No reciepe for success

Facebook Network selection requirement

This week’s reading was Clay Shirky’s last chapter in Here Comes Everybody, chapter 11: Promise, Tool, Bargain. Shirky explains that en though “there is no recipe for the successful use of social tools…every working system is a mix of social and technological factors.” (260) Despite the inability to find an exact formula for success he claims that every successful example in his book has used the following three elements:

1.) Promise – This is the “why” someone should join or contribute to a specific group. It is vitally important because it is the the promise that converts the potential user into an actual user. Shirky explains that the key to a good promise is balancing between being too broad or too extreme. The key is that “the implicit promise of any given group matters more than any explicit one” (262). This idea of creating meaning and convincing  the potential user is unique because it is not simple “selling” the idea of social media, but convincing users to actually participate and take action.

Facebook: How private is it?

In the article titled “Mass Interpersonal Persuasion: An Early View of a New Phenomenon” BJ Fogg explores the role mass interpersonal persuasion (MPI) plays in social networking sites. Fogg believes MPI, a new form of persuasion, emerged when Facebook launched its Facebook Platform in May 2007. The new platform allows third parties to create and distribute web applications to all members of the site combining interpersonal persuasion with the reach of mass media (2).

He explains a course he created at Stanford University teaching the psychology and metrics of Facebook applications. Students were instructed to test various options and use data to create and distribute their applications, competing against big companies and professionals to attract users (3).

Fogg describes the six components of Mass Interpersonal Persuasion. An important point to note is that these components have existed before the Facebook Platform, however, they had never been used all together until now.

Facebook is Basically the Matrix, Based on the Ideas of Descartes

In Meditation I: “Of the Things of Which We May Doubt,” the correlation between Descartes’ musings and the 1999 movie The Matrix are pretty easy to see: both address the perception of reality and determining and deciding truth and falsehood in that reality. Both delve into the idea that our very senses are capable of deceit, to the point that we could be asleep, trapped in a virtual reality constructed by an indeterminate power.

Descartes is determined to challenge his past perceptions about reality by deciding to reject anything but that which is devoid of doubt (#2), building up to a conjecture about the suspicion of the actuality of reality. He also notes that our culpability to this lie is in proportion to the power of the deceptive party (#10); in the movie, the robots have taken over the world and stuck humans in pods that prevent them any type of contact with the real world, except for groups like Morpheus’s crew.