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Some of These Friends Are Not Like the
Others.
Our panelists today are Dr. Vic Perotti and
Dr. Sean Hansen.
A 16-year veteran of RIT's Saunders College, Dr. Vic
Perotti is an Associate Professor who currently
leads the MIS marketing and digital business area.
During his career, he has directed interdisciplinary
research projects funded by the National Science
Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and the
Kauffman Foundation, among others.
He has been awarded RIT's highest teaching award.
His research centers on business implications of
new technologies, including digital
business, digital entrepreneurship, future
Internet architectures, Web business models, and
mobile work.
Dr. Sean Hansen has joined the Saunders College faculty
in 2010 as an Assisatant Professor of Management
Information Systems.
His research interests include the areas of agile
software development, requirements engineering,
IT strategy, Web 2.0 technologies, and the
application of contemporary cognitive
theory to information systems development.
His research has been published in several
leading Information Systems Journals,
including MIS Quarterly, Decision Sciences,
Information Systems Journal, and Information and
Organization.
Take it away, Sean and Vic.
Welcome, everybody.
Awesome.
Happy lunch hour.
Yes.
Just to quickly go through our agenda, it'll
pop up in a second, we're going to first discuss a
little bit about the ubiquity of networks, the
fact that we're surrounded increasingly -- or that
social networks are increasingly embedded
within our lives in multiple ways.
We'll move on to the question of whether or not
we are exceeding our limits as human beings, as
individuals and groups, in terms of those networks, a
little bit about how networks grow, and again,
relating that back to the question of limitations
that might be placed on those.
Then we're going to discuss a little bit about
how we are moving from a state of scarcity to a
state of surplus with regard to data in general,
specifically based on the growth of those social
networks.
And then finally, we're going to talk a bit about
the growth and management of both group networks or
organizational networks and individual networks.
So that was me.
You'll learn to discern us based on our voices.
I think we sound different enough.
Vic will take over here.
VIC PEROTTI: Hi Folks, good afternoon.
I hope you are eating lunch while you watch
this.
I am guessing many of you are working with other
networks while you listen to Sean and I in the
background.
This is fun for us.
We are broadcasting right out of the picturesque
Dean's Conference room at the Saunders College of
Business.
So, this is a fun first experiment for the
webinar.
I like to begin talks like this one by reminding
everyone that we are in a very special moment in
time.
I think it's very easy to forget about that.
I like the way that an author named Kevin Kelly
says it.
He says: This is amazing, and we're not amazed.
And what's amazing is the way that an incredible
array of technologies has come into our lives and
totally disrupted our daily activities,
disrupted industries, disrupted governments,
disrupted a lot of the things that are happening.
And this has come within the last 15 years.
And so our experiences today are in many ways
very different than those of our parents, than those
of our grandparents, and for me, they're different
from how it was when I was an undergraduate.
You may -- you alumni, some of whom I definitely
recognized in our list of attendees, have watched
some of this happen too.
So, you know, today Sean and I are going to
reflect.
We're going to have a -- I like to call it a
jazz-like performance, thinking about the way all
of this has changed a number of things, and
beginning with a conversation about
networks.
So I began to reflect on the ubiquity of social
networks, and this originated years ago.
Professor Neil Hair and I gave a talk entitled
"Ubiquitous Social Networks," and really,
it's an acknowledgment that social networks have
become so, so, so, so important that they follow
you everywhere.
So for example, if we flip it around, you might think
about how could you get away from your social
networks?
Where would you go to get away from them?
Certainly you know that there are bathroom users
of social media.
Hopefully somebody is laughing at that.
[Laughter] It's no secret.
You can read posts like that all the time.
You don't have to work very hard about it.
You need only watch the latest automobile
commercials to see people using social media from
the comfort of their car.
SEAN HANSEN: Hopefully hands free.
VIC PEROTTI: Hopefully hands free.
I like the commercial where the guy goes on a
date, and just after the date, he is playing back
his Facebook feed and hearing how well the date
went in retrospect in social media.
You can't go to the movies.
The Movies have become very much interested in
this phenomenon.
I have a picture there of the Facebook movie, "You
Don't Get to 500 Million Friends without Making a
Few Enemies."
I have a great image that I didn't share with you
during a power outage of New York City, everybody
running to the plugs for charging their cell phones
so they can stay in touch with their social media
friends.
It is a really radically different world than we
have come from.
These networks, Social networks, and other
networks have become a really default way that we
communicate, probably the dominant way that we
communicate.
In terms of total usage, social networks passed
email years ago in terms of total usage.
One of the things I think is funny is social media
has become one of the key things that our astronauts
do to stay connected.
This guy submits pictures back to earth in his
Twitter feed from the space station.
There's a recent one from Boston.
He took a picture of Boston just after the
unfortunate events that happened there.
So you can't even go to space and get away from
social media.
It's everywhere.
And that's just one element in the different
networks that we want to consider.
I want to quickly; before we change to the next
slide, say a word about the title.
The subtitle is "Some of These Friends Are Not Like
the Others."
And I think you gathered from Sean's ideas in the
agenda, I feel like -- and I think others feel like
-- we have sort of begun to cross a boundary where
it's getting to be a little too much in a
number of ways, a little too many friends, a little
too present in our lives.
And so we're at a moment where we may begin to
think about the other side.
It may become a real question, is there a place
where I can get away from all this communication?
And that's what we are going to reflect on over
the next few minutes.
Let'*** up the next slide.
So one thing to reflect on is Facebook is dominant.
This is some data from the Pew Internet research
group showing that about 67% of the people in their
most recent poll are active users of social
media, and you can see some of the active
demographics there.
But Twitter is popular, Pinterest is popular,
Instagram is popular, Tumblr is popular.
People are using more and more different kinds of
networks, and this is just the beginning.
I was chatting with my digital entrepreneurship
class a few minutes ago and asking them how many
profiles do you maintain?
Sean, how many profiles do you maintain online?
SEAN HANSEN: That's a good question.
I don't know.
Three or four.
I think.
VIC PEROTTI: I had students say as high as
30, 50.
It's one thing, of course, to sign up and join a
community, and it's quite another to sort of manage
these relationships going forward.
So it's something to reflect on.
This sort of multiplies the demands of the network
over time.
I think it's interesting.
SEAN HANSEN: Well, and I do want to also call
attention in this little graphic, I think something
worth calling attention to is the service is
especially appealing to column, now I think
Facebook is fairly widely adopted by many, but in
some of the other social platforms, you do see some
self-selection, you know, some different groups.
I know I posed the question to my own classes
about which platforms they use, and if you pose the
question of whether or not you use Pinterest, the men
will not say they use it.
Even if they do, they won't be caught admitting
it.
Because it is -- there is a certain gender
association with that particular social network.
And so what you do see in this data and others is
that there may be people gravitating toward certain
social networks based on their real-world social
groups.
VIC PEROTTI: I like that, and it does take me
back where I wanted to go.
I mean, some of these friends are not like the
others means, in a sense, that in joining networks,
we, I think, kind of got excited and started
friending everybody or accepting all friend
requests.
Maybe this sounds familiar to you.
Some of the people in the room look like it sounds
familiar to them.
And maybe that's not the right approach, or maybe
we need to find ways to deal with the situation
where we don't want to be connected to everybody in
exactly the same way.
And we'll talk about that nuance going forward.
I'm ready.
Let's see what the next slide looks like.
Oh, yeah SEAN HANSEN: Robin Dunbar.
So this is -- Dunbar's number, Robin Dunbar, if
you were to Google him, you might run into him
being referred to as a social media guru because
he has called attention to some of the possible
limits around social media.
But he's actually an Evolutionary Psychologist.
This number of 150 is something that has turned
up in a number of his studies and those of other
colleagues, broadly in his sort of set of certain
paradigm within evolutionary psychology,
that says 150 seems to be a number -- a cap on the
human capacity for developing and maintaining
social groups.
And this is based, again, on the research that's
been done on this covers a very broad context, let's
say.
VIC PEROTTI: Yeah.
SEAN HANSEN: So certainly, looking at --
in some of Dunbar's original work, he looked
at who do you send Christmas cards to?
He is a British scientist, and he studied the British
population about who is sending out Christmas
cards or annual holiday cards.
And the numbers seemed to gravitate toward about
150.
It was a little higher in that case.
But then looking at hunter/gatherer groups,
they all tend to get to about a number not
exceeding 150, so traditional
hunter/gatherer groups.
Even in organizations, certain organizations,
when they are not hierarchically structured,
once they get to about 150, they tend to split.
So there's this number that pops up in all these
different environments of social interaction, and
the way Dunbar actually captures it is to say that
150, you can think of it as the -- the number of
people you would not feel embarrassed about simply
joining uninvited for a drink if you were to run
into them at the bar, which I think is kind of
an interesting way because we can all put ourselves
in that position where if I spotted somebody and I
recognized them, how many of those people would I
just walk up to and say, you know, can we share a
drink?
You want to share a drink?
That kind of thing.
VIC PEROTTI: I think the neat question is how
applicable is Dunbar today?
So there's widespread understanding that, you
know, we're headed toward some kind of limit.
Certainly, my tolerance for some of my Facebook
friends is rapidly waning.
We are hitting some kind of limit there.
But there may be more profound things going on.
Dunbar's work initially with the greeting cards
was a decade ago, and some of the modern social
networks, like Path, is limiting people to 150
connections based on this Dunbar number business.
So I think it's a very interesting question.
Are we really at some kind of limit of human beings,
or do all these new technologies extend our
capabilities in some interesting way?
SEAN HANSEN: Well, and let me make one additional
point there.
With regard to this number, it's based on
empirical observation of groups, but it's also
based on brain science.
So the argument that you get from Dunbar and other
evolutionary psychologists is that this is not simply
something that we tend to do, but it might be a
limitation of our cognitive capacity as
individuals.
And so then the question is what implication does
that have for the creation and management of social
networks in an Internet fashion?
VIC PEROTTI: I think limits are an interesting
theme that we could spend more time with but we
won't due to our time restriction.
Think about Twitter's limit of 140 characters,
which really defined what Twitter was all about and
made it the popular thing that it is today.
It's based on, I think, a deep insight that people
don't want to consume long-form status messages.
And so instead, they consume short things in
Twitter.
That limit is very good for Twitter.
Might be good in general.
And may very well be connected to the cognitive
capability of people.
Let's turn one more slide.
SEAN HANSEN: People leaving.
VIC PEROTTI: Yeah, if we look a little deeper into
the Pew Internet research, there's lots of reasons
why people choose to take a break, a multiweek break
from their social networks, from Facebook in
particular.
But the number that fascinates me in this
table is the 61%.
Almost two-thirds of people report having a
serious break in their social media usage.
And that's just another indicator, I think, that
you know, we're getting saturated with all these
messages that we're receiving.
SEAN HANSEN: Well, and there is a question of
sustainability, sustainability not in sort
of an ecological sense as we frequently talk about
today, but sustainability in terms of what are the
behaviors that we can sustain over the
long-term.
And I think most of the discussion that we see is
about continual growth of social networking
platforms.
But I know from my own experience -- which
obviously is anecdotal -- that my participation
certainly waxes and wanes with regard to social
networking platforms.
And I think a lot of us probably have had that
experience.
And then the question is, is how are these
sustainable over the long run?
If we start looking at these channels, a few
mechanisms for getting business done, which we
will talk about momentarily, are there
implications for sustainability of these as
business practices, as business channels?
VIC PEROTTI: I think that's actually a nice
segue into the next slide.
Let's think for a minute about how networks grow.
Because networks in general are businesses.
The idea is that we discover somehow how to
make some profit off of the huge number of users
that become connected to our social network.
So if I am creating a social network, I am going
to try to get as big a user base as possible.
What that means is I am going to make it as
convenient as possible for people to get connected.
And it's very easy to see that in any social network
that you look at.
Facebook's Add Friend button, you can see
everywhere you look.
It's very easy to add a friend.
It's just one click away, boom, you're connected.
LinkedIn has made it easier than ever to hit a
plus sign and get connected to somebody.
Follow is a link in Twitter, and it's just
that easy.
If we reflect on the opposite for a minute,
you'll realize that it's much more difficult,
particularly where we started, to shrink your
network or control who sees things in your
network or manage your security.
So in terms of the user interface, there is a
deep, embedded preference for growing networks
rather than shrinking or managing networks.
I do think that's had a profound impact on the way
things have gone.
It works well to support a business model.
It may not work well to support individuals and
communication.
That's a trade-off we experience.
SEAN HANSEN: And I think there's sort of a question
of social pressures and social stigma here as
well.
Maybe not stigma.
But I think many of us, you know, you'll use the
social networking platforms, and we identify
people that we haven't seen in 20 years, and we
think, oh, I remember that person.
So you add them.
But you're much less likely to delete.
You know?
I think we have good evidence that says these
networks do tend to grow, but then they don't shrink
again.
Then that raises the question do we need to
have easier ways of shrinking?
Or do we want to exercise easier ways of shrinking?
Because, we might feel bad hiding or deleting a
friend on Facebook or another social media
platform just because it seems like a slight that
we're committing.
VIC PEROTTI: I think there is an absolute
social stigma associated with defriending somebody,
and in this day and age, it has become easy to sort
of just screen them completely out of your
feed.
So if they are writing 50 posts a day, you don't
have to see it.
That's something that I have learned to manage
very well.
I want to point out one more thing at the bottom
of the slide.
Embedded in those social networks are a set of
algorithms that do very interesting things.
And we don't reflect on them very often.
In fact, Sean and I have had this conversation
outside of this presentation.
These algorithms have a lot to do with our
experience of social networks.
So, on the one hand -- I have a little picture
there -- they recommend who we might like to
follow from Twitter, from Facebook, or from other
social networks.
Somehow, they're deciding that these people are a
good match to who we are and who we are already
connected with.
But that's based on some computer making that
decision for us.
And that could be a good recommendation; it could
be a bad recommendation.
But I am very much convinced that it has a
lot to do with how our networks grow and
specifically whom is added to our networks.
The other place you see it, incidentally, is in
deciding whose stuff is most represented in your
news feed.
So I see information -- I have lots of contacts, and
I see information from some of them a lot more
than others.
And Facebook's news feed algorithm is in the
background making decisions about that.
SEAN HANSEN: And that actually, I think, leads
us to the next topic, which is -- or the next
facet, which is the question of filter
bubbles, which is a phrase that comes from a
political activist by the name of Eli Pariser.
I'm not sure, actually, that's how you pronounce
his last name.
VIC PEROTTI: Me neither.
SEAN HANSEN: But that's what it looks like to me.
VIC PEROTTI: Sorry, Eli.
SEAN HANSEN: He's a fairly prominent gent,
again, in certain political circles.
He has coined this phrase "filter bubble" because he
raises the point about that in the use of social
media, and actually, the Internet in general, we
are increasingly being shown information that the
masters of the Internet, that those developing the
search engines and the social media platforms,
think is what we want to see.
And they think that's what we want to see based on
our past behavior.
The issue is that this personalization, this act
of Web personalization or presenting us things that
the algorithmic gatekeepers, to use
Pariser's phrase, determine is what we want
isn't really a matter of our control.
So that once the algorithm decides you want to see
one thing and not the other, you are not going
to get the opportunity to see the other.
You see what they deem to be appropriate for you.
And that raises a fairly substantial ethical
question at a societal level, which is if we see
only what we already agree with or what we tend to
like and never are faced with things that might
contradict our perspectives or introduce
a new thought or different perspective into our world
view, are we really becoming isolated from one
another in various ways?
And there's lots of evidence that suggest that
we are seeing this sort of -- this societal
isolation.
Straightforward evidence, just like increasing
polarization or political spectrum, there's a reason
why FOX News and MSNBC are the two most popular cable
news networks.
No slight to anyone on the call who might work for
CNN.
It's just based on my review of the numbers.
But the reason that those two are the most popular
is they tend to gravitate - tend to speak to one
side of the political spectrum or the other.
And so what you have is people essentially seeking
out environments that tell them what they've already
heard, but from a societal perspective, is that
existence of those types of filter bubbles where,
even without our choice, we tend to see only one
side of the story, does that create a
dysfunctional social dynamic?
VIC PEROTTI: I think, absolutely, and hearing
the same thing over and over again can be boring.
It may make us less interested in using these
services for a longer term or more often.
We're going to make sort of a radical transition
here and talk about some of the outcomes of all
this social media.
We use it at a record pace.
It is, as I've said, the dominant form of
communication.
And the one thing that we can be sure of is there is
a digital trail left behind.
In many ways, that digital trail, like the
communication, is beyond the abilities of people to
manage.
But the emergence of this big data concept I think
really centers around our capabilities extended by
the computing -- now using technology as an enabler
-- to wrap our minds around all of the amazing
things that are happening and summarizing them,
visualizing them, looking for trends in them, and
that is developing new kinds of understanding
that never have been possible before.
SEAN HANSEN: Can I make one point?
Sorry, Vic.
VIC PEROTTI: I don't know.
(Laughter) SEAN HANSEN: If I can clear my
throat, perhaps I can.
To my mind, it's not a radical term because the
previous concept of filter bubbles and the issue of
big data both turn on the same question, which is a
question of complexity.
With the rise of social media and multiple
platforms and, you know, multiple profiles, 30-plus
profiles that people might be managing, we have
increased complexity.
And I think the developers of those algorithmic
mechanisms that create the potential phenomenon of a
filter bubble are intended as responses to
complexity; helping us address complexity by
showing us things that they deem are most
relevant for us.
And the same issue arises here, that we see with the
explosion of social media platforms and other types
of information technologies that we have
the emergence of this phenomenon that's broadly
called "big data."
And it's not a phrase that I'm not particularly a fan
of.
VIC PEROTTI: Agree.
SEAN HANSEN: Because it's not very descriptive,
right, and it's not that descriptive for a reason.
This idea that we get data sets, we now encounter
data sets that are so large and so diverse that
we almost don't know what to do with them.
They exceed the processing capacity with which we
used to deal with large amounts of data, which was
commensurate with database technology.
So you'll see various quantifiers placed on
this, terabytes of data, petabytes of data,
exabytes of data, things like that, but there's no
definitive guideline.
It's just this idea of big data; right?
VIC PEROTTI: Yeah.
SEAN HANSEN: And I think what we want to call
attention to is it's actually the social media
platforms that are one of the significant drivers of
that big data phenomenon.
And we call it a big data phenomenon, but it's both
a challenge and an opportunity.
The challenge is how do we make sense out of it?
Right?
The opportunity is if we can make sense out of it.
And that applies to both data generated from a
social stream as well as from other, again,
information technology.
VIC PEROTTI: I think let's head to the next
slide.
I think the opportunity is pretty profound.
You see people like Nate Silver correctly
predicting the presidential election,
including almost every state or every state in
this case.
There are changes in the way that sports are
happening in part because of the ability to analyze
the players in new and unprecedented ways.
This slide reflects on how quickly this is
happening to us - or maybe at the accelerating pace
at which this is happening to us.
So I began with Kevin Kelly, this is amazing,
and we're not amazed.
This is astounding what's happening to us as we live
and breathe.
I mean, every day, huge amounts of data are
appearing, and I love the statistic, 90% of the data
in the world today is created in the last two
years.
Astounding.
This is very, very different than where we
were just a few days ago.
SEAN HANSEN: Well, and again, the question that I
think it poses is when do we hit our limit?
Right?
When do we, as human beings, hit a limit?
You know, I remember just as a young man or child
hearing statistics something to that effect,
that it wasn't 90%; right?
At the time, it was some significant percentage of
information or knowledge is generated within the
last five or ten years.
But the number -- the number of years keeps
shrinking, and the percentage keeps going up.
So we are now at this point, 90% of the data in the world has
been generated in the last two years.
And again, as the quote states, a lot of that is
driven by social media.
So a number of the things cited here, posts on
social media sites, digital pictures and
video, purchase -- well, not so much purchase
transactions, but certainly the cell phone
GPS signals.
All of those relate to the contemporary phenomenon of
social media, which is becoming more mobile in
nature.
And so it's driving this explosion of data.
And that poses, again, to my earlier comment, that
presents an opportunity because there was a time
when data was scarce.
Right?
The primary objective of an organization was how do
we get our hands on more data?
You know, the classic comment from every MBA --
soon to be graduating MBA when they do a case
analysis, their classic resolution always involves
at least one recommendation, something
to the effect of, well, we need to do more research.
We need to gather additional data.
I think the insight we're getting now is we can get
as much data as we want.
Data is no longer scarce.
Insight is still scarce.
And so the question then becomes how do we glean
insight from this wave of data that's washing over
us?
VIC PEROTTI: It becomes much more a selection
process.
There is such a mass of data, it becomes very
difficult even to choose which subset of this mass
of data you want to address.
One way we do this is through visualization,
which is the next slide.
SEAN HANSEN: Yeah, this is, to me, one of the
really promising domains in terms of trying to make
sense out of massive amounts of data.
And as I'll show you in a second, specifically data
coming from social media is one of these domains
where we can really actually get some insight
through some advanced visualization techniques.
If anyone's particularly interested, obviously, in
the context of this short discussion, we can't go
into a great deal of depth, but if anyone is
interested in some of the explosion -- or the new
insights coming from data visualization, we can
certainly provide some names.
Some of the names that come to mind, Edward Tufty
is sort of the godfather of this stuff.
Hans Rosling, a number of really good Ted Talks if
anyone is interested in that.
David Mccandless is another guy who's done
some really pioneering work in this regard.
One of the points, though, is that if we are
trying to really get insight from data, data
visualization can get us a long way, but it has to do
certain things in order for us to actually get
knowledge out of those visualizations.
And some of the things that we call attention to
here, it has to be data that actually enables
comparison.
Numbers become relevant to us when compared with
other numbers.
So we have to have visualizations that enable
that comparison, give us some idea about causality,
what's causing what within the data being presented,
and also ensuring that we're seeing data in
context.
These are principles that are -- can largely be
derived from Tufty's work, but pretty important as we
move forward in terms of managing data, managing
data from social networks and other sources, that we
have to be able to see what's the -- you know,
the data in context so that we're not just -- so
that we're making more informed decisions.
VIC PEROTTI: Yeah.
SEAN HANSEN: Can we go to the next slide real
quick?
VIC PEROTTI: Yeah, we better.
SEAN HANSEN: So this is an example that I love.
We initially intended possibly going to the Web
and showing you a little bit of this.
So we included the URL at the bottom of the screen.
But this is a little data visualization that was
done by The New York Times based on Twitter feeds
during the Super Bowl a couple years back.
Steelers, Cardinals, I think that was 2009.
Does it say?
Yeah, 2009.
The Super Bowl.
And it's a very fun visualization.
I've used it in class a number of times.
So in a couple of seconds, you can see in --
you can get immediate insight flowing from the
Twitter streams that were occurring during the Super
Bowl, insights as far as all things that were being
tweeted, frequency of tweets or volume of tweets
in given areas.
You get a sense of geography.
In this particular example, I did the talking
about ads thread and played through it and
picked Rochester to see what we were talking about
here in Rochester at that particular time.
You see most of the country was talking about
CareerBuilder.
But again, this is about getting insight from that
social media stream.
So for example, if you spent a couple million
dollars for 30 seconds of air time during the Super
Bowl, I think it's pretty insightful to get a sense
from social media of how interesting or how
interested your viewers were in what you had to
say.
CareerBuilder was one very strong example.
But to me, this kind of visualization, where you
are taking large amounts of data and summarizing it
in a very concise way, is much more insightful than
when, you know, the news program will say so-and-so
is tweeting, just tweeted this comment.
You know, that's -
VIC PEROTTI: Right.
SEAN HANSEN: Cherry-picking.
VIC PEROTTI: Absolutely.
SEAN HANSEN: As opposed to giving big sets of
information.
VIC PEROTTI: Now, I'm going to make a quick
remark, and then we'll keep moving.
One is that visualization; I think where we're coming
from is produced by an expert in a sort of a
static thing.
And we're heading to an area, I think, of
consumer, citizen, user-generated data
visualizations.
You'll have your hands on the data.
You'll have your hands on the tools.
And you will be able to explore dynamically data
sets rather than seeing the result of somebody
else's work, which is pretty cool.
I think Nate Silver, The New York Times
statistician, in part was successful because he
visualized well.
He allowed people to understand a very detailed
algorithm, again, through a visual of the United
States on a map.
SEAN HANSEN: That's a great point.
Let's touch the -- VIC PEROTTI: Now thinking
about take-home messages or ideas going forward.
SEAN HANSEN: Yeah, so we are realizing we are
running a little behind, so we will try to pick the
pace up a touch.
But, I think what we walked through was some of
the aspects of the phenomenon broadly of
social media and the growth of social media,
aspects sort of positive and negative, the things
that we see interesting, sort of challenging the
way we do things as a society and as business,
as managers.
Again, being at a business school here, we do
frequently sort of ask the question how does this
impact the world of business?
But we also want to look -- looking forward, what
are the key trends we see going out?
And here's a couple that we want to touch upon.
The first is we use the phrase Facebook inside.
It's really not Facebook anymore.
We are seeing the growth of certainly, internal
social media platforms within organizations.
So a lot of organizations -- I like the quote from
Ryan Holmes, who is the CEO of Hootsuite, which is
a social media aggregator -- aggregation service,
dashboard service, that says we're finally, you
know, seeing social media make the jump from the
dorm room to the boardroom.
So it really is starting to impact the way we do
business.
And organizations have taken that insight and
started to create a number of internal social media
platforms, so you might refer to these social
media, social software suites, that integrate
social networking functionality, email,
instant messaging, collaboration platforms,
wikis, all of that into a single platform.
So I think we'll continue to see the growth of that
in the coming years.
We are also seeing that these -- this
functionality is moving beyond the marketing
department.
Traditionally, this is something where marketing
saw a lot of promise.
But the applications elsewhere was an open
question.
And we're now starting to see a number of these
other groups adopting this social media functionality
to enhance their own productivity.
One of the things I like to call attention to is
that this is largely a return to knowledge
management.
In the 1990s, the phrase "knowledge management" was
very popular.
It was -- you might call it a management catch
phrase.
But it was -- stemmed from this old idea, someone at
Hewlett-Packard had posed the question how great it
would be only if HP knew what HP knows.
With the idea being how can the organization tap
into the knowledge of its individuals?
And I think what we are seeing with social media
platforms and social software suites is a
return to that question with new solutions of
mechanisms for organizations to tap into
those -- that base of knowledge and to make sure
people within the organization can access
others within the organization who have the
expertise that might be needed on a given project
or given endeavor.
I think we're also starting to see the -- to
the quote from Holmes, at the top of the screen, the
C-suite within organizations are starting
to realize that social media is probably not
something that can be done ad hoc.
That we really need to craft some strategies and
understand specifically how the organization is
going to use social media, why it's going to use
social media, and also deciding on outcome
measures, what the metrics are going to be.
Because you can only manage what you can
measure.
So with regard to social media, that becomes a key
question for us.
VIC PEROTTI: That seems a little overdue to me.
SEAN HANSEN: I think you are absolutely right.
And the last piece is that we're starting to see
is an expansion of formal education programs around
social media.
So certainly we are very proud of here the fact
that we've integrating this into a number of our
programs.
New media marketing probably being the one
with the most obvious focus on this.
But certainly within MIS, a number of our other
programs.
Actually, not just here in the Saunders College of
Business, but across campus I think we're
seeing a lot of our educational programs at
RIT that focus on the application of social
media and how it can be managed going forward.
And I think you are going to see a continual growth
of that as institutions of higher education learn
that this is not a social phenomenon that's going
away.
We've got to learn how to do it in a concerted and
rigorous manner.
VIC PEROTTI: Awesome.
I think the way to bring it home now is to go back
to the level of the individual, which is more
or less where we began.
The implication for people, I think, is fairly
profound and still evolving.
It is certainly the case that defriending somebody
has always had kind of a social stigma to it.
That's the most obvious way to shrink your
network.
You just cut the connection.
Based on user feedback, social networking
companies like Facebook have begun to develop
alternatives to doing that.
For example, the ability to control your news feed
I think is better than ever in Facebook.
The same is true in Twitter.
We're getting more and more nuanced tools, as
users demand more and more nuanced tools, to control
the information that we see, and that allows us to
manage different kinds of friends; right?
The people that I'm really close to, I can see their
stuff every day or every hour if they post it.
And the people I am less close to I will see less
frequently.
So it's working with the algorithms that are built
into these programs and giving the user more input
into that process.
But in the meantime, we have collectively
developed strategies like developing multiple
profiles.
Many of my colleagues have a profile that's more
professional and a profile that's more personal or
family oriented.
That's possible.
An insight that goes along with that, I think,
is the idea that each of these is a kind of
identity that we're projecting into a
different environment.
We have our employer-friendly
identity, we have our family-friendly identity,
and that's something that's likely to continue
going forward.
SEAN HANSEN: But I do think, Vic, actually, if
we can just discuss briefly on that concept, I
think that's also a challenge when we look at
social media platforms because in regular social
situations, human beings are pretty good at
maintaining multiple identities.
We don't like to think so.
We like to think we're one person from start to
finish.
But in reality, we speak to our friends in very
different ways than we speak to our colleagues at
work.
We speak to our family members -- as I learned
when I came home for Thanksgiving the first
time when I was an undergraduate.
I Realized I had to clean up my language pretty
quickly because my mother wasn't going to go for
that.
My dad was okay with it, but my mother wasn't going
to go for the way I talked to my friends at college;
right?
But we learn.
We learn how to maintain those different identities
as human beings.
The question is in an online world, can we
maintain those boundaries in the same way?
And I think it's something I know I have struggled
with this.
I think a lot of people have struggled with this.
Maintaining boundaries in a social media environment
is very different than the way we do it as human
beings, in a traditional social environment.
VIC PEROTTI: Yeah.
If I reflect on what a lot of people have said to me,
even this morning, it's that they often modify
their identity for reasons other than you might
think.
It's too much of a pain to manage multiple profiles,
so I'm just not going to put anything on there that
anybody might object to.
And that's a little bit sad, I think.
We are -- we have tools that enable us to
communicate in amazing new ways, and we don't use
them because it's not convenient.
The tools are not yet ready to allow us to have
these, you know, deep and different kinds of
relationships that we want to have or that we have
already.
SEAN HANSEN: Yeah.
VIC PEROTTI: It's an interesting question.
SEAN HANSEN: So do we simply filter ourselves?
VIC PEROTTI: I submit that we do.
SEAN HANSEN: Yeah.
VIC PEROTTI: There are many tools out there that
make this very interesting.
I think about Hootsuite or Tweet Deck that allow you
to manage multiple accounts at the same time.
But I love the tool called Quitter that allows you to
track down who it was that stopped following you on
Twitter.
That's fascinating to me.
This is available on Facebook too.
SEAN HANSEN: Social media vendettas can only
be the next step.
VIC PEROTTI: For people who are very interested in
these networks, that is a really important point of
information.
It's public information.
It's not a secret that, you know, so-and-so
defriended me.
But I might not discover it in the wash of all the
information I have on a day-to-day basis.
But now there are additional tools that will
allow me to do that if I care about that.
For many of us, probably that's not that important.
Sally, take us home.
SALLY HAIGH: So thank you, Sean and Vic, for
your thoughts on managing social networks.
We do have some questions that I'd like to get right
to.
We do have a question from Mary, and she wants to
know what can you do about filter bubbles?
SEAN HANSEN: Well, yeah, that's a good question
because the challenge is if the filter bubble
phenomenon is legitimate, there's not much you can
do.
You can do some things, like deleting cookies, and
if you delete some of your Web history and things
like that.
Part of the personalization mechanisms
are driven by those tools, so cookies, I think most
people are familiar with.
It's basically small pieces of code that are
placed on your machine that shows your past
search history and your past Web activity.
And if you get rid of that, you're essentially
coming to the Web anew, not entirely because the
platforms also maintain some of that history.
But it can help to eliminate some of that
filtering bias.
But the broader question is, without knowing what
the algorithms are -- and a number of these, again,
algorithmic gatekeepers to use Parisers phrase, it's
hard to know how to address it.
Because there's a certain extent to which you might
say it's happening behind our back.
I don't mean that in sort of a malicious intent way,
but it's not something that is before us so that
we can take action to address it.
VIC PEROTTI: I think, you know, the challenge is
to be a truly educated person; you can't rely on
whatever it is that Facebook thinks you want
to see.
You're going have to be very active in pursuing
your knowledge.
That may mean you don't only read the Atlantic
Monthly, you read something else.
You read the Economist.
You read The Wall Street Journal.
You watch Fox as well as CNN to get different
perspectives.
SEAN HANSEN: And Actually, to this point --
and I think this actually brings us back to some of
what we are doing here at RIT now -- is I also think
it raises the premium on critical thinking.
As many of you may know, critical thinking is a big
area of focus for the university, for the
Institute, going forward.
But I really see critical thinking as the new
literacy.
So literacy still matters.
Literacy and numeracy still matter.
But to me, the winners and losers in the social media
age and in the Internet age are going increasingly
to people who can look at an argument and break it
down and discern to what degree they should accept
it and whether or not the people making such an
argument are providing evidence to support it.
So the study of critical thinking and engendering
critical thinking in the in the next generation of
youth and young adults I think is absolutely
critical from a societal perspective.
VIC PEROTTI: Yup, I think part of the literacy
is understanding this very concept, that there are
filter bubbles, that there are algorithms in the
background making decisions for you.
We use that word "literacy" a lot.
It could mean programming literacy in this day and
age.
It could be the ability to create media.
There are new kinds of literacy that are relevant
today that were never relevant before.
I wholeheartedly agree with Sean.
Critical thinking and pursuing diverse
viewpoints is the challenge that we all face
today.
Certainly, the opportunity is there to do that,
though, with all the information that surrounds
us.
SALLY HAIGH: We have another great question
from Dave.
How do you get the 50-plus generation to cross the
chasm to social networks, given that they don't know
the language and the tools of social media?
There is a large chasm from the dorm room to the
baby boomer.
VIC PEROTTI: I hear this all the time, many, many
times.
Sometimes I'll joke to the answer to this question.
Have you seen the interface to Twitter?
I will describe it to you.
To the left is a text box, and to the right is a
button.
It's fairly straightforward.
The nuance, the learning that has to happen to
participate, is not how to use the tools.
They are so intuitive.
The learning that has to happen is the cultural
dynamics in these networks.
It is what does RTMT mean?
What have people done with these tools to make
Twitter a useful place?
How are people using Facebook?
Is it okay to private message somebody?
You wouldn't know that if you're not an active user
of the tool, but you can easily figure out how to
do it.
I would like to suggest, Dave, wherever you are,
that you hire one of our outstanding RIT alumni to
help you with this situation.
In fact, the people that ask me this question most
frequently are people looking for a 20-year-old
to come in and help them with some of the network
dynamics in social media.
Failing that, if you don't like that answer,
there are many, many ways to learn.
But the best one is simply to practice.
Spend some time in a community, find somebody
that you admire in a community, and watch what
they do.
SEAN HANSEN: Well, and I would also say - and this
is sort of me trying to exercise the critical
thinking that I try and tell my students to
exercise -- I'm not certain -- you know, I
would probably have to do a little digging to have
the numbers at my fingertips, but I'm not
certain that the chasm is quite as large as you
perceive it to be.
You know, I do know the Pew Internet and American
Life Project that Vic referenced a second ago, I
know some of the data from there says we have now
reached the point where more than half of all
adults over the age of 65 are actively online.
I don't know that that's specific to social media
platforms, but are online and engaging in
Internet-based activities on a regular basis.
So I think we may be seeing that chasm closing
on its own.
One of the things that I love when I talk to my
students is, you know, they love phrases like,
well, our generation believes the following.
Our generation is the Internet generation.
Our generation -- you know, that kind of thing.
And I like to point out to them whenever that
statement comes up; I pose the question, what's the
average Facebook user?
It's not an 18-year-old man or woman.
It's not a 22-year-old man or woman.
The average Facebook user is a 35-year-old man I
think was the last time I looked at the numbers.
So I wanted to say, like it or not, guys, the
average Facebook user looks a lot more like me
than like you guys.
VIC PEROTTI: Right.
SEAN HANSEN: That was five years ago, though, so
now I'm over the average.
VIC PEROTTI: But the point in part is that the pace
of change is so much quicker than a generation.
We are all in it together.
The 18-year-olds today and the 46-year-olds today are
all experiencing this together at the same time
because it's happening like that.
It's crazy.
Yes, they are growing up with it, yes, they got
access to it earlier in life, but we are all
experiencing it together.
SEAN HANSEN: This is a phrase that I know; one of
my former colleagues uses the phrase of "digital
natives."
There is a definite reality in the fact that
younger adults are digital natives.
They have been born and bred in a digital
environment.
And that does give certain sensibilities and certain
perspectives that maybe those of us that are
digital immigrants don't have.
I think sometimes digital immigrants might have some
lessons to teach in the opposite direction, but I
think we have to recognize that there are lessons
going in both directions there.
VIC PEROTTI: Cool. Another one?
SALLY HAIGH: We have time for one last
question, and Melissa would like to know if the
human brain inherently limits us to 150 social
connections, does that mean that there is no
point to maintaining networks larger than that?
And what is the implication?
SEAN HANSEN: I think the -- it's an interesting
question, you know, of whether or not the human
brain -- if we concede that the human brain
limits us in that regard, then the conclusion might
be, oh, well, then there's nothing we can do about
it.
But in reality, when we look at information
technology, we have, in so many ways, expanded or
built upon the capacity of the human brain.
And I think we might see the same thing here.
Right?
So in the discussion we had of big data and
visualization, the human brain wouldn't have been
able to make sense out of a lot of that Twitter
stream, in The New York Times example.
There is no individual on earth who could have made
sense out of that.
And yet, through the use of some technology, we
were able to -- we're able to actually consolidate
it, present it in a concise and easily
digestible fashion, and actually get some insight.
And I think I'm a firm believer that technology
can hold, you know, I don't want to be
deterministic and assume that it will, but can hold
promise for helping us take advantage -- you
know, expand upon our ability.
And also, I do think that 150 is for co-social
relationships.
But there's no reason to believe that we can't have
social networks and just acknowledge that not all
those people are going to be people we're going to
be willing to approach for a beer when we see them
sometime or approach to share lunch together or
something like that.
VIC PEROTTI: Yeah, I think that that's hitting
the nail right on the head for what I was thinking.
I mean, that research was based on people mailing
Christmas cards.
It is a totally different technology.
Today, because of the technology, goodness knows
how many people I'm connected to, but it's
well more than 150, and I like to think I do an okay
job staying connected with these people in different
ways.
These networks have enabled us to have a new
kind of power, I think.
It's extended our limits.
And probably the deepest way goes right back to the
subtitle.
I want to deal with some friends in different ways
than others, and these networks are beginning to
allow me to do that in a way that I'm comfortable
with.
They are not there yet.
It's a challenge still.
But at the same time, I feel like I'm not limited
to 150, not even close.
Maybe the number of close, close friends that
I can maintain is much smaller.
SEAN HANSEN: But that point you make about
different types of friends.
Again, our subtitle suggests it.
I think that's the real question going forward is
how do we establish and maintain various types of
boundaries.
I have one little story which I find amusing
because of my tendency toward self-deprecation.
I went to a holiday party a number of years ago, and
I was in a group, and we were going as the
Flintstones, and I was Betty Rubble.
Now, I thought it was funny.
My friends thought it was funny.
But my sister-in-law posted the picture on
Facebook, and all of a sudden I thought I would
have no problem sharing that picture with any of
my friends.
I'm not sure I want my dissertation advisor to
see that picture.
Right?
And that kind of boundary setting and boundary
blurring is, I think, the real challenge posed by
the current technology, and the solutions to that
are going to be critical, I think, for us going
forward.
VIC PEROTTI: Feel free to write if you'd like to
see that picture.
SEAN HANSEN: I don't have it.
VIC PEROTTI: Send a message to Sally.
SEAN HANSEN: It's her picture. [Laughter]
SALLY HAIGH: Well thank you I'm sorry
we couldn't get to everyone's questions
today.
Thank you, both Vic and Sean, for being our
distinguished panelists today.
And to all of our RIT alumni who joined us in
this lively discussion.
Please note that our next webinar, scheduled for May
23rd, and our presenter will be lecturer Mike
Johansson, talking about how social media is
changing industry and how you can capitalize on that
change.