UberNoggin

Those who know me probably know that after finishing my PhD a year ago I went into a little bit of an academic funk. There was soul-searching, head banging, and more than a little bit of self doubt. Imposter syndrome and other forms of intellectual angst aren’t all that unusual in academia but I had it bad. Most of the turmoil was around the fact that I’ve switched disciplines. I went from being an English geek (rhetoric specifically) to teaching and researching in a Business school. Don’t get me wrong. It’s amazing. It kicks ass in a major way. However, learning the norms and conventions of being a researcher in a discipline that is so different from where I came from has its hurdles. Add to that the typical post-PhD trouble of establishing your personal research agenda with no more faculty/advisor hand holding and there are some non-trivial growing pains to get through.

I spent about three months last year writing a research question a day just to get ideas out. Afterwards, I went through them to see what trends I could uncover in my interests. There were certainly some “Gee, I know what I was thinking about that week” kind of trends but the overall picture helped me focus on my desire to make real meaning out of big data collected from social sources. Social technologies have been my thing for a long time. I even designed a giant certification program for Kelley about social technologies in business.  But in terms of research agenda, I still had some refining to do.

There are a couple of big issues related to being an academic who studies social technologies:

1. It moves FAST! You just can’t be an “expert” in everything related to these tools. For every new tool that comes to market another one becomes defunct and you’re constantly crossing your fingers that the dying ones aren’t the ones you’re studying and that the new ones don’t make your ideas completely wrong.
2. There are TONS of self-proclaimed social technology experts out there. You just don’t have this in other areas. Random people can’t profess themselves to be medical or legal experts. There aren’t “biology gurus” on Twitter. But you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone with a bio like “I’m a speaker, guru, and social media evangelist.” I’m not competing with these folks but to the general public it’s tough to discern the difference between these people and serious academics who study the same topics.
3. Not everyone takes social technology seriously yet. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that this whole internet thing is a fad or just something that the kids are into…well, my student loans would have been paid off a long time ago.

That being said, I’m not deterred. I know that even with hundreds of articles on Facebook alone, there’s still room for unique thoughts when it comes to research and social technologies. So where do I want to fit in and will that work in my new discipline?

I think I finally have the answer. It’s big data. It’s scraping millions of Tweets to answer big questions. It’s aggregating content created by prosumers from dozens of channels to see what we can find. I’m tired of hearing about monitoring services and clipping services that only serve to provide a biased pinhole view of the conversation. It’s time to stop looking just at the trees you think are relevant to you and start studying the forest and the ecosystem within it.

So, after all this time and all this hair pulling, I finally have it. I have my BIG question and a fairly good research agenda to back it up.  My goal is to found out if there is a better way to harness and uncover insights from big data gathered from social sources. Rather than asking a question and then gathering data directly related to that question, I want to find a scalable and repeatable way to conduct ongoing analysis of this data to shed light on unexpected trends and correlations that then lead to research questions. I want to find the freaky, unexpected, surprising and yet powerful revelations that make us wonder why and dig deeper.

Having arrived at this focus I feel excited and geared up. The path isn’t totally clear yet but it’s so much better than it was and I’m optimistic that I’ve landed somewhere that I can do some interesting and important things. It’s so good to finally feel that way.

Most folks who know me know that I disagree with the idea of Natives and Immigrants in terms of technology (ala Prensky). Today’s high schoolers and undergrads are not natives to technology. They don’t have some magical innate ability to understand new technologies. What they usually have is a clear lack of fear when encountering a new technology. They aren’t afraid to try to figure it out and it makes them look more “native.”

As is typical, though, it’s easier to criticize someone’s idea and much harder to suggest a replacement so I’ve been thinking hard about better terms to describe the almost palpable difference between “us” and “them,”  looking for a metaphor that helps us understand rather than label, empower rather than excuse. So here’s the idea I’ve been playing with recently. It may not be the right one so I welcome feedback.

Revolutionaries and Beneficiaries

Revolutionaries: Those who have been and are involved in the development, application, and implications of technology accessible to the masses. Regardless of age or education, these are the folks who develop new technologies or ways of thinking about technologies that pave the way for mass adoption. This also includes those who think about the application and effects of these technologies (educators, philosophers, futurists, early adopters etc)

Beneficiaries: Those who benefit from the actions of the Revolutionaries via mass accessible technologies and their application. For example, my students don’t have to wrestle with whether using a word processing program is beneficial to their work because others (educators, technologists, researchers, previous users) have already done the footwork to prove that the convenience and ease that word processing possesses over a typewriter, for example, are worth learning the software.

These are not closed categories. A Beneficiary could easily become a Revolutionary if he/she begins to think about technology in new ways rather than just benefiting from advances and adopting them. Revolutionaries may become Beneficiaries if they settle into a technology they are comfortable with and stop comparing it to other options or stop thinking about the implications of that technology’s use.

I would suggest that most of us are both Beneficiaries and Revolutionaries. When I drive my car or use my microwave I typically don’t think about the way they’ve changed my life. I press the buttons and my popcorn pops. If my microwave breaks and I have to learn to pop popcorn on the stove I may start thinking more like a Revolutionary: “Wow! That microwave really changes the way I live.”

Neither way of thinking is superior to the other. Both have their place. If I allowed myself to get bogged down in Revolutionary thinking every time I switched on a light I’d not get much done. If I blindly adopt every new technology that comes along my quality of life would, no doubt, drop as I tried to use everything in the course of my day without judging them for their usefulness.

So? What do you think? Do these terms ring truer to you than the Native and Immigrant? Are there better terms to describe these ways of thinking and adoption?

Mark and I often do a bit of brainstorming on the big dry erase boards in our dining room. Lately, we’ve been churning out research-type questions about virtual worlds. I thought I’d post them to save them from little hands and erasers and perhaps to get some discussion going.

• What is a virtual world? what definition works best to aid research? Is it different than a virtual environment?
• How does the ability to see others’ friends list change our perception of them? How is that perception different in a space where we can’t who someone is friends with?
• How can identity formation mechanics be made interoperable? Should they?
• How is the style/goal of the world or environment tied to expected avatar behavior (ex. Miis with guns?)?
• What are the trust implications of communication in multiple virtual spaces? (ex. Do I trust someone more who I know in SL and on Twitter?)
• Are social networks virtual worlds?
• Identity: does more information = more trust, does more or less choice allow for more succinct identities?
• Are we more or less immersed in spaces where we have more choices in identity formation?
• Does less identity = less immersion?
• Does greater choice in identity formation result in more accurate identity portrayal? more trust worthy identity?
• How would MUVEs and MMORPGs be changed if more SNS mechanics were added to them?
• What influences greater number of friends in an MMORPG/MUVE? mechanics of friendship? purpose or advantage of friendship? personality expression?
• Do SL or FB users have more friends? How does introversion or extroversion influence number of friends in each space?
• Is FB a more powerful social network because it can incorporate multiple identities and connections? Pull info from other spaces?
• Do we “know” people more if we”know” more than one of their online identities? If one of those identities is a SNS rather than a MUVE or MMORPG?
• How do we verify someone’s identity? What info do we need to feel that we know who they are?

These are pretty disorganized but you probably get the drift of where the ideas are going. I haven’t had a chance to think through any one of them to the point of satisfaction but Mark and I have been wrestling with the definition of virtual world because we just don’t feel that the definitions offered by others are prepared to deal with the multitude of spaces that are popping up online. So far we think that a virtual world is one in which:

• the world goes on whether you’re logged in or not; you can’t pause the world
• digital
• hosted remotely
• capacity more multi-user
• users are represented by some kind of avatar, identity that they create (even if it’s text-based or very limited in construction)

What would you add? Would you take anything away?