Birds of a feather don't always flock together

This post is dedicated to @leahmcyyc, a rebuttal of her post What is your innovative threshold? (you know I couldn't resist answering back).

Leah makes a great case for Rogers' diffusion of innovation theory, referencing a bit of Kadushin, to explain how she got onto the Facebook bandwagon early into the adoption process. She also references the "tipping point" when Facebook exploded in front of everyone's eyes and her "snobby friends" finally joined the worlds largest social network.

Ok, here's my soapbox moment. I'm not on Facebook. Never have been, and if I have my way, never will be. Why? Well at first it was a principle thing for me - I watched my PR classmates jump on the bandwagon, trying their hardest to see who could collect more friends than the other. Ugh, popularity contest? Count me out please.

Then I started thinking of how I stay connected with people socially and it solidified my rationale to not be involved with Facebook. My good friends (high school, both undergrad degrees, throughout my travels, etc.) I still keep in touch with through other means. Most of them I still have a mailing address, email address and/or telephone numbers for and I'd prefer to pick up a phone and call them or write them a letter any day. I'm pretty good at staying in touch so I DO actually call and write.

I was talking about this with @hburridge yesterday and I explained that I've chosen different social technologies to increase and maintain my networks. It's helped me personally and professionally, connecting me with friends present and past. I was not an early adopter to Twitter (I joined in 2009), but within my group of good friends I was the first on the scene, and they are just finally joining me now. I look forward to networking with them in this space, and they've told me that if I've held out this long from joining Facebook, to stay off...that it's a dying network.

Not being on Facebook doesn't make me a snob (at least I hope that's not what I portray), it just means I've found different, equally robust ways to stay in touch with those that I mean to.

Image courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/48110918@N06/

Exercising influence in social networks

I will readily admit that I'm an early adopter with a lot of social media and technology and because of that, my social networks have grown exponentially. For example when I first moved to Edmonton, I knew only a handful of people that I used to be friends with in high school and during my first undergrad. I was fresh to the city and really keen to get involved in my community ~ Twitter offered the best platform for me to network with the movers and shakers of Edmonton and get my name and face out there.

Fast forward two years ~ I had already been operating personally on Twitter and LinkedIn and I started to see opportunities where my workplace could be connecting with community partners through social media, helping to build our online presence.

It took a bit of time, and use of anecdotal evidence, but eventually I was given the green light to research and create social media profiles for work. As Kadushin discusses in Chapter 9 of the text, through diffusion of innovation, as an early adopter in our organization I had credibility to create and then influence others to join social media.

Kadushin calls this the "Two-Step Flow" of communications - how media influences influencers who in turn adopt the technology and in turn become influencers on others (p. 140). Influencers model desired behaviours with the hope that through their enthusiasm they can hook others into joining.

Kadushin also talks about how potential adopters of innovation and technology tend to imitate the previous adopters within social networks ( p. 138). He mentions how later on, adopters tend to jump on the "bandwagon" with their interest. Early adopters on the other hand, get into the social space early and evaluate how the technology fills their needs as they go.

I am now happy to say that after setting up our social media accounts, I'm now conversing and connecting with our researchers, staff, students and alumni. I am also fortunate to have a supportive dean who is keen to learn about social media and how she can model behaviour so others in the organization follow.

Strong and weak ties and the Alberta election

In round two of our networked collaboration lectures perspectives from Clay Shirky and Keith Hampton shed further light into the grassroots of networked groups and in particular, the Hampton article looks at how social networks motivate people through the democratic process.


The concept of bonding and bridging is introduced by Hampton to help readers understand where the strong and weak ties lay within social network relationships. It is that relationships of strong and weak ties where Hampton believes people feel safe to discuss such hot button things like politics (sound familiar ~ safety in social networks....Kadushin).

Hampton writes that, "citizens and society benefit from individual and collective action to address issues of public concern through activities outside of elections and government" (p. 4). He goes on to discuss that the collectives that are motivated along political lines demonstrate homophilous tendencies and if there is any dissention it comes from the periphery or those with weak ties.

This article was an 'a-ha' moment for me as I further saw concepts that we've covered in Phelan, Kadushin, Shirky and Benkler solidified in this simple paper. And on the heels of the Alberta election I could see the case study that unfolded on my Twitter feed for 23 days before we headed to the polls.

When the writ was dropped immediately the voices of some of my stronger Twitter ties were the loudest - and I expected them to be quick out of the gates, throwing their support behind a candidate. Thanks to the many ways that we are networked, as Hampton iterates, "these new technologies have the potential to fundamentally change the nature of social interaction and democratic engagement" (p. 8). 

After about two weeks of constant, in-your-face campaigning on behalf of political candidates, suddenly my strong Twitter ties grew silent as each of their candidates navigated PR minefields. As election day drew closer and the panic of a potential Wildrose Party government loomed it was the weaker of my Twitter ties that began to chime in ~ those who are traditionally not comfortable talking about their political choices in a public forum. I remember being fascinated by the action leading up to April 23 as panic settled in and Alberta residents felt threatened. 

Much like the Calgary mayoral campaign this past provincial election really motivated the netizens to become involved and cast their vote. Surprisingly though, voter turnout did not hit an all-time high. Just imagine the ways people can be engaged and inspired by the time the next election rolls around?

Image courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/royography/

Being like the Borg?

I really enjoyed this week's readings and how Kadushin as well as Benkler and Benjamin Phelan transitioned from small social networks to the way organizations network.


The Hive (quibbling aside amongst the researchers in the first half of the paper) really delve into the world of eusociality - is a term used for the highest level of social organization in a hierarchical classification (Wikipedia definition). At the heart of this article appears to be moral behaviour and the differences between altruists and individualists - with the belief by Darwin that the actions of altruists would overpower the selfish actions of individualists. And all of these beliefs are understood and derived from looking at how ants perform in a colony and how bees perform in their hives.


If you apply this type of mentality to the social networks of today, does Phelan's article still ring true? Can altruistic traits be encoded in DNA and passed on from generation to generation (as Darwin tried to determine)? Well it seems that good character traits, like altruism, aren't just a part of your physical make-up. It's also determined by the environment one is raised in and the behaviours that exist in that group.


I was drawn back to an article that I had analyzed for our first assignment in COMM 501 - Communications Research. In the article I read about the Sichuan earthquake in China, and how media helped spread the message about how survivors could be involved in the relief efforts. I kept thinking that while we as humans are more socially networked today thanks to the Internet, it seems to take a worldwide catastrophe to motivate us to altruism. 


Gone it seems are the days where people did things out of the good of their own hearts. Now it seems that only when disaster visits the doorstep do people feel motivated to step out of their insular bubbles and help their fellow man. I would like to think that personally I could have my altruistic side tapped for much less than disaster but I don't truly know how I would react. How do you think you would in the same situation?

A day at the conservatory

This blog can't be about all school all the time, and thankfully this afternoon classmate Hillary and I left the books and blogs behind for a few hours and walked down the hill to the Muttart Conservatory for some sunshine, fresh air and plants.

I've taken enough photos of these gorgeous pyramids on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River from the outside, but this is only the second time I've ever been inside of the pyramids to see their wonders. Three pyramids are static, with plants from the Tropical, Temporal and Arid climates. The fourth pyramid is a feature and this month it was hydrangeas! Oh the perfume when we walked in.

The walk was a perfect way to break up some of the reading and writing monotony of our spring intensive. Back to the books this week though. We're already planning what adventure we'll be on next weekend!

The wealth of networks

Well so much for this post being saved so I could revisit it later. Have you ever written a brilliant email or a couple of pages for a paper and then it never saves? That's what happened with this post. Ugh...now to see if I can pull together the threads of Kadushin and Benkler again.

Kadushin and Benkler both examined what social networks were like from the perspective of small groups. Small groups could comprised of any number of individuals, close friends, family members, etc. but these members all had certain roles and characteristics that were enhanced by their small group interaction.

Kadushin probes the idea of small groups or pure informal groups, observing that over time these groups create cliques and that the group exhibits certain characteristics including judging the group by attractiveness and formalizing some sort of leader for the group. Those external to the group will always want to be inside the small group, so will place their social networking efforts in the direction of hopefully joining the group. For members internally, they see no value creating relationships outside of their clique so do not reciprocate social efforts to those externally. A lopsided network is created and maintained (sigh...does this remind anyone of high school and either being one of the cool kids or not?).

Benkler's article examines how with the advent of the Internet came the occurrence of more virtual communities and with that the fear that society would disintegrate. Benkler quotes Howard Rheingold's 1993 The Virtual Community, "There is a hunger for community, no longer satisfied by the declining availability of physical spaces for human connection. There is a newly available medium that allows people to connect despite their physical distance" (Benkler, p. 359) which gives us an understanding of how the advent of the Internet was first received and perceived.

From 1993 to 2000 reports continued to emphasize that the longer that people spent online, the less time they actually invested in human to human contact. However, over time a different picture emerged. Benkler references a study done by Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman. These men studied a Toronto suburb that had access to high-speed wiring ahead of broadband (Benkler, p. 363). What they found was that through Internet access, members of the community began to make connections to the weaker ties in their community, strengthening them so that offline people were more inclined to visit with others when they ran into them around the town. This seemed in direct opposition to what researchers first believed ~ that society would disintegrate physically as more people moved online.

Personally I've seen the change in my family over the years; as we've moved increasingly online, so too has the ways in which we stay in touch with each other. When I first began travelling in 2000 I had daily emails, weekly long distance telephone calls and handwritten letters to stay in touch with my friends and family. Over the years I incorporated IM (instant messaging) and video chatting to the mix. Today I spend a lot of time text messaging or tweeting family or friends and while it's a quick fix to catch up with those I care about, I still prefer to pick up the telephone and call them or arrange a visit in person.

Technology added to the mix or removed, social networking I believe always depends on the person doing it and they will make all the difference to the mix.

Image courtesy of http://www.itsafullnest.com/page/14/

Relationship broker

In Chapter 5 of Charles Kadushin's book, he begins to analyze some of the psychological foundations upon which social networks are built and maintained. As he begins to analyze the depth to which social networks run, Kadushin references, Boissevain who wrote a book called Friends of Friends.

Boissevain mentions at one point how within social networks there are highly specialized at the social network process and he named them "brokers" (Kadushin, 57). These brokers help manage the connections between networks for some sort of profit - but not the monetary kind.

It makes me think of the connections I've made over my lifetime, through the different hats I've worn professionally. Some of these connections have stayed professional, some are more close to me. But all have come in handy at some point in time. Have you ever had someone ask if you could put them in touch with another group they know you have connections to? It's a heady feeling.

More than just a heady feeling, social networks fulfill two needs according to Kadushin: 1) to feel safe; and 2) to reach out (Kadushin, 56). Rationalized as almost an inherent function in humans from birth (we are programmed to feel safe and reach out to our mothers in infancy), I find the reasons that I seek out others is because growing up I had very few friends, at least until I was a teenager. If anything the experience has helped me appreciate the relationships and connections that I do have that much more.

Image courtesy of carloszardoya's Flikr account