Major Studio Narrative: Paper 2

The link below is for my free writing on social change and the urban landscape of downtown NY.msn_freewriting_2.pdf

Major Studio Narrative: Portrait Prototype

Group: Tarynne Goldberg
Myeong Jae Lee
Rohini MetharamOur initial idea of depicting the character through a one sided conversation in a breakup was too narrative. We had to go back and refine the piece to portray the character without being too literal. We stuck with the same concept for the prototype and worked mainly with sound and a little text to bring out the character through just the emotions, thoughts and sounds that he/she would experience during this part of their life. Below is our prototype. Enjoy!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7711656600848794819

Major Studio:Analytical Paper 1

For your enjoyment, my first analytical paper on the European montage scene from Rules of Attraction…

msn_freewriting1.pdf

Collab: Final Project

Conor Clarke, Vaskiliki Touhouliotis, Tarynne Goldenberg

Final Project, Urban Group: Post-Panotptic Pat

dae_ccvttg_pppfinal.pdf

Intro to Broadcast Design: final show open

The final show package for 21 Jump Street:

jumpfinal01_open.jpg  ||   jumpfinal02_openhd.jpg

jumpfinal03_logos.jpg

jumpfinal04_bumpin.jpg

jumpfinal05_bumpout.jpg

jumpfinal06_lowerthird.jpg

jumpfinal07_animbug.jpg

jumpfinal08_transbullet.jpg  || jumpfinal09_transdesk.jp || jumpfinal10_translock.jpg

jumpfinal12_credits.jpg

jumpfinal13_homepage.jpg || jumpfinal14_characters.jpg || jumpfinal15_video.jpg

Major Studio: Adieu to you

My final project for all to enjoy….below is the abstract and below that the link for the pdf.

ABSTRACT
Online social networks are useful tools in terms of building and maintaining social connections and exchanging information in an online arena. This paper outlines the journey of a false Facebook profile from conception to eventual banishment. The project’s initial goals sought to gain popularity through the creation of a fake profile for rain boots, and based on the connections formed, draw comparisons between friendships online versus offline. The latter part of the paper focuses on the technicalities of Facebook user politics and network policies, as well as criticism of the aforementioned.

to read the whole paper…majorstudio_finalpaper.pdf

works-cited.pdf

Collab

Major Studio:Final Project, prototypes

Major Studio: Final Project, part three

Write a narrative description of the project(s). What is it, who is it designed for, what is it designed to do, what kind of technology does it explore, why should we care about it, where will we see or what is the project’s life beyond the classroom, how does it make a difference?

Social networks allow users to create profiles, exchange information, and connect to other users on the network. Each network has it’s own set of rules (i.e. permissions to view profiles), and specific unwritten social dynamics. In fact, it is not uncommon for a person to have and maintain profiles on more than one social network site. Despite the information exchange and other features of these sites, many people use these networks to “friend” other users by connecting to them, essentially creating a personalized web of connections, or a digital network of real life friends and acquaintances.

I was interested in how and why these connections are made. Three hours after creating my account, I received a friend request from a girl I had attended high school with, and had not seen since graduation. We were not friendly then, and we are not friends now, at least not in the real world. It seems bizarre that I can be friends with someone on facebook, and just having that connection gives me access to the intimate details of their life: relationship status, religious views, private photographs, etc. However, outside the realm of the digital world, that kind of exchange of information would never occur.

Perhaps “friending” people on facebook is less about the actual meaning of the connection, and more about making as many connections to acquaintances as possible. It begins to take on a hunt and gather mentality, where “friends” are made, and connections forged for the sake of building a network that supplies a user with endless opportunities to obtain information. After all, humans are social creatures, and it is an innate desire to belong to a group or community; the need to have connections with others is nothing new.

However, maybe it is more than forming a connection. I think it is also a way of gaining attention, as in hey, look at my profile, come see what I’ve been up to. Essentially the profiles people make for themselves on these social networks are carefully edited versions of their real world selves, a representation. This means that social networks should technically be a representation of the way friendship works in the real world.

But how much like the real world are these social networks? I’ve already stated that there are people in my friend pool that I would not consider an actual friend, or someone I would spend any time with in the real world. And, if I bumped into one of these people on the street, I certainly would not go into whom I am dating or show them pictures that I had recently taken. From there, the person would not be able to select a person from one of those photos and immediately “click-through” to get their bio and information.

With the invention of the online profile came the invention of the online self. The Internet has become a place where 60% of the content is created and driven by personal users. This means that not only are we are editing the content of the web, but we also have begun to edit ourselves as well. These online selves are caricatures, mere snapshots, but they are nonetheless a powerful form of self-representation.

Ultimately what I want from my project is to explore the nature of these online friendships and their meaning in relation to offline, real world connections. In a digital world where the social network rules, and anyone can be famous or popular simply by hunting and gathering friends on the Internet, how does one begin to gauge the authenticity and meaningfulness of these click-through friendships? As digital friendships become the social norm, how do those connections translate into the real world, and how does that, if at all, affect non-digital friendships? How far are people willing to go to gain friends or popularity on these websites? What determines the kinds of “people” that users are willing to friend? How does one not only obtain, but also maintain popularity? What aspect of the profile is the most important: wittiness, photos, interests, number of other friends?

I plan to create two MySpace profiles: one for my red rain boots, and one for a person. In order to make friends, I intend to take the same approach: requesting and accepting all friends. I want to see which profile is more successful in terms of popularity; the person versus the inanimate object. There is already an ample amount of pseudo-profiles for non-real people, either promotional characters, objects, or famous historical figures such as Albert Einstein, so I know the rain boots have a good chance at gaining friends.

It will be designed for users of that specific social network to see what makes someone a desirable friend. Because the social network already exists, all I have to do is take photos, set up, and maintain both profiles. I hope the project will help me understand the relation between online and offline relationships, more specifically the legitimacy of online connections, and popularity online versus offline.

Major Studio: Final Project, part two

Articles and Research:

1. Analysis of Topological Characteristics of Huge Online Social Networking Services

Social networking services are a fast-growing business in the Internet. However, it is unknown if online relationships and their growth patterns are the same as in real-life social networks. In this experiment, the observers compared the structures of three online social networking services in order to study friendship connections, correlation, and evolution over time. Certain online social networking services encourage online activities that cannot be easily copied in real life; newer sites such as mySpace and orkut show that they deviate from close-knit online social networks which show a similar degree correlation pattern to real-life social networks

2. Structure and Evolution of Online Social Networks

This paper looked at the evolution of structure within large online social networks. The observers looked at two main sites, and found that essentially both were segmented in much the same way: singletons who do not participate in the network;isolated communities which overwhelmingly display star structure; and a giant component anchored by a well-connected core region which persists even in the absence of stars. Their model of network growth captures those aspects of component structure and follows the experimental results, characterizing users as either passive members of the network; inviters who encourage offline friends and acquaintances to migrate online; and linkers who fully participate in thte social evolution of the network.

3. A Familiar Face(book): Profile Elements as Signals in an Online Social Network

Using data from a popular online social network site, this paper explores the relationship between profile structure(namely, which fields are completed) and number of friends, giving designers insight into the importance of the profile and how it works to encourage connections and articulated relationships between users. It describes a theoretical framework that draws on aspects of signaling theory, common ground theory, and transaction cost theory to generate an understanding of why certain profile fields may be more predictive of friendship articulation on the site.

4. A Face(book) in the Crowd: Social Searching vs Social Browsing

Large numbers of college students have become acid Facb ook users in a short perod of time. In this paper, the observers explored whethere these students were using Facebook to find new pople in their offline communities or to learn more about people they intially meet offline. The data suffested that users are largely employing Facebook to learn more about people they meet offline, and are less likely to use the site to initiate new connections.

5. Group Formation in Large Social Networks: Membership, Growth, and Evolution

The processes by which communitites come together , attract new members, and develop over time is a central reserach issue in the social sciences – political movements, professional organizations, and religious denominations all provide fundamental examples of such communities. In the digital domain, online groups are becoming increasingly prominent due to the growth of communitya nd social networking sites such as mySpace. This paper seeks to answer the questions: what are the structural features that influence whether individuals will join communities, which communities will grow rapidly, and how do the overlaps among pairs of communities change overtime?

6.When Online Meets Offline:The Effect of Modality Switching on Relational Communication

Collaborative partnerships developed via text-based computer-mediated communication commonly shift interactions to alternative formats. Extant research indicated that shifting from one modality to another, or “modality switching,” can have profound positive and negative effects on relational outcomes. Drawing on social presence theory and social information processing theory, this study examines the influence of meeting FtF after varying lengths of time interacting via computer-mediated communication on relational communication. Consistent with predictions, remaining online yielded greater intimacy and social attraction than the other conditions in which FtF contact occurred. With respect to the CMC conditions, modality switching modestly enhanced relational outcomes in the ‘early’ switching partnerships but more strongly dampened those of ‘late’ switching ones.

7. From TV Pitchman To MySpace Buddy

Alltel spokesman, Chad, a fictional character was given a mySpace page, and essentially a large friend pool followed. People become so fascinated and into the story of Chad that it lead to the creation of a fake website for his enemies, who in turn also received a fan base.

8. Measurement and Analysis of Online Social Networks

Online social networking sites like Orkut, YouTube, and Flickr and among the most popular sites on the Internet. Users of these sites form a social network, which provides a powerful means of sharing, organizing, and finding content and contacts. The popularity of these sites provides an opportunity to study the characteristics of online social network graphs at large scale. Understanding these graphs is important, both to improve current systems and to design new applications of online social networks

9. Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics

Openness and scalability, modularity and trust, transparency and security; these are some keywords emerging from contemporary debates about the structure and future of the Internet among engineers, entrepreneurs, and other individuals intimately involved with the programming and design of technical infrastructures. Such terms of debate may not be familiar to anthropologists and other cultural commentators who more regularly focus on the workings of gender, race, and identity or analyze structures of power, sovereignty, and governance. However, they are no less terms of political contest for being embedded in technical practice. This nexus of technology and politics is where the fieldwork described in this article took place, focusing on a distinct social group whose defining characteristic is recursive in nature: a group constituted by a shared, profound concern for the technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own association. I call this mode of association a “recursive public”; the people who participate in it will be referred to as “geeks”; and the Internet is the condition of their association.1

In this article, both argument-by-technology and discursive argument are followed to trace how openness exists simultaneously in both forms: first, as the rhetoric and ideas espoused by individuals who work on, care about, have responsibility for, or otherwise see themselves as involved in the Internet; and second, as the real technical and legal structure that the Internet may take at a particular moment in time. This article differs from existing research in that it uses this example and these informants primarily as a means for carrying out an ethnography not of geeks but of the Internet itself.

10.Musical Community on the Internet: An On-line Ethnography

How and why people find meaning in their use of the Internet should be as important as textual analysis for anthropologists to study. Ethnographic approaches understand the social and technological interactions (and processes) that despite taking place in the virtual realm of cyberspace, have consequences for lived social worlds. Until recently, anthropology has produced relatively few studies of the Internet, and fewer still were ethnographically based. The problem may be, as Michael Fischer argues, that “ethnographic fieldwork provides the tools of investigations, but those tools are challenged by cyberspace to maintain insider-outsider critical and comparative perspectives—not to become absorbed—and to adapt writing strategies that can map voicing and tonalities, locate people and their social structures, and thereby articulate critical sites of constraints and openness” (Fischer 1999:246-247).

11.Social Networks and the Semantic Web

A formal, web-based representation of social networks is both a necessity in terms of infrastructure as well as prominent application for hte Semantic Web. In this paper we prsent three advances in exploiting the opportunity of semantically-enriched network data:(1) an ontology for the representation of social networks and relationships (2) a hybrid system for online data acquisition that combines traditional web mining techniques with the collection of Semantic Web data(3) a case study highlighting some of hte possible analysis of this data using methods from Social Network Analysis, the brance of sociology concerned with relational data.

12. Online articles about the Samy Worm: how one mySpace user hacked the system and figured out an exponential algorithm for making and finding friends online.