The O’Reilly Webcast: Youth & Creativity, hosted by Julie Baher and Bill Westerman, presented an insightful picture of youths’ social media activity beyond Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.  Interestingly, Baher and Westerman found that the latter platforms were in fact not often used by “creative publishing” teens to express themselves.  Rather, those teens were using more niche sites like planet renders and imeem that enabled them to “have something to say, or sense of self around their topic of choice.”

Baher and Westerman’s presentation was informed by four in-home studies.  The participants, clearly not a representative sample of American teens, were exceptionally bright and creative online publishers who offered clear insight into their bubbling online subculture.

Taken together, the studies uncovered seven emerging themes in youth digital publishing:

1. Expression: who I am
2. Belonging: micro-communities
3. Velocity: throw away media
4. Inspiration: emulating and following
5. Learning: watching, “doing on the fly”
6. Helping: global apprentice
7. Co-designing: beyond lone designer

It will be interesting to follow these themes as they begin to ripple through mainstream teen culture.  In particular, “belonging” and “helping,” because I believe as an increasing proportion of online teens create public content they will become less tolerant of them being lost & not critqued in broad sites like Facebook.

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Every single day people, arguable most, blindly accept companies’ TOS (“terms of service”).  They unresistingly click “I Agree” to whatever legal jargon is in between them and their desired product or service.  Why?  People trust the companies have their best interest in mind.  They trust, for example, that the photos they post to Facebook are not thrown up on a billboard on I-5, or a silly comment they made on a friend’s wall will live on for eternity.

It comes down to people believing Mark Zuckerberg when he says, “We wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want.  The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work.”

However, in light of Facebook’s recent attempt to discreetly change their TOS without user buy in, Zuckerberg’s words resonate as mere pleasantries.  Why did Facebook quietly, and in turn deceptively, try to change their TOS?  Why didn’t they build on their trust with users by openly (possibly collaboratively) re-working their original content license?  Why weren’t users asked to re-sign off on the terms?  What about a mass notification?  Facebook sure didn’t have a difficult time sending one when they reverted back to their original TOS.

I understand that TOS on the internet, especially those set out by social networking sites, will continually evolve.  It is just a matter of how they evolve.  Just as an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution underscores, “The issue of who controls the data posted to the site is a massive gray area that continues to evolve as Internet companies and consumers shape social norms of how to define trust in the digital age and share their lives through new technology.”

That being said, I believe that until we have settled on an industry standard, agreeing to a company’s TOS has to be done with a degree of trust and knowledge that you are giving up quite a bit of power and ownership to the website operator.

Further Reading:
Facebook’s Users Ask Who Owns Information
Facebook’s terms-of-service change has users abuzz
The Facebook Terms of Use Debate—We Care Because It’s Social
Facebook TOS
Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.”
Facebook Clarifies Terms Of Service: “We Do Not Own Your Stuff Forever”

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With the proliferation of social networking sites, we are increasingly reliant on our online profiles to accurately present our personalities. But do they? Dr. Scott Counts of Microsoft Research’s VIBE Group explored just how people’s perceptions are impacted by the advent of online identities.

In a recent presentation of findings, Dr. Counts discussed studies that delved into the ways we self-present our personalities via online profiles and how others perceive those presentations.  The results were interesting, and proved the promising reliability and accuracy of the newfound ability to “right-click” on someone via their online profiles.

Below are the insight summaries from two of the Mircrosoft studies that focused on how people perceive personalities via online profiles.

STUDY ONE:  Automatic Trait Inferences

The first study demonstrated that people encode personality characteristics sub-consciously, and they are more likely to remember implied personality traits (i.e. you can infer that Ted is a hick because “he likes to go muddin’ and drink in the cornfields”).

Secondly, it showed that coherence (how clear your information fits together), and the number of attributes (how much you say), are two primary factors of your online profile that strongly correlate with a reader’s memory of it.

Taken together though, it demonstrated that if a personality trait is sub-consciously implied, then an abundance of attributes is actually negatively correlated with recall.

Takeaways:

1. If people can imply a personality trait, they will have a better recall of you if you are more coherent and include less attributes.
2. If people cannot imply a personality trait, than being less coherent and supplying more attributes is helpful for others to remember you.

Ideally, you can say very little about yourself and be remembered, so long as your story is clear about who you are.

STUDY 2: Thin Slices of Online Profile Attributes

Dr. Counts found Gladwell’s statement –  “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and people based on very narrow slices of experience” – to extend beyond face-to-face interactions to online interactions.

Takeaways:

1. Certain attributes contribute more meaningfully to the interpretation of a profile than others, such as  favorite TV shows
2. Users can make predictive inferences using condensed profiles

• Inferences made from an “about me statement” are similar to inferences made from an entire profile
• With only 5 attributes, people can do a pretty go job of determining if they would befriend a person
• With a small amount of information, people are generally observed similarly by a number of readers

Thus, if your online profile merely includes a few free form attributes like your photo, favorite TV shows, and interests, people will get the gist.

CONCLUSION

Taken together, Dr. Counts Microsoft studies demonstrated that: we subconsciously infer other people’s personalities from their online profiles; these inferences are actually remembered much better than listed content; we form pretty accurate perceptions of personality from online profiles; and we need almost no information to infer personalities from online profiles.

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