Friendship based on algorithms

What’s this now? A “News Feed” and a “Live Feed”? Facebook has changed its interface again. I didn’t immediately understand. Apparently, the Live Feed includes everything that’s currently going on in my social online world, and the News Feed just features some highlights. In other words, Facebook believes that a lot of the stuff my friends are up to is simply not relevant. Fair enough, I heard a lot of people say that the previous News Feed had become slightly overwhelming. But how does Facebook know what the interesting stuff is?

Election reporting – Turning bar charts into a multimedia show

It was federal election time in Germany yesterday. Since this blog isn’t primarily about political commentary, I shall refer you here for a more detailed summary of the results, if you’re interested. In a nutshell, Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrat party (CDU) will form a new centre-right alliance with the pro-business Free Democrats Party (FDP). Since this blog is primarily concerned with communication and all its related matters, I took a closer look at how the election night was reported by mainstream and social media.

Teachers, students, technology – New and shifting boundaries

I just quickly want to advertise a brilliant article I found in yesterday’s Guardian supplement about how new communication technologies change the relationship between teachers and students. The starting point is the most recent moral scandal in the UK which saw a female teacher being jailed for having an affair with a 15-year-old girl. A large number of the text messages they had exchanged were used as evidence in the case.

The Guardian article by John Henley offers a very balanced and nuanced perspective on how teachers and students have started to interact through new technologies. It’s all about boundaries that were once clearly established and now seem to become permeable. It’s about questions such as “Should I be friends with my students on Facebook?” or “Is it okay to send them emails?”.

When teachers and students suddenly meet in some virtual space, there are risks for both parties. So far, most public attention has focused on teachers who find themselves ridiculed on some video website or photo blog. Germany recently witnessed a court case in which a teacher had sued against an online portal which allows students to grade their teachers. The case was lost, but sparked a controversial discussion about any kind of rating websites, from doctors to travel companies.

As several cases cited in the Guardian article illustrate, students are also at risk when teachers use these new media to approach them in an indecent fashion. Oftentimes, social networking sites and other virtual spaces cannot offer enough control over the interactions they enable. This problem clearly extends beyond the teacher-student relationship into online child pornography in general.

What does it mean to be a teacher?

The bigger picture here is not so much about being ridiculed or indecent contact with minors. It’s about the changing role and self-understanding of teachers in an age of free-flowing information. It will no longer be possible for them to guard their classroom as a little island where they enjoy unchallenged authority over what knowledge gets circulated and how students learn. Teachers and schools will need to adjust to a new information environment in which they provide guidance on how to deal with these massive amounts of information.

That includes opening themselves up to new communication technologies (social networking sites, email, etc.) and figuring out a way in which they engage with their students while maintaining important boundaries.

The trouble with Facebook friends

There’s plenty of talk at the moment about the impact of social networking sites on friendship. Bring up the topic at a party or during a coffee break and you will certainly trigger quite a lively discussion. Some will tell you that Facebook is the end of friendship as we know it. Others will proudly report how they reconnect and interact with so many more people than they used to and how that certainly cannot be a bad thing, can it?

I would offer a boring compromise. My close friends are still my close friends and there will always be only a handful of them. Similarly, there will always be a few hundred others I’m just not that close to – whether they now populate my Facebook newsfeed or not. In other words, social networking sites are unlikely to change how important a person is to me, but they will change the way I interact with them. It adds and alters the mix of communication channels.

0=not a friend, 1=friend

A general problem in this discussion whether it’s good or bad to have 583 Facebook friends is this inconspicuous little word “friend”. It’s quite a tricky one. Facebook deals with friends in a binary fashion. 0=not a friend, 1=friend. It might be a cultural thing that Americans see the world that way, but it’s certainly a bit too black and white for the rest of us. Of course, for a critical commentator, it is then quite easy to jump at a friends list with 583 people and announce the end of friendship.

Would it help if Facebook had a more nuanced friends classification scheme? Let’s say, it could range from “most awesome best friend in the world” to “randomly met at a party on my way out”. While this would certainly make it more clear that not all Facebook friends are created equal, it would be terribly unfeasible, as I recently discovered.

Friends on a scale from 1 to 10

I decided to do a bit of social management on my Facebook friends list. My newsfeed had been full of stuff and people I wasn’t interested it, my privacy settings didn’t distinguish between different groups of people, and overall I wanted to have a bit more intimacy with those close friends I care about. So the idea was to create different lists (you can do that) and assign friends to them according to how close I am to them.

This failed. I must admit that rating friends according to some one-dimensional scale is a terrible, useless, and probably quite unethical idea. From a practical point of view, I had to give up after 10 people or so because it took me forever for each of them to decide where to put them. Funnily enough, while I was thinking about them and where to put them, they tended to move back up the scale and I felt the urge to contact them immediately.

So in the end, I ended up creating lists according to how I know the person, for example high school, work, and so on. This turned out to be quite nice because I can now tune in to different social news streams from different stages of my life. I also ended up deleting a few people because – despite all my research attempts – I could not figure out who they are and how I know them.

Always say “Yes and No”

When somebody asks you whether you think the Internet is about to change life as we know it, say “Yes… [hesitate a bit]… and no”. With that sort of answer you can never go wrong and it also makes you sound smart because apparently you’ve taken all kinds of perspectives into account. Besides, it’s probably the correct answer. If people aren’t happy with it, add something like “…but everything’s faster now and there’s more of it, too.”

Here’s an example. It was never true that the person who buys a newspaper will be the only one reading it. He/she will forget it on the bus, throw it over the fence to the neighbors in the afternoon. He/she may even cut out an article to show to someone else. In fact, that’s what my grandpa still does – complete with the newspaper name and the date handwritten in one corner. So that’s how it used to be done.

And what would my grandpa do if he was using the internet? He would go to his Google Reader or newspaper website (Kieler Nachrichten, by the way), find something interesting, and show it to someone else – now complete with the link and a nice little comment. Not much new there, just a bit more digital. The difference is, he would do it all the time, with many of his Facebook friends, across the entire Universe, and with instantaneous delivery. That’s why you can add “…but everything’s faster now and there’s more of it, too.”

I really meant to write about how and why people share online content with others, but I guess I got carried away… oh well, next post.