Social Networking from an IE perspective

    Everyone knows that today is an information age. Basically, social networking is also an integrated information platform. Compared with other information products or service, the feature of social networking is that it has an obvious correspondence between the information and real users, which makes it become more regular and analyzable. This is the first thing I learnt from this course.

    Before the class, I had  an opinion that social networking is just a kind of products like 'renren' or 'QQ', which is used for communication or entertainment, and its content is quite simple. However, now I found there are lots of profound knowledge inside. The relationship between users, the motivation of users' action, the influence of the media, all of them are not generated by accident or random. All the information we see on a social networking product is based on the regularity of anthropology, psychology, mathematics, sociology and so on.

    Now, inland researchers pay less attention about this subject and very few college in mainland China has this course. Personally, I think this is a deficiency…

    The second thing I learnt from this course is the influence of the social networking. In the past, I thought social networking is only a tool like toothbrush -- we buy it and use it, and drop it when we don't need it. But later on I found the power of social networking is much stronger than I thought. The users think they control the products when they are using Facebook or twitter but the fact is that the network also 'control' the users at the same time. Our thought and action are influenced by the social media unconsciously. What's more, the influence not only works on the individuals but also the society as a whole. 

    Of course, this is not means the social networking is horrible thing. What I want to explain is the great influence of it. It just like a cellphone: the original purpose of it is letting one person talk to another, however, no one predicted it can change the world in so much. Similarly, the effect of social networking now is much greater than its beginning and it is a hard thing for us to image what it will looks like in the future.  

    However, isn't the unknown thing that makes future attractive and beautiful? 

Two kinds of Social media : BLOG VS Micro-BLOG

I don't know how many people remember this happened in China : 10 years ago, in about 2003, the most popular internet products was the portal web: 163, sohu, etc. Then, 4 years later, the blog appeared and quickly become very hot in every internet users group. However, now, it is the time of micro-blog. SInce the beginning of 2013, there are 500,000,000 users in sina micro-blog, and the number of daily active users was 46,200,000. How does the micro-blog replace the status of the Blog?

we can find something interesting about the content. The blog's maximum words of the article is 10000 (Chinese) while the micro-blog is only 140. That means, no matter how communicative you are or how much you know, you can say only 140 words in the micro-blog. It seems making a limitation for those who want to write more. But the fact is that it is easier to play for everyone!

For example, you see a friend's blog talking about food. He wrote lots of words and looks like very professional. Although you feel interesting but you are neither good at writing nor cooking, so you can just give a short comment for his article. However, if it is happened in micro-blog. What you do is -- taking a picture of your dinner (whatever it is ), add a short sentence (like: it is f**king good!), done! In a popular Chinese slang is '140字你写了不吃亏，140字你写了不上当，真正的物超所值，写啥啥实惠!'

The attractiveness of the micro-blog is easy, fast and convenient.

The form of the content largely influence the form of the users' relationship. In the blog, the author is in the middle of the relationship. All the comments are for him and he gets most of the attention. Even there are some discussion among the commenters, the relationship is weak.

In the micro-blog, the action of forwarding is combing comments and publishing. The easier the publishing way is, the more people take participate  in the communication. The importance of the first author weaken and every user tend to plays an equal role. In this form, the communication is reticular and the value of single user strengthen.

Here is an example.

This is one of Hanhan's blog which has 445338 times reading and 17129 comments. But in these comments, seldom is replied. Users' relationship shows in this picture:

Compared with that, a micro-blog activity called 'plays ugly' attractive many users. 

The  users post their photo and the photo attractive more users. The form of users' relationship shows in this:

But what I want to say is not 'micro-blog is better than blog'. Although now the micro-blog has more users, the weakness is obvious.

Blog focus on the original author. it makes the professional, technical or what we called 'good' one can stand out from all the users. In other words, the valuable information can be took care. However, in the micro-blog, it has a tend to make everything equal. Words lost its characters when it has to reduce to 140. Aslo, 140 words is not enough for logic, academic, technology or any careful thought. A good example for this is now we using the blog to finish the homework instead of twitter.

Epistemic Cognition in Online Collaboration

    It was interesting to do this experiment. Although I've studied for so many years, I never thought about how this process happened.  What I did and what I want when I'm learning ?

    In the individual study, my mainly aim was finding the correct answer for the question -- maybe not exactly correct but at least an almost  correct answer.  In terms of epistemic cognition aim, it should belong to the level 1 -- minimally justified belief. I copied the definition in Wikipedia for the question 1. Without any examination, I tend to believe the answer from Wikipedia should not be wrong.(figure 1.)  

However, when I did the group study, my aim was higher. I think at that time my aim was in the level 3 -- understand. Because in this process, more than convincing myself, I also need to convinced others. It requires that I must understand the information I got. Now, knowing the answer of 'Why' and 'How' is more important than a simple definition.

    Besides the epistemic aim, there are also some other differences between these two process. Firstly it is the structure of knowledge. When we do the process of gaining knowledge, in fact, we are using our existed knowledge and experience to try to understand the new information.  In the activity one, my knowledge structure is simplex. However, it is become complex when I discuss and share idea in the activities two. Due to the difference of our major, we got different conclusion from the same information. (figure 2.)

    Secondly, it is the difference in Certainty, sources, and justification of

knowledge. In the activity one, I rarely thought about the certainty of my information. But in the part two, I have to certificate the resource I got because all these information will be shared with others. So there is an interesting question -- why I pay more attention to the reliability of resource in the activity two than that in activity one? I think it may because of the third difference in two process and I will talk it later. What's more, with the information interaction in the discussion in activity 2, I got more resource, so I need to spend more time on reflecting others information. At the same time, my information was also checked and reflected by others. In this process, all the information we have become strong and reliable and the weak information was eliminated.(figure 4.)

    The third part is the difference of epistemic virtue and responsibility. In the activities I feel more responsibility than activity one which mixture the responsibility of knowledge and responsibility of group. I think it is why I spend more time to check my information's reliability in the activity 2. I guess this phenomenon could be explained by sociology and psychology.

    The final part is the Reliably and processes. Compared with activity 1, we did more inference in the activity 2. For example, I directly got the definition of Semantic Web on the Wikipedia in activity 1, but the definition we got in activity 2 was based on many evidence and fact and we had a process of inference, reasoning and analogy. Although the definition we got finally looks similar with that in Wikipedia, but the group members got a better understanding of what we learned.

    Another interesting thing about the activity 2 is how to guarantee the efficiency of cooperation and discussion. We made some rules and advise for the discussion.(Figure 3.) 

For example, we make a particular area in the document for members to discussion .(FIgure 4.)

 

And the group leader give advise about how to combine all our answer into one. It is a fact that not every member played the same role in the discussion. But I think due to the difference from individuals make the discussion more efficient. 

Typhoon Usagi

Typhoon has come and passed.

Leaves me with the starry sky.

1st Blog for Social Networking

Before the serious topic,let me talk about the weather. After all, it's a blog, not a paper~

It is said that the Typhoon Usagi would landed in HK today. Since I was born and grew up in the north of China, I never seen a really typhoon. So Usagi made me fell excited and expected.

In my imagination, in the typhoon weather, it will be dark outside and so many things are rolled up into the sky by the storm, like the shirts, the umbrellas,the furniture or even small cars.The window may be crushed by the wind and accompanied with the scared cream. But later on I found that maybe I watched too much Hollywood movies. In fact, it was peaceful last night and it is extreeeeeeeemely peaceful today morning. No wind, no rain. It Seem like a good day for fishing or swimming... And the key point is ---- no holiday! :(



OK, now let's move to the lecture, talking something about the social network. I will write this homework in the form of Q&A.


Q1: What is Social Networking (from an Information Engineering perspective)?

A1: The first thing I thought when I saw this question is that 'what is the information engineering perspective'? It seemed like that I need to describe the common things in a more professional and technical way. I need to find something more than 'Facebook is social networking'. In fact, I guess the point is that as an IE student, I should know what had happened behind 'login the Facebook'. That is something more fundamental or something we could call it principle.

To describe it in this way, personally, I think there are three main elements in social networking -- users, information and relation. Users build relation with others by creating, spreading, exchanging, changing the information, and in contrast, the relation also impact the way the users use information. More than other information subject, social networking not only focus on the mathematics or computer science, but also involves the sociology, psychology, ethology or other subjects. it's a composite subject.

With its influence increasing, now social networking is far more than a 'virtual community'. And I extremely look forward how it will change the way we live in the future.



Q2: What do you know about social networking?

A2: It reminds me a picture I've just seen. (click to open)

This picture shows how people use humanity weakness to provide networking services. In this picture, the mentioned networking services are more than social networking. But it still reveal a fact that psychology plays a very important role in the social networking.

Why Facebook is so popular? Because people want to share and gossip (I don't know if this word is appropriate) to raise their own presence. Twitter meet people's demand of expression. Online games become more and more hot because it can satisfy people's vanity. From my own perspective, most of networking products are doing the same thing -- find people's desire, and meet their demand to attract users, then transform users to money.



Q3: What do you want to know about social networking?

A3: I'm interested in how this virtual world influence the real world. First of all, it is true that in this information age, we cannot clearly distinguish the online world from the real world. They are bang together. But there are still some obvious difference between them.
I interested in two particular cases. One is Wikipedia and the other is microblog in China.

Wikipedia provide a new way for people to get knowledge. But with the cost of getting knowledge decreasing, will the the value of knowledge itself decrease too? The online information is free, but sometimes it uncertain. Whether the knowledge provided by network users is reliable or it just a personal opinion? It undoubtedly will change the way we learn and read, but how?

The second one is the microblog. Today, microblog in China plays multiple roles. Firstly, it works as it original purpose -- let people talk and communicate with others. Secondly, it has his unique use in China -- let people talk and participate government and policy in public place. It involves a sensitive topic in mainland China -- freedom of speech and restricting freedom of speech. The question is that whether the microblog can change the environment of speech? We should expect it more or expect it less?