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I've been going through more internet-psychology-research papers and I'm starting to see a pattern. They have the notion of people bringing their cultural backgrounds and demographics into the internet. They lack, or almost entirely lack, the concept of internet culture as a separate entity.
For example:
Bloggers are typically cautious about engaging in self-disclosure because of concerns that what they post may have negative consequences. This article examines the relationship between anonymity (both visual and discursive) and self-disclosure on weblogs through an online survey. The results suggest that increased visual anonymity is not associated with greater self-disclosure, and the findings about the role of discursive anonymity are mixed. Bloggers whose target audience does not include people they know offline report a higher degree of anonymity than those whose audience does. Future studies need to explore the reasons why bloggers visually and discursively identify themselves in particular ways.
It's framed in the context of a person residing in a vacuum, talking to a faceless, unresponsive entity. On blogs with the commenting off, yes, I suppose this is how it works, but I've never understood the point of those anyway, they're newspaper columns pasted onto the internet and not really the same thing.
This is probably a symptom of not spending enough time steeped in the internet community on a casual, social basis as opposed to a mostly research basis. The vast majority of the peopleworking on this sort of thing didn't grow up intimately tied to the internet, although the number's growing. They lack the perspective of the internet-as-world, the internet as a collective rather than a series of tubes through which messages are passed back and forth devoid of context or the forming of bonds between individuals.
Now, I don't think the researchers are actually seeing internet actions as isolated, but that's the mindset that seems to be there. It's like...I don't really know what it is like, I think that's really the problem. It's not something we've had a precedent for.
Por ejemplo, there's a lot of studying the internet regarding a specific demographic--Muslims, Koreans, teenagers, people with depression, etc. While this is a reasonable and noble research task it doesn't really gain the whole picture. IRL people of the same cultural background and age group tend to hang out together, the internet a little less so. There's people on my flist as old as my parents, people from different countries, people with different gender identities and sexual preferences, people whose religious or political beliefs are far different from mine, and I should probably stop with the diversity before that little "the more you know" star comes charging at my head.
(I would like to note at this point I went to look up the origins of the "the more you know" star and spent fifteen minutes wandering Wikipedia before I got back here)
Point is, we can't assume this is just a wider scale version of people sending letters back and forth to each other. That way lies inaccurate information and cat macros. The evolution of cultures and subcultures, the construction of social roles and unwritten rules in ways unthinkable IRL because it's just not a medium where that would work, the maintenance of group unity and dissident chastisement, the spread of information at a ludicrous speed...it's there, it's just that you don't see it. It's like looking at a bunch of wandering ants and assuming each is acting alone rather than realizing they're all a unified group with a specific structure to their behaviors. Which I guess makes sockpuppets Myrmarachne.
There are some people who actually seem to get it, but the number is so small as to mildly irritate me every time I try to dig into a pile of papers on the subject. It's not that they're incompetent or lazy, it's just that no one's gotten their heads around the concept yet.
And if I weren't trying to get my PhD in it, I might actually see it as a bad thing. ^_^
For example:
Bloggers are typically cautious about engaging in self-disclosure because of concerns that what they post may have negative consequences. This article examines the relationship between anonymity (both visual and discursive) and self-disclosure on weblogs through an online survey. The results suggest that increased visual anonymity is not associated with greater self-disclosure, and the findings about the role of discursive anonymity are mixed. Bloggers whose target audience does not include people they know offline report a higher degree of anonymity than those whose audience does. Future studies need to explore the reasons why bloggers visually and discursively identify themselves in particular ways.
It's framed in the context of a person residing in a vacuum, talking to a faceless, unresponsive entity. On blogs with the commenting off, yes, I suppose this is how it works, but I've never understood the point of those anyway, they're newspaper columns pasted onto the internet and not really the same thing.
This is probably a symptom of not spending enough time steeped in the internet community on a casual, social basis as opposed to a mostly research basis. The vast majority of the peopleworking on this sort of thing didn't grow up intimately tied to the internet, although the number's growing. They lack the perspective of the internet-as-world, the internet as a collective rather than a series of tubes through which messages are passed back and forth devoid of context or the forming of bonds between individuals.
Now, I don't think the researchers are actually seeing internet actions as isolated, but that's the mindset that seems to be there. It's like...I don't really know what it is like, I think that's really the problem. It's not something we've had a precedent for.
Por ejemplo, there's a lot of studying the internet regarding a specific demographic--Muslims, Koreans, teenagers, people with depression, etc. While this is a reasonable and noble research task it doesn't really gain the whole picture. IRL people of the same cultural background and age group tend to hang out together, the internet a little less so. There's people on my flist as old as my parents, people from different countries, people with different gender identities and sexual preferences, people whose religious or political beliefs are far different from mine, and I should probably stop with the diversity before that little "the more you know" star comes charging at my head.
(I would like to note at this point I went to look up the origins of the "the more you know" star and spent fifteen minutes wandering Wikipedia before I got back here)
Point is, we can't assume this is just a wider scale version of people sending letters back and forth to each other. That way lies inaccurate information and cat macros. The evolution of cultures and subcultures, the construction of social roles and unwritten rules in ways unthinkable IRL because it's just not a medium where that would work, the maintenance of group unity and dissident chastisement, the spread of information at a ludicrous speed...it's there, it's just that you don't see it. It's like looking at a bunch of wandering ants and assuming each is acting alone rather than realizing they're all a unified group with a specific structure to their behaviors. Which I guess makes sockpuppets Myrmarachne.
There are some people who actually seem to get it, but the number is so small as to mildly irritate me every time I try to dig into a pile of papers on the subject. It's not that they're incompetent or lazy, it's just that no one's gotten their heads around the concept yet.
And if I weren't trying to get my PhD in it, I might actually see it as a bad thing. ^_^
