RODERICKGRAHAM.COM

I think one way in which new media promotes piece is by (1) decreasing the social distance and (2) decreasing the the information differential between people. Throughout history, wars have been started at the behest of a few on the top. The reasons to fight are usually particular to the upper classes or maybe even a handful of people – delusions of grandeur, oil, simple status, etc, and quite insufficient. But due to social distance people in power have appeared otherwordly (see Triumph of the Will and watch Germans fawning over Adolf Hitler) and due to differences in what they know and what we know they can push the masses in the direction they so choose (see George Bush and the WMD’s he knew they had but we didn’t).

New media, with its decentralized nature, makes it easier for people to gather and disseminate information. This allows more information to be known about our leaders, and it makes them appear less Godly, more human, and more like us. We are less likely to take their word as gospel. This gathering and disseminating of information also means that it is harder for governments to lie, conceal the truth, or otherwise produce a narrative that best serves their ends. In a society where new media is prevelant, the people get a say in what the nation’s narrative is.

There are at least two possible answers to this question*:

1. People help those they hardly know because there are incentives embedded in the online community (e.g. reputation, points, etc.). This approach sees people as individual, rational, resource maximizers.
2. People help because it is in our evolved nature to do so. We are natural cooperators, and for many forms of group activity we do not need any incentive. This approach sees people as fundamentally social animals, with an innate desire to work collectively.

Most scholars of human behavior have spent the last twentieth century working under the first assumption that we need incentive in order to do things that have no direct benefit to us (e.g. in order to get students to fill out a survey, we need to offer them money, otherwise they would not do it). Further, in cases where incentives could not be offered, then punishments needed to be given in order to encourage collective behavior (e.g. if there was no fine for littering, more people would simply drop their trash because it is not in their best interest to walk to a trash can). This assumption is strongest in economics, but it permeates even my discipline, sociology. We also see this approach in businesses, law,
and public policy. Everyone was trying to find out how to get the incentives right.

But in the past thirty years or so, research in economics, social psychology, and evolutionary biology has led to the conclusion that we are natural cooperators. In short, in any population, there are usually more cooperators (people who need no incentive) than non-cooperators. So, given a population of users in an online community, you will always get a good number of people who are willing to simply answer questions without needing any incentive – no points, no votes, nothing**.

There is a catch however. Many natural cooperators lend a helping hand, and expect help in return. If they do not get help, they will not be so generous in the future (for those who read economics or social psychology or evolutionary psychology books, this is the “tit-for-tat” strategy).

In most online forums you have very little participation because those who are willing to write posts and comments soon find that most people simply read the posts, get the information, and do not participate. Those natural cooperators then leave.

So, in an online community, there needs to be a critical mass of cooperators to keep exchanges going.

Ironically, this leads us back to the first answer, that people are selfish and need incentives to cooperate. In order to have a stable, and vibrant online community you need to make sure to provide incentives for selfish people who only respond to “votes” or “likes” or some other form of reward. If there was some way to know the composition of the people browsing a website, one could calibrate the code to fit that composition. However, we never know, so it is always a safe decision to go ahead and give rewards. That way the cooperators will be reciprocated, and the selfish ones will get their reward.

So, like most things in life, the answer is not a simple one. The answer is that people help those they hardly know because some are selfish and selfless!

*This question was posted on Quora, and I attempted to answer it there.  So, this is a repost….

**Yochai Benkler‘s The Penguin and the Leviathan gives a very good review of this literature.

Information technology, especially the Internet, has become so integral to the workings of modern day life, that I think it’s necessary that we fully integrate digital literacy into our educational institutions.  As it stands, a computer class falls into three categories:

• An elective – students in high school or college choose to take these courses as a part of a liberal arts curriculum.  Said students, especially in college, pay as much attention to the course as they would an art or music appreciation class, which is very little relative to their other required courses.
• A “pseudo” computer literacy course – this course doesn’t really discuss the science, history, logic, or rational behind information technology.  Instead, the class becomes a vocational class about computers.  Students practice opening and closing documents, writing equations in excel, and yes, typing.  These are important skills, but this course does not nearly get at the heart of how information technology structures modern life.
• A required course for select majors – students majoring in a computer related field, or a field that relies heavily on computing will take an intro course that covers the basics of information technology.  These courses lay the groundwork for understanding how information technology effects our world.  Unfortunately only those select majors – a small percentage – get this valuable information.

During the course of an educational career, students should take one or more courses that encompass these three components of digital literacy (at the least). I wish I could take credit for this concise image, but the credit goes to an educator, Phil Macoumb, who blogs at http://macoun.edublogs.org

Some may say that with these three options, we have enough.  American students are falling behind as it is in math and science, time shouldn’t be wasted on computer literacy.  I could buy that argument if I presumed that digital literacy was a skill like woodworking, something that could be used by a select group of practitioners or learned “on the job”.   But it is no more a skill than learning about how our constitution has molded American life, or how Greek tragedies have informed modern storytelling.  But just like math and English (admittedly not the same degree) the population as a whole needs to have a strong grasp of digital literacy in order for society to function properly.

Let me explain…

Read more…

Like most children of the 80′s, I was told that computers were the future.   So,when I entered college in the early 90′s, I majored in computer science.  However, instead of playing video games, planning war games, or at the very least monitoring a bunch of whirring machines, I found myself learning code and enrolled in math classes.

What?  Where was all the stuff?  I wanted to be the nerdy black guy who helped the hero save the world by feverishly clicking buttons and somehow deriving an answer based upon some highly technical knowledge “my” computers spit out (or alternatively…a bad buy…like the geeky black guy from the first Die Hard movie).   Needless to say, after fiddling with Fortran for a semester, I changed from computer science to biology.

In retrospect, I was learning computer science.  But I operated under the false belief, at that time,  that owning was knowing.  I didn’t care about the concepts that underlie the concept of computing, or even why computers were important.  I just assumed that I would be sitting in a classroom loaded with computer terminals and then magically it would all come together.  I could chalk this false belief up to a combination of youth and coming from a working class background where I was the first in my immediate family to go to college.

But this false belief also operates at an institutional level.  Let me explain…

Read more…

I have begun to hang out a coffee shop near my home called Small Point Cafe.  Its a great coffeehouse.  Small Point is in a good location in downtown Providence with a lot of foot traffic.  I can sit at the window and people watch (one of my favorite pastimes).  The bathroom is clean, the service is nice, the ambiance is relaxing (in a granola-artsy type of way…see pics from another blogger here).  And, in what is now a requirement for coffee shops, they have free wi-fi.

Small Point Cafe finally broke my allegiance to Starbucks.  When my home or office surroundings get stale I go to Small Point for a fresh environment to stimulate my mind.  On this particular day I decided to do some more research on my white nationalism project.  I tried to log into the American Renaissance website, an avowedly white nationalist website.  Well…as it turns out, I cannot access many of those websites because…as the webfilter at Small Point says, they are websites of “hate and aggression”.

As a good liberal, I initially applauded this idea.  Let’s stop hate speech, I thought.  But then, I remembered recent arguments I had made about free speech and political correctness (here).  And then, I thought about even more recent arguments (my last post, actually) about how governments try and block websites they don’t like (here).

Is there much of a difference, in principal, between this sign and a "whites only" sign?

And suddenly I didn’t like the idea of Small Point blocking American Renaissance, or any website for that matter.  This raises so many questions.

• If I can draw a generalization from the ambiance of Small Point (organic, green, artsy) I can make an assumption that the owners and even more so the patrons of the cafe are left or center left in their political orientations.  Wouldn’t that imply some level of tolerance…even tolerance for groups that are intolerant?
• At the same time, this is a private enterprise.  Shouldn’t they have the right to ban whatever websites they see fit?
• But then, we don’t let private enterprises segregate their customers by race anymore (thank God…I couldn’t people watch if I had to sit in the back near the bathroom).  So should we let private enterprises segregate websites by political orientation – in effect putting websites showing that are deemed “hate websites” a “whites only” sign?

This amounts to the digital segregation of opinion.  Just food for thought.

We think of the Internet as a medium for free speech.  And, in a familiar progression, free speech equals dissent which can equal democracy.  And we all like democracy.  Its a good thing.  Late 2010 and early 2011 has witnessed this progression in North Africa and the Middle East.  We have all witnessed the “Arab Spring“, as it is now being called.  Information spread via the Internet was one of the catalysts for political change in that region.

But governments are getting adept at finding out who’s who on the web (see Mozorov’s The Net Delusion):

First, every device connected to the Internet is given a unique number known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address.  This is not unlike a mailbox.  While governments cannot exactly say that you personally sent information from that address, chances are highly likely that you or someone you know used that computer (this is not unlike a mailbox, where outgoing mail sent from that box is most likely sent by the owner…although technically someone could place mail in someone else’s box to be sent).  They can simply block information from traveling to and from your ISP, or they can trace information sent online back to its IP address.   By the way, if you would like to know your IP address, go here.

Second, passwords used for social networking and e-mail accounts can be stolen using malware like Firesheep.  From our IP addresses, we send out information packets.  Firesheep and other types of malware are “packet sniffers”.  Once the passwords are stolen of course, all hell breaks loose, and people’s personal information is compromised.  Repressive governments, especially those with more resources such as China and Iran, hire hackers to build this malware and hack into the emails and social network accounts of suspected dissidents.

I would like to believe that one of the great things about the Internet is that it can foster free speech.  But, when anonymity is lost, speech is no longer free in some countries.  Speaking out can cost you your livelihood, some jail time, and maybe your life.

Peyman Bagheri is a blogger who has fled Iran for fear of being imprisoned (picture from CNN.com). Other potential bloggers fear the same repercussions, and thus remain silent.

Just as hard as governments are working to erase anonymity and increase the costs of speech, there are others working just as hard to keep the Internet anonymous and keep speech free.

Let me explain…

Read more…

When sociologists talk about institutions, they talk about collections of practices that order the lives of generations of people.  When we say “order the lives”, we mean that the institution possesses symbols, values, and norms that we believe, understand, and adhere to.  In this way, the catholic church would be an institution.  Marriage is also an institution.

We can even talk about people or businesses as being institutions as well – if they are so visible that they order our lives, and they possess a permanence that makes them relevant to generations of people.  Thus, Dick Clark would be an institution, or Monday Night Football (even the recently retired John Madden).

Facebook has arguably become a social institution. President Obama may have started what will become a rite of passage for politicans...doing Facebook Town Halls.

There are several companies of the digital age that are good candidates for being called institutions: Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.  Certainly their market dominance suggests that they are some of the most important economic forces of the digital age (along with Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft).  But these companies, more than others, appear to have become inseparable parts of the social fabric of the nation.

Let me explain…

Read more…

When I teach my Sociology of the Family classes, and the topic of single parent homes come up, I find myself always repeating a central theme: children in two parent home tend to do better educationally and are less likely to end up in the criminal justice system than children in single parent homes.  There are many reasons why this is the case, but one is that on average a single parent can do less parenting than two.  Parenting involves responsibilities from imputing values, teaching life lessons, providing security and emotional support, and more.  And two parents working can do this better than one.

"Tethering texts" work to strengthen the bond between parent and child.

Technology can alleviate some of the difficulties that all parents (but for obvious reasons this post focuses on single parents ) face.  Single parents can send what I call “tethering texts”.  “Tethering texts” work to strengthen the bond between parent and child.  The text itself is a virtual tether.   Tethering texts make it potentially easier to impute values, teach life lessons, provide emotional support, etc.

Let me explain….

Read more…

Recently I changed my operating system from Windows to Ubuntu.  Ubuntu, is an operating system that is open-source (the license is free and the computer code is open to the public).  After using Ubuntu for several weeks now, I can say without reservation that this operating system is not only an alternative to Windows, but for certain categories of people, it is a superior alternative.  We should expect that Ubuntu’s open-source, customizable environment is a natural fit for the tech-savvy, highly educated crowd who loves tinkering with software.

All applications on Ubuntu are free, and are good alternatives to the software on Windows and Apple operating systems.

But I think this operating system may find its highest value among social groups that have been seen as traditionally disadvantaged with respect to technology – the poor, and minorities.

Let me explain…

Read more…

You can learn a lot about a person by asking them these three questions:

1. Do you have a 40 hour work week?
2. Do you work on a shift (9 to 5, 4 to 12)?
3. Do you get overtime?

There was a time when people clamored for jobs in which answers to shoft work, overtime was "yes".

The more of these questions that they answer “yes” to, the less money or less education they probably have.  100 years ago, if you would have asked those same questions, and they said “yes”, it would have led to the exact opposite conclusion.  They probably would have had more money and more education.

Let me explain…

Read more…