I think that data portability would lead to aggregation and homogenization in the sense Gail was talking about. The mere fact that each site demands that a user reenter fundamental facts when signing up gives the opportunity--and perhaps even increases the likelihood--of the user designing different personae for each site. It's this diverse part of SNS that is so appealing to a lot of researchers, I think. For some reason, this aspect seems "new" and unique to technology to a lot of researchers; like this doesn't happen in face-to-face interactions, for instance. On this subject, can anyone point me to research which does draw parallels between the two paradigms? -Conor Michael Zimmer wrote:
That's why I'd argue for data portability, not aggregation. Allow my to choose my own context for which to share my personal information. If I tire of the culture at Facebook, I should be able to easily port my profile to another site.
No?
On Jul 2, 2007, at 4:23 PM, 'Gail Taylor wrote:
I am hesitant to say 'yes' to the suggestion there should be a way to aggregate social networking sites. I think it would lead to homogenization of practices for the user, who is currently having a 'multi-cultural' experience interacting with others in various online spaces. For example, the culture of Facebook is similar, but also different, than what one might expect hanging out in MySpace or other product that enables networking with others. This approach to aggregating processes is also one that decontextualizes information that is extracted from other souces, as opposed to allowing the user to interact in an environment where the information would be contextualized. There would be advantages and drawbacks to this approach. Depending on the knowledge and expertise of the people developing the aggregator, the program could be great or not so great for the end user.
/Gail
--------------------------------------- Gail D. Taylor, M.Ed. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Human Resource Education Ph.D. Student Educational Psychology Teaching Assistant Library & Information Science Research Assistant
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