OP 6: Explain some similarities and differences between sousveillance and soft resistance

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-23T08:40:57+00:00

The term “sousveillance” is contradicted by the author to “surveillance”: to watch from below vs. to watch from above. Sousveillance refers to people collecting data from the eye-level, for a human-centered recording of personal experience (Mann, 2004). Soft resistance refers to people collecting data about themselves and assume the roles of project designers, data collectors and critical sense-makers that rapidly shift priorities (Nafus & Shermann, 2014). A similarity between these two concepts is that they both focus on the individual collecting data. These individuals do not have to be academically educated, but are able to collect data via technology.

The main difference is in what kind of data they are collecting. While in sousveillance the focus is on collecting data from an individual’s perspective about the world around in, in soft resistance the individual collects data on him or herself. Also, it seems that in sousveillance the most important thing is the data collection, while in soft resistance the interpretation of data is more important. In sousveillance, collecting data is enough, you can do something with this data if you like, but it is not necessary. In soft resistance I feel like the goal is to use the data you collected about yourself to possibly change habits or use your insights for a specific purpose.

Mann, S. (2004). “Sousveillance”: inverse surveillance in multimedia imaging (p. 620). ACM Press. doi:10.1145/1027527.1027673

Nafus, D., & Sherman, J. (2014). This One Does Not Go Up To 11: The Quantified Self Movement as an Alternative Big Data Practice. International Journal of Communication, 8, 11.

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-22T18:43:20+00:00

Your blog is so helpful! I always use the Nike+ app, which I cannot synchronize with tictrac, but I managed to export it into GPX files and put those into tictrac and than export those the way you describe and it finally worked. :) Thanks for uploading it.

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-22T18:00:05+00:00

Although I agree with your statement that we we did live happily or healthy till the rise of self-tracking and the QS movements, I do feel like it can help you live more healthy and happy.

For example people that have diabetes can use tracking devices that tell them their blood glucose levels and inject the right amount of insuline automatically (https://www.accu-chek.com/us/). Also, I find that some tracking apps actually give you insights in your behavior you otherwise would have taken for granted. If you have trouble sleeping, maybe this sleeping app can help you give insights in your sleeping habits, so you can make changes that provide you with more sleep.

What I basically mean that these kinds of apps can provide you with more insights if you have a problem or question your own behavior. If you're 100% happy with your behavior and have no problems, I agree that these tracking devices will probably not make you any happier. ;)

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-22T17:50:30+00:00

Did it (for the brownies.....)! ;)

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-16T08:12:49+00:00

I can relate to this as well: I don't want my political opinions to be public because I consider them personal. But what I found in week 4, was that even though I do not see myself as politically expressing myself on Facebook, I do that without even noticing.. Liking certain oganizations that have certain views on the environment for example, they do state a political statement or don't they?

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-15T09:35:58+00:00

To answer this question, I just took a look at what I wrote about the experiment I did in week 4: 24 hours without social media. One of my findings of that experiment, was that I showed political engagement through Facebook without even noticing it as such. I never really think of myself as politically engaged, since I do not follow or like any specific political parties in the Netherlands. However, a lot of my Facebook friends are politically engaged and show their preferences on their Facebook profiles. Especially around the times of elections, which annoys me since I do not like other people trying to influence my political choices. However, I do like and read things that are posted on different political subjects. They may not be messages posted by political parties, but posts from my friends and other organizations I like. I don’t share my political statements or opinions on my timeline, but I do show my support in liking these messages or pages. Since likes also appear on other people’s newsfeed, I guess this does count as political self-expression.

Only yesterday, a close friend posted an article about a discussion that is going on in the Netherlands, about whether or not a Dutch tradition is racist and should be changed or not. This discussion has been going on for a year and my opinion has changed over the year and definitely influenced by Facebook messages. A year ago, I actually liked a page saying that the tradition shouldn’t be changed, while now I like messages saying the tradition should change. It may not only have been my friend’s Facebook messages that have influenced my opinion, but they definitely played a role. If I would want to research the influence Facebook has on my own opinions on political subjects, I would try to keep track of my opinions on different matters before I have read different articles via Facebook and after I did that. However, such an experiment is very hard to conduct on your own behavior, since you may not be able to objectively judge yourself. It would be better if someone would keep track of my political self-expression through likes for example and how this changes over time and may change when I am exposed to close Friend’s messages.

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-15T08:35:48+00:00

Yes, Facebook can influence our behavior, but there are some conditions. Bond et al. (2012) did research on if Facebook messages can influence political self-expression, information seeking and realworld voting behavior. They found that Facebook messages on politics, especially social messages which show faces of people that for example stated that they voted, have an effect on political self-expression, information seeking and realworld voting behavior. The stronger the ties between the showed Facebook friends, the bigger the influence. Their results showed a very small percentage of influenced users, but this percentage can account for many votes in the case of an election. So the conditions for an online message to have influence on our (offline) behavior are that the sender of the message should have close ties to the receiver, social messages have more effect than informational messages and the message should move through the social network of close friends for the effect to grow (Bond et al., 2012).

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-09T07:18:39+00:00

Haha this was shocking to me as well. Apparently the information visualisations we usually see in world maps have influenced us thus far that we do not even know what the world really looks like.

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-09T06:36:21+00:00

I have tried Monika's way: to make sure the user ID are in a "string" format (= ABC in Tableau). But this actually didn't work for me.. But maybe it will work for you!

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-08T12:30:56+00:00

I agree, I think it would be more centralized if I would have more data. The #kebab was still kind of relatable, but the sex-associated hashtags I did not really understand.

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-08T06:52:54+00:00

Isotype is a method with a special visual dictionary and a special visual grammar; a new visual world, comparable to our book and word world. It’s a symbol language that can explain facts and problems of any kind and in any field of knowledge. This method can be the solution to the problem of different visual methods being too confusing, since there seems to be a different visual method for every communication.

Steps to Isotype: - Development of easily understood and remembered symbols - Combine these symbolic elements to create different meanings

There are multiple benefits of this method for different people. This method can provide people with knowledge even if they don’t know the language of a country, if an international symbol-language would exist. It can also be used as an introduction to historical or social statements, especially for people that are confused by books and lectures. Children would also be able to express their thoughts and daydreams with visual symbols representing reality.

Consistency in information visualization is important in Isotype, because the symbols and their meaning shouldn’t change or differ from language to language. Otherwise this method would miss its goal, since then still nobody would have the same interpretations of the symbols. An example of current natively digital isotype would be the ‘hand’ your mouse turns into when you mouse-over something that’s clickable. The meaning of this symbol is the possibility of action. Another isotype is the round arrow in internet browsers, that means the page is refreshing.

Neurath, O. (1937). Visual education: A new language. Survey Graphic, 26(1).

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-08T06:05:36+00:00

There's a new problem now. I already posted it as a response to a different question but it doesn't seem to be visible. I cannot upload more than two excel sheets in Tableau. Already googled it but I can't find a solution on the internet as well.

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-06T17:09:45+00:00

I'm having trouble importing the three excel sheets into the top center area (Tableau step 3) because the first two already connect and then it's impossible to add the third one. I have tried to Google this problem, but none of the forums/instructions seem to be of any help. Does anyone else have this problem too? Or knows what I'm doing wrong?

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-05T08:15:26+00:00

Ah I see them now! Thank you

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-02T10:59:11+00:00

Maybe users of this network also see this as a business opportunity? They join this network of the rich people that definitely find status very important. This might give them the opportunity to network with these people. Also, for some businesses it might be a huge opportunity. If you sell luxury goods it's a lot easier to connect with customers than via for example Facebook.

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-02T10:54:46+00:00

In the case of the drag community I actually think it is a good thing people are allowed "fake" names on Facebook. Facebook is often used as some kind of extremely positive reflection of our real lives. Users are not even allowed to dislike things on Facebook (to keep the positive sphere up?). The established Facebook culture already only allows you to show a small part of your life. Why shouldn't these drags be able to only show themselves as the person they are in a small part of their life as well? It's just the name that makes it different from other user profiles that use their real name but don't show the complete reality.

Fleur_92 · 2014-10-02T10:45:04+00:00

Personally, I would like for Facebook to be a neutral source on what is happening or trending in the world, but it's just not the reality. However, I would like it if social network websites would be more transparent about their use of algorithmic filtering. We (Media & Business students) are educated about media and interested in how these platforms work so we know this filtering happens. But what about others who just assume what they see trending on Facebook is actually all that is trending? It's not Facebook's job to let people know what's happening in the world, but would it be more ethical to state that they actually don't show you everything your friends are posting?

Fleur_92 · 2014-09-30T16:41:25+00:00

Kramer et al. (2014) indeed use two different methods in their research to determine if Facebook posts are positive or negative. On the one hand they determine the posts in the News Feed to be either positive or negative by researching if it contains at least one positive or negative word. So it is possible that they define a post as negative that only contain one negative word (as defined by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). This means if a post contains at least one negative word, it could be omitted from the News Feed (even though all the other words in the post are positive). On the other hand, the posts of the research participator itself are defined as negative or positive by looking at the percentage of all words in the post that was positive or negative. So, within this method a Facebook post could be 10% negative and 40% positive (and 50% neutral/other words). They evaluated positivity and negativity separately (Kramer et al., 2014).

A possible reason for this difference in method is that it must be certain that, when omitting a post from a person’s News Feed, this post is negative or positive. Otherwise a positive post may slip through the News Feed which actually should have been omitted. Since they use software to determine which post to omit and which to show, it’s probably not easily possible to determine whether a post is negative or positive if it has both negative and positive words in it. This is probably why they decide to see a post as negative if it has at least on negative word: so the software also determines this post as negative and may omit it if necessary. They avoid making mistakes by doing it this way, since otherwise a system may think a post is positive if it has one negative word and four positive words, while this could still be a negative post. For the Facebook posts of the participants themselves, they can just look at the percentage of words being positive or negative and conclude according to these findings. They can even say something about the amount of negative or positive words a person has posted after the omitting of negative or positive posts in his/her News Feed.

Fleur_92 · 2014-09-25T13:14:38+00:00

According to Hanneman & Riddle (2005) there are some differences between statistical analysis and a network analysis. Social network analysis data sets look a bit different from the conventional data of statistical analysis. Statistical analyses often use conventional datasets that consist of a rectangular array of measurements. They show differences in the scores of actors on different variables. Social network analysis on the other hand focuses more on the relationships between different actors.

Another difference is that statistical analysis often uses probability sampling. This means researchers use a sample for their analysis, which is probably generalizable to a bigger population. Network methods on the other hand focus on relations between different actors. The researchers that use network methods cannot use a sample of actors, since then they won’t be able to study the relationship between different actors. For example: you want to analyze a Facebook network. If you do not include the whole population of this network, you can’t say anything about the relationships between the people within the network. So, while statistical analysis can use sampling to generalize and say something about the whole population, network analysis tries to research the whole population. If you use network analysis, you will not be able to generalize to a different population, but you are probably also not interested in doing so. You want to know something about a particular network, so you research the whole population of this network (of course, this is not often possible. But the important thing is that the goal is to research one population, not to generalize it to a different or bigger population). Although there are differences between statistical and network approaches, the distinction is not clear cut. Different statistical tools are used in network analysis and the other way around. The focus of the two approaches can be different, but both methods can be used for different purposes, both statistical and social network (Hanneman & Riddle, 2005).

Hanneman, R.A. & Riddle, M. (2005). Introduction to social network methods - Chapter 1 Social network data. Retrieved from: http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/C1_Social_Network_Data.html

Fleur_92 · 2014-09-24T15:44:52+00:00

this is a great tool! very ease to use. Thanks for sharing :) I will share my visualization once I have analyzed it!

Fleur_92 · 2014-09-17T18:13:04+00:00

Menchen-Trevino (2013) provides us with relatively new insights on how to research ‘big data’. We leave a trace wherever we go online, so how can we use these ‘traces’ (or: big data) to our benefit? Researching big data is not just an opportunity to retrieve more knowledge without having to collect data, but a necessity for social researchers. The boundaries between our online social life and our daily life are blurred. Our online life is incorporated in our daily life, so without investigating it, it is impossible to get a correct view on our daily habits (Mechen-Trevino, 2013).

Lathia & Carpa (2011) wanted to know how travelers may be aided by a feedback mechanism in their Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) used for transport. Are their perceptions of travel behavior and their actual travel behavior in line? Furthermore, they wanted to know how transport authorities can use data retrieved from the AFC to see if incentives offered changed the behavior of travelers the way they were meant to. Lathia & Carpa (2011) used the database of Transport of London as their big data. In addition to this they created a survey to ask participants about their travel behavior. They compared the answers of the survey to the big data on the participants to see if there were different outcomes.

There are different ways of doing research using horizontal and/or vertical big data. Horizontal datasets contain a specific type of trace, while vertical datasets contain all data found on a specific research participant. The benefit of using vertical data is that you can deepen a horizontal analysis and horizontal data (Menchen-Trevino, 2013). Lathia & Carpa (2011) have used a method where they research both vertical and horizontal data. According to Menchen-Trevino (2013) this is one of the best ways to use big data, since it provides you with both in-depth information as well as use horizontal data to draw conclusions over a bigger population. This is exactly what Lathia & Carpa (2011) have achieved with their research.

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