Exploring Users’ Information Behavior in Social Networks: A Contribution to the Understanding of the Use of Social Networks

Juantífico1 Comment

My first scientific book was just released. Exploring… is a revised and expanded version of my master thesis, it starts from the reflection that social networks are commonly seen as a technology used only for entertainment. However, they can also be used for serious purposes in business and education environments, as they are powerful tools that can accomplish various roles and purposes. This book presents research done from an information science perspective; where the researcher took as a starting point and expanded on the issues presented in Bawden & Robinson’s The Dark Side of Information (2009). Presented with this book are extensive transcripts of the interviewed students and academic staff of a master course, who were asked about the issues of Web 2.0 and social networks identified in the literature, along with the typical features or characteristics of social networks. With the analysis and discussion of the interviews, this book provides insights regarding trends and tendencies of users’ information behavior in social networks, with the aim of contributing to a better understanding of users and the design of such systems. Exploring Users’ Information Behavior in Social Networks was awarded 2nd place in the category of Social Sciences Master Theses at the Students’ Scientific Research Contest of Tallinn University.

In the back of the book, as required by the publisher, there is an extremely short info about me: Juan Daniel Machin Mastromatteo, Bachelor in Librarianship (Universidad Central de Venezuela), Int. Master in DILL (Oslo University College, Tallinn University, Parma University), PhD student (Tallinn University). Has a vast experience in academic libraries in Venezuela, where he led information literacy projects and developed multimedia tutorials and library promotion materials.

You can always go to the Curriculum Vitae page to expand on it 🙂

You can find the book available in Amazon (US / UK  / DE) and MoreBooks

New direction

JuantíficoLeave a comment

A new direction on the blog is coming. I realized after Doris created her own blog (Check it out!!) that she, and of course I also tend to prepare so carefully every post. So I come up with very long and polished posts. But at the same time, I think that goes against the whole purpose of Internet culture and social media these days.

You may have seen that in 2010 and until now this blog was very much unattended, except the long and perhaps a bit controversial last posts.

While I was doing my master thesis I couldn’t get to write too much and then I didn’t even write a post for it! That’s coming. My new job (almost finished now), studies and all the changes in life undermined my blogging, too. Let’s see how it goes.

From now and specially from July, I’m changing to shorter and more frequent posts. As always, you can check what I read and like on the Internet through the Tumblr.

Cheers!

Random Rant

Juantífico1 Comment

At the time of writing this, I am in Athens, on the occasion of an international conference. After our respective presentations, which were very well received (I believe), we took the occasion to relax a bit and have a couple of beers and a good conversation.

Between jokes and serious talk (both these tones use to get confused in a dialog among friends), we were talking about some of our favorite topics as we do whenever we have the chance to meet. With this friend we talk about our experiences studying our PhDs abroad, the copyright industry’s battle against piracy, open access, alternative business models, the good “old” Wikipedia, the Internet, and digital culture in general. Today’s conversation was about how, in a way, we see ourselves almost as outsiders when in conservative academic circles. This isn’t the case of this conference, I must point out, as we were not criticized and I believe both our researches were well received by the academics present.

For example, on one side, my friend is using a grounded theory method on his research about metadata, he is interviewing mostly young researchers and academics from the LIS field. He told me he has been highly criticized because of the method he is using and even some have told him: “why metadata?” (WHAT!!) More than as a friend, I think even as a colleague, I believe in his research. I told him: what is the problem? Aren’t there already enough research done in a more traditional top down way with tried and good approaches or theories?

This is also applicable to my own PhD research, where I take an action research perspective to study the use of social networking tools in higher education. Possible critics may very well point out the highly subjective charge of my research, by making direct interventions on the activities I give to the participants. But then, isn’t learning one of the most subjective processes? We are not machines.

We argued that we get very weary and a bit tired at times of the old debate of positivism vs. constructivism, or objectivism vs. subjectivism. I believe there is not a single phenomenon in social sciences or humanities for which someone has found an absolute, universal, measurable and replicable truth.

I don’t remember where I saw it, perhaps you can identify where I got this piece of quote without author: “The outcome or goal does not matter, the most important thing is the journey.” All the insights you could get around a problem or a phenomenon subject to study; or all the discussion that leads you to your findings. Isn’t that good enough on the social sciences and the humanities?

On Piracy, the Industry and Bad Practices (2) [Day Against DRM Edition]

JuantíficoLeave a comment

This is a follow up to the almost forgotten post: On the Pirate Bay, its trial and The Industry (1). So, today (May 4th, 2011), on the Day Against DRM (Digital Rights Management), I think it will make a nice contribution to the international initiative. Please share, write and express your opinions on this perversion of the Industry. My opinions further down!

Waiting for a final resolution on the case of the Pirate Bay (TPB) has been a long wait. Who would have thought that after loosing the trial, the website would be still up and running to this date. However, the ex-TPB guys stated in the past that they could spend years with appeals on this case. After trials and appeals nothing has changed much, just some modifications on the amount of money the accused have to pay and jail time. There were some developments leading nowhere like some rumors about the acquisition of TPB by companies like Global Gaming Factory, but it led nowhere. Perhaps the most interesting development was that on the 18th of May 2010, a new host for TPB appeared and it was no other than the Swedish Pirate Party!

Extract of the TorrentFreak article of the day:

“Today, on 18 May [2010], the Swedish Pirate Party took over the delivery of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay,” says the Party’s Rick Falkvinge in a statement. “We got tired of Hollywood’s cat and mouse game with the Pirate Bay so we decided to offer the site bandwidth,” he adds. “It is time to take the bull by the horns and stand up for what we believe is a legitimate activity.” The Pirate Party say they will provide bandwidth to the site’s homepage and search engine. The Party adds the attempts at censoring The Pirate Bay “is an attempt to silence one of today’s most important opinion makers in matters of civil liberties and rights on the web,” adding that it is “nothing less than political censorship, and something that any democratic-minded person must reject.”

The previous part of this post promised some of my views on the Industry and piracy. I am going to talk about the industry being in most of the cases the entertainment industry, mostly based on the US. It sometimes can also include other industries, such as the book and publishing industry that also share some of the same bad business practices. I present below a list of some issues of the industry that I think they have a direct (or at least a big) influence on piracy. I believe these to be very important causes of piracy, it is a shame that after more than a decade of a crusade against Internet based piracy, the industry fails to hear/see these arguments. Of course I am not the first one talking about these things. No matter which side you are on, feel free to leave a comment.

Bad Business Models

In order to illustrate bad business models, I pick as an example the business model of Sony with its Playstation Network (PSN). For example, the PSN is available in X number of countries, not all countries. So, the store is not even region but country locked. In order to buy content from a store you need either a credit card or a prepaid card code. The problem is, first with the credit cards: you need a credit card from the same country as the PSN you are trying to buy content from. For example if you trying to buy from the Finnish PSN you need a Finnish credit card. So then, there is a problem with Estonia that doesn’t have a PSN store and you cannot buy from any PSN stores with an Estonian credit card. So then, we have the business practice of not allowing customers to buy products. Thumbs up! Then, the prepaid cards that Sony released in Europe incredibly late, they only work for the intended country, you can imagine the chaos in Europe with so many different currencies. In that sense, Microsoft and Nintendo got it right with a points system… And then, the infamous Downloadable Content (DLC) is sometimes country locked! Estonia is the perfect example why this is so messed up. For example, here we can receive games from the UK, Germany, Norway and Finland, then if you want DLC for one game you have to work some arcane magic to enjoy the full product. So, it seems Sony doesn’t want money from some nations… There are workarounds for these issues, of course. I won’t beat Sony much more, thanks to the configuration of the PSN business model I will not have any issues because of the leaking of information after the PSN hack and blackout, as they didn’t let me use my credit card.

Distributing Companies

Sometimes bad practices seem to be the fault of only part of the Industry, such as the distributors of media. Let’s say a movie is produced by one company but then the distributing rights belong to other company. Problems arrive when the distributing companies insist on knowing the target they have, most of the times underestimating (or overestimating) their needs and wants. So that’s one view on why records or movie stores are so full of garbage and some things are just not available in your country. Some can argue further and say that the industry is the one determining what media products (or artists) should someone consume, so that’s why we have the Justin Biebers or the boy/girl band of the moment. But then, what would be a natural answer to a market over saturated with bad media?

Region Lock Bullshit

Cannot be called in a different way. We have seen region locks on DVDs, Blurays, etc. For the industry, people will be born, grow, multiply and die in the same part of the planet, and they would never buy anything in any other part if they happen to travel. What about international students or people for whatever reason has to move to another country, the Industry doesn’t seem to know this actually happens. Moreover, people in some parts of the world do not deserve to be able to buy some media products.

This content is not available in your location

Similar somehow to the region lock bullshit. How many times have you seen this on YouTube or even in official websites? Internet is not supposed to be World Wide? And then they talk about internationalization, globalization and all that gibberish that it is said to be the norm in this day but it isn’t because of things like that. Why something that is available freely in the US cannot be available in Estonia? Often the official answer is accepted, sound plausible, but I think this shouldn’t be happening. If someone just wants to see something on the Web just to be sure before running to the store and buy it. Why shouldn’t this person be allowed to?

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

DRM provides limitations of access, lifetime of the digital content, region lock, number of copies (or none), number of installs, determines which devices can run or play something, among many other limitations. comes from the fixation of maximizing (or rather squeezing) profit for some digital product. This is wrongly done by limiting the ways you can access or interact with this piece of digital product, on the grounds to prevent piracy. Actually DRM gives the concept of ownership a different more limited dimension. My example is courtesy of PSN again: Capcom has released two games with DRM in the PSN. These games require authentication with some servers every time you run them, even when they have offline components, you can’t play if you don’t have Internet, or if the service is down. The latter is the case with the PSN blackout. In my (and several others) view, the only thing DRM is good for is for crippling user experience and punish paying customers because of the pirates. By the way, the pirate versions of most goods that originally have DRM often offer a better user experience.

A Pirated Copy is equal to a Lost Sale

I save for the last one argument some strongly contend while the industry take it as dogmatic. For the industry, a pirated copy is equal to a lost sale. I think there are so many factors influencing the downloading of a piece of media that to say it is equal to a lost sale is wrong. I don’t think that in all cases where somebody downloading a pirate copy of some content would have bought it if it wasn’t for the pirate option. At least, this direct proportion between a pirated copy and a lost sale is very difficult to prove, if not impossible.

I gave above some factors influencing the download of some pirated media, such as: awful DRM in the original, lack of availability (or non at all) of the legal copy on the market, region locked content, among others. Are these reasons to approve piracy? Of course not. However, it seems the Industry ignores these facts and is just interested in maximum profit and suing everybody who doesn’t comply with their business models. In a very good talk, Larry Lessig stated that currently it is not artists who are being financially compensated with the triumphs of the war on piracy, only lawyers are. And the Industry itself. Is that really what copyright is it for?

There have been different interesting studies proving the Industry wrong. There is a survey of Dutch artists, where the majority don’t think that piracy is hurting them and the artists who really know what DRM is are against it. A very good study was done by a group of academics under the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), showing that the Industry has been better than ever during the era of the P2P war on piracy. Another study concludes that piracy has boosted Anime sales, one animation genre that is so scarcely available in most countries. The last read I can recommend to you is another study made in Norway that concludes that although the Industry has been hurt by piracy, musicians’ income is rising.

I don’t support piracy. However, the Industry should hear the public and the criticisms against it, adapt their business models to the age we live in and really provide quality content with reasonable pricing and availability. Otherwise they could just fade away and be forgotten or the user generated or indie content will someday become mainstream.

P.S.: In Venezuela, a regular music CD costs around 42 US$

2010 in review

JuantíficoLeave a comment

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,800 times in 2010. That’s about 7 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 4 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 28 posts. There were 2 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 149kb.

The busiest day of the year was March 9th with 113 views. The most popular post that day was Venezuela bans videogames.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were kotaku.com, facebook.com, search.conduit.com, judamasmases.wordpress.com, and google.es.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for the beatles, mars attacks, sealand, bride of the monster, and mars attack.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Venezuela bans videogames March 2010
3 comments

2

The Beatles 2009 remasters October 2009
2 comments

3

Mars Attacks Micro Review May 2009

4

Entrevista sobre Alfabetización Informacional April 2008
5 comments

5

On the Pirate Bay, its trial and The Industry (1) April 2009
9 comments

Censorship in videogames: the Manhunt 2 case

JuantíficoLeave a comment

Once there was a little videogame by Rockstar called Manhunt 2, which entered its development stage in 2004. In 2007 this game was submitted to two of the most important rating boards for games, the ESRB (USA) and the BBFC (UK), and both of them refused to give them a certain rating which is the maximum rating allowed for a game to be released in a home console. In the case of the ESRB, the rating given was an Adults Only (AO). In order to release the game on the Wii or the PSP they would have needed up to a Mature rating (M). So Rockstar was forced to modify the game to submit it again. In the USA was accepted after this, in the UK it was a bit more difficult, as the modified version was rejected again. Finally, it was released with a delay of nearly a year because of this issue and the version you can find all over Europe is imported from the UK. I haven’t found information about what happened about the submission to PEGI and I bet Rockstar didn’t even want to try with the Australian ratings board! But anyway, this is enough background information.

I was in Norway when I bought the imported version of Manhunt 2 and my impression was “interesting”, it was a stunning, shocking videogame. I’m sure all the controversies, scandals and the ratings issues just raised the hype and the game didn’t let me down in this respect. You just escape an asylum (just like Arkham) not knowing who you are and just wonder around finding clues, moving slowly by the shadows and executing people with a wide variety of weapons and environmental kills. Of course I wondered how would it look uncensored. The funny thing is that it is a disappointing game in other aspects. Graphics, depth, simple but very hard gameplay. Although the story and atmosphere are very good. However, I don’t want to talk about the quality of the game itself either.

The way Rockstar censored the game was around the executions, they put a lot of noise effects and video filters over the action so you can’t see quite right what’s going on.

All these are old news, my point is that I just played an uncensored version of Manhunt 2 (without any video filters), and I can tell you that the censored version is WAY more creepy, violent, explicit and disturbing! I think this sensation is caused exactly by the way it was censored, it leaves more to the imagination, and the imagination is just being unleashed by the outstanding atmosphere of the game. Your imagination fills in the gaps of the filters, and the filters themselves make everything more creepy.  You might ask: So the game is not violent/creepy without the censorship? Yes, of course it is. However, the gore is minimum and sometimes the camera just goes away. I suppose both these elements are related to the limited power of the Wii or the PSP. We have seen more gore elsewhere anyway.

I think if the objective of the rating boards was to make sure the softest version possible of the game would be released, they failed, miserably. It is interesting to take this point and make a generalization that sometimes do happen: when attempting to censor or criticize something and make a scandal out of it, the outcomes are the totally opposite than the ones conservative people want to make. Sometimes they give more force to what they want to hide. I’ll touch this point again in another post, also related to videogames.

Revenge of the Nerds Micro Review

Juantífico1 Comment

Revenge of the Nerds (Jeff Kanew, 1984). This movie is very good and entertaining and it has aged well. Check out the musical number in DEVO/Michael Jackson style! Maybe nerds have a bit more respect nowadays, or at least some of them have proven to be very successful people. In a broad sense this is one of those American movies were two very different groups (one of them dysfunctional) clash or battle with each other, and the viewer has the chance to side with one of them. You have the Nerds, of the fraternity Lambda Lambda Lambda which are sort of the “ugly ducklings” or anti-heroes of the story and the other are the Pi Delta Pi  and the Alpha Betas which are depicted as the “normal not nerds” kids, for me these are the villains. If you don’t side with the Nerds while watching the movie, then you must have problems.

I’m making this review a bit different by adding the following sort of social commentary. It is really sad to see some things happening in the movie happen today: bullying / cyber bullying. In some learning environments, there is a tacit belief that the stronger or the most apt in sports can and shall dominate other students weaker in these areas. I think I was very lucky that in college I had a very normal and pleasant life, there are no such things as fraternities in the country I studied my Bachelor degree and I think that the fact it was a public university also helps in that because of the high diversity there, these problems don’t happen too often. The previous time I saw that movie must have been like 12 years ago and maybe I didn’t understand it as I see it today. I really hated the characters of the “normals”, I even couldn’t stand them on screen! I already told you it was easy my pass through university, but high school was a different story, there was a certain person who studied almost all the way since primary with me, hated that stupid piece of s+++t. It was the bully of the school and the school even promised several times they would get him out, but they didn’t and no corrective action worked with him. I think now in retrospective that his only presence after some years influenced the environment so everything and everyone were kind of at his service, even girls and teachers. I think this environment did some terrible things to me, as for example I was not very confident in many ways when I was a kid, sucked at sports (except the last two years), my performance just declined with time, I felt depressed some times and well, overall my self confidence was very low and I believe that some of the decisions I took just at the end of high school and at the beginning of college years were affected by this. I think bullies can undermine the lives and hopes of other students who don’t decide to confront them, and also for the student who just go with it. I sadly just confronted him a couple of times, if I were to live again those years I’m sure I would kick his sorry ass very badly. But now I’m proud to say that I overcame most of my insecurities and issues created by high school’s fault. Like Lewis in the movie I decided to take a stand and I even recovered the best girl from the evil clutches of the bullies. And yes, I’m a Nerd!

Venezuela bans videogames

Juantífico4 Comments

As a kid there were two things that encouraged me to explore new worlds and learn English: rock music and videogames. Some days ago in Venezuela, my place of birth, they started to enforce a law to practically ban videogames., with fines from 30.000 to 60.000 US$ and prison time from 3 to 5 years for those who import, sell, distribute and (use?) videogames. That is very sad for me, as Venezuelan and as a gamer. I feel they are closing a way for kids to learn English with games to have more and better opportunities than the ones who don’t develop language skills (it is important to note that before the current generation of game consoles, which are multilingual, we had the same North American releases, in English). The major driving force behind the law is to protect children from violent games, a thing in itself very plausible, but is a total ban we are talking about, ignoring any age rating system that exist or the rights of adults to enjoy these products as well.

The law’s name is Law for the Banning of Videos and War Toys. It is no secret that there’s a huge problem of crime and violence in the country, this is one of the premises supporting the law, as the congress state that “there are scientific studies that prove there is a notorious influence on the future citizen’s conduct and the activities they do in the games”. But how about the incendiary speeches of most of the politicians in the country? And the possession of guns among the civil population and the shootouts in the slums? How about the continuous acquisition of guns, weapons, planes, submarines, etc? The almost declarations of war with neighboring countries?

The politicians at the congress indicate that this law “is not going to solve the problem of the violence, but it opens a space, a positive scenario for the discussion in different areas, nationally and internationally”. These statements only show the shortsighted criteria used by the politicians to make this law, how do you open a space for discussion with a total ban? It’s like in the United States with the prohibition, you only encourage the creation of illegal channels and businesses which is way worse as history has proven. As a gamer, I had to cope up with the problems of distribution of games in Venezuela, there are no GameStops, so there were independent importers who could charge you up to 140 US$ for a game and about 900 for a console (these were numbers I found out between December-February when I went to Venezuela), now with all videogames related economy being illegal, how much should be the price for an original game?

As many of the country’s laws intended to censor something, the solution is to ban, to punish or close,  like they did with the radio stations they closed, with the television channel they had the luxury to close two times, can one be critical? No, the government won’t even try to find a middle ground, to cite a Venezuelan politician: we have a clash of classes.

Some could say that the law is not a total ban, but it’s so vague, so we can be talking about that stomping on goombas or racing a kart while throwing turtle shells is violent and war-like.

So it’s Game Over and no Continues left, it’s a sad, sad day…

How checking an online library catalog can be a geeky travel to the past

Juantífico10 Comments

The National Library of Venezuela offers one of the most unique experiences in online library catalogs. To be able to check the catalog, you need to go first on a part of their website where you have the instructions on how to use it, only in spanish for now, but take my word on them.

First you will need a software to uncompress files, like Winizip or Winrar, then you have to download a “3270 emulator” for Windows, sorry, no Linux or Mac OS support for now, but works on Vista and 7, so that alone it’s pretty cool. As for this 3270 emulator, Wikipedia says it’s “a computer program that duplicates the functions of an IBM 3270 (manufactured c.a. 1972) mainframe computer terminal on a PC or similar microcomputer.”

So, following the installation of the emulator, configure the IP to 200.90.17.68 and you will enter the automation suite ND-NOTIS. Again, taken from Wikipedia: “ND-NOTIS was a tightly integrated yet modular office automation suite by Norsk Data introduced in the early 80s, running on the SINTRAN III platform on both ND-100 and ND-500 architectures.”
Now there’s no more mouse input for you, so you have to login and input commands using only the keyboard: you press “b”, then “Enter”, then “Tab”, you put in the username “OPERATOR” and password “OP3RAT0R” (pretty sneaky, huh?), then “Enter”, “F10” and write in caps the word “LUIN” and… VOILA!

Cannibalize Yourself Forever!

Juantífico1 Comment

image002

Between 2002 and 2005 I managed to bring together a group of students from various schools of the Central University of Venezuela in a rather heterogeneous group, but with the common interest of writing literature. The first years we had no visible name or voice, but it was in 2005 that we really made university hear about ourselves, we found we could register the group as a group of university extension, which we did. With this request we could request the use of the auditoriums and halls of the Faculty of Humanities, pay for a few hours. We did some presentations on these places, also in the open areas of the University, in the classrooms we made our literary meetings and on the Internet we found a way to communicate and disseminate our writings. 2005 was our golden age, but  at the end of that year, the group disappears and today in 2009 the site where the magazine  was will be closed as Yahoo Geocities service changes and becomes a paid service, so I post t his invaluable material on my blog to rest and inspire. Let this be a reminder of something we accomplished and to be as well a tribute to the  Canibalización Aleatoria (Random Cannibalization Group) and all the poets who were part of it. Sometimes I feel nostalgia for the time we spent together, all that we did and also the material produced, its quality fills me with pride, although I would like the group to continue to exist, but I know time and distance are factors difficult to overcome. Without further ado I present the 5 numbers of the Venezuelan Experimental Literary Magazine Canibalízate. Enjoy them. (Only in Spanish, sorry).

No. 1

No. 2

No. 3

No. 4

No. 5