Thanks to Josie Fraser for the heads up on Thomas Ryberg’s draft paper on Networked Identities. I had noted Thomas as someone with interesting ideas at Explode (look bottom right) but hadn’t yet checked out his work. He is raising some really good questions about the tension of networked individualism. I have been puzzling for some years about the best ways to understand learning and collaboration, and think that collective and individual perspectives are important. Haythornthwaite (2001; 2002) has done some very interesting work on strong and weak ties. I find her concept of multiplexity to be very useful, that media occupy the most useful niche in group communication and collaboration:
“To examine these environments requires a multiplex approach, one that examines the nature and development of group activities, the way in which multiple types of interactions are accomplished through the variety of media available for communication, and how this combines to create the collaborative environment.”
A few years ago, Blackwell published a really good book on the Internet in Everyday Life, with some good empirical studies. There is a version of the Introduction (by Wellman and Haythornthwaite) online, where you can read about particularism (to be avoided!!)
“Similarly, early studies of media use tended to consider only one medium, in isolation, and often relating to only one social context, rather than looking at use of all media and their multiple deployments (Haythornthwaite, 2001). Analyses have also often been implicitly (and somewhat Utopianly) egalitarian, rarely taking into account how differences in power and status affect how classweb communicate with each other. Throughout, analysts committed the fundamental sin of particularism, thinking of the Internet as a lived experience distinct from the rest of life.”
I like her mention of power and status, since these dimensions are often absent from analyses of the online experience.
http://classweb.lis.uiuc.edu/~haythorn/Publications/Papers/Book%20Ch
Haythornthwaite, C. 2001, 'Exploring multiplexity: Social network structures in a computer-supported distance learning class', Information Society, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 211-26.
---- 2002, 'Strong, weak, and latent ties and the impact of new media', Information Society, vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 385-401.
Keywords: networked individualism, social network, strong ties, weak ties
