Qotw5: What's in a Name?

"What's in a name?
That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

(William Shakespeare)

The quote taken from Shakespeare’s well known play Romeo & Juliet probably will not sit in well with online pseudonyms. Pseudonymity is simply anonymity that hides a person behind an online persona via a username. Many internet users have a number of different identities they use online, to allow them to explore different aspects of their persona, interests or hobbies. But pseudonymity is also the key to membership systems as well, as it allows members of the community to learn to identify other members they like or dislike based upon their behaviors and personality. Pseudononymous systems strike a balance between people’s needs to obscure their identities online, while still allowing them to build reputations in those usernames. These systems have been shown to work very well for an online community.

People build reputations in their usernames and so their reputation becomes something they value and want to protect. Members who have an investment in something within your community are far less likely to blow that investment through inappropriate, negative behavior.
A reputation is really the collection of tags that are assigned to an individual or entity to reflect their status within a specific social network. Given that individuals play different roles in social networks; they can serve variously as connectors, gatekeepers, truth-tellers and enforcers. Reputations are tied to roles within social networks. Even in online communities, reputation tags are the motivator and governor of behaviors. People take seriously the reputation scores of an eBay seller/buyer, the accumulated scores of a player of online games, or the number of friends and ratings one has in the online social networks of Linkedin, Orkut, Friendster, Facebook or My Space. (Clippinger 2005)

An account I own under MySpace is mainly used to access music sites. In a nutshell, MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos. (“Wikipedia, 2007”)


As you can see here, this is my account under MySpace. I use my real name and not other any moniker created as I feel old friends who stumble across my profile will be able to identify by my actual name. Although there is an option to make my account private, I choose against it. Therefore my full profile is assessable to whomever in MySpace. This means my pictures, my introduction, my music tastes, my top 12 friends are etc. It is very easy to size me up simply by spending a mere 5 minutes browsing through my profile. I do not add any fancy codes to my page to spice up the look of my account so understandably, traffic to my account is relatively moderate. This can be easily monitored by checking the numbers on my profile views.

Reputation garnered from this account is easily established by my interaction within the community. For instance, when I add a music band’s page into my list or when I comment to my friends accounts or pictures. I build up a reputation by choosing carefully what I wish to present myself to the online community. There have numerous incidents when I do know of friends who have their profiles completely ripped off. The term coined for this is Fakesters accounts. The rate this happens just goes to show how easy identity theft can occur online. Fortunately, I have never undergone a stolen identity before. Perhaps my profile just may not be that interesting to steal from.



In a bid to jazz up my profile, I carried out a mini experiment by simply changing my name to a pseudonym instead. I chose ‘scarlet’ as I use that moniker when tagging on friends blogs or in MSN. I kept everything else the same, from my default picture to my ‘About Me’ section. Upon logging in the following day, I found my profile views shot up to 820 from a lowly 322 the previous night. Friend requests and new messages were awaiting me in my inbox as well. It was amazing how a pseudonym like ‘scarlet’ could be so powerful to evoke attention from the MySpace community in 24 hours.

New ways of establishing and of hiding identity are evolving in the virtual world. It is a world that has evolved an intricate system of signals and behaviors that aid in establishing identity and in controlling identity deception. (Donath 1996) The more attractive an identity is presented, the more likely are its chances to get stolen and reproduced completely. Back to Shakespeares quote I used in the beginning, “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Apparently in my case, ‘scarlet’ smells a whole lot sweeter then my real name which is ironic since ‘Raihana’ actually means sweet fragrance.


References:

Donath, J.S. (1996) Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. Retrieved on February 22, 2007 from < http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html>

Clippinger, J. (2005). Identity, Reputation and Social Currency. Retrieved on February 22, 2007 from <http://onthecommons.org/node/723>

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (2007) Retrieved on February 22, 2007 from < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace>

QotW4: I Give, Therefore I Take

“He who brings me news of a great thought before unknown presents me with what is always an acceptable gift.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

The past tense of “I give” is “I take” a professor from last semester candidly mentioned. In reality, the rule of reciprocation and obligation are two trump cards marketers wield as persuasion tactics. The rise of the Internet soon followed the birth of the concept of "virtual community." From the beginning, the concept of virtual community gained wide currency in part because of its utopian resonance. Given that online interaction is relatively anonymous, that there is no central authority, and that it is difficult or impossible to impose monetary or physical sanctions on someone, it is striking that the Internet is not literally a war of all against all. (Kollock, 1999) Many observers were struck by the voluntary and democratic nature of virtual communities. The online practice of strangers helping other strangers with advice and information spoke forcefully to long-standing images of idealized community life of generous mutual aid.

Why do some individuals invest so much time and effort in posting free advice and information online while others do so rarely, if at all? Research suggests that a powerful motivation for disproportionate gift giving in virtual communities can be traced to rational calculation- individuals may expect reciprocity in the not-too-distant future, individuals wish to contribute to the general welfare or they wish to repay past generosity. (Curien, Fauchart, Laffond, & Moreau, 2004)

The Gift Economy offers us a means to learn, to understand, to take charge and to change our world. It is a natural economy, steeped in millions of years of pre-civilization human culture and the culture of all life on Earth. If enough of us embraced it, the modern 'market' economy built on the faulty and inhuman foundations of inequality, scarcity, false quantification of value and acquisition could not survive. In a 'market' economy, the highest status belongs to those who have acquired the most. More generally, in hunter-gatherer societies the hunter's status was not determined by how much of the kill he ate but rather by what he brought back for others.

In a Gift Economy, the highest status belongs to those who have given the most. But what is most important is that the gift must always move. This idea was recently popularized by the terrific little movie called Pay it Forward. Every gift is its own reward but that reward is multiplied without limit, when the gift is passed along to others. A story is a gift. Blogs are gifts. Ideas and insights and teaching and counsel are gifts. Conversations and advice are gifts. (Hyde, 1983)

The Photographers’ Network is one such local online community I belong to. This site aims to be a "photography learning community", in which more experienced photographers, both avid amateurs and professional, provide mutual support, as well as being a resource for those interested in learning about photography. The most prominent sections of the site are forums and galleries featuring member-contributed photos and writing. Volunteer moderators and editors are responsible for most of this content. Almost all the content on the site can be commented upon by members and the comments become a significant part of the content.

The audience consists of photography enthusiasts and would-be enthusiasts but with a significant number of semi-professionals and professionals. Due to the growth in digital photography, there has been a substantial increase in novices visiting the site to use it as a learning resource. Although the audience is predominantly 80% male, female budding photographers feel no reservations to contributing freely thanks to online interaction being relatively anonymous. When people pass on free advice or offer useful information, the recipient is often unknown to them and the giver may never encounter the recipient again. (Kollock, 1999)

Online communities are for all intents and purpose communities made up of strangers who remain strangers so the question that inevitably arises is what could motivate strangers to give gifts to other strangers? Status and status seeking sustain gift giving in virtual consumer communities. However, because status seeking online cannot be done by display or by asserting rank, it takes a different form of identity enactment: The gift comes with a message about the gift giver, a message that contains the identity that the giver wants to establish as a way of communicating status. The power of this process and the reason that it can sustain gift giving resides in the fact that the persuasiveness of the message as a way of seeking status does not depend on direct interaction with the receiver of this information. The dual investment that gift givers make- in the gift and in the accompanying message- is in principle enough to sustain further gift giving.


References:

Kollock, P. (1999) The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace, Communities in Cyberspace. Retrieved on February 9, 2007 from < http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm>

Curien, N., Fauchart, E., Laffond, G., & Moreau, F. (2004). Online consumer communities. Working paper, Laboratoire d' econometrie, Paris. Retrieved on February 9, 2007 from <http://www.cnam-econometrie.com/upload/OLC-CUP.pdf>

Hyde, L. (1983) The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. Vintage Books

QotW3: File Sharing - Innocent or Guilty?

The person who declared the best things in life are free might have very well included MP3s and file sharing networks. Mention downloading of music to any peer around you and chances are, every single one of them are guilty of file to file sharing at some point.

Peer-to-peer is now the common term used to describe Internet file-sharing services. The name derives from the underlying structure of the Internet, in which various computers store information and other computers retrieve it through interconnected networks. With P2P, all computers sharing information over the Internet are "peers" because they both store and retrieve information.

P2P technology enables computer users to share this information through communications, processing power and data files with other users. Use of P2P technology can yield significant benefits such as enhancing efficiency by allowing faster file transfers, conserving bandwidth and reducing storage needs. Businesses, government agencies, academic institutions use P2P applications for a variety of tasks. However, the most common application by far is commercial file-sharing software programs used by consumers to exchange files such as music and movie files with others; information presented in the FTC’s report indicates that tens of millions of individuals have used a P2P file-sharing program. (Douglas, 2004)

The majority of P2P services' users trade digital copies of songs and to a lesser extent, movies. Though there is nothing illegal about the technology itself as it can be used to share any type of digital file, such as personal photos or text files, many of the files traded through P2P networks are copyrighted. It is the unauthorized "sharing" of these copyrighted materials that has stirred the P2P controversy. A heated public debate started when the original file-sharing service, Napster, went online in 1999. Napster was shut down in 2001 but the debate raged on as other file-sharing services swarmed in to take its place.

Here in the information age, virtually all intellectual creations can be protected by some form of intellectual property law. Intellectual property divides the universe of intellectual creations into three domains: copyrights, trademarks and patents. In a nutshell, copyright protects expression, trademark protects names and patents protect ideas.

The Copyright Act of 1976 states that the items of expression can include literary, dramatic and musical works, pantomimes and choreography, pictorial, graphic and sculptural works, audio-visual works; sound recordings and architectural works. An original expression is eligible for copyright protection as soon as it is fixed in a tangible form. (Liebowitz, 2002)

With this in mind, music companies immediately pointed fingers at the dramatic growth of file sharing among individuals who search, share, and download music files from each other as sales of recorded music drop. In fact, a study headed by Oberholzer-Gee found that for the most popular albums in the top 25 percent that had more than 600,000 sales. File-sharing actually boosts sales. Despite predictions that the Internet would level the playing field of the music industry, giving consumers equal access to underground and independently produced artists as to chart-topping pop darlings, music downloads parallels music sales. (Pottier, 2004)

Oberholzer-Gee poses several theories on the slack pace of music sales. From what he calls the "CD replacement boom" winding down as listeners have evolved from replacing their vinyl with CDs, to the rising price of CDs and finally to MP3 downloads. Despite the initial surprise at the results of their study, it makes clear economic sense that every download does not displace a CD sale. As the proliferation of digital media and the ease of disseminating it churn on, it drives the discussion of property rights into the courts, making economists take notice. The fine line between granting sufficient protection of intellectual property to spur creation yet not requiring such stringent protection that market forces will be choked, is as important to economists as to lawyers.

Napster has proven that dealing with file-sharing networks with an iron fist is not the way to go. One goes down only to have multiple clones rise up from its demise. Just like charging culprits for downloading illegally, there are millions that slip through the net. Instead record companies should learn to tweak file-sharing to the best of their advantage. If you can’t beat them, at least, learn to play with them.

Reference:

Guy Douglas (March, 2004). “Copyright and Peer-to-Peer Music File Sharing”. Retrieved February 3, 2007 from http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v11n1/douglas111.html

Stanley J.Liebowitz (June, 2002). “Copyright Issues, Copying and MP3 File-Sharing”. Retrieved February 3, 2007 from http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/intprop/main.htm#me

Beth Pottier (April 15th, 2004). “File-Sharing May Boost CD Sales”. Retrieved February 3, 2007 from http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/04.15/09-filesharing.html