User talk:HoDstripes

What is it to be visible online? Is visibility a terrifying concept, the idea that we may be seen by government bodies and authoritative structures without consent? Critics of the 'always-on' culture may like to perpetuate this. Or is it the way in which companies track our data in order to sell us products? An equally dystopian thought but now a reality of our everyday lives. Or does it simply summarise the way in which we choose to share information with friends, family and followers on social media sites? All three come may come together to define the term but the difference is that the first two are to a large extent out of our control - as long as we are online we are not given a choice as to whether the government can access our search history or personal information for example. However, on social media sites, the choice of visibility is often forced upon us, and in fact can be used as a selling point for that site.

One of the biggest social media sites active today is Facebook, a site which is hard to avoid at university. It is the first place I go to when I open my web browser, regardless of what I was actually going online for. It is also my main source of communication with family members, friends and fellow students. As such, control of my visibility is important and this site above others may have the most extensive privacy settings for users. In fact it now features a privacy shortcut tab through which you can modify your settings quickly and easily. I control who sees my posts, who can comment on them, get tagged in them, who can tag me and so on. Personally, I like to make sure my page is only visible to my 'friends' on Facebook and depending on my posts tailor my audience to be only those in the Stirling area or only my friends back home in Ireland. This is how I control who sees my information and personal statuses. When in secondary school, I was taught that future employers would look at my Facebook account and general online activity to assess whether I could appropriately represent their company. The privacy settings I have on my social media sites reflect this. This seemingly detailed level of control is a very attractive feature of Facebook. Yet everything I do on Facebook is ultimately their property and they may do with it what they wish. I do not have full control of my information, no matter how many new privacy features they throw at me. Is visibility online something we have control over at all? HoDstripes (discuss • contribs) 16:25, 22 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Really well written piece on visibility. Do you think that all social media sites should have privacy settings as in depth as Facebook or do you think that a simple "request to be a friend" option like Twitter has is enough? ItsMartholomew (discuss • contribs) 10:47, 26 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

@ItsMartholomew: I think it really depends on the type of site it is. If it is one in which we share a lot of private information such as Facebook then yes, I agree whole heartedly with the depth of the settings. I feel like Twitter is meant to be more impersonal and so what is shared is impersonal, i.e. it's usually a pseudonym, not much personal info is on the user page and the thoughts shared aren't as private as there is an expectation for the public to see them. Therefore changing the privacy settings on Twitter would ultimately change what the site is. Sites like Tumblr though could perhaps benefit from increased privacy settings I believe.--HoDstripes (discuss • contribs) 21:25, 27 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

How do I deal with the incredible amount of information out there? I suppose I do not, I am simply passive to it and more than this, I am overwhelmed. This is particularly true in a social context. It is all too easy to be drowned by the amount of constant content being thrown at you online, from the Facebook feeds and features to the many articles 'recommended for you'. Combine this with the large volume of people constantly present to pay attention to and it is easy to be 'overloaded'.

Dunbar's number states that the average number of people with whom we can maintain stable social relationships is roughly 150, and yet according to research by the Pew Research Centre adult Facebook users have a mean number of 338 friends.^[1] Therefore it is clear that Facebook encourages, through its format, the maintenance of an unhealthy amount of relationships. If we are to take Twitter into account also then the number increases dramatically. You may have a hundred people to follow on Twitter and a further 1000 followers to interact with. Recent additional features on sites only increase the amount of information thrown at you concerning people in your social group. For example, Facebook now tells you how many new posts a 'friend' of yours has made that you haven't seen. It also incorporates into your news feed a selection of posts that your friends haven't even shared but simply 'liked' or 'commented on'. This is all excessive information we are bombarded with on a daily basis. If we happen to miss any of this we must feel we are out of the loop.

I think if I do have a coping mechanism for all of this, it must be simply becoming detached or very stressed. I either completely disengage from the site (from replying to people, from looking at events, from keeping up with friends) or I try and deal with the information in one go spending hours at my laptop. I simply cannot have a steady stream of all the information on a consistent basis. An interesting article - "Structuring computer-mediated communication systems to avoid information overload" suggests the re-organisation of sites to be based more on small communities, like dorm rooms. This could be helpful in reducing the anxiety associated with social information overload. If sites such as Facebook gave you less information on people's activities on it, and also gave an option for creating a 'close friend' group so that you only interact with this smaller collection of people on a daily basis then I would much better cope with the abundance of information available. --HoDstripes (discuss • contribs) 15:13, 28 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hey there! I really like the personal reaction to sheer wealth of information available online. I'm particularly taken by your methods of coping with the information overload; by simply walking away from the information, or overindulging until there is no more to consume. I see from other discussion pages that there are programs available to limit your time online. Have you ever considered installing one? Personally, I suffer from very similar problems, and am yet to install one of these programs. I also thought your call for a more concise newsfeed to be intriguing; I've set a few 'close friends' on facebook, and so all their information turns up first. Yet I scroll downwards to what I honestly don't care about regardless. So, I sympathise completely. Do you know if there are any of these social media platforms available? Just curious. Finally, I love the use of Dunbar's number; makes so much sense! CaDowns (discuss • contribs) 21:00, 3 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

@CaDowns: Thank you so much for your feedbackǃ Yes I have considered installing software like that before but I've never gotten round to it, mostly because nowadays I find I have to be 'always on' social sites for work reasons which is frustrating. I went to a conference the past weekend and chose not to go online that much while there as I was doing a lot and even coming back to Wikibooks I found I've missed so much, let alone the amount of committee information I could miss if I couldn't go online constantly. It's a tough situation. I don't think there really are any sites like that. One solution might be to make a professional Facebook page to speak with acquaintances/strangers/colleagues/not as close friends and a personal one with a smaller group of people but I don't know how well that would work not having done it myself. Actually the closest I can think of is Google Plus as it allows you to make different 'circles' for these different people and I think you can choose which circles you view? Have you had much experience with Google Plus? --HoDstripes (discuss • contribs) 17:01, 7 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

@HoDstripes: Hi, I feel like I can relate quite well with what you said about having a coping mechanism of some sort. I do too tend to ignore most of the things that appear on Facebook as for example people commenting or liking something that is not directly related to me. On the contrary, if I am scrolling through my timeline and see something that catches my eye I stop, have a look and only then see who has liked or commented on it. I think that this way of proceeding, although I realise I do it mostly unconsciously, is more of an attempt to see who among my friends has shared something that I have in common with them, while I do not feel particularly bothered by the unnecessary links of information that Facebook does among my friends or friends of my friends. On the other hand, I have found that this overload can sometimes be twisted and use for our own advantage. For instance, I have recently made a promise to myself to try and be more engaged with news and events that are happening around the world, as I often felt like I was living in a little bubble. Platforms like Twitter, with its speed in sharing and converging information, are very useful for that: I followed about 9-10 news accounts, trying to differentiate as much as possible, and most of them are of the "breaking news" type. What I have noticed is that being used to the abundance of contingent information such as my friends' updates on Facebook I have now to actively push myself to stop and think about what I have just read. I want to read and inform myself, but it requires effort to 'picture' it. Which is ironic, given the amount of picture I see everyday on my timelines. An earthquake in Indonesia is not just a 140 characters tweet, there are people and damages and consequences, but at the beginning, maybe as an habit, I feel nothing as if that was just something else that had happened around me and I can ignore just like other things. However, by prioritising or characterising this kind of "overload" or abundance over other types on other platforms I, maybe naively, feel more in control of this wholeness of information. Everynameistaken15 (discuss • contribs) 23:54, 3 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Everynameistaken15: I understand that, picking which sites or types of information you take in can help. Looking on Twitter more than Facebook helps reduce a social overload while also giving you a sense you're keeping on top of things. I recently re-activated my Twitter account and I'm doing the same thing as you, following a bunch of news sites. It feels like information I should be overloaded with, rather than constant and often irrelevant social information on Facebook. --HoDstripes (discuss • contribs) 17:01, 7 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

I really admire the detail you have gone into when considering the users whom are being overloaded with information. How you have actually researched if we are in fact bombarded with too much info or not. To me the answer is slightly unsurprising as I would suspect people could not cope with what they have given themselves online in terms of Facebook friends for example. How the temptation of having as many friends as we like and unlimited everything seeming to be an indication of why this is an occurrence. However, I was surprised by how many people we are allowed for it to be considered stable. Especially when as you have said you compare that number to the likes of twitter. The internet is a very interesting place where you can find things you never thought you would, find the darkest recesses but mainly to meet people and form relationships. Ones not made possible any other way like pen pals, clubs around the world, fandoms etc. When thinking about this it is easy to consider just how many new people you could encounter and begin a relationship with and to just how easy it would be to become overwhelmed by it. So maybe the wider thing to think about is - how we were always going to become overwhelmed by the internet, by its very vast nature, as it was always set up to be bigger than any one human could ever possibly cope with. User: The one behind the pillar (discuss • contribs) 01:48, 4 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

@The one behind the pillar: I think your final point is very true. I love how I can connect with people from all over the world, keep up with friends from Ireland, join in fan groups that could be based somewhere in America and the internet was always designed to do this. I think streamlining the sites we often use to socialise though could help, like Google Plus does with 'circles' as I was mentioning in another comment. So creating a circle of people who are close that we can keep 'stable relationships' with and see their stuff, but then also having other people in separate circles so we can still connect with them but don't need to be constantly overloaded with their info. The internet is huge but maybe we can create our own little corners in it, to protect ourself from the sheer amount of space that threatens to overwhelm us? --HoDstripes (discuss • contribs) 17:01, 7 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

@HoDstripes: I like how you have engaged with this exercise on a social axis, especially considering the ubiquity of social networking in our daily lives. You could argue this is not just simply information overload, but also an overload of socialisation. I say this due to the data you have provided regarding the limits of social interaction and how you have noted that your coping mechanisms are to detach yourself completely or become stressed. In my exercise I discussed how Clay Johnson uses a metaphor of dieting to explain the overload of information. He states that people tend to eat dessert first by only engaging with information that is of interest to them, and then spreading that information online. This is an explanation for how the majority of us have no conscious filter when confronted with an abundance of information and engage, like you have mentioned, passively or unconsciously. It would seem most of us, then, are overindulging in dessert until we can take no more and either need to create a barrier between ourselves and information or become stressed. Beespence1 (discuss • contribs) 01:56, 4 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Beespence1: I agree with this, but then the problem we face is how do we create this barrier while many professions require us to stay up to date on social information online, particularly in the media field we wish to go into? --HoDstripes (discuss • contribs) 17:01, 7 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hello, I really like your approach and that you back up your arguments with facts. It is really interesting to see, what kind of number of friends is realistic and what is actually the brutal reality. Since you were talking about the massive amount of friends and followers that people have on their facebook and twitter accounts, I was wondering how you think about Sherry Turkles point of view, stating that even if we have a lot of friends on social media and are communicating with them, that we can still feel all alone and lonely? And another very interesting point is that she says, that there is a great risk that we come to see others as objects and are only interested in the parts we find interesting and amusing (that they post on social media). What do you think about that? I think it kind of promotes your point, that we ,,feel out of the loop´´, when not getting information about our friends on social media. --Handkel (discuss • contribs) 10:34, 4 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Handkel: Firstly in response to her view that people feel alone and lonely while having a lot of internet friends/followers, I think that is the very issue. If we have too many relationships for our brains to properly balance then we balance none well and it becomes difficult to have those deeper connections with people. These deeper connections are really what makes us feel together and not lonely. If we only maintain large amounts of surface connections, we can't realistically spend a few hours having a long, deep conversation for example. I also believe the objects issue you raise comes from the same root cause, not having deeper conversations or connections with friends. If we only see them as a label of 'friend' and have small talk, how do we hope to imagine them complexly? We can only see them for the aspect they bring to our large collection of 'friends'. --HoDstripes (discuss • contribs) 17:01, 7 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hi, I can totally empathise with you're reaction to information online. It can be so overwhelming and I'm glad other people struggle to find a way to cope. I recently read quite a good article on the merits of quitting social media (the article is specifically about Twitter but I don't think it necessarily is limited to one site). I also really like the points raised about friendships online vs in real life and the study you quote is interesting. I'm not sure however whether this dynamic can be applied to a site like Twitter where interaction is so much more fluid and the relationship dynamic between followers and following can be entirely different to Facebook friends. However I do keep the number of people I follow strictly at 200 maximum to avoid my timeline being completely bombarded with content all the time, and I don't tend to look at the content of whomever is following me unless I'm following them, so perhaps I'm only speaking for myself. --Idkun (discuss • contribs) 12:35, 4 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Idkun: I love the way that article is writtenǃ I've only just started it but I'm going to take the time to have a proper read over tea soon. Yes, you are right that Twitter followers are different to Facebook friends, it is something to consider. However I think the sheer amount of information that the people you follow on Twitter give you per minute is perhaps more than 200 friends on Facebook because it's easier to consistently write 140 words, or link things than update a status. Therefore I would argue there might be more social overload on Twitter. --HoDstripes (discuss • contribs) 17:01, 7 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

Sociocultural constructivism is the rather lengthy word for the sort of teaching practice involved in the Wiki exercise we have completed.^[2] It relies on co-operation and the facilitating of an environment which encourages this. This was done in part by the discussions page and the incentive of marks for words written there. This meant that there was constant communication and constructive advice. However a negative affect may have been the addition of irrelevant input for the sake of marks, this ties into the concept of gamification. If each word added to the discussion area increased record of a person's 'contribs' then it may have turned into a process whereby each participant attempted to 'score' a higher amount of contribs in a game-like manner regardless of content. The competitive aspect of it may have come from being able to view everyone's contribs. I found myself often looking at various people's contributions in comparison to mine to work out how I stood in the project and the group. It did result in increasing the amount I engaged and therefore can be seen as a positive, but it also lowered the quality of some contributions.

Following from this gamification idea, is the idea that certain social political structures had to be adhered to in order to complete the actual book. Leaving us to organise the way in which the book was constructed was interesting as it essentially forced our groups into creating our own small societies with our own set of rules for collaboratively gaining good marks. If you started to look at it very abstractly you could see it almost becoming a mini form of either socialism or capitalism. The group either divided up sections so there was equal work for everyone (perhaps putting restrictions on how many areas a student could take charge of writing on) meaning relatively equal marks across the board but reduced chances of higher marks for some, or it was free form and could become competitive in writing as much as possible for higher individual marks. It became a very political and sometimes heated environment.

Offline, I found that often I did not speak of specifics relating to the project as this was better to be spoken of online where it could be marked. I spoke of the exercise mainly in terms of understanding how much I should do based on others and resolving larger issues. This was helpful to do face to face with peers where they could let me know if I was on the right track with ideas or not. Response times are also obviously reduced in face to face conversations and so if I needed to quickly check whether someone had time to do a particular section with me or not I would ask in person. It also helped for our smaller groups to work out issues as communicating in our separate groups on the page was more difficult as people didn't check those discussions as often. The smaller groups we were in usually were a collection of people we already knew or friends who were almost definitely there to help and improve all of our marks together and so it seemed like little unions within the larger state that was the Wikibook. This takes it back into the topic of the political web.

Personally, I enjoyed looking up articles that informed and scared me equally on the topic of surveillance and learning more about those technologies for my sections. I would say the book we created contained a lot of useful information but also taking Jaron Lanier's more cynical perspective.^[3], it is also dangerous to consider the collective all-wise, particularly when it is related to individual gain rather than for the purpose of the knowledge itself. --HoDstripes (discuss • contribs) 22:10, 3 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

I really liked your take on the Wiki Exercise. I had never even thought of the idea of linking it to gamification! After reading what you hae said about it now, it seems clear that this was very much the case for many users, myself included. It is very easy to get caught up in numbers, contribs and character counts and forget that we are here to make an established and proffesional Wiki Book. I do like how you managed to draw on some positives with this aspect though, it does in a way force some users to provide more contributons. Of course, there is a possiblity that this doesn't neccessiate high quality, but it did provide a useful way to keep the project moving forward, whether this was intentional or not.

The power structure comments were also succint and interesting. There was a definite power struggle at play here, and I think that no matter how hard many of us tried to make sure this was a group project, at the end of the day, this is marked individually and an element of selfishness comes to play. Often, there was n obvious defenceness in some users regarding their sections and if there was ever overlap, even if accidental, it did contribute to that "heated environment" you mentioned. Thedellboy (discuss • contribs) 12:57, 5 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

I agree with a lot of the points you made here. Having most of our marks coming from theses 'contribs' discouraged any group meetings face-to-face with your peers. I did actually meet up with my group, but only after a lengthy discussion online where we all agreed that despite not having that aspect of our group work marked, we would personally benefit from being able to talk about the project face-to-face. Working in the smaller groups was relatively easy compared to navigating among all the people contributing to the chapter. I like your remark on Jaron Lanier's article and the individual gain - as that was the case in this project. The individual gain we would get from the 'contribs' overshadowed the collective aspect of the work and to me it looked like not that many people were interested in the projects aside from their part. I guess in the end this project did teach us a lot about working in groups - it might have been stressful at the time but it might help us in the future. Riinamaria (discuss • contribs) 13:05, 5 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

Your comment on gamification really stood out to me as I feel it is a key criticism that can be made regarding the project, at least in terms of constructing a quality collection of academic research. At the same time, I am surprised by the extent to which people became involved in competing with others. Maybe it was naïve of me, but throughout I felt that as long as I completed my own work to a decent standard I would get a decent grade regardless. Then again, the altogether more desperate nature of my own group's efforts to complete our side of things probably led to a desire just to see the project finished. So long as we had a finished section that we had put at least some work into, no matter how little, we would feel satisfied that the target, or production quota if you like, had been met. Regardless, your points offer an interesting perspective on the wikibook project. -ReluctantCyborg (discuss • contribs) 17:03, 7 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

I really enjoyed your review of the wikibooks project. I was particularly taken by your comments on internal power structuring and 'small p' politics of the everyday. As previously mentioned in another comment, it is remarkably difficult to work collaboratively in a display of collective intelligence when there is such a clear individualistic interest in getting a good individual mark, or even getting the project finished by the deadline. This, from my own perspective, is an underlying issue with the project, wherein the individual drives of the contributors are very clearly in play, therefore contributing to the 'heated arguments' in some discussion threads.

I also like how you deal with the subject of the 'contribs'. I have read on other discussions that the contribs are controversial in themselves, so I find it interesting to read a review which analyses them as positively as you do, while many other users - admittedly, myself included - view them negatively. Regardless, good job! CaDowns (discuss • contribs) 23:02, 7 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

@HoDstripes: Your contributions provide evidence of understanding wiki markup and demonstrate you have understood the importance of collaboration. Be careful of your frequent use of journalistic sources in the chapter, which should be matched by further use of academic sources. Your exercises get better as they go on and add a level of critical engagement.

Your contribution to the book page gives a good brief overview of the subject under discussion in your chosen themed chapter. There is a good range of concepts associated with your subject, and the effort to deliver critical definitions, drawing from relevant literature and scholarship, and your own critical voice in the building of a robust argument is very much in evidence. The primary and secondary sources you found about the chapter’s themes cover a good range and depth of subject matter.

• Reading and research:
  • evidence of critical engagement with set materials, although some ideas and procedures more securely grasped than others
  • evidence of independent reading of somewhat circumscribed range of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material
• Argument and analysis:
  • well-articulated and well-supported argument featuring variable depth of understanding
  • satisfactory level of evidence of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position in discussion);
  • satisfactory level of evidence of relational thinking (through making connections between key ideas from the module and wider literature, and supporting these connections in discussion);
  • evidence of variable independent critical ability

• Evidence from contributions to both editing and discussion of content to a variable standard (i.e. volume and breadth of activity as evidenced through contribs)
• Satisfactory engagement with and learning from other Wikipedians about the task of writing/editing content for a Wikibook
• Reflexive, creative and fairly well-managed use of discussion pages using deployment of somewhat limited judgement relating to key issues, concepts or procedures

Overall Mark % available on Succeed

FMSU9A4marker (discuss • contribs) 14:51, 3 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

1. ↑ Pew Centre Research.
2. ↑ The Effectiveness of Instructional Models with Collaborative Learning Approaches in Undergraduate Online Courses,.
3. ↑ Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, Jaron Lanier.