Re Willard's Uncapher's post: "The report obviously sticks to a rather instrumentalist view of the Internet, tailored to e-commerce, and doesn't appear to venture, if the pre-reports are accurate, to raising issues of surveillance, sharing of data, encryption, and other such aspects of Net use." Seems there is now a constant stream of cyber/Internet tracking studies (Pew, NTIA, UCLA, etc.) with a (and a growing enterprise for academics to add to this) available that focus mostly on household research with little attention to questions related to institutional disadvantage, e.g., national surveys/tracking studies (census not random sample studies) on libraries, schools, etc. where the policy remedies are focused (e.g., e-rate)? Also, these studies are so absent 'context' that it begs the question: why are Internet researchers focusing on this? Where's the beef? Soapbox here, but does it not bother anyone that there is so much money/effort going into such tracking studies? To what end? I'll risk posing the 'so what' question to get some discussion going. B. Lentz, UTAustin
I just taught a day of my grad cmc seminar yesterday in which we read the results of a number of these studies (the homenet stuff too, old and new), and my students had much the same reaction as yours, Becky. "Why ask the question?" cried one particularly exasperated person. Your call for analyses of context is right on. I'd also like to see more analyses of different uses of the internet, different kinds of internet users, and in general more analysis of differences instead of looking for unilateral effects (or the lack thereof) caused by The Internet. On the other hand, I find these tracking studies really interesting and useful for getting a snapshot overview. Nancy
Re Willard's Uncapher's post:
"The report obviously sticks to a rather instrumentalist view of the Internet, tailored to e-commerce, and doesn't appear to venture, if the pre-reports are accurate, to raising issues of surveillance, sharing of data, encryption, and other such aspects of Net use."
Seems there is now a constant stream of cyber/Internet tracking studies (Pew, NTIA, UCLA, etc.) with a (and a growing enterprise for academics to add to this) available that focus mostly on household research with little attention to questions related to institutional disadvantage, e.g., national surveys/tracking studies (census not random sample studies) on libraries, schools, etc. where the policy remedies are focused (e.g., e-rate)? Also, these studies are so absent 'context' that it begs the question: why are Internet researchers focusing on this? Where's the beef? Soapbox here, but does it not bother anyone that there is so much money/effort going into such tracking studies? To what end? I'll risk posing the 'so what' question to get some discussion going.
B. Lentz, UTAustin
In some ways, these tracking studies are like the very "worst" research that we used to do (and in some cases, still do) about television usuage. Sure, knowing that X number of subjects have the television on Y number of hours and are tuned to Z program, is interesting. Such knowledge certainly "works" for some of the commercial interests at hand (demographic analyses of audiences etc.). Similar information about the internet is also interesting, especially in that it encourages appreciation of the increasingly important role of networked digital communication environments in everyday life. Unfortunately, usage data of this sort tells us a thing about (a) what users are DOING while engated in the technology (even when we know what they say they think they are doing....) and more importantly (b) what their use MEANS, both to them and to the industries and practices at hand. In some ways, we are back to the old questions about what we can learn via surveys (quant) vs. field work (qual) . . . . we can make some pretty big interpretive mistakes based on usage data, alone. Edward Lee Lamoureux, Ph. D. Associate Professor, Speech Communication and Multimedia Editor, Journal of Communication and Religion Bradley University Peoria IL 61625 ell@bradley.edu http://hilltop.bradley.edu/~ell Fax: 309-677-3446
I'd been resisting a response to the "so what" question until i heard back from the survey designers, but i must admit that i'd like to now join Lentz's soapbox. I'm having a hard time analyzing the data, because i can't figure out what the questions are asking. Since i can come up with about 10 different ways of answering each question, i can't even imagine what the subjects were thinking. The question on the UCLA survey that rubbed me the wrong way the most was: "Do you use multiple screen names with different personalities?" What does that _mean_? I was hoping that there was clarification in the survey, but this is literally how the question was asked (although it was used to conclude information about communication role-play and sexed behavior). What constitutes a screen name? Are we talking about an instant messanger screen name? An email account? A Win2K login? A separate screen name for MSN Passport and Yahoo? What constitutes a different personality? Is this only when it is performed to be something that you are not (suggested by the common teen response)? Might a personality refer to the amount of information you give away about yourself? Or the type? i.e. the separation of content revealed in a work versus home context (which i'd guess to be fairly common amongst adult US users). If only 7.2% responded positively to this, it couldn't have meant all the different ways in which people use separate "screen names" to communicate with different people about different things? (Or could it have?) I get the gut feeling that i could use the data to make quite a few contradicting (or inaccurate) statements about behavior, which makes me tremendously worried. For example, i could see makers of login-convergence systems read this to say that users have no need for separate logins or email addresses. Am i the only one who can imagine how this data can actually be used in a harmful manner? danah
From: RG Lentz <rgmagnolia@earthlink.com>
Also, these studies are so absent 'context' that it begs the question: why are Internet researchers focusing on this? Where's the beef? Soapbox here, but does it not bother anyone that there is so much money/effort going into such tracking studies? To what end? I'll risk posing the 'so what' question to get some discussion going.
I tend to agree with Lentz, et. al. (if someone wants to do an edited volume proposal on this, I'll help)perhaps the place to start with critique of this sort of thing is to demand the codebook if it is not publicly available to researchers, it should be provided upon request, then we can see the actual questions and coding, and build the critiques with that in mind. While tracking surveys overall do have issues, I find the real problem between the lack of parity between the claims as presented to the public and the claims that are possible given a narrowest or widest interpretation of the information presented that could be derived from the data. jeremy hunsinger on the ibook www.cddc.vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy www.dromocracy.com
Michael Suman sent me a draft of the survey that i put up at http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/danah/4aoir/DRAFT29.doc for group perusal. I'm assuming, as the author didn't indicate otherwise, that forwarding this is OK for academic purposes. The following note is what i received with the attachment: Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2001 15:28:32 -0800 From: Michael Suman <msuman@ucla.edu> To: danah boyd <danah@media.mit.edu> Subject: Re: Surveying the Digital Future Here is our questionnaire so you can see exactly how we asked the questions. On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, jeremy hunsinger wrote:
I tend to agree with Lentz, et. al. (if someone wants to do an edited volume proposal on this, I'll help)perhaps the place to start with critique of this sort of thing is to demand the codebook if it is not publicly available to researchers, it should be provided upon request, then we can see the actual questions and coding, and build the critiques with that in mind. While tracking surveys overall do have issues, I find the real problem between the lack of parity between the claims as presented to the public and the claims that are possible given a narrowest or widest interpretation of the information presented that could be derived from the data.
jeremy hunsinger on the ibook www.cddc.vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy www.dromocracy.com
participants (5)
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danah boyd -
Ed Lamoureux -
jeremy hunsinger -
Nancy Baym -
RG Lentz