Donath, J. (2020). 2. Visualizing Social Landscapes. In The Social Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20240817102406/https://covid-19.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ljr3x1qq/release/1
- Immediately, the discussion about visualizing social interaction online brings to mind some of the MMOs I have spent time playing in my undergraduate days! Interacting with each other’s avatar was sometimes just a silly prank (particularly where voice communication was being used outside of the game), but it was just as expressive as pranking each other in real life. Where text communication was used, it was also possible for other players to “eavesdrop” on the conversation in passing, just as if they were walking past an energetic discussion on the street.
- Visualizations are something we dealt with quite a bit in COMP683. There’s a definite knack to selecting a good (rather than a merely adequate) visualization for each instance where one is useful.
- Maps are a useful thing, and it is correct to say that they gain much of their utility from abstraction and simplification. I would consider legends to be a similar tool, and (at least to my mind) more applicable in a wider variety of contexts. If I am visualizing something, it is just as important to know what I am looking at, as it is to be seeing it in the first place. And just as with a map, the decision on what to highlight and how to do so is key to enabling viewer understanding.
- An algorithmic map is also somewhat subjective in what it displays, because it encodes the subjective judgements of the algorithm’s author(s) to determine what should be abstracted and under what conditions each level of abstraction should be employed. But once the algorithm is coded, those judgements will be implemented evenly and without (further) bias. I would suggest that this is not only faster to update and run, but could also be a “fairer” map generator overall?
- Map interactivity is a feature which enables autonomy, which means that an interactive map can help stimulate intrinsic motivation to play with and learn from it, no? Shout-out to SDT from last week!
- The point about maps enabling asocial navigation is a good one. Wayfaring is a more romantic thought, certainly, but in practice… I prefer a map for various reasons–not least of which is not having to work to comprehend the other person’s directions. That doesn’t necessarily mean I want to avoid interacting with people entirely, however. Still, it’s a good point to keep in mind, that even something as simple as a “reference” like a map can function to change a community dramatically, such as when we shift focus to information retrieval rather than discussion.
Donath, J. (2020). 4. Mapping Social Networks. In The Social Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20240820021904/https://covid-19.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ngsi0mxz/release/1
- I’m amused by the example of choosing who to speak to by going through a list of names versus picking a network cluster. In my LiveJournal days, I essentially had separate filters for those “rings” of closeness–close friends, good friends, acquaintances, loose ties, etc. I could (and did) also filter by interest, or by physical proximity. There was always a common thread that those filters were constructed upon, and that’s what made those filters such an intuitive tool to use.
- It also comes to my mind that a network is precisely how I saw and understood social groups as I first entered university. I mapped out who was connected to whom, who was the common link between different groups, and who spoke with authority both within and between groups. This was something I did rather formally at the time, largely because dealing with social groups was a skill I was still learning. These days I don’t think of things quite so rigidly… but the concepts are still accurate, it seems.
- Knowing that every map has omissions, and knowing that there are many ways people may answer a single question (such as that about “close ties”), I’m reminded that in order to understand the answer, we must first understand the question. Part of that process of understanding will always involve asking how the question was formed, for what purpose, why it was phrased as such, how it was heard, how it was perceived… there are so many factors at work. No wonder researchers must usually ask more narrowly-defined questions!
- Back to what I said previously about mapping some of the social networks around me when I had first entered university… I wanted to know who the “authorities” were, and who connected what group… but I never actually considered that there’s more roles. I mean, I probably considered “rebroadcasting” (which could be seen as amplifying?) but beyond that… filtering of information, tuning of information (to emphasize or highlight particular parts)… there’s more things we can do with information than just stop it or rebroadcast it. Fascinating.
- I was never on MySpace, but LiveJournal definitely encouraged connections among strangers. Part of that was because you could add interest-based tags to your own profile, and people could browse those tags… since your profile also listed your friends and people who had friended you–friendships were not necessarily reciprocal!–that was another avenue for people to find you. And, of course, then there was the content of each person’s journal, plus any additional links they had on their profile.
- More importantly, while you could go to anybody’s journal and read their posts, you could also click the “Friends” tab and read all of their friends’ posts. This was, in fact, where I spent most of my time–I didn’t need to read my own journal, I wanted to read those of my friends! Privacy levels were integrated, so even if a friend posted something very private and I could see it on my friends page, strangers browsing my friends page could not see it.
- In that way, the friends page offered people a public view of who the journal owner wanted to follow and read. It was an excellent way of discovering social links, but it didn’t necessarily show you everything… it was a sanitized, public view by default.
- Comments on the journal entries could also be public or private (between the journal owner and the commenter). The comments were the other half of the conversation, and they said much in aggregate about who was reading and responding, and on what topics.
Ardito, G. & Dron, J. (2024). The emergence of autonomy in intertwingled learning environments: a model of teaching and learning. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 241-264. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2024.2325746
- Why on earth would anybody perceive “traditional” education to be a linear system, no matter how complex? Identical inputs will never yield prescribed or predictable outputs–the human species is not that simple. It’s all about probabilities, but even then, a successful teacher will need to consider how to address the outliers. That’s part of the whole deal!
- I like the description of keeping the system “on the edge of chaos.” It’s the balance between enough chaos to enable further progress, and enough order to prevent the entire system from collapsing on itself.
- This, incidentally, is also why I dislike corporations who pursue “disruption” purely. Chaos must be balanced with order. It is not enough to unmake the previous system; there must be a replacement. Those who destroy without a plan for creation are only halfway there, and 50% isn’t good enough.
- Understanding that the graphs are quite possibly not “complete,” I’m amused by the omission of a key resource in Figure 7–the people! Not just teachers, but most importantly, the fellow students who were able to pass on their knowledge via peer mentoring! Isn’t that kind of the whole point, really? Creating an environment where your resources are not just oriented vertically in teacher-student dimension, but horizontally in student-student dimension? (And likewise in faculty-faculty interactions as well, I might add.)
- Nobody who trains another, yet withholds the ability for them to train those who come later, has finished the job. Part of teaching any subject is enabling those who have taught to turn around and pass their knowledge on in turn. With that in mind, how blind would we have to be to believe that teacher-to-student interactions are the only interactions of value in a learning environment? Students will teach others as they go; would it not make sense to help them practice doing so effectively, as part of learning the material?
Martin, A. (2013, May 1). The web’s ‘echo chamber’ leaves us none the wiser. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/online-stubbornness/
- I would accept that language may not be evidence of thought, but is evidence of how we think. The structure of our thinking is encoded into the structure of our language. And in a similar sense, learning a new language and its structure will also change the structure of our thoughts.
- What does this say about people who are fluent in (and regularly use!) more than one language? If they have learned to move seamlessly from one language to another, does this mean they hold two separate patterns of thought–or does it mean that they have constructed a hybrid of the two, different from either that came before it?
- Now suppose someone learned the patois or pidgin language that was originally a combination of two other languages. It would follow that they have learned the hybrid patterns of thought as well, but not necessarily the methods of thought behind the predecessor languages. To them, the other two source languages may appear vaguely familiar, but also not; the same may be true of the accompanying structure of thinking.
- What does this mean in the context of an echo chamber? It’s comforting to hear people who speak in the same “language” as you do, with the accompanying shorthands and abbreviations of concept. But it doesn’t expand your thinking or make you think critically about your own thought and how you could “translate” from one to the other by finding points of commonality and breaking down the points of difference.
- This article also hits on two other points that I find important: the Internet makes finding similar viewpoints easy because it removes geographical boundaries, and online networks are no more of an echo-chamber than real-life social networks. Put these two together, and you could rightly suggest that the reason the Internet has facilitated the effects of an echo chamber, a filter bubble, or a more strongly-polarized culture is because of the removal of geographical boundaries. That is, when we had a geographically restricted set of people with whom we would have most interactions through our lives, that was our available network. To some extent, the necessity of interacting with people of differing viewpoints was built into this, because of the restrictions on the network. While it was possible to hold extreme views, it was more likely that each person would have to understand how to work with people of diverse perspectives, and the effect of an echo chamber was more limited because of that. When those geographic boundaries were removed, humans had more freedom to seek out interactions which were most comfortable, rather than most practical. I don’t discount the culpability of corporate interests tuning their algorithms to maximize “engagement with the machine,” but let’s not ignore our own fallibility as a species–given the opportunity, most of us would happily retreat to the comfort of people who think and speak like us. When we do not actively prioritize learning and growing outside our “native” environments, we end up constructing our own echo chambers.
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