something for the weekend

Last Post of the year: Facebook, SingStar and 2009

Well, I am obviously a dreadful blogger….  I keep getting distracted and forget to update it, then I forget that about the things I wanted to blog anyway…  A few things have happened recently that I wanted to jot down.

1) I was at www.icis2008.org early in December presenting our work on Facebook (see my last post).  The work went down well (I think) we still have some more work to do on making the contribution stronger, but it’ll get there.  I’m particularly interested in looking at the power as related the morality of technology – how do non-human actors engage in the processes of the exercise of power with us?  Also, another interesting thing happened at ICIS, a few people asked about my work on www.gaydar.co.uk, not only was this flattering, but it was satisfying given the age it has taken to get this work published!  Also, it was great that both men and women asked about the work as central to some of it are notions of masculinity and all too often this can be conflated with men, and men’s interests… So the fact that women gender researchers were interested in this was refreshing given the nature of the conference – (within information systems gender, I feel very much equates with Women in the main and I don’t think that’s very helpful).  Obviously it’s different in other fields where gender research takes place – I do acknowlege that.

2) This is as exciting as my life gets…. Finally, Sony have seen fit to release an update for the SingStar PS3 game which allows PS2 discs to be used within the PS3 game (although only on certain versions of the PS3 console which is strange).  As I’m researching this, it’s going to be interesting to see how this change is viewed by the players I am enaged with.  I know on various social networking sites and forums, the upgrade has been eagerly anticipated, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in practice.

Anyway, all the best for 2009 for those people that actually look at this – I’m hoping my cold shifts soon, so I feel a bit more refreshed before I go back to work on the 5th January…  I’m sure I’ll get through my new year party though… ;o)

Facebook’s Ethics

Here’s a copy of the paper I recently presented at Liverpool John Moore’s Facebook Symposium for those of you who asked for it.  You can find details of the day here (which is where I nicked this image from).  It was a really good day with what must have been over 60 people attending.  Jane Secker, one of the other speakers has done a nice write up of the event here.

I wrote the paper with Kathy McGrath of Brunel University and Marie Griffiths who works with me at Salford.  The paper came about because for a while, Kathy and I had been talking about writing together.  Then, Kathy saw some of the work Marie and I had done before on Habbo Hotel which had and ethical bent.  However, Kathy thought that we didn’t really put the affordances of the technology to the fore.  I thought this was interesting as it fed into my thinking at the time regarding what’s different about social networking sites as compared to other technologies, how do we define them, and what role does technology have in shaping peoples experiences. So… Kathy came up with idea of us looking at the morality of technology via Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and we got to write a paper (using some data Marie and I had been collecting about facebook) about the role of technology acting with users.  It sort of sits as a response to much research which (over?) emphasises the role of human agency in such spaces.  Anyway, here’s the paper ( facebookworkshop) and below is the abstract.  A much extended version of the paper is being presented at the forthcoming International Conference on Information Systems (www.icis2008.org).

Facebook’s Ethics – This paper provides insights into the ethical issues raised by social networking technologies. We argue that much research has focused on the ends to which people deploy social networking technologies, and the consequences arising, with a view to making policy recommendations and ethical interventions. We suggest that research about social networking sites tends to adopt a tool view of the technologies and utilitarian notions of ethics so that the focus is on the behaviours of human agents – technology as an actor is downplayed. We focus explicitly upon the agency, and hence the moral character, of technology to show both the possibilities for, and limitations of, ethical interventions in such cases. We argue that technologies as well as humans have a moral character such that ethical responsibility for the consequences of social networking is diffused among a wide variety of actors. Taking this into account, it seems appropriate to suggest that blanket policy recommendations requiring the developers of social networking sites to revise their designs fail to recognize the diffuse nature of ethical responsibility. However, opening up such technologies to scrutiny on a regular basis can increase public awareness of the issues. Thus, we suggest an ongoing process of evaluating social networking sites is required and, moreover that there is value in studying the development and use of technologies in their infancy, or if established, in the experiences of novice users. Similarly, flash points in technological trajectories may prove useful sites of investigation.