Facebook 2010: The Saga Continues

Facebook, the social networking prodigy, is growing at an astounding rate. Far from just a fad, Facebook is proving that it is here, and here to stay. However, not without internal changes and external criticisms. Take a look inside the social service's biggest year yet.


Flowtown - Social Media Marketing Application

Mashable: 10 Predictions for the News Media in 2011

In many ways, 2010 was finally the year of mobile for news media, and especially so if you consider the iPad a mobile device. Many news organizations like The Washington Post and CNN included heavy social media integrations into their apps, opening the devices beyond news consumption.

In 2011, the focus on mobile will continue to grow with the launch of mobile- and iPad-only news products, but the greater focus for news media in 2011 will be on re-imagining its approach to the open social web. The focus will shift from searchable news to social and share-able news, as social media referrals close the gap on search traffic for more news organizations. In the coming year, news media's focus will be affected by the personalization of news consumption and social media's influence on journalism.

Read more on Mashable.

Task 14: Final reflections

The course of New Interactive Environments (NIE) is coming to an end and here are my reflections on the last couple of months.

Before I go on with my personal experience, observations and suggestions, I'd like to say that it actually depends very much on whether the course was supposed to be rather theoretical or more practical. Without a doubt, Terje and Sebastian provided us with adequate reading materials and useful theories. If the meaning of the term 'interactivity' was somewhat blurred to some us before, then it should be quite clear now. I enjoyed searching for my own understanding of interactivity, one of the "apply theory in practice" kind of tasks.

So, half of the purpose of the course was well achieved. Before analyzing or using any interactive environments, it is necessary to understand what interactivity is, how it can be measured and what difference it makes to us in the world of digitally mediated interaction. However, I feel we didn't take full advantage of the possibilities to make the course itself interactive, and this is not brickbat on the facilitators' address only. I remember Terje and Sebastian tried to squeeze out some activity from us, participants, during the first and the second Flashmeeting session, but what do you do with these reserved and buttoned-up Estonians, right?

Anyway, although there seemed to be a certain reason why the organization of the course remained rather secretive, I personally would have preferred to know the topics we were going to learn in advance, in a well set out course layout. I believe this would have made the learning process more effective. Referring to the same Flashmeeting session where we tried to simultaneously write things down in Piratepad, it would have worked out better if we had been given a more concrete task, or would have known the destination we were moving to. Only later (with Task 11) it probably made more sense what we were doing back then. Talking about the communication tools, I found Skype very practical in another course where we had a weekly Wednesday night group chat. It's better to follow, the chat history is saved and can be read afterwards even if you can't be present during the chat but are in the group. Flashmeeting kept logging me off, especially when we used Piratepad at the same time.

I'd like to suggest combining different forms of course participation (blog posts, forum, group chat, wiki). In NIE, all the tasks followed the same structure: read an article, explore the theory and put out a post on your Weblog. This generated reviews and summaries on the same articles in 10 different rewordings (formulations) but at the same time limited the outcome to a very few examples. To be able to analyze my experiences with NIE, I have to compare it with the other online courses I took this semester. In one of them, where we knew the topics for each of the 14 weeks, all of us were given the same weekly task but the task usually had different outcomes, because we were mostly asked to find an example to represent the topic of the week. This made reading other students' blog posts more interesting as all of them taught something new. A good way to follow these posts could be social bookmarking as done, for example, in the PLENK2010 course. Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds which allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

The other night we had our small pre Christmas dinner with some IMKE students and we discussed a little bit about the courses of this semester. Most of us agreed that online courses, although they are supposed to enable independent learning, should still include some more teaching. It's easy to get lost from the right path when you are trying to make sense of the material alone. Most of the times students are given the option to ask when they have a question (by e-mail or other form), but they often don't bother. Yet these questions, hesitations and mistakes can be noticed by the facilitators when they read through the blog posts. I would personally appreciate it a lot if the facilitators brought them up in the following group chat and explained both where we nailed it and where we missed the guess. I would also appreciate it if there were some explanations and thoughts written about specific topics also by the facilitators before students are asked to carry out a task on it, as in a traditional class where lecturer first explains something, shares the knowledge, and then comes the homework.

These are my feelings about the first semester. I took three online courses. And it took me some time to get used to it as during my Bachelor, which I finished 4 years ago, I probably only had a few of them altogether. I sometimes struggled to find motivation to go through the material by myself, other times I missed listening rather than reading, but I'm glad I'm learning so much new and absolutely intriguing things that IMKE has got to offer. And I'd like to thank Terje (and Sebastian) for being part of it and for putting their effort into it.

Task 13: Redesigning and re-instrumentalising activities

"Computer mediation of human interaction will transform by radically altering – in fact, dissolving – many familiar contexts in which we act. A wider range of technologies support human interaction by increasing awareness of actions, possibilities of action, tools for and products of action, and context of activity." (Grudin, 2000)

Think of one activity. It can be anything, from different fields, from your every day life, etc. How is it carried out now? Is it possible to redesign this activity to make its outcome more efficient, more reasonable? Is it possible to re-instrumentalise and re-organise it with the help of emerging digital technology? Describe your activity and explain how you would redesign it, re-instrumentalise it and re-organise it to be more efficient, enjoyable, etc.

References

Grudin, J. (2000). Digitally Mediated Interaction: Technology and the Urge System.

Task 12: Tool or medium?

There has been a tremendous change in the way people live, work and play over the past couple of decades, since the Internet reached a critical mass in the early 1990s and the adoption of personal computer by the public allowed rapid global communications and networking to shape modern society. The past ten years or so have seen changes at a much faster pace. Modern digital technology in its various forms (PCs, notebooks, netbooks, tablets, pocket-sized devices, and the web applications or Web 2.0 phenomenon) has been the key player in promoting these changes.

"Technology runs in the veins of society. It is the fuel that drives our lives. It is an integral part of daily life. It has definitely benefited society. It has brought luxury in the life of the common man," writes Manali Oak on Buzzle.com. While this is true that the automation brought about by technology (for example the electronic gadgets that have entered the homes of the common man) has saved human effort and time to a large extent, we could hardly find a more general term to decribe computers and their importance in the societal activity than to define them as mere tools or just instruments.

According to Rückriem, "Computer technology, taken as a tool, is just a new technology like many others, say e.g. motorcars or airplanes." Cars and planes change our activity when we make use of them, but they change it not, if we don't. They make a difference in societal practice, but we can always find alternatives to using them. At the same time, it is becoming more and more obvious that computer technology is in fact without any alternative, unavoidable, irreversible, general and even universal. It changes not only one specific concrete activity but revolutionizes the societal activity structure as a whole. "There is no revolution with broader or more fundamental consequences than the invention of book printing or computer technology. There is no medium with a broader range of impact. In our days it touches even the last tribe in the Brasilian jungle," finds Rückriem. Therefore, as Rückriem suggests, if we insist on characterizing computer technology as a "tool", we must be aware that it is a tool of its own with quite a different quality, or better yet, we need a qualitatively different and unmistakable concept. That means the concept of "medium", where media are both: material substratum and meaning, actuality and potentiality at the same time, storing not only specific technologies but the specific form of societal activity.

The computer technology, needless to say, has changed the face of the world. There is no doubt the uses of technology and society interact strongly. Computers can store, organize and manage huge amounts of data and process large amounts of information. Internet that seeded from the computer networking concepts is the most effective communication platform and the largest information base existing today. Web 2.0 sites and applications give users the no choice but to interact or collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as both producers and consumers of user-generated content in a virtual community. The Web is therefore "a collaborative medium", a place where we can all meet to read and write. The expansion of media production through new technologies that are accessible and affordable to the general public (including all digital media technologies, such as question-answer databases, digital video, blogging, podcasting, forums, social networking, mobile phone photography and wikis) has probably made the interaction of technology and society the one thing more than any other that gives society a meaning and defines us as human beings.

However, in recent years it has become popular to point fingers of accusation at technology as if it were "autonomous" and driving us all to perdition. But isn't it rather naive to think of aggressive technology affecting a passive society? Admittedly, there is always the potential for abuse or misuse of a technology, but technology is not inherently destructive. Or as Feenberg says, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people". In the same way, it is upto us how constructive or destructive use we make of the tools and media provided to us by the current Digital Age. It is also true that information and communication technology has involved us in technology so intimately that our activities have begun to shape its development. We are working towards even better technical solutions and quite obviously an even more integrated relationship between technology and society, but we do it because it brings along some explicit and evidential advantages for important institutions, such as schools, social work services, public health system, and sciences, to name a few. These advantages are able to outweigh the disadvantages as long as we are able to keep things under control. (If we can, is another question.)

To conclude, I think it is unquestionable that digital computer technology represents a fundamentally outstanding technical revolution which changes our living and working completely, and revolutionizes our societal practice as a whole. It is a combination of a "tool" that has proved helpful for both the critical processes in the industry as well the household and a "medium" that gives contemporary society a meaning. There is no question whether we should or could or shall ignore it. We cannot resist or struggle against technological innovation, at least not when we keep finding it so attractive and utterly useful. As Rückriem says, "It [computer technology] seems to mark an already ongoing process of new drafts of our societal existence as a whole emerging. Its revolutionary importance is therefore not comparable to any other existing technology. No political revolution is comparable with computer based globalization. This urges us to reflect on digital information and telecommunication technologies as catalysts of a new social system emerging."

Week 12: Ethics and Law in New Media

December 6-12

Topic 23: In Search of Middle Ground: Hybrid Approaches

Topic 24: What About the Future?

Food for Thought

Try to position yourself on the "Free vs Proprietary" scale. What would you expect from a hybrid licensing scheme? What is your impression about the MS Shared Source?

Task 11: Our components versus components of activity theory

New Interactive Environments

To keep it simple, I agree with Terje's interpretation of the activity theory and its usefulness in practice: "I think the power of the activity theory actually lies in its flexibility and freedom to interpret it according to one's needs. It provides vocabulary for talking about human activity systems, it provides components of the activity to focus on and determines connections between them. It provides one of the ways to look at what humans do and how."

Trying to describe interactive environment as a human activity system, what could be the components and the relationships between them? While searching for my own understanding of interactivity, I saw it as a measure of a media's potential ability to help the user connect, interplay, socialize, retrieve, personalize and exchange information, give feedback, form and participate in communities, or in other words, a means that helps to keep the interpersonal communication alive at any time, anywhere, with anyone we choose to. Therefore, one way to look at the system is to describe user as the subject of the interactive environment, while the object is the array of opportunities to build the environment, and the outcome that user strives for is the human to human interaction (communication, collaboration). Taking a personal perspective, tools are the personal media we use to communicate (from pen and paper back in the old days to emails, (Internet) phone and video calls, instant messengers, SMS and so on in the current age). Community can be a small group of the closest friends to a global network of people with the same interests. Rules exist in the form of etiquette or netiquette (network etiquette), and division of labour can be seen as the different roles users take in the community.

When we tried to describe activity system at the beginning of the course, we thought of it more like a project rather than an interactive system. We were able to instantly name and define components such as start, end, timeframe, time management, plan, schedule, resources, restrictions, etc. An activity system is a logical collection of activities designed to fulfill some purpose, which means that often times it has a certain timeframe, plan and resources, but sometimes these components are irrelevant. One example of interactive environment is our course NIE. It started in October and ends in December, and whatever the subject and the object are (depending on the perspective, students versus facilitators), it has a timeframe. We can also think of interactive environment applying the activity theory in our personal life where interactions are not always planned and some components become irrelevant. However, without a clear perspective, in terms of the activity system we were supposed to describe, I think we listed most of the necessary components, including mediators (tools, rules), but we didn't define relation(ship)s between the components. Although we didn't specify the subject and the object (which would have helped us to shorten the list), we covered the basic structure of an activity system. We also listed the components (such as process, task, options, sequence) necessary to decompose activity into actions and operations in order to analyse the activity structure. There were some components that the basic framework of the activity theory does not clearly mention but which are closely tied to the outcome, such as feedback and evaluation (of quality, workmanship).

Trying to compare our components with the components of activity theory