I’m absolutely positioning the Kindle to be a replacement habit for Facebook and Twitter. How much smarter would you be if you replaced half of your social media usage with reading?

sir

"move in a circle"

neither able to do or suggest anything

fancy themselves equal

The mere trash

rich people

seen romantically situated among wood on a high eminence at some little distance

signal-boost

Among the many phenomena we’d tentatively attribute, in large part, to the trend: the rise of sharebait (nee clickbait) and the general BuzzFeedification of traditional media; the Internet hoax-industrial complex, which only seems to be growing stronger; and the utter lack of intelligent online discourse around any remotely complicated, controversial topic.

Today, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at the Comparative and International Education Society’s Annual Conference with representatives of two open education projects that depend on Creative Commons licenses to do their work. One is the OER publisher Siyavula, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Among other things, they publish textbooks for use in primary and secondary school in math and science. After high school students in the country protested about the conditions of their education – singling out textbook prices as a barrier to their learning – the South African government relied on the Creative Commons license used by Siyavula to print and distribute 10 million Siyavula textbooks to school children, some of whom had never had their own textbook before. The other are the related teacher education projects, TESSA, and TESS-India, which use the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license on teacher training materials. Created first in English, the projects and their teachers rely on the reuse rights granted by the Creative Commons license to translate and localize these training materials to make them authentic for teachers in the linguistically and culturally diverse settings of sub-Saharan Africa and India. (Both projects are linked to and supported by the Open University in the UK, http://www.open.ac.uk/, which uses Creative Commons-licensed materials as well.) If one wakes up hoping to feel that one’s work in the world is useful, then an experience like this makes it a good day.

Where’s my next dashboard? I imagine a next-gen reader that brings me the open web and my social circles in a way that helps me attend to and manage all the flow. There are apps for that, a nice example being FlowReader, which has been around since 2013. I try these things hopefully but so far none has stuck.

Digital connectivity reshapes how movements connect, organize, and evolve during their lifespan.

My goal in this book was above all to develop theories and to present a conceptual analysis of what digital technologies mean for how social move-ments, power and society interact, rather than provide a complete empirical descriptive account of any one movement.

Facebook’s lofty aims were emblazoned even on securities filings: “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.”

The opening section also lays out come key concepts for the book, including social movement capacities (“social movements’ abilities”) and signals (“their repertoire of protest, like marches, rallies, and occupations as signals of those capacities”) (xi), as well as the problem of tactical freeze (“the inability of these movements to adjust tactics, negotiate demands, and push for

As deepfakes make their way into social media, their spread will likely follow the same pattern as other fake news stories. In a MIT study investigating the diffusion of false content on Twitter published between 2006 and 2017, researchers found that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truth in all categories of information.” False stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth and reached 1,500 people six times more quickly than accurate articles.

But now it was all for the best: a law of nature, a chance for the monopolists to do good for the universe. The cheerer-in-chief for the monopoly form is Peter Thiel, author of Competition Is for Losers. Labeling the competitive economy a “relic of history” and a “trap,” he proclaimed that “only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.”

In total, Facebook managed to string together 67 unchallenged acquisitions, which seems impressive, unless you consider that Amazon undertook 91 and Google got away with 214 (a few of which were conditioned). In this way, the tech industry became essentially composed of just a few giant trusts: Google for search and related industries, Facebook for social media, Amazon for online commerce. While competitors remained in the wings, their positions became marginalized with every passing day.

When a dominant firm buys its a nascent challenger, alarm bells are supposed to ring. Yet both American and European regulators found themselves unable to find anything wrong with the takeover.

Entscheidend ist, dass sie Herren des Verfahrens bleiben - und eine Vision für das neue Maschinenzeitalter entwickeln.

Instructional Design Strategies for Intensive Online Courses: An Objectivist-Constructivist Blended Approach

The Importance of Interaction in Web-Based Education: A Program-level Case Study of Online MBA Courses

Learning Needs Analysis of Collaborative E-Classes in Semi-Formal Settings: The REVIT Example.

They can spew hate amongst themselves for eternity, but without amplification it won’t thrive.

My work, rooted in both theory and practice, reveals three things that are essential to bringing individuals into the circle of change: autonomy, guidance, and a sense of social community, or working toward a larger meaningful goal.

Humans participate in social learning for a variety of adaptive reasons, such as reducing uncertainty (Kameda and Nakanishi, 2002), learning complex skills and knowledge that could not have been invented by a single individual alone (Richerson and Boyd, 2000; Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner, 1993), and passing on beneficial cultural traits to offspring (Palmer, 2010). One proposed social-learning mechanism is prestige bias (Henrich and Gil-White, 2001), defined as the selective copying of certain “prestigious” individuals to whom others freely show deference or respect in orderto increase the amount and accuracy of information available to the learner.Prestige bias allows a learner in a novel environment to quickly and inexpensively choose from whom to learn, thus maximizing his or her chances of acquiring adaptive behavioral so lutions toa specific task or enterprisewit hout having to assess directly the adaptiveness of every potential model’s behavior.Learners provide deference to teachers in order to ingratiate themselves with a chosen model, thus gaining extended exposure to that model(Henrich and Gil-White, 2001).New learners can then use that information—who is paying attention to whom—to increase their likelihood of choosing a good teacher.

http://www.zachwhalen.net/posts/how-to-make-a-twitter-bot-with-google-spreadsheets-version-04

Universal education is now widely viewed as one of the basic requirements for a modern society and it serves as a chief catalyst for socio-economic and personal development.

But on the Web, stories of all kinds can show up anywhere and information and news are all mixed together. Light features rotate through prominent spots on the "page" with the same weight as breaking news, sports coverage, and investigative pieces, even on mainstream news sites. Advertorial "features" and opinion pieces are not always clearly identified in digitalspaces.

news is stressful and has little impact on the day-to-day routines —use it for class assignments, avoid it otherwise.” While a few students like this one practiced news abstinence, such students were rare.

While Silvia and Irene are in a very different place from Lacey, in that they are able to work and attend college, respectively, at this point in their lives, they and their children are still at risk

On the other hand, though much less likely, is the possibility of the gig economy becoming a long-term fixture of capitalism.

“The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions… What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change and fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope that society has. This is the only way societies change.” — James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” 1963

On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.

Local- using social media, technology, keeping it horizontal, keeping it simple and humble, celebration is important.

the social technologies- knowing how to organize and have effective meeting- from sociocracy and dragon dreaming, agile tools.

We live in a world of bots and trolls and curated news feeds, in which reality is basically up for grabs.

The last thing most people need is another microphone. They need something to say. (And time to say it.)

In the past, technology has extended the human body, providing it with tools to act upon the world. But at some point, a tool becomes something more. When does it become part of its user?

Snap is also confident that it can reach a high amount of new voters: 80 percent of its users are over 18, so this campaign won't just fall on well-meaning (but still too young) thumbs

We can’t force two people to become friends, nor should we want to.

Facebook does not allow third-party apps to display your newsfeed. This applies to Hootsuite. For this reason, you’ll always have to use Facebook natively. The same pretty much goes for Instagram.

This specification defines the WebFinger protocol, which can be used to discover information about people or other entities on the Internet using standard HTTP methods. WebFinger discovers information for a URI that might not be usable as a locator otherwise, such as account or email URIs.

All of these platforms are different and they focus on different needs. And yet, the foundation is all the same: people subscribing to receive posts from other people. And so, they are all compatible. From within Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, PixelFed and PeerTube users can be followed and interacted with all the same.

ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol based on the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format. ActivityPub is an official W3C recommended standard published by the W3C Social Web Working Group. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and subscribing to content.

Webmention is a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site. From the receiver's perspective, it's a way to request notifications when other sites mention it.

<link rel="pingback" href="https://webmention.io/username/xmlrpc" /> <link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/username/webmention" />

Example 2 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: application/ld+json; profile="http://www.w3.org/ns/anno.jsonld" Link: <http://www.w3.org/ns/ldp#Resource>; rel="type" ETag: "_87e52ce126126" Allow: PUT,GET,OPTIONS,HEAD,DELETE,PATCH Vary: Accept Content-Length: 287 { "@context": "http://www.w3.org/ns/anno.jsonld", "id": "http://example.org/annotations/anno1", "type": "Annotation", "created": "2015-01-31T12:03:45Z", "body": { "type": "TextualBody", "value": "I like this page!" }, "target": "http://www.example.com/index.html" }

Federated blogging application, thanks to ActivityPub

promuoverne

Appare necessario, per quell’indispensabile ripristino delle condizioni della fiducia, avere la massima attenzione alle diversità di ogni tipologia di amministrazione, dal piccolo comune al grande ente centrale, mettendo in evidenza sempre le tante eccellenze presenti, nate spesso dell’impegno di una unità organizzativa e dei suoi dirigenti, che devono trovare pubblicità, apprezzamento dell’opinione pubblica, effettivi riconoscimenti da parte del governo centrale. Anche appoggiandosi a agenzie indipendenti, il governo dovrebbe curare un catalogo ricco e aggiornato di “buoni esempi”, che porti con sé anche la strumentazione amministrativa utile per replicarlo.

Oh no I’m sure any delta is brighter than an epsilon like those. That’s one of the wonderful things about being a gamma. We’re not too stupid and we’re not too bright to be a gamma is to be just right

Rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center.

Trump’s digital strategy, Singer and Brooking argue, is not unlike militant groups and street gangs that leverage the viral web to tell a compelling story about policy, religious dogma, or their own perceived fearsomeness, all in an engaging voice, while repeatedly targeting exactly the right audience to trigger a dopamine response or sheer terror, both online and IRL. "To 'win' the internet, one must learn how to fuse these elements of narrative, authenticity, community, and inundation," Singer and Brooking write. "And if you can 'win' the internet, you can win silly feuds, elections, and deadly serious battles."

In 1968, two psychologists wrote a paper theorizing that computers could become communications devices. The US Department of Defense ran with the idea, and in 1969 the precursor of the internet as we know it today, the military-operated ARPANET, went live. The National Science Foundation took over in the 1980s before business began to dominate in the 90s, at which point, things started to grow in exponential leaps. There were 28,000 internet users in 1987, according to Singer and Brooking. Today, there are billions.

Trump's unlikely rise to the White House was symptomatic of social, political, and technological trends decades in the making—trends that gave rise to the internet and social media and which, in turn, transformed the way we control, spy on, and kill each other.

All tribes need tribal leaders, who in turn need loyalty. Followers of Corbyn and Trump will both detest the comparison, but note how both have the merch, the chants, the hagiography. They’re radically different, but both are products of the tribalism that social media has accidentally brought about.

My relationship is a lot healthier with blogs that I visit when I please. This is another criticism I have with RSS as well—I don’t want my favorite music blog sending me updates every day, always in my face. I just want to go there when I am ready to listen to something new. (I also hope readers to my blog just stop by when they feel like obsessing over the Web with me.)

“We found that 58% of teenagers said they had taken at least one break from at least one social media platform. The most common reason? It was getting in the way of schoolwork or jobs, with more than a third of respondents citing this as their primary reason for leaving social media. Other reasons included feeling tired of the conflict or drama they could see unfolding among their peer group online, and feeling oppressed too by the constant firehose of information.”

Our empirical example also highlighted the value of achieving virtual temporal symmetry for members of a geographically dispersed community. As electronic me­dia become increasingly central to organizational life, in­dividuals may use asynchronous media in various ways to shape devices of virtual symmetry that help them co­ordinate across geographical distance and across multiple temporal structures. This suggests that when studying the use of electronic media, researchers should pay attention to the conditions in which virtual temporal symmetry may be enacted to coordinate distributed activities, and with what consequences. Interesting questions for empirical research include the following. As work groups in orga­nizations become more geographically dispersed and/or more dependent on electronic media, do members enact virtual temporal symmetry for certain purposes? If so, for which types of purposes? And how? If not, how do such work groups achieve temporal coordination?

social ecology formally emerged with the work of Murray Bookchin

the critique of a thing is inherent in the alternative presented

We refer to the plural

About

tri-fold pamphlet created around 2007

This approach, I believe, works well for digital ethics, where we try to articulate rules that govern how we interact with each other through digital technologies. For example, when social media emerged, there was no fixed rule about when it is appropriate to tag someone in a picture and when it isn’t. So we figured out a netiquette and ethical norms as we were going along, based on experience, existing norms, insights from experts etc. There still might be areas of disagreement, but I would argue that overall we have come to an understanding of what is acceptable and what isn’t on this issue, and these norms are passed on to new users of social media.

Phillip Kitcher, in the introduction of The Ethical Project describes the project of this pragmatic naturalism as follows: “Ethics emerges as a human phenomenon, permanently unfinished. We, collectively, made it up, and have developed, refined, and distorted it, generation by generation. Ethics should be understood as a project --the ethical project-- in which we have been engaged for most of our history as a species.” This a functionalist view sees ethics as a set of guidelines that make communal living possible. A successful ethical system is one that can fulfill this function.

For a pragmatist, documenting this change and questioning what perpetuated it in order to better understand our current norm is the more interesting endeavor. From this understanding, ethical guidelines can be crafted, but the descriptive process precedes the prescriptive one.

According to pragmatics, our attitudes and norms change in response to societal changes. For example, in an episode of Mad Men a guest at a party could be seen slapping a child that wasn’t his. It was one of the many (and one of the milder) examples in which the show’s creators’ reminded their audience that in the 1960s different rules governed social interactions.

The social foci hypothesis predicts that links are more likely to form among individuals who, for example, are classmates, co-workers, or go to the same gym (they share a social foci). The triadic closure hypothesis predicts that links are more likely to form among individuals that share “friends” or acquaintances. Finally, the homophily hypothesis predicts that links are more likely to form among individuals who share social characteristics, such as tastes, cultural background, or physical appearance (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1954), (McPherson et al. 2001).

Social scientists explain link formation through two families of mechanisms; one that finds it roots in sociology and the other one in economics. The sociological approach assumes that link formation is connected to the characteristics of individuals and their context. Chief examples of the sociological approach include what I will call the big three sociological link-formation hypotheses. These are: shared social foci, triadic closure, and homophily.

First, I will focus in these larger groups because reviews that transcend the boundary between the social and natural sciences are rare, but I believe them to be valuable. One such review is Borgatti et al. (2009), which compares the network science of natural and social sciences arriving at a similar conclusion to the one I arrived.

Science and Complexity (Weaver 1948); explained the three eras that according to him defined the history of science. These were the era of simplicity, disorganized complexity, and organized complexity. In the eyes of Weaver what separated these three eras was the development of mathematical tools allowing scholars to describe systems of increasing complexity.

Social scientists focus on explaining how context specific social and economic mechanisms drive the structure of networks and on how networks shape social and economic outcomes. By contrast, natural scientists focus primarily on modeling network characteristics that are independent of context, since their focus is to identify universal characteristics of systems instead of context specific mechanisms.

merican public life has become increasingly ideologically segregated as newspapers have given way to screens. But societies have experienced extremism and fragmentation without the assistance of Silicon Valley for centuries. And the polarization in the US began long ago, with the rise of 24-hour cable news. So just how responsible is the internet for today’s divisions? And are they really as bad as they seem?

Social media is well-understood to be contributing to identity politics, but I’d argue it’s contributing to something deeper: identity paralysis. This condition is one in which we have a forced awareness of how everything we say and do — even the seemingly inconsequential, like the shoes we wear, or the airline we fly — reflects on us.

A key difference between inclusive access and buying print textbooks is that students effectively lease the content for the duration of their course, rather than owning the material. If students want to download the content to access it beyond the duration of their course, there is often an additional fee.

You find them in a place that you curate yourself, not one “curated” for you by a massive corporate social network intent on forcing you to be every part of yourself to everyone, all at once. You should control how, when, and where to interact with your people.

we can’t just recreate the same thing we’re trying to escape, and we can’t expect the solution to be precisely as easy on us as the problem was.

our brains have been trained to believe that we want, that we need, a single place where all of “our people” can gather, where it is “easy” to keep up with all of them: a massive network service, just without all the “bad stuff” of the existing ones.

Just like in real life, where your bar trivia team doesn’t really overlap with your work softball team or your church bowling league, all of your online communities gathered in their own places, ones best suited to them, and you didn’t have to act as all facets of yourself simultaneously when trying to only interact with one.

M.B can’t be reduced to stereotypes, of course. But there’s also a bar to entry into this social-media network, and it’s a distinctly technophilic, first-world, Western bar.

You might have seen the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in the previous step. In this 6-minute video, #BlackTwitter after #Ferguson, we meet activists who were involved in the movement and learn about their own uses of Twitter as a platform of protest. Hashtags, when used like this, can be extremely complex in the way they represent ideas, communities and individuals.

To start you thinking, here’s a quote from lead educator Jean Burgess. Jean considers how Twitter has changed since 2006 and reflects on her own use of the platform in the context of changing patterns of use. In response to the suggestion that Twitter is a dying social media platform, Jean states that: the narratives of decline around the place at the moment […] have to do with a certain loss of sociability. And to those of us for whom Twitter’s pleasures were as much to do with ambient intimacy, personal connections and play as they were to do with professional success theatre, celebrity and breaking news, this is a real, felt loss: sociability matters.

Leaming viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral par­ticipation. By this we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcom­ers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community.

"Legitimate peripheral participation" provides a way to speak about the relations between newcom­ers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which newcomers become part of a community of practice. A person's intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of be­coming a full participant in a sociocultural practice. This so­cial process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills.

Thus, an enacted environment has both a public and a private face. Publicly, it is a construction that is usually visible to observers other than the actor. Privately, it is a map of if-then assertions in which actions are related to out- comes. These assertions serve as expectations about what will happen in the future.

At the heart of enactment is the idea that cognition lies in the path of the action. Action precedes cognition and focuses cognition. The sensemaking sequence implied in the phrase, ‘How can I know what I think until I see what I say?’ involves the action of talking, which lays down traces that are examined, so that cognitions can be inferred. These inferred cognitions then become pre- conceptions which partially affect the next episode of talk, which means the next set of traces deposited by talk are affected partially by previous labels and partially by current context. These earlier inferences also affect how the next episode of talk is examined and what is seen.

Another way to use a classification system is to consider if there are other possible values that could be used for a given dimension.

For researchers looking for new avenues within human computation, a starting point would be to pick two dimensions and list all possible combinations of values.

These properties formed three of our dimensions: motivation, human skill, and aggregation.

A subtle distinction among human computation systems is the order in which these three roles are performed. We consider the computer to be active only when it is playing an active role in solving the problem, as opposed to simply aggregating results or acting as an information channel. Many permutations are possible.

The classification system we are presenting is based on six of the most salient distinguishing factors. These are summarized in Figure 3.

"... groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent.” [41]

Data mining can be defined broadly as: “the application of specific algorithms for extracting patterns from data.” [17]

“... applications and services that facilitate collective action and social interaction online with rich exchange of multimedia information and evolution of aggregate knowledge...” [48]

The intersection of crowdsourcing with human computation in Figure 1 represents applications that could reasonably be considered as replacements for either traditional human roles or computer roles.

“Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.” [24

modern usage was inspired by von Ahn’s 2005 dissertation titled "Human Computation" [64] and the work leading to it. That thesis defines the term as: “...a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve.”

When classifying an artifact, we consider not what it aspires to be, but what it is in its present state.

human computation does not encompass online discussions or creative projects where the initiative and flow of activity are directed primarily by the participants’ inspiration, as opposed to a predetermined plan designed to solve a computational problem.

Human computation is related to, but not synonymous with terms such as collective intelligence, crowdsourcing, and social computing, though all are important to understanding the landscape in which human computation is situated.

Because of both the content that people upload and the behavioral traces that they leavebehind, social network sites have unprecedented quantities of data concerning humaninteraction. This presents unique opportunities and challenges. On one hand, SNSs offera vibrant “living lab” and access to behavioral data at a scale inconceivable to manysocial scientists. On the other, the data that are available present serious research ethicsquestions and introduce new types of biases that must be examined (boyd and Crawford2012)

For those of us who believe that social network sites are socio-technical systems, in whichsocial and technical factors shape one another, failing to describe the site under studyignores the fact that the technological constraints and affordances of a site will shapeuser practices and that social norms will emerge over time. Not including informationabout what the feature set was at the time of data collection forecloses the possibility ofidentifying patterns that emerge over time and through the accumulated scholarshipacross a range of sites and user samples. Unfortunately, because they have no knowledgeabout how things will continue to evolve and which features will becomeimportant to track, researchers may not be able to identify the salient features to reportand may struggle with devoting scarce publication space to these details, but this doesn’tundermine the importance of conscientious consideration towards describing the artifactbeing analyzed.

In order to produce scholarship that will be enduring, the onus is on social mediaresearchers to describe the technological artifact that they are analyzing with as muchcare as survey researchers take in describing the population sampled, and with as muchdetail as ethnographers use when describing their field site. This is not to say thatresearchers must continue to describe technologies as if no one knows what they are—weare beyond the point where researchers must explain how electronic mail or “email” islike or unlike postal mail. But, rather, researchers must clearly describe the socio-technical context of the particular site, service, or application their scholarship isaddressing. In addition to attending to the technology itself, and the interchange betweentechnical and social processes, we believe SNS researchers should make a concertedeffort to include the date of data collection and to describe the site at the moment of datacollection and the relevant practices of its users. These descriptions will enable laterresearchers to synthesize across studies to identify patterns, much in the same wayreporting exact effect sizes allows for future meta-analyses

One key challenge of studying social media is that designers of these tools are innovatingat a very rapid timeframe and often with little advance notice. Given the rapidly changinginfrastructure and the timeframe of academic publishing, the site at the time of datacollection is likely to be very different from its incarnation at the point of publication.

Because of howpeople's position within the SNS shapes their experiences of it, activity-centric analysesrequire contextualization and translation, not unlike what social scientists studyingdiffering cultural practices have had to do for decades.

What oneexperiences on SNSs and the content to which one is exposed differs depending on thestructure of one's network, a user's individual preferences and history, and her activitiesat that moment.

By far the most pressing challengefor SNS scholars lies in the rapid pace at which innovations and technical changes areimplemented in this space. For scholarship in this arena to develop, SNS researchersneed to be mindful of the ways in which these sites evolve over time and the effects thismay have on the interpersonal, psychological, and sociological processes they arestudying.

What makes “social media” significant as a category is not the technology, butrather the socio-technical dynamics that unfolded as millions of people embraced thetechnology and used it to collaborate, share information, and socialize. Popular genres ofsocial media integrated the public nature of interest-driven CMC with the more intimatedynamics of interpersonal CMC.

All SNSs support multiple modes of communication: one-to-many and one-to-one,synchronous and asynchronous, textual and media-based

Many of the weak tie relationships articulatedon SNSs would fade away were it not for the ease with which people can communicate,share, and maintain simple connections. For this reason, this new definition positionssocial network sites first and foremost as a communication platform, while alsohighlighting the importance of sharing content, typically consumed through a stream.

A social network site is anetworked communication platformin which participants1) haveuniquely identifiable profilesthat consist of user-supplied content, contentprovided by other users, and/or system-level data; 2) canpublicly articulateconnectionsthat can be viewed and traversed by others; and 3) can consume,produce, and/or interact withstreams of user-generated contentprovided by theirconnections on the site.

As social network sites have become mainstream, traversing the connections betweenpeople to view profiles is no longer the sole—or, even primary—way of participation.Content is surfaced through streams, and each piece of content is embedded withnumerous links to other content nuggets.

Yet, one significant shift has unfolded: the traversability ofconnections has become more important for machines than users. As APIs make thesocial graph available to broader audiences, algorithms are being designed to traversethe graph and learn about the individual nodes’ relationship to one another.

The ability to see—andtraverse—others’ contact lists was innovative and important in several ways. From anadoption perspective, it enabled users to find shared contacts easily, thus lowering thebarriers to initiating contact with other users and enabling users to harness networkeffects more easily. From a social perspective, it allowed people to easily see therelationships between others, to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances, and totravel through the network in a way that enhanced social interactions.

The rise of open APIs and developer platforms meant that these collections of articulatedcontacts became valuable in contexts outside that particular SNS. Engineers andentrepreneurs alike began talking about the “social graph”—the global network oflinkages between all individuals within a system (Fitzpatrick and Recordon2007). Thislanguage emerged at a time when commercial entities began to believe that the socialgraph hadvalue beyond the individual's relationship with a given social networksite.

As SNSs became more popular with a wider range ofindividuals, many individuals’ contact lists became more diverse as these users Friendedpeople representing a range of contexts (family, professional contacts, church members,etc.). This growing diversity has contributed to cases of “context collapse,” whichdescribes the ways in which individuals that we know from different social contexts cometogether in SNSs in potentially uncomfortable ways (Marwick and boyd2011)

For users, these connections represent what sociologistsrefer to as a person'ssocial network—the collection of social relations of varyingstrengths and importance that a person maintains

Earlier communication tools enabled individuals to create a private list ofcontacts (for instance a buddy list on instant messaging), to establish a group of contactsthat were shared by others (such as a listserv membership list), or to publish a list ofrelated links (such as a blogroll), but SNSs extended the practice of creating a publiclyvisible, personally curated list of contacts and made it a mainstream practice.

Streams of quotidian,ephemeral content encourage people to participate more in that they provide an initialartifact around which others can engage. Features that support actions associated withstatus updates—the ability to post comments to, share, or register interest in an update—also encourage a stream of activity that is prompted by an update but often takes on a lifeof its own in the central stream. Today's SNSs are more like news aggregators than theyare like profile-based contexts, even if the algorithm for displaying content is quiteobfuscated.

In boyd and Ellison (2007), we attempted to stabilize the discussion by offeringa definition of social network sites:web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-publicprofile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom theyshare a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and thosemade by others within the system.

hus it becomes possible to see how ques-tions around data use need to shift from asking what is in the data, to include discussions of how the data is structured, and how this structure codifies value systems and social practices, subject positions and forms of visibility and invisi-bility (and thus forms of surveillance), along with the very ideas of crisis, risk governance and preparedness. Practices around big data produce and perpetuate specific forms of social engagement as well as understandings of the areas affected and the people being served.

Big data is not just about knowing more. It could be – and should be – about knowing better or about changing what knowing means. It is an ethico- episteme-ontological- political matter. The ‘needle in the haystack’ metaphor conceals the fact that there is no such thing as one reality that can be revealed. But multiple, lived are made through mediations and human and technological assemblages. Refugees’ realities of intersecting intelligences are shaped by the ethico- episteme-ontological politics of big data.

Burns (2015) builds on this to investigate how within digital humanitarianism discourses, big data produce and perform subjects ‘in need’ (individuals or com-munities affected by crises) and a humanitarian ‘saviour’ community that, in turn, seeks answers through big data

Crises are often not a crisis of information. It is often not a lack of data or capacity to analyse it that prevents ‘us’ from pre-venting disasters or responding effectively. Risk management fails because there is a lack of a relational sense of responsibility. But this does not have to be the case. Technologies that are designed to support collaboration, such as what Jasanoff (2007) terms ‘technologies of humility’, can be better explored to find ways of framing data and correlations that elicit a greater sense of relational responsibility and commitment.

In some ways this constitutes the production of ‘liquid resilience’ – a deflection of risk to the individuals and communities affected which moves us from the idea of an all-powerful and knowing state to that of a ‘plethora of partial projects and initiatives that are seeking to harness ICTs in the service of better knowing and governing individuals and populations’ (Ruppert 2012: 118)

Indeed, as Chandler (2015: 9) also argues, crowdsourcing of big data does not equate to a democratisation of risk assessment or risk governance:

ut Burns finds that humanitarian staff often describe the local communities and ‘crowds’ as the ‘eyes, ears and sensors’ of UN staff, which does not index a genuine collaborative relationship. He states: ‘In all these cases, the discourse talks of putting local people “in the driving seat” when in reality the direction of the journey has already been decided’ (Burns 2015: 48). Burns (2015: 42) also notes that this leads to a transformation of social responsibility into individual responsibility.Neoliberalism’s promotion of free market norms is therefore much more than the simple ideology of free market economics. It is a specific form of social rule that institutionalises a rationality of competition, enterprise indi-vidualised responsibility. Although the state ‘steps back’ and encourages the free conduct of individuals, this is achieved through active intervention into civil society and the opening up of new areas to the logic of private enter-prise and individual initiative. This is the logic behind the rise of resilience

The UNHCR has even called for the refugees themselves to also develop their own data solutions and ideas (see Palmer 2014) as a way to help build their ideologies into the data infrastructures and thus bring their prisms into view. This could create a richer situational awareness and a better ability to understand and deal with unfolding and future crises by supporting resilient communities through giving them the means of data producing and sharing

Doing so switches the discourse from vulnerability, where there is a need for external protection mobilised from above to come in and rescue the refugees, to one of resilience, where self- sufficiency and autonomy are part of the equation (Meier 2013).