La simulation sociale pour combattre la censure : texte de ma conférence à TEDxParisUniversités
Le samedi 19 mai j’ai été parmi les heureux conférenciers de l’édition 2012 de TEDxParisUniversités. A cette occasion, j’ai pu présenter au public français les résultats du projet ICCU (Internet Censorship and Civil Unrest) que je mène avec Paola Tubaro, enseignante-chercheuse à l’Université de Greenwich, Londres. L’accueil a été plus que chaleureux : la tweeterie m’a porté en triomphe, j’ai reçu les accolades des organisateurs et je me suis imbibé de l’enthousiasme d’étudiants et de militants de tout bord. J’exagère, mais pas tant que ça (suffit de lire le compte-rendu Storify concocté par Gayané Adourian ;). Voici donc le texte et les slides de mon intervention, en attendant la vidéo.
Aujourd’hui je vais vous parler des effets négatifs de la censure des médias sociaux, en passant par le cas des émeutes britanniques de 2011.
La censure est extrêmement difficile à étudier du point de vue des sciences sociales. Dans la mesure où elle est une interruption de flux d’information, les données relatives à ses conséquences et à son efficacité prétendue sont souvent inaccessibles aux chercheurs. C’est pourquoi nous devons nous appuyer sur une méthode innovante : la simulation sociale. Read more
What’s the actual size of your personal social network? Some numbers
Ok, so you have hundreds of friends on Facebook and thousands of followers on Twitter. Big deal. How many will show up to help you win that human pyramid contest, uh? And how many have you actually being interacting with in the last few months? More broadly, what’s the size of your actual social network? Scientists have been looking for an answer to that question, exploring the cognitive limits of the number of individuals one person can create ties with, both online and offline.
Famously, in 1992 anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed a rough estimate of 150. The ‘Dunbar’s number’ was the result of a large-scale study comparing the size of the neocortex in primates and humans. But in 1998 that figure pretty much doubled when social network analyst Peter Killworth contemplated a mean personal network size of 290. And in 2010 that number doubled again, as sociologist Matthew Salganik settled for an estimate of 610 personal ties.
So who says 1,200? Nobody yet. Maybe (I’m just teasing) psychologist Lisa Barrett will come up with a number of her own, if the hype surrounding her latest article published in Nature Neuroscience continues. What hype? Didn’t you see this?
Apparently, after scanning a few brains, Barrett and her team discovered a fancy correlation between personal network size and the size of the corpus amygdaloideum. Turns out Facebook has nothing to do with the matter in question. If the numbers of the average size of personal networks are going up as years go by, it’s not because of our increasing technological embeddedness. Dunbar’s number was based on the size of human neocortex (i.e. that part of the human brain presiding higher mental functions), so it would come as no surprise if it was way smaller than the one correlated to the size of the amygdala (the part that regulates emotional responses and aggression). After all, it’s safe to say that among our acquaintances the number of those we would like to punch is higher than that of those with whom we would enjoy a civilized chat…
Bickart, K., Wright, C., Dautoff, R., Dickerson, B., & Barrett, L. (2010). Amygdala volume and social network size in humans Nature Neuroscience, advance online publication DOI: 10.1038/nn.2724
Dunbar, R. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates Journal of Human Evolution, 22 (6), 469-493 DOI: 10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J
Killworth, P., Johnsen, E., Bernard, H. R., Shelley, G., & McCarty, C. (1990). Estimating the size of personal networks Social Networks, 12 (4), 289-312 DOI: 10.1016/0378-8733(90)90012-X
McCormick, T., Salganik, M., & Zheng, T. (2010). How Many People Do You Know?: Efficiently Estimating Personal Network Size Journal of the American Statistical Association, 105 (489), 59-70 DOI: 10.1198/jasa.2009.ap08518
ps. This post was inspired by a few tweets exchanged with mathematician Valdis Krebs (@orgnet) and anthropologist Sally Applin (@AnthroPunk). To them goes my appreciation and #FF.
Tableau des équivalences web occidental / web chinois
Il y a quelques mois, lors de la conférence Lift10, l’auditoire a été capturé par le brillant exposé de Basile Zimmermann. Le jeune professeur de l’Université de Genève a expliqué – d’une manière extrêmement convaincante – comment la différence culturelle entre la Chine et les sociétés euro-étasuniennes soit encodée dans le langage et dans les pratiques d’écriture. Et quand les usages technologiques s’en mêlent, l’écart peut se creuser encore davantage. Les claviers, les écrans, et les conventions communicationnelles opposent radicalement la manière de lire des contenus en ligne en Chine et dans les pays « alphabetiques ».
Certes utile pour se repérer dans le web chinois, le tableau concocté par l’expert de médias sociaux Thomas Crampton, doit IMHO être lu à l’aune des commentaires de Basile Zimmermann – qui nous invite à ne pas réduire la différence culturelle à un simple jeu d’équivalences.
Running experiments on Twitter? Don’t forget the bug
Just a quick post to point you to an interesting article about tie formation on Twitter – which is also the place where I found this reference, a couple of days ago:
Scott A. Golder and Sarita Yardi (2010). Structural Predictors of Tie Formation in Twitter: Transitivity and Mutuality. Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Conference on Social Computing. August 20-22, Minneapolis, MN.
Here I summarize the results:
- The more followers you have, the more followers you attract (ok, admittedly this doesn’t come as a surprise…);
- Reciprocity in tie formation doesn’t seem to be due to similarity in interests but, more likely, to some kind of social obligation (well, this is getting more interesting);
- Self-presentation (pic, bio and location) doesn’t seem to matter, except for location which appears to be negatively correlated to tie formation (now they got my attention…);
- Transitivity and mutuality predict tie formation if they are taken together, but authors « suggest that a consistent status hierarchy and some level of tie strength drive this effect » (this is definitely worth looking into).
Don’t believe the hype (about the role of social media in Iran protests)
« Iranian reformist candidates Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoub and their supporters have few communications options. They have no access to national TV, radio, or newspapers, which are under state control. Text messaging is being blocked and web sites are filtered. How are they able to organize a huge protest movement?
While the mainstream media has focused on the role of Twitter and decentralized organizing, the real picture of digital activism in Iran is more complex. Protests are organized centrally by the campaigns of reformist candidates and then that information is disseminated both online and off. The role of citizens with regard to social media is as citizen journalists, using YouTube and Twitter to report on what is happening, rather than to organize the protests. Since this activity is intended for an international audience (and is in English) it is no wonder that this use of social media is more visible to a Western audience than the online tactics actually being used to organize the protests. »
Digital Activism in Iran: Beyond the Headlines
By Hamid Tehrani, June 20, 2009
(read the rest of this article on Digiactive: a world of digital activists)
Links for Education and Social Media (eng, fr, pt)
A Study on the Effective Use of Social Software by Further and Higher Education in the UK to Support Student Learning and Engagement (by Shailey Minocha, Department of Computing, The Open University, UK)
http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/getfile.cfm?documentfileid=14866
Manifesto sobre as Mídias Locativas (by André Lemos, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil)
http://andrelemos.info/404nOtF0und/404_71.htm
L’Observatoire des Mondes Numériques en Sciences Humaines (OMNSH)
http://www.omnsh.org/
Wisconsin student twitters his way to PhD in biomedical engineering
First off this video:
What is it all about? Just another day in the Twitter-crazed US media landscape: a high-profiled news report on Adam Wilson, a biomedical engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who, according to Wired, managed to send a tweet using only his brain. Quite self-referentially, the first telepathic microblogging message in the history of humankind simply read: « USING EEG TO SEND TWEET ». I cannot help but wonder if Antonio Meucci’s first telephone call went something like that, too – with him shouting « I’M USING MY MOUTH TO SPEAK ON THE PHONE!!! »
Using Twitter during surgery
An interesting way of integrating robotic surgery and micro-blogging. A publicity stunt, basically. Question is, what’s with medicine and online communications? The answer, in a forthcoming article by Yours Faithfully, featured in the March 2009 issue of the French journal Esprit. Stay tuned. —a
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What’s this blog about?
I'm an associate professor of Digital Humanities at the Paris Institute of Technology (ParisTech) and a researcher in sociology at the Edgar-Morin Center (EHESS, Paris). Bodyspacesociety offers regular updates about my ongoing research, publications, and teaching. If you want updates on media features and conferences, please click here.
The views presented on this blog are solely mine and do not represent the positions of my institutions of affiliation.
New books out now!
The special issue of the journal 'Communications' Cultures du numérique is out. Also, you might want to check my latest book Les liaisons numériques. Vers une nouvelle sociabilité?. Both published by Editions du Seuil, both available in bookshops and online.
» Buy Liaisons numériques
» Visit the companion website
» Buy Cultures du numérique (Communications, n. 88)
All blog content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 France License.
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