Information technology capabilities for digital social networks

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Information technology capabilities for digital
social networks

• Camille Grange Izak Benbasat
• University of British Columbia, Vancouver

IEEE-SocialCom, Vancouver, August 30th
2009 Social Mobile Web Workshop
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Overview

• Context
• Social media UGC digital social networks
• Socio-technical designs that help individuals
  contribute and/or exploit resources embedded in
  relationships
• An ultimate objective what is the value of these
  SNs? How to enhance that value?
• Could be for example through better design or
  better use.
• First, we need to know what generic
  goals/activities SN can help support.
• As a first step, we develop a classification of
  digital SN usage types/IT capabilities. By doing
  that, we
• Synthesize and integrate salient literature (MIS,
  HCI)
• Use SN concepts (nodes, links) to specify IT
  capabilities
• Identify potential theoretical approaches
• Highlight design opportunities and challenges

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The four domains of IT levers for Digital SN
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Building Sustaining the Network
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• Help self-present, build multi-faced identities
• Self-presentation theory (Goffman 1967),
  Self-verification theory (Swan 1983), Identity
  fragmentation (Boyd et al. 2002)
• Help strengthen ties
• Network closure (Coleman 1990), Sense of virtual
  community (Blanchard Markus 2004), Common bond
  Common identity (Ren et al. 2007)
• Enable network growth
• Structural holes (Burt 1992), Social browsing
  (Lampe et al. 2007)

Nodes
Breadth of ties
Opportunities for new ties
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Observing the Network
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• Make the social structure visible
• Network Awareness (Steiny 2009), Viral
  communications (Bampo et al. 2008), Role
  identification (Wang and Chi-Lu 2004)
• Help monitor dynamics
• Viral communications (Bampo et al. 2008),
  Surveillance (Lampe et al. 2007)

Existence of ties
Networks activity
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Extracting Resources from the Network
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• Help access/mine people and resources
• Advice seeking in social networks (Borgatti
  Cross 2003)
• Help evaluate people and resources
• Online peer-to-peer money lending (Lin et al.
  2009)

Nodes their accessibility
Nodes cliques
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Disseminating through the Network
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• Diffuse broadly and quickly
• Contagion (Bampo et al. 2008), mass interpersonal
  persuasion (Fogg 2008), micro-blogging (Java et
  al. 2007)
• Diffuse selectively
• Social networking site (Boyd et al. 2002),
  control of information sharing (Moncur 2009)
• Create persuasive messages
• Persuasion in SN (Weiksner et al. 2008 Steiny
  2009)

Number of nodes
Position of nodes ties that link them
Nodes/paths selection
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Complementarities and insights
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Observing and Extracting can contribute to
the building and sustaining of the SN
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Observing can help disseminate more
efficiently.
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Overload growth of SN (number of nodes and their
activation) Privacy reach rapidity users
misconceptions
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Synthesis

• Contributions
• Organization of existing sometimes scattered
  empirical literature / theoretical approaches
• Integration in a unifying framework
• Accounts for specific SN attributes (nodes, ties)
• Future research
• Enrich with emerging literature
• Focus on one of the four domain and identify
  specific IT properties and their affordances as
  well as effects on people
• vs. focus on a particular application domain
  (e.g., online shopping, dating, money lending)
  and cover all aspects