skewed.

Black Swan effect

[anonymous]

Originally, I started writing in line, but my ramblings got so long that I broke it out as a blog post.

I posted my thoughts on my blog: L2ideas.com/blog
http://l2ideas.com/blog/2007/11/black-swan-effect-of-social-networking.asp