This semester for my Social Ecology Field Research class, I decided to extend my studies from Culture, Power, Cyberspace to include real world implications. Through participant observation, interviews, and analyzing historical sources, I was able to piece together an analysis of my experience in Second Life.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32865293/SE194-Research-Paper-Final-Draft
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Hackers Group
Hackers Group
Joseph Fodor, Adam Berro, Catherine Nguyen
Luke Brunda, Lauren Lopez, Allison Weiner, Christopher Kwak
METHODS
There were two main methods we used when conducting our research on Irvine Underground, a local hacker community. To gain an insider’s view on the history of Irvine Underground, we attended a general meeting on May 14th, 2010. We discussed their beginnings as well as various questions about how the members view hacking. Our questions ranged from simple inquiries such as what it means to be a hacker, to slightly more complicated questions, such as how they determine the legality and ethics behind what they do. By attending the general meeting, we were able to conduct face-to-face interviews with one of the founding members of Irvine Underground, along with various other members. These face-to-face interviews were highly successful and provided insight on how the personal relationships between the members worked. Due to the interview and communal discussion approach we took there was potential that answers were not as well thought out or fully developed. Due to this factor, we obtained the email addresses of members. This allowed for written follow-up questions in which the members were able to delve more into specific issues. However, we have yet to get any responses from the members. This shows one of the weaknesses of our methods. In the future having a written questionnaire at the time of initial interview would be beneficial and necessary for sound research.
Along with the interviews of Irvine Underground members, gaining a broader understanding of the hacker community was necessary. To do so one member from our group posted a questionnaire on a prominent hacker website and forum, hackthissite.org. The written questionnaire allowed hackthissite members to provide well thought out and thorough responses. The members on this forum are global, although a large majority of them reside in the United States. By getting responses from a much more geographically diverse population, we were able to deduce whether or not the trends we discovered with Irvine Underground applied on a broader scale. As this paper mostly focuses on Irvine Underground, the interviews with members from hackthissite.org acted as a benchmark for comparisons, allowing us more insight on how hackers view themselves.
What is a “hacker”?
Culture is constantly contested. As with all communities, the hacker community disputes what it means to be a hacker. The broader hacker community is incredibly varied in terms of interests and ethics. We also found that much diversity exists even within a single hacker community, the Irvine Underground. Despite large variation between hackers in terms of ethics as well as hacking interests and activities, one concern that unites hackers is the notion of security. Hackers are not only concerned with computers and computer security, though; hacking transcends computers and even technology.
Barfly, a member of the Irvine Underground, explained his ideas of the “old world” and “new world” hackers. The old world view is the emic view, and states that hackers find a way to manipulate software or hardware to serve a purpose, other than its originally intended purpose. In this sense, “hacking” is a clever way of mechanical engineering. The “new world” (mis)conception of a hacker is the definition propagated by the mass media which depicts hackers as criminals who attempt to circumvent security for their own malicious gain. [1]
Truly malicious hackers are actually the minority. Although some hackers harm others by creating and distributing viruses, stealing identities, or credit card theft, most hackers are relatively harmless. Unlike the images of hackers perpetuated by mainstream media, hackers are simply anyone interested in deeply understanding a system, and being able to manipulate and exploit it to achieve some result. While this can certainly refer to computers and computer security, it is equally likely to apply to the non-computer world. For example, lock picking is a popular type of hack among the Irvine Underground. Because the IU is so focused on being a social group and teaching and learning resource, they are open to new types of hacking. During a past meeting, one member brought in a lock picking set and a lock and introduced lock picking to the group. An average person may think very little about locks, but a hacker who is interested in security and lock picking may want to gain a better understanding of the lock as a security measure and a useful skill. .
Another example of hacking that is unrelated to computers or technology is social engineering, the manipulation of people. It relies on the same premises of hacking, understanding a system thoroughly, and using that knowledge to manipulate it, or bypass security. In this case, a hacker knows how to manipulate someone, by gaining their trust, or by tricking them. For example, a social engineer demonstrated a hack at a Defcon convention by choosing a name at random and proceeded to acquire the caller’s credit card number just by talking on the phone to him.
When Barfly, a member of IU, asked another member of the group what a hacker was, he responded, “A hacker is a chameleon!” as he took off his coat. While we discussed what it meant to be a hacker, another member of the IU remarked, “You’re probably learning, it’s hard to define a hacker.” This is certainly true, but the main axes that divides hackers from one another is their personal ethics. This can include whether one is benign and curious, or aggressive and malicious, and their intentions with what and how they hack. How hackers chose to persue hacking categorizes them into a “hat” system.
Defining a Hacker
Hacker communities have developed a unique system of ethics and morality including the construction of their own categories. They utilize these categories in able to judge the actions of those within the community. These categories are known as “Black hat,” “Grey hat,” and “White hat.” Even within small communities, the definition and attributes of these groups are ambiguous and debatable [1]. Still, generally most will agree on a basic definition similar to the following:
Black hat hackers are those who are willing to cause harm or damage to others through “hacking” activities that generally violate the law. An example of this is malicious hackers attempting to steal credit card numbers or someone’s identity.
White hat hackers are those who are unwilling to cause harm or damage to others, or those who preform only legal activities. Often, exceptions are sometimes made for what is seen as a good cause. These examples pertain to those who have somehow upset online communities. Recently, several acts of animal cruelty have resulted in an ad-hoc act of revenge, or vigilante justice. Those who were responsible were hunted out of the anonymity that the internet frequently offers and were held accountable for their actions. The means of achieving “justice” were perceived as cruel in and of themselves by some, as vigilante justices often are.
Grey hat hackers are generally anything in between, and although definitions vary wildly, the consensus [1] is that many hacker communities (and conventions like DEFCON, a large annual hacker convention) are “filled with Grey hats”. Most hackers associate with the category of Grey hat, suggesting primarily that the unique and sometimes ambiguous scenarios created by electronic communication technologies are difficult to consistently judge on a moral scale.
Even the hat system of categorizing hackers is hotly contested within the hacking community. Within a thread labeled “Black, White, or Grey Hat?” on hackthissite.org forums, the members debate on whether it has become archaic or can still be applied today. Many of the members stated that they do not fall specifically in any category; although they may lean more towards one category than another, they often do not classify themselves in one hat. The system of hats looks at the hats within a moral compass that does not apply to everyone. Although the majority of people will see white hats as the good guys, and the black hats as the enemies, black hats themselves see the white hats as the enemies, therefore making themselves the good guys. In the context of the classic “good” and “evil” paradigm associated with the colors black and white, most hackers take a third stance - either failing or refusing to fit in to standard moral terms. The result is that hackers see themselves not as “good” or “evil,” but as “okay.” Hackers will also often dislike the system of hats because hacking in itself is a hobby, and there is no need for a ‘badge of honor’ such as a hat.
Inevitably, the categorical Black, Grey, and White hats are filled with debate and exceptions. In a group so difficult to define as hackers, it is only to be expected that beliefs, actions, and activism will be as difficult to explain as it is sometimes to justify. Hackers are a group that relish the opportunity to find loopholes and exploits in almost any system - and not necessarily just mechanical or electrical systems. While the Hacker Quarterly 2600 alludes to the 2600 Hertz tone that could be created with a Cap’n Crunch whistle to achieve free phone calls from pay phones, others focus on fields like social engineering, in which they attempt to breach human defenses and convictions - sometimes even including face-to-face lying.
Social engineering on communities like HackThisSite.org lead to comments that challenge typical preconceptions of morality:
“Ok i know social engineering is illegal but out of curiosity how do you do it?”
“The best advice I can give is to get comfortable lying. Lie to someone each day... You need to be a compulsive liar so it comes naturally when you need it.” [2]
Social engineering is defined on HackThisSite.org as “the art of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information,” and “typically applies to trickery for information gathering or computer system access.” It is seen as another branch of typical hacker attempts to breech security measures. In contrast to the complicated and sophisticated computer skills necessary to “crack” a password, it may be much easier to trick the user into revealing it.
The direct acknowledgement that social engineering may be illegal - whether correct or incorrect - lends to a perception that perhaps, morality and legality are not always exactly aligned. In this particular case, the user continued to state that it was “just out of curiosity” - echoing a commonly heard sentiment that hackers are interested in exploration of security systems. A common defense is that not everyone uses the “black hat” mentality of abusing knowledge for their own advantage.
The quest for knowledge may be another strong motivation in all aspects of the hacking community. The user who suggested “[lieing] to someone each day” was, surprisingly enough, a student currently studying criminal justice. This user - who was also a moderator on the forum [3], wielding administrative authority on the message board - recommended taking classes or reading books on body language and behavior. The emphasis on learning - particularly self-directed learning - is a strong and common thread that feeds and unites the hacker community.
History
Understanding the hacking community requires a history of hacking. One of the earliest documented forms of hacking came in play with the use of a toy whistle, a toy whistle found in boxes of Captain Crunch cereal. When blown, the whistle emits a sound at the pitch of 2600 hertz, the exact sound needed to control telephone lines and place free long distance calls. John Draper was the man who discovered this in the late 1960s, and he used this to his advantage. [7] He began to develop “blue boxes”, devices that would mimic other tones that phone companies used. It was not malicious intent that led John Draper to develop these blue boxes; rather, it was because “I’m learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System, do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that's my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer“ [7]. Draper only wished to expose the flaws that he had found in the phone company lines, and never aspired to receive financial gain from his blue boxes. Although the same cannot always be said for the rest of the community (collectively known as phone-phreaks), like hackers, the majority of them were involved in the ‘phreaking’ out of curiosity and the yearning for knowledge. The community understood that their actions were considered illegal, but it was the desire to learn more and improve the phone system that prompted them to push forward. Some phone-phreaks were arrested and put in jail for fraud. Yet like their modern day cousin, the computer hacker, they sometimes found jobs in the phone business, improving phone systems for the same companies that had them arrested in the first place. Draper himself was arrested for fraud, but ended up developing the first word processor for Apple II while still in jail. The parallels between these phone-phreaks and computer hackers are striking, and only demonstrate the wide spectrum that falls under the umbrella of hackers.
History and Legality, Cont.
While trying to further understand how hackers came to be, BigMomma, a member of IU, proceeded to tell us about her father using Ham Radio in the 50s.
According to Kristen Haring in her article “The ‘Freer Men’ of Ham Radio,” these amateurs “passed hours at a cluttered worktable in the basement, attic, or garage. There [they] used two-way radio equipment to contact other radio stations-- speaking into a microphone, typing at a keyboard, or tapping out Morse code on a telegraph key”[8]. While Haring discusses how ham radio reinforced the users’ masculinity, BigMomma argues that “hams” were the first hackers. In the 1950s, the term “hacker” was synonymous with “nerd” or “geek.” According to BigMomma, they were interested in finding ways to use hardware and software for an extra feature or purpose. In other words, hackers use already existing technologies in a different way than originally intended. [1] Hams would tweak the two-way radios and make contact with other hams, sometimes as far away as China. It was this “tinkering” that made the hams the first hackers.
Just as modern media is concerned with security and legal issues with hacking, so were neighbors with hams in the 60s. Hams would sometimes receive postcards from those they had contacted through the radios. Neighbors who noticed mail coming in from communist countries such as China or Eastern Europe suspected treason. They would also accuse neighboring hams of interfering with their electrical systems. These concerns do not seem too far off from the paranoia over the image of the malicious, identity stealing hacker of the 21st century.
Certainly, there are malicious hackers who aim to steal credit card and social security numbers, however BigMomma wished us to know that they are by far the minority. Most of the activities conducted by hackers are in a legal gray area. In order to further illustrate her point, BigMomma gave the example of a key logger. A key logger is a device the user can attach to a laptop or desktop to record every keystroke made on that computer. The IU had a competition in one of their monthly meetings and BigMomma won this device. She stated that she loves it because she can use it for security purposes. She can know if anyone besides herself or her husband uses her computer and exactly what they used it for. However, the device can be used maliciously. A hacker can also attach it to another computer, without the owners permission or knowledge and use it to steal identity information. A key logger is a hacking device that occupies a legal gray area, it is not illegal within itself, but a hacker can use it for illegal purposes.
Another legal issue present in the hacking subculture is the bounds of free speech. BigMomma discussed a scandal at the 2008 Defconin which three MIT students published an 87 page paper titled “Anatomy of a Subway Hack”. The paper described how they duplicated Boston subway cards and rode for free. Before they could give their presentation, they received orders from a Massachusetts judge ordering them to stop all presentations and circulation of the paper. They were also ordered to take a link to the paper off of their website. The Massachusetts Transit Authority argued that the students endangered subway riders. The MIT students adhered to the orders, but responded that their right to free speech had been infringed upon. In an article titled “A Cyberspace Independence Declaration,” author John Barlow argues against censorship over the internet. He articulates that no governmental agency had jurisdiction over the internet because it is not an actual place. He says, “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here” [10]. Under this declaration, the MIT students should have been allowed to publish whatever they pleased. They had no intention of selling the handmade subway tickets and even expressed in their paper that they did not condone stealing a subway ride. Like most hackers, they simply wanted to know if it could be done. [9]
Stereotypes of the hacking community
The media has put out the image that hackers try malicious attacks on websites, and exploit security loopholes to gain access to sensitive information. Yet as stated above, this only represents a small minority of the hacking population. However, though the advent of internet, and in that sense, a more easily accessible global network, the prevalence of online media has only propagated the negative viewpoint of hacking. The word ‘hack’ has even become a bit of a joke for members of Facebook, especially those of the college age. Leaving your Facebook page open and logged in leaves you as prey for friends that decide to sabotage your Facebook page by changing your birthday, or posting up a status about being ‘hacked’. Given the description of hacking that we discussed with Irvine Underground, the Facebook sabotage can be stretched into a mild form of hacking.
Irvine Underground: A look into a hacker community
Irvine Underground is a hacker community that started around June or July of 2002 with four starting members. One of the founding members, Barfly, gave us a tour of his tight-knit community. He said that the Irvine Underground was created primarily in order to share knowledge about computers as a reaction to other hacker and computer groups. Barfly and the other founding members couldn’t find a group that really catered to its members. He gave us his first experience in a hacker group as an example, calling them the typical stereotype of computer nerds. That group had six members, with four quietly using the computers and two arguing over whether one programming language was better than another. He began to feel as though there were no good hacking communities until he met the founding member of the Nevada Underground, which began in 1997, at the 2600 Meeting (a hacker quarterly). Both shared a frustration with competitive hacking groups that focused more on each individual’s ego and one-upping each other rather than collaborative information sharing and friendship.
The two decided to call their group the Irvine Underground, named after the Nevada Underground. They based the group on “commonality, friendship, and knowledge.” In keeping with the aim of the group, subsequent members had diverse reasons for joining IU. BigMomma, a woman in her fifties explained that other groups and conventions made her feel uncomfortable because as a female, she would have many young men, roughly the age of her children hitting on her. Another member, PunkKid, explained that his interests in hacking and computers developed after he dropped out of high school because he didn’t like the “system.” He went to college at the age of sixteen and worked at the college where he worked on computers and safety walls. He explained that he did not like “structure and standardization,” and deviating from that norm constituted his sense of hacking. As with the telegraph operators, the hackers of IU looked for a community where they could meet with like-minded individuals to maintain friendships. Standage explained that the telegraph operators would talk to each other during their downtimes, and by doing so, form friendships and romantic attachments to the point that, “within a few months of the electric telegraph being opened to the public, it was used for something that even the most farsighted of telegraph advocates never dared to imagine: to conduct an online wedding [11]. The wedding was conducted over telegraph wires between two telegraph operators with hundreds of fellow telegraph operators attending virtually via standing at telegraph stations, listening in. [11] It isn’t too far of a stretch to claim that some telegraph operators went to work for the community, rather than the pay, and Barfly feels the same, saying, “if the whole group becomes a pottery group I couldn’t care less,” showing that he is committed to the community rather than the hobby.
Irvine Underground was formed in order to fill a need in the Orange County area, but also to give people a sense of community, like BigMomma and PunkKid. Barfly also wanted Irvine Underground to be a place where the members could share knowledge and learn from each other. So the group regularly has seminars presented by members or guest speakers to introduce new material to the group. Some presentations even involve the use of a projector and powerpoint slides! However, they took a break from the seminars for a year and a half to focus on the community and getting to know each other, but Barfly is eager to get back to the seminars. They all want to learn from each other and many have even joined this group in order to share their own knowledge and to learn from other people.
However, this group is by no means homogenous; each member has his or her own preferences and interests. Some of the various interests we found were creating viruses, coding languages, webpages, lockpicking, robots, cryptology, etc. Many in the group exclaimed that they gained a lot of new knowledge since joining this community. We were also informed that each person had his or her own level of skill, with some people knowing little to nothing about hacking or computers while others were incredibly skilled. Many of these lesser-skilled people have friends in the community and are always welcome while the older or more skilled members are always delighted to show or explain some aspect of hacking or computers. Barfly explained that lock picking was never in the community until someone introduced them to the skill, and now most of the members know how to pick locks. This is a fairly good example of the community being a good resource for each member. Although the group is always active, many people do not show up to many of the meetings. Barfly explains that the community will always be kept alive by new members and, most importantly of all, the core members. The draw to the community is so strong that one core member who lives in Nevada always makes it to a meeting every month! Although they also have a forum, the Irvine Underground makes a point to meet at least once a month at public establishments, such as IHOP. It seems as if the community is and will continue to run strong
Conclusion
Hacking is a complex topic ridden with misunderstanding and stereotypes. To truly understand both the activity itself and the community involved, one must delve into an emic perspective. The history of hacking goes back much farther than our common misnomers of the topic. Understanding hacking’s history allows us to gain a deeper perspective into what people gain from it. People utilized tricks and manipulated information to provide easier or better ways of doing things. Rarely were the intentions malicious, though they often allowed for some gain. More than anything the act of hacking provided a fun and intriguing puzzle. Hackers themselves debate about how to define their existence as well as their purpose. There is a struggle to maintain an ethical code between the White Hats and the Black Hats. This struggle, in itself, has lead to the definition of what most hackers settle into, Gray Hat hacking. As different hacking communities are allowed to grow, our understanding and means of defining them can as well. This allows us to employ etic perspectives to our views on the hacking community. Through the anthropological research of these communities we are able to deepener our propensity to understand hackers and incorporate them as an important part of greater society.
Works Cited
[1] Irvine Underground meeting. May 14, 2010.
[2] http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/throwpuppy.asp
[3] Stuart Reeves, Barry Brown, and Eric Laurier, Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise. Games and Culture 4(3):205–27, 2009.
[4] http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/8c9e3/you_wouldnt_download_a_car/
[5] http://www.hackthissite.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=116
[6] http://www.hackthissite.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=116&t=4928
[7] Rosenbaum, Ron “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/courses/cs279/HW1/rosenbaum71_bluebox.pdf
[8] Kristen Haring, The “Freer Men” of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance. Technology and Culture 44(4):734–61, 2003.
[9] Youtube (MIT Students Subway Hack): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxGkFb19eSQ
[10] John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996
[11] Standage, Tom The Victorian Internet
[12] http://www.hackthissite.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=5047
Joseph Fodor, Adam Berro, Catherine Nguyen
Luke Brunda, Lauren Lopez, Allison Weiner, Christopher Kwak
METHODS
There were two main methods we used when conducting our research on Irvine Underground, a local hacker community. To gain an insider’s view on the history of Irvine Underground, we attended a general meeting on May 14th, 2010. We discussed their beginnings as well as various questions about how the members view hacking. Our questions ranged from simple inquiries such as what it means to be a hacker, to slightly more complicated questions, such as how they determine the legality and ethics behind what they do. By attending the general meeting, we were able to conduct face-to-face interviews with one of the founding members of Irvine Underground, along with various other members. These face-to-face interviews were highly successful and provided insight on how the personal relationships between the members worked. Due to the interview and communal discussion approach we took there was potential that answers were not as well thought out or fully developed. Due to this factor, we obtained the email addresses of members. This allowed for written follow-up questions in which the members were able to delve more into specific issues. However, we have yet to get any responses from the members. This shows one of the weaknesses of our methods. In the future having a written questionnaire at the time of initial interview would be beneficial and necessary for sound research.
Along with the interviews of Irvine Underground members, gaining a broader understanding of the hacker community was necessary. To do so one member from our group posted a questionnaire on a prominent hacker website and forum, hackthissite.org. The written questionnaire allowed hackthissite members to provide well thought out and thorough responses. The members on this forum are global, although a large majority of them reside in the United States. By getting responses from a much more geographically diverse population, we were able to deduce whether or not the trends we discovered with Irvine Underground applied on a broader scale. As this paper mostly focuses on Irvine Underground, the interviews with members from hackthissite.org acted as a benchmark for comparisons, allowing us more insight on how hackers view themselves.
What is a “hacker”?
Culture is constantly contested. As with all communities, the hacker community disputes what it means to be a hacker. The broader hacker community is incredibly varied in terms of interests and ethics. We also found that much diversity exists even within a single hacker community, the Irvine Underground. Despite large variation between hackers in terms of ethics as well as hacking interests and activities, one concern that unites hackers is the notion of security. Hackers are not only concerned with computers and computer security, though; hacking transcends computers and even technology.
Barfly, a member of the Irvine Underground, explained his ideas of the “old world” and “new world” hackers. The old world view is the emic view, and states that hackers find a way to manipulate software or hardware to serve a purpose, other than its originally intended purpose. In this sense, “hacking” is a clever way of mechanical engineering. The “new world” (mis)conception of a hacker is the definition propagated by the mass media which depicts hackers as criminals who attempt to circumvent security for their own malicious gain. [1]
Truly malicious hackers are actually the minority. Although some hackers harm others by creating and distributing viruses, stealing identities, or credit card theft, most hackers are relatively harmless. Unlike the images of hackers perpetuated by mainstream media, hackers are simply anyone interested in deeply understanding a system, and being able to manipulate and exploit it to achieve some result. While this can certainly refer to computers and computer security, it is equally likely to apply to the non-computer world. For example, lock picking is a popular type of hack among the Irvine Underground. Because the IU is so focused on being a social group and teaching and learning resource, they are open to new types of hacking. During a past meeting, one member brought in a lock picking set and a lock and introduced lock picking to the group. An average person may think very little about locks, but a hacker who is interested in security and lock picking may want to gain a better understanding of the lock as a security measure and a useful skill. .
Another example of hacking that is unrelated to computers or technology is social engineering, the manipulation of people. It relies on the same premises of hacking, understanding a system thoroughly, and using that knowledge to manipulate it, or bypass security. In this case, a hacker knows how to manipulate someone, by gaining their trust, or by tricking them. For example, a social engineer demonstrated a hack at a Defcon convention by choosing a name at random and proceeded to acquire the caller’s credit card number just by talking on the phone to him.
When Barfly, a member of IU, asked another member of the group what a hacker was, he responded, “A hacker is a chameleon!” as he took off his coat. While we discussed what it meant to be a hacker, another member of the IU remarked, “You’re probably learning, it’s hard to define a hacker.” This is certainly true, but the main axes that divides hackers from one another is their personal ethics. This can include whether one is benign and curious, or aggressive and malicious, and their intentions with what and how they hack. How hackers chose to persue hacking categorizes them into a “hat” system.
Defining a Hacker
Hacker communities have developed a unique system of ethics and morality including the construction of their own categories. They utilize these categories in able to judge the actions of those within the community. These categories are known as “Black hat,” “Grey hat,” and “White hat.” Even within small communities, the definition and attributes of these groups are ambiguous and debatable [1]. Still, generally most will agree on a basic definition similar to the following:
Black hat hackers are those who are willing to cause harm or damage to others through “hacking” activities that generally violate the law. An example of this is malicious hackers attempting to steal credit card numbers or someone’s identity.
White hat hackers are those who are unwilling to cause harm or damage to others, or those who preform only legal activities. Often, exceptions are sometimes made for what is seen as a good cause. These examples pertain to those who have somehow upset online communities. Recently, several acts of animal cruelty have resulted in an ad-hoc act of revenge, or vigilante justice. Those who were responsible were hunted out of the anonymity that the internet frequently offers and were held accountable for their actions. The means of achieving “justice” were perceived as cruel in and of themselves by some, as vigilante justices often are.
Grey hat hackers are generally anything in between, and although definitions vary wildly, the consensus [1] is that many hacker communities (and conventions like DEFCON, a large annual hacker convention) are “filled with Grey hats”. Most hackers associate with the category of Grey hat, suggesting primarily that the unique and sometimes ambiguous scenarios created by electronic communication technologies are difficult to consistently judge on a moral scale.
Even the hat system of categorizing hackers is hotly contested within the hacking community. Within a thread labeled “Black, White, or Grey Hat?” on hackthissite.org forums, the members debate on whether it has become archaic or can still be applied today. Many of the members stated that they do not fall specifically in any category; although they may lean more towards one category than another, they often do not classify themselves in one hat. The system of hats looks at the hats within a moral compass that does not apply to everyone. Although the majority of people will see white hats as the good guys, and the black hats as the enemies, black hats themselves see the white hats as the enemies, therefore making themselves the good guys. In the context of the classic “good” and “evil” paradigm associated with the colors black and white, most hackers take a third stance - either failing or refusing to fit in to standard moral terms. The result is that hackers see themselves not as “good” or “evil,” but as “okay.” Hackers will also often dislike the system of hats because hacking in itself is a hobby, and there is no need for a ‘badge of honor’ such as a hat.
Inevitably, the categorical Black, Grey, and White hats are filled with debate and exceptions. In a group so difficult to define as hackers, it is only to be expected that beliefs, actions, and activism will be as difficult to explain as it is sometimes to justify. Hackers are a group that relish the opportunity to find loopholes and exploits in almost any system - and not necessarily just mechanical or electrical systems. While the Hacker Quarterly 2600 alludes to the 2600 Hertz tone that could be created with a Cap’n Crunch whistle to achieve free phone calls from pay phones, others focus on fields like social engineering, in which they attempt to breach human defenses and convictions - sometimes even including face-to-face lying.
Social engineering on communities like HackThisSite.org lead to comments that challenge typical preconceptions of morality:
“Ok i know social engineering is illegal but out of curiosity how do you do it?”
“The best advice I can give is to get comfortable lying. Lie to someone each day... You need to be a compulsive liar so it comes naturally when you need it.” [2]
Social engineering is defined on HackThisSite.org as “the art of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information,” and “typically applies to trickery for information gathering or computer system access.” It is seen as another branch of typical hacker attempts to breech security measures. In contrast to the complicated and sophisticated computer skills necessary to “crack” a password, it may be much easier to trick the user into revealing it.
The direct acknowledgement that social engineering may be illegal - whether correct or incorrect - lends to a perception that perhaps, morality and legality are not always exactly aligned. In this particular case, the user continued to state that it was “just out of curiosity” - echoing a commonly heard sentiment that hackers are interested in exploration of security systems. A common defense is that not everyone uses the “black hat” mentality of abusing knowledge for their own advantage.
The quest for knowledge may be another strong motivation in all aspects of the hacking community. The user who suggested “[lieing] to someone each day” was, surprisingly enough, a student currently studying criminal justice. This user - who was also a moderator on the forum [3], wielding administrative authority on the message board - recommended taking classes or reading books on body language and behavior. The emphasis on learning - particularly self-directed learning - is a strong and common thread that feeds and unites the hacker community.
History
Understanding the hacking community requires a history of hacking. One of the earliest documented forms of hacking came in play with the use of a toy whistle, a toy whistle found in boxes of Captain Crunch cereal. When blown, the whistle emits a sound at the pitch of 2600 hertz, the exact sound needed to control telephone lines and place free long distance calls. John Draper was the man who discovered this in the late 1960s, and he used this to his advantage. [7] He began to develop “blue boxes”, devices that would mimic other tones that phone companies used. It was not malicious intent that led John Draper to develop these blue boxes; rather, it was because “I’m learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System, do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that's my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer“ [7]. Draper only wished to expose the flaws that he had found in the phone company lines, and never aspired to receive financial gain from his blue boxes. Although the same cannot always be said for the rest of the community (collectively known as phone-phreaks), like hackers, the majority of them were involved in the ‘phreaking’ out of curiosity and the yearning for knowledge. The community understood that their actions were considered illegal, but it was the desire to learn more and improve the phone system that prompted them to push forward. Some phone-phreaks were arrested and put in jail for fraud. Yet like their modern day cousin, the computer hacker, they sometimes found jobs in the phone business, improving phone systems for the same companies that had them arrested in the first place. Draper himself was arrested for fraud, but ended up developing the first word processor for Apple II while still in jail. The parallels between these phone-phreaks and computer hackers are striking, and only demonstrate the wide spectrum that falls under the umbrella of hackers.
History and Legality, Cont.
While trying to further understand how hackers came to be, BigMomma, a member of IU, proceeded to tell us about her father using Ham Radio in the 50s.
According to Kristen Haring in her article “The ‘Freer Men’ of Ham Radio,” these amateurs “passed hours at a cluttered worktable in the basement, attic, or garage. There [they] used two-way radio equipment to contact other radio stations-- speaking into a microphone, typing at a keyboard, or tapping out Morse code on a telegraph key”[8]. While Haring discusses how ham radio reinforced the users’ masculinity, BigMomma argues that “hams” were the first hackers. In the 1950s, the term “hacker” was synonymous with “nerd” or “geek.” According to BigMomma, they were interested in finding ways to use hardware and software for an extra feature or purpose. In other words, hackers use already existing technologies in a different way than originally intended. [1] Hams would tweak the two-way radios and make contact with other hams, sometimes as far away as China. It was this “tinkering” that made the hams the first hackers.
Just as modern media is concerned with security and legal issues with hacking, so were neighbors with hams in the 60s. Hams would sometimes receive postcards from those they had contacted through the radios. Neighbors who noticed mail coming in from communist countries such as China or Eastern Europe suspected treason. They would also accuse neighboring hams of interfering with their electrical systems. These concerns do not seem too far off from the paranoia over the image of the malicious, identity stealing hacker of the 21st century.
Certainly, there are malicious hackers who aim to steal credit card and social security numbers, however BigMomma wished us to know that they are by far the minority. Most of the activities conducted by hackers are in a legal gray area. In order to further illustrate her point, BigMomma gave the example of a key logger. A key logger is a device the user can attach to a laptop or desktop to record every keystroke made on that computer. The IU had a competition in one of their monthly meetings and BigMomma won this device. She stated that she loves it because she can use it for security purposes. She can know if anyone besides herself or her husband uses her computer and exactly what they used it for. However, the device can be used maliciously. A hacker can also attach it to another computer, without the owners permission or knowledge and use it to steal identity information. A key logger is a hacking device that occupies a legal gray area, it is not illegal within itself, but a hacker can use it for illegal purposes.
Another legal issue present in the hacking subculture is the bounds of free speech. BigMomma discussed a scandal at the 2008 Defconin which three MIT students published an 87 page paper titled “Anatomy of a Subway Hack”. The paper described how they duplicated Boston subway cards and rode for free. Before they could give their presentation, they received orders from a Massachusetts judge ordering them to stop all presentations and circulation of the paper. They were also ordered to take a link to the paper off of their website. The Massachusetts Transit Authority argued that the students endangered subway riders. The MIT students adhered to the orders, but responded that their right to free speech had been infringed upon. In an article titled “A Cyberspace Independence Declaration,” author John Barlow argues against censorship over the internet. He articulates that no governmental agency had jurisdiction over the internet because it is not an actual place. He says, “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here” [10]. Under this declaration, the MIT students should have been allowed to publish whatever they pleased. They had no intention of selling the handmade subway tickets and even expressed in their paper that they did not condone stealing a subway ride. Like most hackers, they simply wanted to know if it could be done. [9]
Stereotypes of the hacking community
The media has put out the image that hackers try malicious attacks on websites, and exploit security loopholes to gain access to sensitive information. Yet as stated above, this only represents a small minority of the hacking population. However, though the advent of internet, and in that sense, a more easily accessible global network, the prevalence of online media has only propagated the negative viewpoint of hacking. The word ‘hack’ has even become a bit of a joke for members of Facebook, especially those of the college age. Leaving your Facebook page open and logged in leaves you as prey for friends that decide to sabotage your Facebook page by changing your birthday, or posting up a status about being ‘hacked’. Given the description of hacking that we discussed with Irvine Underground, the Facebook sabotage can be stretched into a mild form of hacking.
Irvine Underground: A look into a hacker community
Irvine Underground is a hacker community that started around June or July of 2002 with four starting members. One of the founding members, Barfly, gave us a tour of his tight-knit community. He said that the Irvine Underground was created primarily in order to share knowledge about computers as a reaction to other hacker and computer groups. Barfly and the other founding members couldn’t find a group that really catered to its members. He gave us his first experience in a hacker group as an example, calling them the typical stereotype of computer nerds. That group had six members, with four quietly using the computers and two arguing over whether one programming language was better than another. He began to feel as though there were no good hacking communities until he met the founding member of the Nevada Underground, which began in 1997, at the 2600 Meeting (a hacker quarterly). Both shared a frustration with competitive hacking groups that focused more on each individual’s ego and one-upping each other rather than collaborative information sharing and friendship.
The two decided to call their group the Irvine Underground, named after the Nevada Underground. They based the group on “commonality, friendship, and knowledge.” In keeping with the aim of the group, subsequent members had diverse reasons for joining IU. BigMomma, a woman in her fifties explained that other groups and conventions made her feel uncomfortable because as a female, she would have many young men, roughly the age of her children hitting on her. Another member, PunkKid, explained that his interests in hacking and computers developed after he dropped out of high school because he didn’t like the “system.” He went to college at the age of sixteen and worked at the college where he worked on computers and safety walls. He explained that he did not like “structure and standardization,” and deviating from that norm constituted his sense of hacking. As with the telegraph operators, the hackers of IU looked for a community where they could meet with like-minded individuals to maintain friendships. Standage explained that the telegraph operators would talk to each other during their downtimes, and by doing so, form friendships and romantic attachments to the point that, “within a few months of the electric telegraph being opened to the public, it was used for something that even the most farsighted of telegraph advocates never dared to imagine: to conduct an online wedding [11]. The wedding was conducted over telegraph wires between two telegraph operators with hundreds of fellow telegraph operators attending virtually via standing at telegraph stations, listening in. [11] It isn’t too far of a stretch to claim that some telegraph operators went to work for the community, rather than the pay, and Barfly feels the same, saying, “if the whole group becomes a pottery group I couldn’t care less,” showing that he is committed to the community rather than the hobby.
Irvine Underground was formed in order to fill a need in the Orange County area, but also to give people a sense of community, like BigMomma and PunkKid. Barfly also wanted Irvine Underground to be a place where the members could share knowledge and learn from each other. So the group regularly has seminars presented by members or guest speakers to introduce new material to the group. Some presentations even involve the use of a projector and powerpoint slides! However, they took a break from the seminars for a year and a half to focus on the community and getting to know each other, but Barfly is eager to get back to the seminars. They all want to learn from each other and many have even joined this group in order to share their own knowledge and to learn from other people.
However, this group is by no means homogenous; each member has his or her own preferences and interests. Some of the various interests we found were creating viruses, coding languages, webpages, lockpicking, robots, cryptology, etc. Many in the group exclaimed that they gained a lot of new knowledge since joining this community. We were also informed that each person had his or her own level of skill, with some people knowing little to nothing about hacking or computers while others were incredibly skilled. Many of these lesser-skilled people have friends in the community and are always welcome while the older or more skilled members are always delighted to show or explain some aspect of hacking or computers. Barfly explained that lock picking was never in the community until someone introduced them to the skill, and now most of the members know how to pick locks. This is a fairly good example of the community being a good resource for each member. Although the group is always active, many people do not show up to many of the meetings. Barfly explains that the community will always be kept alive by new members and, most importantly of all, the core members. The draw to the community is so strong that one core member who lives in Nevada always makes it to a meeting every month! Although they also have a forum, the Irvine Underground makes a point to meet at least once a month at public establishments, such as IHOP. It seems as if the community is and will continue to run strong
Conclusion
Hacking is a complex topic ridden with misunderstanding and stereotypes. To truly understand both the activity itself and the community involved, one must delve into an emic perspective. The history of hacking goes back much farther than our common misnomers of the topic. Understanding hacking’s history allows us to gain a deeper perspective into what people gain from it. People utilized tricks and manipulated information to provide easier or better ways of doing things. Rarely were the intentions malicious, though they often allowed for some gain. More than anything the act of hacking provided a fun and intriguing puzzle. Hackers themselves debate about how to define their existence as well as their purpose. There is a struggle to maintain an ethical code between the White Hats and the Black Hats. This struggle, in itself, has lead to the definition of what most hackers settle into, Gray Hat hacking. As different hacking communities are allowed to grow, our understanding and means of defining them can as well. This allows us to employ etic perspectives to our views on the hacking community. Through the anthropological research of these communities we are able to deepener our propensity to understand hackers and incorporate them as an important part of greater society.
Works Cited
[1] Irvine Underground meeting. May 14, 2010.
[2] http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/throwpuppy.asp
[3] Stuart Reeves, Barry Brown, and Eric Laurier, Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise. Games and Culture 4(3):205–27, 2009.
[4] http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/8c9e3/you_wouldnt_download_a_car/
[5] http://www.hackthissite.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=116
[6] http://www.hackthissite.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=116&t=4928
[7] Rosenbaum, Ron “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/courses/cs279/HW1/rosenbaum71_bluebox.pdf
[8] Kristen Haring, The “Freer Men” of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance. Technology and Culture 44(4):734–61, 2003.
[9] Youtube (MIT Students Subway Hack): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxGkFb19eSQ
[10] John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996
[11] Standage, Tom The Victorian Internet
[12] http://www.hackthissite.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=5047
Friendly Communication Via Xbox Live
Friendly Communication Via Xbox Live
By:
Mikael Buencamino
Catherine Cahill
Kevin Kim
Alyssa Mervyn
Jennifer Uken
Nicole Vargo
Professor Tom Boellstorff
Anthropology 128C
June 10th, 2010
Introduction
In the realm of cyberspace nothing compares to popularity and the universal appeal of videogames. An incredible sum of money is spent on videogame production, advertising, distribution, and an even more overwhelming amount is spent by the general public on these games. In 2008 the videogame industry was worth $22 billion and has continued to increase through present day. This incredibly lucrative market is not only responsible for incredible amounts of currency exchange but it also commands people’s attention for countless hours a day all over the globe. With advanced technology, like online gaming forums like Xbox Live which has over 20 million registered users, gamers can play against each other across the globe and communicate during contests. This element of communication is especially interesting to our group of anthropological researchers because it brings a new sense of human connection to the formerly isolating nature of videogame playing. As a group, we decided to examine the relationships of friends and their communication patterns via Xbox Live. To further narrow our scope of focus we chose the most popular game for the console Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 which sold 4.7 million copies worldwide within 24 hours of release. With the popularity of Xbox Live and the game we chose we knew we’d be able to find plenty of subjects to help us answer our research question: is online gaming via Xbox Live an effective means of communication for friends? We expect our results to indicate that it is effective for some groups of friends. Our research will delve into the more humanistic side of gaming, the interactions and communication of gamers and the relationships they form in this competitive cyberspace.
Literature Review: Articles from Class
While the basis of our research is grounded in the Xbox Live networking platform, the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (from here on, known as COD) in of itself warrants enough influence through both its design and intent for a closer analysis. In “Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise,” an article composed by Reeves et. al., the authors breaks down the very elements that comprise the first person shooter (FPS) audience unique. While Reeves uses the game Counter-Strike as his research base, the same elements apply and extend to FPS online-play in general. A “core component of FPS experiences is the pleasure obtained from the player’s engagement and gradual mastering of the game mechanic” (Reeves 2009:206). As players surpass the initial skill level of synching their movements with the environment, they begin to develop a sense of the terrain and actually play tactically. Contrasting significantly with Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games and other consistent environments, FPS players display their skill through mastery of both the game mechanics and its environments rather than developing deep, meaningful social relationships that accompany questing or participating in a guild. Due to the incredibly technical nature of COD there will be a definite effect on the communication patterns of the gamers. Therefore, the general research question requires ascertaining if this technical atmosphere is still conducive to forging and maintaining friends.
In “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project,” Mimi Ito and her fellow researchers investigate a myriad of technologies that were found to be used frequently by today’s youth as a means of self-directed learning. She drew such conclusions through methods of peer-based responses. She discusses the way in which online spaces enable youth to extend their friendships through online spaces like “gaming sites [that] work as mediums for young people to extend, enhance, and hang out with people they already know” (Ito 2008:16). In our own research, we will explore this idea and see if Xbox Live allows us to see if there are similarities between the way people will come together and play a game of basketball and the interaction of players and friends during a game of COD.
We think that for some people, the gaming extension of a friendship allows the sharing of technical knowledge, as Ito noted “[a]mong boys, gaming has become a pervasive social activity and a context where they share technical and media-related knowledge” (Ito 2008:26). It is in this observation that boys that are using gaming as a social means and context to share this kind of knowledge, and that may make it difficult for us to locate girl gamers to interview for our own research.
Kristen Haring’s “The ‘Freer Men’ of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance,” analyzes the social implications of technologies long-outdated in their use, which provides insight into how technology has shaped certain social norms. The amateur radio hobbyists, or “hams,” of the Cold War era may very well be the equivalent of the male gamer on Xbox Live. According to Haring, “95 to 99 percent were male. On average the ham had completed more years of schooling...than the nonhobbyist, and he was far more likely to hold a job in a technical field” (Haring 2003:735). Additionally, Haring argues that the promotion of technical hobbies in young boys during this era effectively “grounded masculinity in technology” (Haring 2003:740). In society, there persists a consistency of male-dominance in electronic technologies in both their use and in technical employment such as networking, information technologies, and computer services. One of our goals by researching the communicational patterns of gamers is to also see if societal norms like this are reflected in the online gaming community.
Video games are still striving to gain mass appeal. Efforts made in providing more accessible products for those potential gamers outside of the usual gamer demographic, males in their twenties, have proven successful. For example, sales of gaming consoles, like Nintendo Wii, have increased dramatically, and online gaming environments, like Second life, have gained in popularity. . However, the content in the games themselves still caters largely to this stereotype, as Adrienne Shaw analyzes in her article “Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games.” The continued presence of the male majority in technological fields observed earlier in both our research and in the contributions of various researchers is supplemented by Shaw’s analysis of the audiences marketed to by the gaming industry. Shaw states, “… the video game industry greatly limits their market by only appealing to male gamers...annihilating girls and women gaming culture potentially circumscribes their participating in technology careers, because games are often a gateway to computing careers,” (Shaw, 2009:233). In this instance, we can perceive the way in which technological careers are perpetually filled by males as attributable to the way the end product is being produced and marketed.
Literature Review: Outside Sources
Our research question asks video game players about their communication with other players. This communication with other players can differ due to their relationship of varied significance: ties can be strong, they can be weak, or they can be somewhere in between. A strong tie is often considered a connection between close friends. A weak tie is a distant connection that is responsible for the general structure of social networks in society. In the article, The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust, Levin and Cross state that relationships and friendships are crucial to knowledge and creation transfer, and that trustworthiness is a mechanism by which strong ties enable learning. They conclude that the people in strong ties are more accessible and more willing to help. For our research project, we seek to explore the strength of ties between gamers and who they normally play with in attempts to better understand the role of communication in the Xbox online forum. While Levin and Cross do not deny the importance of strong ties, they note that that weak ties provide more useful knowledge than strong ones. Weak ties can be helpful for video game players like those who play Xbox Live, because different strategies and designs in the handling of certain gaming situations. This can be useful knowledge that can be transferred from one social network to another through these weak ties.
In the article, Joining the Video-Game Literacy Club, Norton-Meier discusses how her cohort group, parents with teenage children, feels technologically alienated from the younger generation because of video games on the Xbox. She discusses how this generation, also known as “digital natives,” thinks and processes information differently than her generation. Norton-Meier goes on to discuss how in her own home, the dinner conversation revolves around Xbox and how to handle certain gaming situations. She concludes that “games are a way of knowing – a place of informal learning where entertainment comes first and learning is embedded in the moment” (Norton-Meier 2005:428). This article relates to our research question regarding communication through video games because it shows how our generation uses technology as a major form of communication and learning. Digital natives who play these video games have drastically changed the way people communicate with each other in today’s ever-changing technologically-advanced society. This article is concentrated on effects games have on communication external to video games whereas our research is based on the internal communication of gamers during the game and if it is a feasible and worthwhile means of communication.
In another article, Video Games and the Future of Learning, the authors propose the idea that video games can transform education and learning. They describe how video games can create new and powerful ways to learn in school communities and workplaces. The authors further state that “schools largely sequester students from one another and from the outside world, games bring players together – competitively and cooperatively – in the virtual world of the game and in the social community of its players” (Shaffer et. al. 2005:107). This article relates to our research question because it shows that video games don’t just serve the purpose of playing a competitive game. Instead it allows the players to communicate with each other and share knowledge. Just as the authors describe video gaming as a social phenomenon, communication through this medium gives the players an opportunity to learn in a setting that is not purely academic, allowing the players to build not only their social skills, but their competitive communication skills as well.
Method and Data Collection
Our ethnographic research takes place both inside and outside of the online gaming world of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The methods used in our research, in addition to the literature explored above, were interviews and a mixture of participant and complete observation. Our goal was to obtain a sample representative of the common, mainstream gamer, and to interview them as well as observe how gaming over Xbox Live affected their communication patterns and relationships.
Interviews were conducted on a one-on-one basis through various means. These mediums were e-mail, telephone, in-person, and in-game. Various interviews were conducted and the age group typically fell between the age group of eighteen and thirty-six. Each member of our group conducted interviews with subjects of their choice along with our standardized set of interview questions. Each group member’s characteristics slightly influenced the process because they asked occasional follow-up questions to acquire additional information on something that particularly interested them and might pertain to their individual paper. Also, each group member chose people they knew were gamers, which as a result included mostly their friends. This could have had an adverse effect as some of the interviews, as the interviews might not have been taken seriously by those that took them.
The interviews themselves were fairly encompassing, with questions regarding the communication patterns of the online Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 users on the platform of Xbox Live. We asked numerous questions about the game’s potential to affect friendships in a positive or negative way as well as other various questions about gaming habits and the relationship between gaming and reality. Geography was also taken into account for both the interviewee and the location of those he played with on a regular basis. Interviews were also documented and coded for the determination of any particular trends.
Participant and complete observation required certain group members to actively play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 over Xbox Live and attempt to converse with other players with the goal of conducting an interview. Other group members would simply observe others playing the game to solely pay attention to how the gamers communicated with each other. We were limited by the amount of interviews we could obtain while in the game due to the nature of the game’s multiplayer format and the motivations of the gamers themselves. This is possibly due to the fact that each match is usually an intense ten minute round that warrants the most of one’s attention span. However, we were successful in conducting some very intriguing interviews and did gain valuable qualitative information through observing communication between other gamers.
After careful consideration of our methodology, we then turned our focus to remaining ethical in all our researching endeavors. We made sure to keep the identity of the respondents completely anonymous to ensure that they would not be wary of answering honestly. Also, we gave the same survey to everyone in order to retain consistency and equality among all our subjects. In our data section we included all of our findings to give a holistic and unbiased analysis. We took special care in our interviews to notify everyone, even the strangers online, that we were anthropological researchers and obtained permission to use any data we collected from them.
Data and Results
When embarking on this research, we hoped to find encompassing data representing if and how people use the Xbox Live and the COD gaming platform to maintain, make, and foster friendships. We found that people do communicate via Xbox Live, but also found that few treat communication through online gaming like the actions of calling, emailing, texting, or instant messaging. Most people considered the activity of the game their focus and communicating was simply an additional and less emphasized ability of Xbox Live. It is our belief that if the technology was not available, people would continue to rely on other ways to communicate with friends and new acquaintances.
One of the first questions in our surveys was, “Do you depend on this as a form of communication between you and your friend(s)?” The most common response to the question was a simple “no,” which accounted for 50% of our total respondents. An unexpected trend we discovered was that multiple respondents used or depended on Xbox Live to communicate with specific friends. Upon further questioning of the individuals, they indicated that Xbox Live was a way for them to keep in touch and stay connected with their friends who were more interested in gaming. This strongly suggests that some people do use the system to stay connected with friends. When we asked, “How frequently do you use online games as a form of communication (ex: choosing this over texting. phone calls, instant messaging)?” the trend for not using the system to communicate persisted as 42.9% responded that they never use online games to communicate. However, 23.1% said they only occasionally chose the communication option when they play online. Therefore, the gaming console to our subjects has become a device similar to a telephone that they can use and expect to converse with friends.
The interesting part of the first set of results is the fact that people do not traditionally acknowledge Xbox Live as a main form of communication, but after further questioning many people did report that Xbox Live was as an incredibly effective means of communication with some of their friends. When asked “Is it an effective means of communication between you and your friend?” Only 20% of people responded that it was not. The other 80% agreed that it was anywhere from somewhat to very effective and 9.8% of those agreed it was effective but they preferred another form of communication. To take it one step further, 72.2% respondents felt communicating in the game strengthened their friendship in some form. The number one reason for this, cited by 35.3% of respondents, was that the teamwork and communal aspects to the games played on Xbox Live, like Call of Duty, provided something for them to bond over and, therefore, brought them closer together. This may be due to the fact that an overwhelming 91.6% of respondents talked about things other than the game. So once again, even though people do not consider the gaming system as a device like a telephone meant for communicating, they are still using the opportunity to communicate with each other about various things. Respondents consistently recalled conversation topics revolving around school, life, current events, plans, jokes, and all other elements of casual to serious conversation.
In our ethnographic research we also found that many times groups of friends, or groups of strangers even, would communicate among themselves regarding similar topics to those discussed above. We furthered our research on these conversations by having some of our group members engage in a mixture of participant and observation study through playing Call of Duty with strangers and conversing with them. Between two researchers over six different occasions we logged a total of ten hours of complete observation and an additional six hours of mixed participant observation. This provided us with enlightening qualitative data and interesting examples.
During the most successful session of one of our mixed participation and observation studies, our researcher played through several rounds of Call of Duty with strangers, totaling approximately an hour, before addressing them as a researcher. Throughout the game the players had shared jokes with each other, helped each other out for the ranking boost, and had multiple conversations. As researchers we knew where they were from, about their family life, what they did that day, plans for the weekend, and even shared an emotional moment with one of the respondents as his dog of 15 years had just passed away. When we told them we were doing an anthropological communication project they were caught off guard but intrigued and answered many of our questions. We learned that many times people like playing with strangers because they learn a great deal of things from them inside and outside the game. For example, in the game they learn new places to hide and different strategies for the levels. Outside the game though, they learn about various people’s lives and they practice their debating skills.
Also, it was clear that there was a distinct vernacular and dependence on gamer jargon throughout the conversations. Phrases and slang have been coined specifically in the gaming forum and are now part of popular culture. This is indicative of the community that communication through gaming can produce, and the impact it can have on the surrounding popular culture.
Another question we asked interviewees if they have noticed any negative impacts online gaming has had on their friendships and if they have lost any friends due to the nature of the game. Some responded that it had the potential to if they were excessively mean during the game, but for the most part frustration in the game does not transfer to real life. One respondent disagreed and said that he refuses to play games with his friends online anymore because he is not nice when he plays. He plays to win and his friends do not appreciate his overzealous attitude. Although the environment of the online forum condones and encourages the typically inappropriate comments that sometimes upset people, many of the conversations we witnessed or partook in were incredibly interesting and made us feel connected to those we were playing with.
It is these positive conversations that have led our group to believe that the online gaming forum provided by Xbox Live is a useful tool for making and maintaining friends. Since videogames are wildly popular and people enjoy playing together, it is safe to assume that it could be quite an advantageous way to obtain new friends and socially network. Data from the interviews, however, suggests otherwise, with 55.6% answering “no” to the following question: “have you met and maintained friendships over the online forum?” One particular respondent took it to an extreme and stated that, “I play online games to have alone time. Video games are my escape from reality, I’m not looking for new and exciting ways to connect with people, and I’m especially disinterested in making new friends.” However, a significant 33.4% replied that they had forged and fostered various friendships of some degree. The responses have an extensive range in the level of acquaintanceship, as some only maintained the connection for no more than a few months. There are exceptions, however, because one particular respondent replied, “I’ve been friends with one person for over six years now and I’ve never actually met the guy. But we still talk regularly over gaming and whatever else” (Respondent #7 2010:6/3). Subsequently, even though some are deterred by the idea of making and maintaining friends online, many people do use the Xbox Live system for such purposes. All of our results imply that the vast majority of people using the Xbox Live system are communicating in the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. After completing our research, our group agrees that the interactions and communication patterns that are present on Xbox Live are valuable and can be effective in maintaining relationships if gaming is the central mode of communication.
Analysis
• Discussion and Potential Reasons for our Results
The data collected on the distance between friends communicating via Xbox Live indicated that people rarely played with others outside their region. It was previously thought that the gamers we interviewed would often play with their friends who were residing in different states and regions that were not easily able to physically meet with. At first we were surprised by the results, but then we were told in an interview that they intentionally do not play with people in distant locations because there is an unbearable lag in the game due to the distance and varying internet speeds. If the Internet on the Xbox Live system was improved, the data would probably show that the people would play more often with cross-country friends.
Also, due to our demographic of college students, it is important to take into consideration that many students have not made considerable moves to different locations in the country or further. This would mean that people are still in relative proximity to their friends and therefore are more likely to play with their friends when they are in each other’s physical presence as opposed to relying on an online forum.
Another reason people avoid consistently relying on online games, specifically Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, as a means of communication is because people tend to grow out of games through maturity and no longer exhibit the desire to play them. If certain friends cease to play games that are supported and widely played on the online forum and instead to turn to solo games, they will need to find a different means of communication between their friends.
Overwhelmingly, the data shows that friendships entering the realm of Xbox Live are affected positively. When friends were not online playing together, we found that they were oftentimes physically playing online games in same room.
The research was effective in obtaining results for our particular demographic, as it allowed for conclusions mostly contrary to initial hypotheses. For example, it was expected certain data would prove that many gamers play with strangers online. There was no overwhelming evidence in the research that proved this hypothesis either way. For the most part, the data shows that people prefer to play with their friends online. When a friend is not currently online to a play a game, the gamer will oftentimes contact such friend to see if he is available to go online. In this sense, friendships with an Xbox Live factor are strengthened. However, the data sufficiently show that without this factor, all of those friendships would still survive. Most of the interviewees’ surroundings were similar, and therefore they have similar attitudes surrounding use of the game. These people did not meet each other online. Rather, their friendships were already formed before finding out the other played Xbox Live. Since these people were already friends, it is easy to treat playing Call of Duty like playing a basketball game at the local park or a few rounds of bowling. Granted, in most instances, the time on Xbox Live did not replace any of those activities. Instead, most evenings with friends will be spent out doing normal activities people in their twenties do, and will later be bookended by all gathering at one house to play Call of Duty together.
• Problems and Direction for Future Research
The data collected shows it to be true that many friendships are positively affected by online gaming, and is possibly also accurate in describing many other relationships with an Xbox component. However, in the limited use of subjects to collect such information, these findings cannot be generalized to all players of Xbox Live. The sample of people interviewed for this project was small compared to approximately twenty million current active registered users (Grant 2010:1). The majority of the subjects for this project were between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six, from a college-educated or college-bound lifestyle, and largely not considered to spend exorbitant amounts of time playing video games. Therefore, the results of our research are limited in their scope and if more data could be collected through more interviews and participant and complete observation, more encompassing answers could be produced.
The additional people that would be valuable to this research would be the inclusion of female gamers and interviewees that are not actively a part of the college setting. Female gamers could likely have different answers to the interview questions than the male gamers did due to the fact that females and males generally have different communication patterns. Interviewing a demographic of individuals who are not enrolled in college would have been beneficial to our research because in the college setting, most gamers who did or did not play previously are surrounded by many people and find each other to play with. It is not necessary for these subjects to find and add strangers to play with online. Instead, they play with their friends that they already know.
Conclusion
After methodical research of gamers and their communication patterns via Xbox Live we were definitely surprised by a lot of the data we compiled and learned a considerable amount about the gaming community. We were pleased that our results indicated that it was an effective means of communication for groups of friends that shared a passion for gaming. However, the results were not entirely conclusive and further research would be beneficial to thoroughly explore the humanistic side of gaming.
Works Cited
Grant, Christopher
2010 Xbox by the numbers: 20m Xbox Live users, 10m nongaming, 39m Xbox 360 consoles worldwide. Joystiq, http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/06/xbox-by-the-numbers-20m-xbox-live-users-10m-nongaming-39m-xbo/, accessed on May 26.
Haring, Kristen
2003 The “Freer Men” of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance, Technology and Culture, 44(4):734–61.
Ito, Mimi et al
2008 Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project.
Levin, Daniel and Cross, Rob
2004 The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust: The Mediating Role of Trust in Effective Knowledge Transfer, Management Science, 50(11):1477-1490.
Norton-Meier, Lori
2005 Joining the Video-Game Literacy Club: A Reluctant Mother Tries to Join the “Flow,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 48(5):428-432.
Reeves, Stuart et al.
2009 Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise, Games and Culture 4(3):205–27.
Respondent #7
2010 Interview by Jennifer Uken. June 3.
Shaffer, David et al.
2005 Video Games and the Future of Learning, The Phi Delta Kappan, 87(2):104-111.
Shaw, Adrienne
2009 Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games, Games and Culture 4(3):228–53.
By:
Mikael Buencamino
Catherine Cahill
Kevin Kim
Alyssa Mervyn
Jennifer Uken
Nicole Vargo
Professor Tom Boellstorff
Anthropology 128C
June 10th, 2010
Introduction
In the realm of cyberspace nothing compares to popularity and the universal appeal of videogames. An incredible sum of money is spent on videogame production, advertising, distribution, and an even more overwhelming amount is spent by the general public on these games. In 2008 the videogame industry was worth $22 billion and has continued to increase through present day. This incredibly lucrative market is not only responsible for incredible amounts of currency exchange but it also commands people’s attention for countless hours a day all over the globe. With advanced technology, like online gaming forums like Xbox Live which has over 20 million registered users, gamers can play against each other across the globe and communicate during contests. This element of communication is especially interesting to our group of anthropological researchers because it brings a new sense of human connection to the formerly isolating nature of videogame playing. As a group, we decided to examine the relationships of friends and their communication patterns via Xbox Live. To further narrow our scope of focus we chose the most popular game for the console Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 which sold 4.7 million copies worldwide within 24 hours of release. With the popularity of Xbox Live and the game we chose we knew we’d be able to find plenty of subjects to help us answer our research question: is online gaming via Xbox Live an effective means of communication for friends? We expect our results to indicate that it is effective for some groups of friends. Our research will delve into the more humanistic side of gaming, the interactions and communication of gamers and the relationships they form in this competitive cyberspace.
Literature Review: Articles from Class
While the basis of our research is grounded in the Xbox Live networking platform, the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (from here on, known as COD) in of itself warrants enough influence through both its design and intent for a closer analysis. In “Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise,” an article composed by Reeves et. al., the authors breaks down the very elements that comprise the first person shooter (FPS) audience unique. While Reeves uses the game Counter-Strike as his research base, the same elements apply and extend to FPS online-play in general. A “core component of FPS experiences is the pleasure obtained from the player’s engagement and gradual mastering of the game mechanic” (Reeves 2009:206). As players surpass the initial skill level of synching their movements with the environment, they begin to develop a sense of the terrain and actually play tactically. Contrasting significantly with Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games and other consistent environments, FPS players display their skill through mastery of both the game mechanics and its environments rather than developing deep, meaningful social relationships that accompany questing or participating in a guild. Due to the incredibly technical nature of COD there will be a definite effect on the communication patterns of the gamers. Therefore, the general research question requires ascertaining if this technical atmosphere is still conducive to forging and maintaining friends.
In “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project,” Mimi Ito and her fellow researchers investigate a myriad of technologies that were found to be used frequently by today’s youth as a means of self-directed learning. She drew such conclusions through methods of peer-based responses. She discusses the way in which online spaces enable youth to extend their friendships through online spaces like “gaming sites [that] work as mediums for young people to extend, enhance, and hang out with people they already know” (Ito 2008:16). In our own research, we will explore this idea and see if Xbox Live allows us to see if there are similarities between the way people will come together and play a game of basketball and the interaction of players and friends during a game of COD.
We think that for some people, the gaming extension of a friendship allows the sharing of technical knowledge, as Ito noted “[a]mong boys, gaming has become a pervasive social activity and a context where they share technical and media-related knowledge” (Ito 2008:26). It is in this observation that boys that are using gaming as a social means and context to share this kind of knowledge, and that may make it difficult for us to locate girl gamers to interview for our own research.
Kristen Haring’s “The ‘Freer Men’ of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance,” analyzes the social implications of technologies long-outdated in their use, which provides insight into how technology has shaped certain social norms. The amateur radio hobbyists, or “hams,” of the Cold War era may very well be the equivalent of the male gamer on Xbox Live. According to Haring, “95 to 99 percent were male. On average the ham had completed more years of schooling...than the nonhobbyist, and he was far more likely to hold a job in a technical field” (Haring 2003:735). Additionally, Haring argues that the promotion of technical hobbies in young boys during this era effectively “grounded masculinity in technology” (Haring 2003:740). In society, there persists a consistency of male-dominance in electronic technologies in both their use and in technical employment such as networking, information technologies, and computer services. One of our goals by researching the communicational patterns of gamers is to also see if societal norms like this are reflected in the online gaming community.
Video games are still striving to gain mass appeal. Efforts made in providing more accessible products for those potential gamers outside of the usual gamer demographic, males in their twenties, have proven successful. For example, sales of gaming consoles, like Nintendo Wii, have increased dramatically, and online gaming environments, like Second life, have gained in popularity. . However, the content in the games themselves still caters largely to this stereotype, as Adrienne Shaw analyzes in her article “Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games.” The continued presence of the male majority in technological fields observed earlier in both our research and in the contributions of various researchers is supplemented by Shaw’s analysis of the audiences marketed to by the gaming industry. Shaw states, “… the video game industry greatly limits their market by only appealing to male gamers...annihilating girls and women gaming culture potentially circumscribes their participating in technology careers, because games are often a gateway to computing careers,” (Shaw, 2009:233). In this instance, we can perceive the way in which technological careers are perpetually filled by males as attributable to the way the end product is being produced and marketed.
Literature Review: Outside Sources
Our research question asks video game players about their communication with other players. This communication with other players can differ due to their relationship of varied significance: ties can be strong, they can be weak, or they can be somewhere in between. A strong tie is often considered a connection between close friends. A weak tie is a distant connection that is responsible for the general structure of social networks in society. In the article, The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust, Levin and Cross state that relationships and friendships are crucial to knowledge and creation transfer, and that trustworthiness is a mechanism by which strong ties enable learning. They conclude that the people in strong ties are more accessible and more willing to help. For our research project, we seek to explore the strength of ties between gamers and who they normally play with in attempts to better understand the role of communication in the Xbox online forum. While Levin and Cross do not deny the importance of strong ties, they note that that weak ties provide more useful knowledge than strong ones. Weak ties can be helpful for video game players like those who play Xbox Live, because different strategies and designs in the handling of certain gaming situations. This can be useful knowledge that can be transferred from one social network to another through these weak ties.
In the article, Joining the Video-Game Literacy Club, Norton-Meier discusses how her cohort group, parents with teenage children, feels technologically alienated from the younger generation because of video games on the Xbox. She discusses how this generation, also known as “digital natives,” thinks and processes information differently than her generation. Norton-Meier goes on to discuss how in her own home, the dinner conversation revolves around Xbox and how to handle certain gaming situations. She concludes that “games are a way of knowing – a place of informal learning where entertainment comes first and learning is embedded in the moment” (Norton-Meier 2005:428). This article relates to our research question regarding communication through video games because it shows how our generation uses technology as a major form of communication and learning. Digital natives who play these video games have drastically changed the way people communicate with each other in today’s ever-changing technologically-advanced society. This article is concentrated on effects games have on communication external to video games whereas our research is based on the internal communication of gamers during the game and if it is a feasible and worthwhile means of communication.
In another article, Video Games and the Future of Learning, the authors propose the idea that video games can transform education and learning. They describe how video games can create new and powerful ways to learn in school communities and workplaces. The authors further state that “schools largely sequester students from one another and from the outside world, games bring players together – competitively and cooperatively – in the virtual world of the game and in the social community of its players” (Shaffer et. al. 2005:107). This article relates to our research question because it shows that video games don’t just serve the purpose of playing a competitive game. Instead it allows the players to communicate with each other and share knowledge. Just as the authors describe video gaming as a social phenomenon, communication through this medium gives the players an opportunity to learn in a setting that is not purely academic, allowing the players to build not only their social skills, but their competitive communication skills as well.
Method and Data Collection
Our ethnographic research takes place both inside and outside of the online gaming world of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The methods used in our research, in addition to the literature explored above, were interviews and a mixture of participant and complete observation. Our goal was to obtain a sample representative of the common, mainstream gamer, and to interview them as well as observe how gaming over Xbox Live affected their communication patterns and relationships.
Interviews were conducted on a one-on-one basis through various means. These mediums were e-mail, telephone, in-person, and in-game. Various interviews were conducted and the age group typically fell between the age group of eighteen and thirty-six. Each member of our group conducted interviews with subjects of their choice along with our standardized set of interview questions. Each group member’s characteristics slightly influenced the process because they asked occasional follow-up questions to acquire additional information on something that particularly interested them and might pertain to their individual paper. Also, each group member chose people they knew were gamers, which as a result included mostly their friends. This could have had an adverse effect as some of the interviews, as the interviews might not have been taken seriously by those that took them.
The interviews themselves were fairly encompassing, with questions regarding the communication patterns of the online Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 users on the platform of Xbox Live. We asked numerous questions about the game’s potential to affect friendships in a positive or negative way as well as other various questions about gaming habits and the relationship between gaming and reality. Geography was also taken into account for both the interviewee and the location of those he played with on a regular basis. Interviews were also documented and coded for the determination of any particular trends.
Participant and complete observation required certain group members to actively play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 over Xbox Live and attempt to converse with other players with the goal of conducting an interview. Other group members would simply observe others playing the game to solely pay attention to how the gamers communicated with each other. We were limited by the amount of interviews we could obtain while in the game due to the nature of the game’s multiplayer format and the motivations of the gamers themselves. This is possibly due to the fact that each match is usually an intense ten minute round that warrants the most of one’s attention span. However, we were successful in conducting some very intriguing interviews and did gain valuable qualitative information through observing communication between other gamers.
After careful consideration of our methodology, we then turned our focus to remaining ethical in all our researching endeavors. We made sure to keep the identity of the respondents completely anonymous to ensure that they would not be wary of answering honestly. Also, we gave the same survey to everyone in order to retain consistency and equality among all our subjects. In our data section we included all of our findings to give a holistic and unbiased analysis. We took special care in our interviews to notify everyone, even the strangers online, that we were anthropological researchers and obtained permission to use any data we collected from them.
Data and Results
When embarking on this research, we hoped to find encompassing data representing if and how people use the Xbox Live and the COD gaming platform to maintain, make, and foster friendships. We found that people do communicate via Xbox Live, but also found that few treat communication through online gaming like the actions of calling, emailing, texting, or instant messaging. Most people considered the activity of the game their focus and communicating was simply an additional and less emphasized ability of Xbox Live. It is our belief that if the technology was not available, people would continue to rely on other ways to communicate with friends and new acquaintances.
One of the first questions in our surveys was, “Do you depend on this as a form of communication between you and your friend(s)?” The most common response to the question was a simple “no,” which accounted for 50% of our total respondents. An unexpected trend we discovered was that multiple respondents used or depended on Xbox Live to communicate with specific friends. Upon further questioning of the individuals, they indicated that Xbox Live was a way for them to keep in touch and stay connected with their friends who were more interested in gaming. This strongly suggests that some people do use the system to stay connected with friends. When we asked, “How frequently do you use online games as a form of communication (ex: choosing this over texting. phone calls, instant messaging)?” the trend for not using the system to communicate persisted as 42.9% responded that they never use online games to communicate. However, 23.1% said they only occasionally chose the communication option when they play online. Therefore, the gaming console to our subjects has become a device similar to a telephone that they can use and expect to converse with friends.
The interesting part of the first set of results is the fact that people do not traditionally acknowledge Xbox Live as a main form of communication, but after further questioning many people did report that Xbox Live was as an incredibly effective means of communication with some of their friends. When asked “Is it an effective means of communication between you and your friend?” Only 20% of people responded that it was not. The other 80% agreed that it was anywhere from somewhat to very effective and 9.8% of those agreed it was effective but they preferred another form of communication. To take it one step further, 72.2% respondents felt communicating in the game strengthened their friendship in some form. The number one reason for this, cited by 35.3% of respondents, was that the teamwork and communal aspects to the games played on Xbox Live, like Call of Duty, provided something for them to bond over and, therefore, brought them closer together. This may be due to the fact that an overwhelming 91.6% of respondents talked about things other than the game. So once again, even though people do not consider the gaming system as a device like a telephone meant for communicating, they are still using the opportunity to communicate with each other about various things. Respondents consistently recalled conversation topics revolving around school, life, current events, plans, jokes, and all other elements of casual to serious conversation.
In our ethnographic research we also found that many times groups of friends, or groups of strangers even, would communicate among themselves regarding similar topics to those discussed above. We furthered our research on these conversations by having some of our group members engage in a mixture of participant and observation study through playing Call of Duty with strangers and conversing with them. Between two researchers over six different occasions we logged a total of ten hours of complete observation and an additional six hours of mixed participant observation. This provided us with enlightening qualitative data and interesting examples.
During the most successful session of one of our mixed participation and observation studies, our researcher played through several rounds of Call of Duty with strangers, totaling approximately an hour, before addressing them as a researcher. Throughout the game the players had shared jokes with each other, helped each other out for the ranking boost, and had multiple conversations. As researchers we knew where they were from, about their family life, what they did that day, plans for the weekend, and even shared an emotional moment with one of the respondents as his dog of 15 years had just passed away. When we told them we were doing an anthropological communication project they were caught off guard but intrigued and answered many of our questions. We learned that many times people like playing with strangers because they learn a great deal of things from them inside and outside the game. For example, in the game they learn new places to hide and different strategies for the levels. Outside the game though, they learn about various people’s lives and they practice their debating skills.
Also, it was clear that there was a distinct vernacular and dependence on gamer jargon throughout the conversations. Phrases and slang have been coined specifically in the gaming forum and are now part of popular culture. This is indicative of the community that communication through gaming can produce, and the impact it can have on the surrounding popular culture.
Another question we asked interviewees if they have noticed any negative impacts online gaming has had on their friendships and if they have lost any friends due to the nature of the game. Some responded that it had the potential to if they were excessively mean during the game, but for the most part frustration in the game does not transfer to real life. One respondent disagreed and said that he refuses to play games with his friends online anymore because he is not nice when he plays. He plays to win and his friends do not appreciate his overzealous attitude. Although the environment of the online forum condones and encourages the typically inappropriate comments that sometimes upset people, many of the conversations we witnessed or partook in were incredibly interesting and made us feel connected to those we were playing with.
It is these positive conversations that have led our group to believe that the online gaming forum provided by Xbox Live is a useful tool for making and maintaining friends. Since videogames are wildly popular and people enjoy playing together, it is safe to assume that it could be quite an advantageous way to obtain new friends and socially network. Data from the interviews, however, suggests otherwise, with 55.6% answering “no” to the following question: “have you met and maintained friendships over the online forum?” One particular respondent took it to an extreme and stated that, “I play online games to have alone time. Video games are my escape from reality, I’m not looking for new and exciting ways to connect with people, and I’m especially disinterested in making new friends.” However, a significant 33.4% replied that they had forged and fostered various friendships of some degree. The responses have an extensive range in the level of acquaintanceship, as some only maintained the connection for no more than a few months. There are exceptions, however, because one particular respondent replied, “I’ve been friends with one person for over six years now and I’ve never actually met the guy. But we still talk regularly over gaming and whatever else” (Respondent #7 2010:6/3). Subsequently, even though some are deterred by the idea of making and maintaining friends online, many people do use the Xbox Live system for such purposes. All of our results imply that the vast majority of people using the Xbox Live system are communicating in the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. After completing our research, our group agrees that the interactions and communication patterns that are present on Xbox Live are valuable and can be effective in maintaining relationships if gaming is the central mode of communication.
Analysis
• Discussion and Potential Reasons for our Results
The data collected on the distance between friends communicating via Xbox Live indicated that people rarely played with others outside their region. It was previously thought that the gamers we interviewed would often play with their friends who were residing in different states and regions that were not easily able to physically meet with. At first we were surprised by the results, but then we were told in an interview that they intentionally do not play with people in distant locations because there is an unbearable lag in the game due to the distance and varying internet speeds. If the Internet on the Xbox Live system was improved, the data would probably show that the people would play more often with cross-country friends.
Also, due to our demographic of college students, it is important to take into consideration that many students have not made considerable moves to different locations in the country or further. This would mean that people are still in relative proximity to their friends and therefore are more likely to play with their friends when they are in each other’s physical presence as opposed to relying on an online forum.
Another reason people avoid consistently relying on online games, specifically Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, as a means of communication is because people tend to grow out of games through maturity and no longer exhibit the desire to play them. If certain friends cease to play games that are supported and widely played on the online forum and instead to turn to solo games, they will need to find a different means of communication between their friends.
Overwhelmingly, the data shows that friendships entering the realm of Xbox Live are affected positively. When friends were not online playing together, we found that they were oftentimes physically playing online games in same room.
The research was effective in obtaining results for our particular demographic, as it allowed for conclusions mostly contrary to initial hypotheses. For example, it was expected certain data would prove that many gamers play with strangers online. There was no overwhelming evidence in the research that proved this hypothesis either way. For the most part, the data shows that people prefer to play with their friends online. When a friend is not currently online to a play a game, the gamer will oftentimes contact such friend to see if he is available to go online. In this sense, friendships with an Xbox Live factor are strengthened. However, the data sufficiently show that without this factor, all of those friendships would still survive. Most of the interviewees’ surroundings were similar, and therefore they have similar attitudes surrounding use of the game. These people did not meet each other online. Rather, their friendships were already formed before finding out the other played Xbox Live. Since these people were already friends, it is easy to treat playing Call of Duty like playing a basketball game at the local park or a few rounds of bowling. Granted, in most instances, the time on Xbox Live did not replace any of those activities. Instead, most evenings with friends will be spent out doing normal activities people in their twenties do, and will later be bookended by all gathering at one house to play Call of Duty together.
• Problems and Direction for Future Research
The data collected shows it to be true that many friendships are positively affected by online gaming, and is possibly also accurate in describing many other relationships with an Xbox component. However, in the limited use of subjects to collect such information, these findings cannot be generalized to all players of Xbox Live. The sample of people interviewed for this project was small compared to approximately twenty million current active registered users (Grant 2010:1). The majority of the subjects for this project were between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six, from a college-educated or college-bound lifestyle, and largely not considered to spend exorbitant amounts of time playing video games. Therefore, the results of our research are limited in their scope and if more data could be collected through more interviews and participant and complete observation, more encompassing answers could be produced.
The additional people that would be valuable to this research would be the inclusion of female gamers and interviewees that are not actively a part of the college setting. Female gamers could likely have different answers to the interview questions than the male gamers did due to the fact that females and males generally have different communication patterns. Interviewing a demographic of individuals who are not enrolled in college would have been beneficial to our research because in the college setting, most gamers who did or did not play previously are surrounded by many people and find each other to play with. It is not necessary for these subjects to find and add strangers to play with online. Instead, they play with their friends that they already know.
Conclusion
After methodical research of gamers and their communication patterns via Xbox Live we were definitely surprised by a lot of the data we compiled and learned a considerable amount about the gaming community. We were pleased that our results indicated that it was an effective means of communication for groups of friends that shared a passion for gaming. However, the results were not entirely conclusive and further research would be beneficial to thoroughly explore the humanistic side of gaming.
Works Cited
Grant, Christopher
2010 Xbox by the numbers: 20m Xbox Live users, 10m nongaming, 39m Xbox 360 consoles worldwide. Joystiq, http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/06/xbox-by-the-numbers-20m-xbox-live-users-10m-nongaming-39m-xbo/, accessed on May 26.
Haring, Kristen
2003 The “Freer Men” of Ham Radio: How a Technical Hobby Provided Social and Spatial Distance, Technology and Culture, 44(4):734–61.
Ito, Mimi et al
2008 Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project.
Levin, Daniel and Cross, Rob
2004 The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust: The Mediating Role of Trust in Effective Knowledge Transfer, Management Science, 50(11):1477-1490.
Norton-Meier, Lori
2005 Joining the Video-Game Literacy Club: A Reluctant Mother Tries to Join the “Flow,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 48(5):428-432.
Reeves, Stuart et al.
2009 Experts at Play: Understanding Skilled Expertise, Games and Culture 4(3):205–27.
Respondent #7
2010 Interview by Jennifer Uken. June 3.
Shaffer, David et al.
2005 Video Games and the Future of Learning, The Phi Delta Kappan, 87(2):104-111.
Shaw, Adrienne
2009 Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games, Games and Culture 4(3):228–53.
How do the different generations utilize Face-Book?
FACEBOOK
How do the different Generations utilize Facebook?
University of California, Irvine
Anthropology 128C
June 9, 2010
Group Blue:
Joshua Yost
Yuri Choi
Vincent Nyugen
Donovan Tan
Wesley Lin
Patricia Wang
Charles Kope
Introduction
Every aspect and feature in our society has it’s own specific culture. Even something as abstract and intangible as Facebook carries a well-known culture that user’s can become familiar with rather quickly. Facebook started as a small Internet social networking site for college students, however quickly became a worldwide phenomena. Currently, there are more than 400 million users on Facebook all varying in age. As we started thinking about our research question, age was something that was frequently questioned. The interesting question that came to mind was, “How could a single website be able to cater to such a wide range of ages?” Our research was then geared to find out if age determined how Facebook is utilized.
Facebook is interesting to our group because it is more than just an Internet site. It has become an alternative way for establishing one’s identity and also for individuals to interact socially. It acts as a social database to our society. Although some people may not have a Facebook account, it still effects the way in which our society functions. For some, Facebook has drastically changed the way in which relationships are formed and maintained. Our group was able to recognize that Facebook has the potential of diminishing the value of real life relationships, however for most people we found that it acts as a supplement or addition to maintaining relationships and networking. Facebook carries multiple meanings depending on who is interpreting it. Regardless of what perspective it is seen in, Facebook should be a concern to all of society. It creates change within our culture and society, which in turn will affect everyone. Everyday life has been altered because the notion of a stranger or a long lost friend is now gone. Facebook allows distant relationships to rekindle and makes difficult relationships easier to maintain and follow.
Many people think Facebook is a non- influential networking site, however the realm of Facebook goes beyond the computer screen and creates a social phenomenon by changing and affecting our society culturally. This is important because it proves that culture in our society is never static, and is always changing. Facebook is a reflection of the next evolution in how our society is able to interact with one another in which technology develops numerous alternatives to social outlets. Even though there are many facets that can be explored and researched about Face-book, our group chose “age” as the focus of our study. Does age affect user’s utilization of the widely popular Internet social networking application? And if so, does this difference of use reflect upon distinct cultural values between different age groups?
Literature Review
Turner (2005) writes in his article on the WELL about the origins of the online community. Even in the beginning, online communities were utilized in much the same way as Facebook is today. “In the WELL's text-only environment, he conversed with friends and colleagues, met new people, and over time built up relationships of startling intimacy (Turner 2005: 485).” Facebook has benefitted from advancements in technology since then to where the online community is now much more personal with photos, video, etc. The online internet community gives people another way to connect with one another on a more personal level. “Computer networks like the WELL allowed us to recapture the sense of cooperative spirit that so many people seemed to lose when we gained all this technology. (Turner 2005: 486).” Facebook has become the supreme example of this as it has brought literally millions of people together and given them an outlet to connect and converse with one another using the “cooperative spirit” that Turner was talking about. Facebook is a very valuable tool that can be utilized to connect with friends on a personal level that would surely have made the originators of the online community very proud.
In the article by Schiano (1999), she writes about how the internet was becoming and online social community with a growing sense of personal connection. “The growing use of the Internet to provide a sense of personal connection and community is converging with the development of shared virtual spaces. In particular, the strong popularity of Multi-User Domains (MUDs), text-based networked virtual worlds, suggests the high premium many people place on social interactivity in their virtual environments (Schiano 1999; 127).” Her study was on the internet, but it showed how early on, people wanted to use the internet as a way to connect with other people. This is why it is no surprise that today Facebook has over 400 million user accounts. Facebook fills the needs of the people to connect with one another, and gives everyone a place where they can have an online community.
Thompson (2006) spoke in his article about the information overload experienced by being presented with mass loads of personal information about people that the Facebook user may or may not actually see in real life. This ambient awareness is very evident in this research. This research demonstrates how ambient awareness can be created through “friending” people that are not more than acquaintances and learning about them through the Facebook news-feed. This is also demonstrated in the 20-24 year old age group findings with their confessions of profile and photo stalking. People today know more about others of whom they do not interact with in the real world than they have in the past.
Walther, et al (2008) describes the effect one’s appearance on Facebook has on others and the amount of information that people display to become popular with a lot of friends. Our study discovered that participants in the 29 years and older age group were concerned about the security of the information displayed on their Facebook profile in order to prevent the information from being viewed by others. The study by Walther, et al (2008) determined that the image presentation on Facebook profiles does not have an effect of the first impression of other users. Rather, the study found that text content presented on these profiles had more of an effect of the impression of Facebook users.
Ito, et al (2008) studied the effect of new gaming, virtual world, and communications technologies on youths’ psychological development. This relates to this research with all of the age groups, but specifically the 15-19 age group, as they are currently developing with this new technology. The youth today see Facebook as a means to stay in touch with friends outside of school. One participant commented that “Facebook is a demonstration of society’s growing inability to cope with face-to-face interactions.” Facebook is a reflection of the next evolution of how our society is able to interact with one another in which technology develops numerous social outlets.
Method
Setting
The setting of our research is on the internet social network Facebook. (url: www.facebook.com). Originally created for college students, Facebook is now a widely used network for people of all ages from all over the world to stay connected with friends and family. This setting allows room for research about how different age groups utilize Facebook and how it is constantly evolving.
Participants
There were 44 participants in this study, varying in race and gender. All participants were signed up with Facebook and had existing profiles. The participants ranged in age from 15 to 65 with one 85 year old, and currently reside in Southern California.
Procedures
A survey containing 8 questions, 1 closed-ended and 7 open-ended, were distributed to participants via Facebook, in person, and phone calls. Surveys that were sent out through Facebook were distributed using the messaging and Facebook chat applications. This method was used for the majority of participants. Additionally, surveys were conducted through interview either in person or through phone calls. The survey’s closed-ended question asked participants their age. The open-ended questions inquired about their online activities, friends, and overall usage of Facebook. Collectively, these questions aimed at revealing similarities and differences of different age groups in terms of their Facebook usage and how these similarities and differences reflect the core values distinctive to the different age groups. After collecting all the data, responses were grouped according to the participants’ ages. Participants were grouped by age as follows: 15-19, 20-24, 25-28, and 29+. Next, the data was analyzed and coded by key words that appeared in the survey responses. Before analyzing all data, it was anticipated that there would be differences between the age groups concerning Facebook usage primarily for family, friends, and/or business.
Observation
Participant observation was also utilized in this study. All researchers in this study had active Facebook accounts so as to assimilate into the population of interest. By interacting with different Facebook accounts, which included viewing user profiles, newsfeeds, and chatting with other users on Facebook chat, the researchers of this study would able to become immersed in the culture of Facebook. Being apart of the Facebook community was vital for enculturation in this study.
Survey
Please indicate which age group you are in.
15-19 ( ) 20-24 ( ) 25-28 ( ) 29+ ( )
How many hours a week do you spend on Facebook?
What do you friends talk about on Facebook?
What part of Facebook do you enjoy the most?
What applications do you use the most?
What does Facebook mean to you?
What do you mainly use Facebook for?
What influenced to make a Facebook profile?
Findings
Facebook users in the 15-19 age group spent an average of 8-10 hours on Facebook per week. Friends talked about school events and social gossip. Members of this age group enjoyed the photo capabilities the most, and felt the news-feed was their most used application. Participants in the 15-19 age group saw Facebook as a mode of communication and primarily used their Facebook account to talk and gossip with their friends about various things. The main reason given by the participants in the 15-19 age group for creating their profile was to stay friends with different people, and which interestingly were mostly local friends that they saw on a regular basis. The 15-19 age group was not so concerned with long distance friendships.
Facebook users in the 20-24 year-old age group reported to be on Facebook an average of 10-13 hours per week. Topics that are discussed on Facebook in this age group includes drinking, partying, school, work, and inappropriate topics, such as behaviors and activities under the influence and comments fulfilling sexual agendas. Facebook users in the 20-24 year-old age group mostly enjoy wall posts, and commonly confessed to profile and photo stalking. The 20-24 year-old age group had the widest variety of reported applications, and no conclusions could be drawn from their responses. To participants in the 20-24 year-old age group, Facebook was a way to stay connected to distant friends that have gone off to college and their primary use for the social networking site was to communicate with friends. The main reason for creating a profile was reported to be that “MySpace died” and they were going away to college and wanted to stay in touch with friends.
Facebook users in the 25-28 year old age group spend an average of 10-13 hours per week on the social networking site. People in this age group generally talk about school, work, and their visits with family and friends. The 25-28 year-old age group uses the events applications in order to keep in touch with things that are happening locally. For example, one woman who was 27 years old used Facebook to network with her "party crew" as she called them. This was a clubbing group that would get together first only on their Facebook accounts to talk about which club was hot or not, and then later would meet up at that said club. In a way, some from this age group use Facebook as an initial meeting place. Some users from this age group use Facebook as a way to actually meet people outside of just talking on the computer. A couple of participants from this age group reported meeting up with someone they had first met and connected with on the social networking website. Facebook users in the 25-28 year-old age group also see Facebook as a way to maintain long-distance relationships and primarily use the site to communicate with friends and share photos. Facebook users in this age group most commonly created a profile because “MySpace is still dead,” and they had a strong desire to stay in touch or reconnect with old or distant friends.
Facebook users who are 29 years old and older spend an average of 4-6 hours per week on the social networking site. Participants who were 29 years old and older reported talking about business associates and clients, old memories, and family with their Facebook friends. Participants in this age group most enjoyed seeing pictures of friends and family, and most used the news-feed and chat applications in order to keep in contact with their friends. To participants 29 years old and older, Facebook is a means of business-related networking and family communication and primarily use Facebook as a means to keep in touch with friends and family as well as clients and business associates. For example, one woman that was interviewed specifically said that she advertised her hair stylist business and connected with clients via Facebook, and had actually gained new clients by networking with locals that were close to her location. Participants who were 29 years old and older commonly created profiles due to the recommendation of a friend or a family member, or had someone create their profile entirely. Also, this age group was the most concerned about security and privacy, more so than any other age group. The older generations seemed much more conscious of protecting their identity and being careful about what information they allowed to be posted. Finally, the 29 years old and older age group appeared to be more of a long distance, or global networking group, rather than just connecting with local friends like the younger generations.
Analysis
With these findings, age without a doubt effects how an individual views and utilizes Facebook. In this world there exists multiple cultural "spheres", and these spheres affect and shape how it's inhabitants think and their values. Facebook is such a global phenomenon, and since it caters to such broad and vast populations it is bound to affect many cultural spheres. Through this digital medium, people of differing age, ethnicity, sex, and religions can coexist and clash. Though our study is admittedly somewhat sparse in approach and research, enough data has been gathered to give us a clear view into how one aspect of culture, age, affects how an individual would utilize this online application. With the data collected it is easy to compare and contrast the interests and values of each specific age group.
A key similarity between the age groups is that all take advantage of Facebook's remarkable ability to keep in touch in with friends and family. This is not surprising, seeing as it is a social-networking website. Therein lays the key attraction to this online social networking application. Culture can never be described in individual terms; it is naturally and inherently social in nature. People are social animals, and we are hardwired to connect and identify with likeminded people. This transcends different cultural values and perspectives that people of varying degrees may have. But similarities are less interesting, as the most surprising revelations are found in the differences.
One trend that was very noticeable is that in the surveys the younger age groups (15-19) and (20-24) usually used Facebook as another way to stay in contact with friends. But these younger "friend" groups tend to be more centralized. In fact, these two younger age groups tended to use Facebook to keep tabs on friends that they say in a day to day basis. Just because of their age, it is more difficult for individuals in this age range, especially, 15-19, to expand their social network to a great degree. Those still in high school and can't drive have less incentive to create and maintain relationships outside of their immediate social circle. This notion changes slightly as we progress up to the (20-24) age group. Most of the individuals surveyed in this age group reported that they are either currently in college or recently graduated. As one most likely moves out of their parent's house and is able to have a bit more breathing space, the perspective on how Facebook changes slightly. A period of parties, new-found freedoms, and increasing hormones means that the subject matter this age group is interested in is very different than other age groups. This age group loses much of its inhibitions, and their wall posts and updates stand as testament to the increasing vulgarity and "inappropriate" topics. While at this age one begins the search for a career in earnest, most survey participants believed that the visibility of such "inappropriate" topics were not a severe detriment to finding a job. As for the locality of what friends they keep on Facebook, it begins to spread out. With these new found freedoms, this age group is able to branch out and meet people of different ages. But their network still tends to be clustered in the area they reside in.
As for the two older age groups (25-28) and (29 and above) their range of friends expands greatly. As individuals would enter the work force and transition into adults, they develop a much more varied and far-ranged social network. While some of these newly acquired friends may be due to creating an interesting relationship, it seems realistic that some of these new friends can be attributed to professional and work-place needs. Facebook is an important tool to maintain healthy business contacts. Also as one ages friends tend to spread out and go their separate ways, the concept of keeping in touch with "old friends" gains a new importance to the older generation. Also older generations seem to be fixated on the issue of privacy. Their cultural sphere values a great deal of privacy, and rapidly improving technology rushes us all into an new era of connectedness and integration. This can prove to be worrisome and even aggravating to many, as they are not used to so much information about themselves so flippantly available to the public.
Discussion
Analyzing our data, we found that the age groups started to be logged onto facebook mostly during the two age groups of 20-24 and 25-28, with an average user time of ten and thirteen hours a week. Age groups of 15-19 had the second to the most login hours of eight and ten hours a week, with the age group of 29+ last with an average login time of four to six hours. These findings suggest that facebook is predominantly a college phenomenon. The network was launched in 2004, the age group that was in college at the time were the 25-28 age group, followed by the 20-24 age group who was the next generation to actively use the site due to being in college. These two ages are closely related in terms of types of facebook usage. The site has a number of applications that is ideal to the active college student; event pages, photo share, and group pages. All these applications on the site allow one member of a social network to be able to be in contact and send out invitations without having to physically tell each and every single person they know. There have been event invitations with as much as five thousand people being invited, which would be almost impossible to do so by one person physically inviting one person at a time.
The two age groups, 20-24 and 25-29, also have in common that like to stay connected with friends that have gone off to a different college or those that have moved away. Age groups 15-19 keep in touch primarily with friends that they see often, many of the individuals they see are still in high school with them, which is kind of off because they usually see such individual’s everyday. The age groups 29+ tend to use to site to keep in touch with family and or business purposes. This is due to the fact that when these individuals were in college they did not have the luxury of having the facebook network site that was intended for college students only (which was how facebook was originally).
Reasons for joining facebook among the dominant users 20-24 and 25-28 were due to their friends having one and having an ideal college life would be essential to do so. The younger age groups jumped on the site as well due to the face of the declining user activity on myspace, because everyone they knew were converting to facebook. The oldest age group joined for business and or family reasons. These statistics alone show that even though facebook is no longer restricted to college students anymore, its primary focus group are the those individuals. Many of the applications; games, instant messaging, status updates, and others the older age group does not care for and has no use for.
Processing our data, we had not found the landslide results that we had originally hoped for. We believed that everyone in the age group 29+ created a facebook account to stay in touch with family and or for business purposes. We found that some of the respondents of that particular age group also used it to stay in touch with friends that they no longer interact with often, which we did not think of. Another theme we found throughout some of the older age group was the amount of hours spent was more than anticipated, that could be due to the particular reason why the account holder was using it for (i.e. promotion of a business).
Strengths of the study were that we had a wide variety of age groups ranging from 15 to 29+ with a specific distinction between the ages 20-24 and 25-28 The classification of these two groups, even though had many similar characters of their facebook characteristics, was a smart choice by us because in the real world act completely different from each other due to their age. This can be seen in our findings of the two age groups. Even though both age groups like to keep in touch with friends, one of the sole purposes for the 25-28 was mainly this. The 20-24 usage for the site other than staying connected with friends was to show their local activity through status changes of how their night was and the activity of “cyber stalking”. Another strength of the study was that since facebook has a massive population, gathering participants was easy. Open-ended questions let respondents feel free, when answering so they were not constricted to a set of answers that they might not even fit their answer for whatever question it may be.
Weaknesses of the study were that the age group for the older generation could have been categorized more thoughtfully, than a mere 29+ category. There were respondents to the survey who were around the ages of 30 and others who were around the ages of 50. Such a general age category skewed our data findings, due to the fact that many respondents around the ages of 30 used facebook as a means to stay connected with friends while the older age group’s main purpose was to stay connected with family. However, since they were all in the same age category we had to generalize what their main purpose of the site was used for. Another weakness in the study was that all the questions on the study were open ended, which gave us an exponentially wide variety of answers, which in some ways are a good thing, but was hard to generalize them in our study. The survey should have had a selection style format rather than an open ended style for an easier analysis of the data. More participants would have been helpful, having a sample population of 100+ would have given us a bigger variety of answers that could have either changed our statistics or reinforced.
Conclusion
Facebook not only has become a social networking phenomenon, but it has also developed a unique culture of its own. The online culture of different age groups has created an important study of how it is an important benefactor. It is the individual’s age and purpose for facebook that ultimately develops into the culture it has become today. The idea that facebook is able to maintain long distance relationship and create the sense of intimacy plays a large part to its success. This is a culture that both groups share in common when using facebook and the newsfeed application. As both groups begin to deviate in exercise, older users focus facebook on economic and social needs. While younger groups use facebook to achieve a sense of added community to the social circle they already have physically around them. Groups within the age range of 18-28 used facebook most frequently and mainly for social networking. The culture of cyber-stalking has become a norm in the society of facebook. The idea of privacy no longer applies the same as it did a couple of generations ago. Information of individual preference to movies to the area in which the person resides is now open to the public network. Although adults over the ages of 30 felt that these forms of privacy are more alarming, the younger generations were not. This in part had to do with the amount of hours the younger group would spend on the social networking site. The older group might have felt that because business was a factor it did not want to share too much personal information. Also younger generations were more open to the discussion of topics and activities that they participated in. People of older groups had to establish some form of professionalism or example. This is because the main usage of facebook for the older generation is to keep business contacts and family. Age in a large part determines the culture and social network an individual is part of. But the involvement of parents becoming part of an individual’s social network or culture can create a dilemma. When the distinct cultural values of different cultures collide it becomes complicated and difficult. As each age group has different ways of developing their own online culture, it also changes with time. Eventually the groups from the 15-19 group moves on to the 20-24 age categories and so forth. It develops a cycle as to how with age come more responsibility and maturation. These groups will either continue the online culture or create a whole different society as to how facebook is used. Facebook in anticipation for this changing aspect of age eliminated the exclusivity of college student to the entire world. It is now up to the individual and its groups to shape how facebook will become in the future.
Bibliography
Fred Turner, Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community. Technology and Culture 46(3):485–512, 2005.
Diane J. Schiano, Lessons from LambdaMOO: A Social, Text-Based Virtual Environment. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 8(2):127–39, 1999.
Clive Thompson, Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. New York Times, Sept. 7, 2008.
Joseph B. Walther, Brandon Van Der Heide, Sang-Yeon Kim, David Westerman, & Stephanie Tom Tong, The Role of Friends’ Appearance and Behavior on Evaluations of Individuals on Facebook: Are We Known by the Company We Keep? Human Communication Research 34(1):28-49, 2008.
Mimi Ito et al, Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project, 2008.
How do the different Generations utilize Facebook?
University of California, Irvine
Anthropology 128C
June 9, 2010
Group Blue:
Joshua Yost
Yuri Choi
Vincent Nyugen
Donovan Tan
Wesley Lin
Patricia Wang
Charles Kope
Introduction
Every aspect and feature in our society has it’s own specific culture. Even something as abstract and intangible as Facebook carries a well-known culture that user’s can become familiar with rather quickly. Facebook started as a small Internet social networking site for college students, however quickly became a worldwide phenomena. Currently, there are more than 400 million users on Facebook all varying in age. As we started thinking about our research question, age was something that was frequently questioned. The interesting question that came to mind was, “How could a single website be able to cater to such a wide range of ages?” Our research was then geared to find out if age determined how Facebook is utilized.
Facebook is interesting to our group because it is more than just an Internet site. It has become an alternative way for establishing one’s identity and also for individuals to interact socially. It acts as a social database to our society. Although some people may not have a Facebook account, it still effects the way in which our society functions. For some, Facebook has drastically changed the way in which relationships are formed and maintained. Our group was able to recognize that Facebook has the potential of diminishing the value of real life relationships, however for most people we found that it acts as a supplement or addition to maintaining relationships and networking. Facebook carries multiple meanings depending on who is interpreting it. Regardless of what perspective it is seen in, Facebook should be a concern to all of society. It creates change within our culture and society, which in turn will affect everyone. Everyday life has been altered because the notion of a stranger or a long lost friend is now gone. Facebook allows distant relationships to rekindle and makes difficult relationships easier to maintain and follow.
Many people think Facebook is a non- influential networking site, however the realm of Facebook goes beyond the computer screen and creates a social phenomenon by changing and affecting our society culturally. This is important because it proves that culture in our society is never static, and is always changing. Facebook is a reflection of the next evolution in how our society is able to interact with one another in which technology develops numerous alternatives to social outlets. Even though there are many facets that can be explored and researched about Face-book, our group chose “age” as the focus of our study. Does age affect user’s utilization of the widely popular Internet social networking application? And if so, does this difference of use reflect upon distinct cultural values between different age groups?
Literature Review
Turner (2005) writes in his article on the WELL about the origins of the online community. Even in the beginning, online communities were utilized in much the same way as Facebook is today. “In the WELL's text-only environment, he conversed with friends and colleagues, met new people, and over time built up relationships of startling intimacy (Turner 2005: 485).” Facebook has benefitted from advancements in technology since then to where the online community is now much more personal with photos, video, etc. The online internet community gives people another way to connect with one another on a more personal level. “Computer networks like the WELL allowed us to recapture the sense of cooperative spirit that so many people seemed to lose when we gained all this technology. (Turner 2005: 486).” Facebook has become the supreme example of this as it has brought literally millions of people together and given them an outlet to connect and converse with one another using the “cooperative spirit” that Turner was talking about. Facebook is a very valuable tool that can be utilized to connect with friends on a personal level that would surely have made the originators of the online community very proud.
In the article by Schiano (1999), she writes about how the internet was becoming and online social community with a growing sense of personal connection. “The growing use of the Internet to provide a sense of personal connection and community is converging with the development of shared virtual spaces. In particular, the strong popularity of Multi-User Domains (MUDs), text-based networked virtual worlds, suggests the high premium many people place on social interactivity in their virtual environments (Schiano 1999; 127).” Her study was on the internet, but it showed how early on, people wanted to use the internet as a way to connect with other people. This is why it is no surprise that today Facebook has over 400 million user accounts. Facebook fills the needs of the people to connect with one another, and gives everyone a place where they can have an online community.
Thompson (2006) spoke in his article about the information overload experienced by being presented with mass loads of personal information about people that the Facebook user may or may not actually see in real life. This ambient awareness is very evident in this research. This research demonstrates how ambient awareness can be created through “friending” people that are not more than acquaintances and learning about them through the Facebook news-feed. This is also demonstrated in the 20-24 year old age group findings with their confessions of profile and photo stalking. People today know more about others of whom they do not interact with in the real world than they have in the past.
Walther, et al (2008) describes the effect one’s appearance on Facebook has on others and the amount of information that people display to become popular with a lot of friends. Our study discovered that participants in the 29 years and older age group were concerned about the security of the information displayed on their Facebook profile in order to prevent the information from being viewed by others. The study by Walther, et al (2008) determined that the image presentation on Facebook profiles does not have an effect of the first impression of other users. Rather, the study found that text content presented on these profiles had more of an effect of the impression of Facebook users.
Ito, et al (2008) studied the effect of new gaming, virtual world, and communications technologies on youths’ psychological development. This relates to this research with all of the age groups, but specifically the 15-19 age group, as they are currently developing with this new technology. The youth today see Facebook as a means to stay in touch with friends outside of school. One participant commented that “Facebook is a demonstration of society’s growing inability to cope with face-to-face interactions.” Facebook is a reflection of the next evolution of how our society is able to interact with one another in which technology develops numerous social outlets.
Method
Setting
The setting of our research is on the internet social network Facebook. (url: www.facebook.com). Originally created for college students, Facebook is now a widely used network for people of all ages from all over the world to stay connected with friends and family. This setting allows room for research about how different age groups utilize Facebook and how it is constantly evolving.
Participants
There were 44 participants in this study, varying in race and gender. All participants were signed up with Facebook and had existing profiles. The participants ranged in age from 15 to 65 with one 85 year old, and currently reside in Southern California.
Procedures
A survey containing 8 questions, 1 closed-ended and 7 open-ended, were distributed to participants via Facebook, in person, and phone calls. Surveys that were sent out through Facebook were distributed using the messaging and Facebook chat applications. This method was used for the majority of participants. Additionally, surveys were conducted through interview either in person or through phone calls. The survey’s closed-ended question asked participants their age. The open-ended questions inquired about their online activities, friends, and overall usage of Facebook. Collectively, these questions aimed at revealing similarities and differences of different age groups in terms of their Facebook usage and how these similarities and differences reflect the core values distinctive to the different age groups. After collecting all the data, responses were grouped according to the participants’ ages. Participants were grouped by age as follows: 15-19, 20-24, 25-28, and 29+. Next, the data was analyzed and coded by key words that appeared in the survey responses. Before analyzing all data, it was anticipated that there would be differences between the age groups concerning Facebook usage primarily for family, friends, and/or business.
Observation
Participant observation was also utilized in this study. All researchers in this study had active Facebook accounts so as to assimilate into the population of interest. By interacting with different Facebook accounts, which included viewing user profiles, newsfeeds, and chatting with other users on Facebook chat, the researchers of this study would able to become immersed in the culture of Facebook. Being apart of the Facebook community was vital for enculturation in this study.
Survey
Please indicate which age group you are in.
15-19 ( ) 20-24 ( ) 25-28 ( ) 29+ ( )
How many hours a week do you spend on Facebook?
What do you friends talk about on Facebook?
What part of Facebook do you enjoy the most?
What applications do you use the most?
What does Facebook mean to you?
What do you mainly use Facebook for?
What influenced to make a Facebook profile?
Findings
Facebook users in the 15-19 age group spent an average of 8-10 hours on Facebook per week. Friends talked about school events and social gossip. Members of this age group enjoyed the photo capabilities the most, and felt the news-feed was their most used application. Participants in the 15-19 age group saw Facebook as a mode of communication and primarily used their Facebook account to talk and gossip with their friends about various things. The main reason given by the participants in the 15-19 age group for creating their profile was to stay friends with different people, and which interestingly were mostly local friends that they saw on a regular basis. The 15-19 age group was not so concerned with long distance friendships.
Facebook users in the 20-24 year-old age group reported to be on Facebook an average of 10-13 hours per week. Topics that are discussed on Facebook in this age group includes drinking, partying, school, work, and inappropriate topics, such as behaviors and activities under the influence and comments fulfilling sexual agendas. Facebook users in the 20-24 year-old age group mostly enjoy wall posts, and commonly confessed to profile and photo stalking. The 20-24 year-old age group had the widest variety of reported applications, and no conclusions could be drawn from their responses. To participants in the 20-24 year-old age group, Facebook was a way to stay connected to distant friends that have gone off to college and their primary use for the social networking site was to communicate with friends. The main reason for creating a profile was reported to be that “MySpace died” and they were going away to college and wanted to stay in touch with friends.
Facebook users in the 25-28 year old age group spend an average of 10-13 hours per week on the social networking site. People in this age group generally talk about school, work, and their visits with family and friends. The 25-28 year-old age group uses the events applications in order to keep in touch with things that are happening locally. For example, one woman who was 27 years old used Facebook to network with her "party crew" as she called them. This was a clubbing group that would get together first only on their Facebook accounts to talk about which club was hot or not, and then later would meet up at that said club. In a way, some from this age group use Facebook as an initial meeting place. Some users from this age group use Facebook as a way to actually meet people outside of just talking on the computer. A couple of participants from this age group reported meeting up with someone they had first met and connected with on the social networking website. Facebook users in the 25-28 year-old age group also see Facebook as a way to maintain long-distance relationships and primarily use the site to communicate with friends and share photos. Facebook users in this age group most commonly created a profile because “MySpace is still dead,” and they had a strong desire to stay in touch or reconnect with old or distant friends.
Facebook users who are 29 years old and older spend an average of 4-6 hours per week on the social networking site. Participants who were 29 years old and older reported talking about business associates and clients, old memories, and family with their Facebook friends. Participants in this age group most enjoyed seeing pictures of friends and family, and most used the news-feed and chat applications in order to keep in contact with their friends. To participants 29 years old and older, Facebook is a means of business-related networking and family communication and primarily use Facebook as a means to keep in touch with friends and family as well as clients and business associates. For example, one woman that was interviewed specifically said that she advertised her hair stylist business and connected with clients via Facebook, and had actually gained new clients by networking with locals that were close to her location. Participants who were 29 years old and older commonly created profiles due to the recommendation of a friend or a family member, or had someone create their profile entirely. Also, this age group was the most concerned about security and privacy, more so than any other age group. The older generations seemed much more conscious of protecting their identity and being careful about what information they allowed to be posted. Finally, the 29 years old and older age group appeared to be more of a long distance, or global networking group, rather than just connecting with local friends like the younger generations.
Analysis
With these findings, age without a doubt effects how an individual views and utilizes Facebook. In this world there exists multiple cultural "spheres", and these spheres affect and shape how it's inhabitants think and their values. Facebook is such a global phenomenon, and since it caters to such broad and vast populations it is bound to affect many cultural spheres. Through this digital medium, people of differing age, ethnicity, sex, and religions can coexist and clash. Though our study is admittedly somewhat sparse in approach and research, enough data has been gathered to give us a clear view into how one aspect of culture, age, affects how an individual would utilize this online application. With the data collected it is easy to compare and contrast the interests and values of each specific age group.
A key similarity between the age groups is that all take advantage of Facebook's remarkable ability to keep in touch in with friends and family. This is not surprising, seeing as it is a social-networking website. Therein lays the key attraction to this online social networking application. Culture can never be described in individual terms; it is naturally and inherently social in nature. People are social animals, and we are hardwired to connect and identify with likeminded people. This transcends different cultural values and perspectives that people of varying degrees may have. But similarities are less interesting, as the most surprising revelations are found in the differences.
One trend that was very noticeable is that in the surveys the younger age groups (15-19) and (20-24) usually used Facebook as another way to stay in contact with friends. But these younger "friend" groups tend to be more centralized. In fact, these two younger age groups tended to use Facebook to keep tabs on friends that they say in a day to day basis. Just because of their age, it is more difficult for individuals in this age range, especially, 15-19, to expand their social network to a great degree. Those still in high school and can't drive have less incentive to create and maintain relationships outside of their immediate social circle. This notion changes slightly as we progress up to the (20-24) age group. Most of the individuals surveyed in this age group reported that they are either currently in college or recently graduated. As one most likely moves out of their parent's house and is able to have a bit more breathing space, the perspective on how Facebook changes slightly. A period of parties, new-found freedoms, and increasing hormones means that the subject matter this age group is interested in is very different than other age groups. This age group loses much of its inhibitions, and their wall posts and updates stand as testament to the increasing vulgarity and "inappropriate" topics. While at this age one begins the search for a career in earnest, most survey participants believed that the visibility of such "inappropriate" topics were not a severe detriment to finding a job. As for the locality of what friends they keep on Facebook, it begins to spread out. With these new found freedoms, this age group is able to branch out and meet people of different ages. But their network still tends to be clustered in the area they reside in.
As for the two older age groups (25-28) and (29 and above) their range of friends expands greatly. As individuals would enter the work force and transition into adults, they develop a much more varied and far-ranged social network. While some of these newly acquired friends may be due to creating an interesting relationship, it seems realistic that some of these new friends can be attributed to professional and work-place needs. Facebook is an important tool to maintain healthy business contacts. Also as one ages friends tend to spread out and go their separate ways, the concept of keeping in touch with "old friends" gains a new importance to the older generation. Also older generations seem to be fixated on the issue of privacy. Their cultural sphere values a great deal of privacy, and rapidly improving technology rushes us all into an new era of connectedness and integration. This can prove to be worrisome and even aggravating to many, as they are not used to so much information about themselves so flippantly available to the public.
Discussion
Analyzing our data, we found that the age groups started to be logged onto facebook mostly during the two age groups of 20-24 and 25-28, with an average user time of ten and thirteen hours a week. Age groups of 15-19 had the second to the most login hours of eight and ten hours a week, with the age group of 29+ last with an average login time of four to six hours. These findings suggest that facebook is predominantly a college phenomenon. The network was launched in 2004, the age group that was in college at the time were the 25-28 age group, followed by the 20-24 age group who was the next generation to actively use the site due to being in college. These two ages are closely related in terms of types of facebook usage. The site has a number of applications that is ideal to the active college student; event pages, photo share, and group pages. All these applications on the site allow one member of a social network to be able to be in contact and send out invitations without having to physically tell each and every single person they know. There have been event invitations with as much as five thousand people being invited, which would be almost impossible to do so by one person physically inviting one person at a time.
The two age groups, 20-24 and 25-29, also have in common that like to stay connected with friends that have gone off to a different college or those that have moved away. Age groups 15-19 keep in touch primarily with friends that they see often, many of the individuals they see are still in high school with them, which is kind of off because they usually see such individual’s everyday. The age groups 29+ tend to use to site to keep in touch with family and or business purposes. This is due to the fact that when these individuals were in college they did not have the luxury of having the facebook network site that was intended for college students only (which was how facebook was originally).
Reasons for joining facebook among the dominant users 20-24 and 25-28 were due to their friends having one and having an ideal college life would be essential to do so. The younger age groups jumped on the site as well due to the face of the declining user activity on myspace, because everyone they knew were converting to facebook. The oldest age group joined for business and or family reasons. These statistics alone show that even though facebook is no longer restricted to college students anymore, its primary focus group are the those individuals. Many of the applications; games, instant messaging, status updates, and others the older age group does not care for and has no use for.
Processing our data, we had not found the landslide results that we had originally hoped for. We believed that everyone in the age group 29+ created a facebook account to stay in touch with family and or for business purposes. We found that some of the respondents of that particular age group also used it to stay in touch with friends that they no longer interact with often, which we did not think of. Another theme we found throughout some of the older age group was the amount of hours spent was more than anticipated, that could be due to the particular reason why the account holder was using it for (i.e. promotion of a business).
Strengths of the study were that we had a wide variety of age groups ranging from 15 to 29+ with a specific distinction between the ages 20-24 and 25-28 The classification of these two groups, even though had many similar characters of their facebook characteristics, was a smart choice by us because in the real world act completely different from each other due to their age. This can be seen in our findings of the two age groups. Even though both age groups like to keep in touch with friends, one of the sole purposes for the 25-28 was mainly this. The 20-24 usage for the site other than staying connected with friends was to show their local activity through status changes of how their night was and the activity of “cyber stalking”. Another strength of the study was that since facebook has a massive population, gathering participants was easy. Open-ended questions let respondents feel free, when answering so they were not constricted to a set of answers that they might not even fit their answer for whatever question it may be.
Weaknesses of the study were that the age group for the older generation could have been categorized more thoughtfully, than a mere 29+ category. There were respondents to the survey who were around the ages of 30 and others who were around the ages of 50. Such a general age category skewed our data findings, due to the fact that many respondents around the ages of 30 used facebook as a means to stay connected with friends while the older age group’s main purpose was to stay connected with family. However, since they were all in the same age category we had to generalize what their main purpose of the site was used for. Another weakness in the study was that all the questions on the study were open ended, which gave us an exponentially wide variety of answers, which in some ways are a good thing, but was hard to generalize them in our study. The survey should have had a selection style format rather than an open ended style for an easier analysis of the data. More participants would have been helpful, having a sample population of 100+ would have given us a bigger variety of answers that could have either changed our statistics or reinforced.
Conclusion
Facebook not only has become a social networking phenomenon, but it has also developed a unique culture of its own. The online culture of different age groups has created an important study of how it is an important benefactor. It is the individual’s age and purpose for facebook that ultimately develops into the culture it has become today. The idea that facebook is able to maintain long distance relationship and create the sense of intimacy plays a large part to its success. This is a culture that both groups share in common when using facebook and the newsfeed application. As both groups begin to deviate in exercise, older users focus facebook on economic and social needs. While younger groups use facebook to achieve a sense of added community to the social circle they already have physically around them. Groups within the age range of 18-28 used facebook most frequently and mainly for social networking. The culture of cyber-stalking has become a norm in the society of facebook. The idea of privacy no longer applies the same as it did a couple of generations ago. Information of individual preference to movies to the area in which the person resides is now open to the public network. Although adults over the ages of 30 felt that these forms of privacy are more alarming, the younger generations were not. This in part had to do with the amount of hours the younger group would spend on the social networking site. The older group might have felt that because business was a factor it did not want to share too much personal information. Also younger generations were more open to the discussion of topics and activities that they participated in. People of older groups had to establish some form of professionalism or example. This is because the main usage of facebook for the older generation is to keep business contacts and family. Age in a large part determines the culture and social network an individual is part of. But the involvement of parents becoming part of an individual’s social network or culture can create a dilemma. When the distinct cultural values of different cultures collide it becomes complicated and difficult. As each age group has different ways of developing their own online culture, it also changes with time. Eventually the groups from the 15-19 group moves on to the 20-24 age categories and so forth. It develops a cycle as to how with age come more responsibility and maturation. These groups will either continue the online culture or create a whole different society as to how facebook is used. Facebook in anticipation for this changing aspect of age eliminated the exclusivity of college student to the entire world. It is now up to the individual and its groups to shape how facebook will become in the future.
Bibliography
Fred Turner, Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community. Technology and Culture 46(3):485–512, 2005.
Diane J. Schiano, Lessons from LambdaMOO: A Social, Text-Based Virtual Environment. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 8(2):127–39, 1999.
Clive Thompson, Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. New York Times, Sept. 7, 2008.
Joseph B. Walther, Brandon Van Der Heide, Sang-Yeon Kim, David Westerman, & Stephanie Tom Tong, The Role of Friends’ Appearance and Behavior on Evaluations of Individuals on Facebook: Are We Known by the Company We Keep? Human Communication Research 34(1):28-49, 2008.
Mimi Ito et al, Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project, 2008.
Sims 3
I just bought my sister Sims 3 on her birthday which was last Wednesday (June 2). This is an onter example of an "virtual" community. The sims are created by the players and are given likes and dislikes, stats, etc. You can speak to other sims and is based off of "real life." What does this mean for someone who is handicapped and cannot go outside to enjoy other people's company? Is the a suitable replacement? I do not believe this is a suitable replacement, but it can give someone enjoyment. Also, it gives people a sense of community, even when nobody is there. Some people can only be active during the night for whatever circumstances and this may be the only way they can interact, even it is "virtual."
Joseph Fodor
Joseph Fodor
Chat-rou-what?
Albert Alquisola
Charles Huynh
Jennifer Katanyoutanant
Jennifer Nguyen
Lillian Nguyen
Sharon Lin
Intro:
The internet offers people the opportunity to interconnect like never before. Every day, the world gets smaller and smaller, yet can these connection really be meaningful if they are made from such far distances? Can it ever be intimate? Chatroulette gives you the opportunity to chance upon any random stranger with a webcam. Some may change your life, some may not have pants on. Either way, risking a glance at an engorged penis seems like a small price to pay for the opportunity to learn about different cultures from people all over the world. Chatroulette has empowered people to embrace their animalistic behavior rather than subdue them due to lifted social boundaries. Both genders have approached chatroulette with different mindsets which results in vastly different behaviors. With the current progression of technology and society, social media has been met with an army of legal disputes attacking the validity of the site's privatization and user security. This new internet phenomenon is breeding its own culture and this team aims to uncover exactly who partakes in it, why they find it so engaging, and what the real risks may be.
ChatRoulette is one of the latest social websites that pairs up strangers from all over the world. Through webcams, users are able to visually see, talk, or type to their partner. These interactions are randomly generated.
Seventeen year old Andrey Temovskiy created ChatRoulette to stay connected with his friends. “I decided to create a little site for me and my friends where we could connect randomly with other people,”(Stone), stated Ternovskiy in an interview with the New York Times. Similar to speed-dating, users are given a quick first impression and can decide on whether to continue talking with that person or initiate conversation with another stranger. “Entering ChatRoulette is akin to speed-dating tens of thousands of perfect strangers — some clothed, some not,”(Bilton).
Although initially created for social interactions, ChatRoulette’s fame has attracted many users that exploit the site for their own sexual desires. Rather than condemning these sexual exploitations, we want to explore the various cultures within ChatRoulette.
Gender:
In the virtual realm of chat roulette, the gender roles and overall actions and demeanors of users are taken to extremes. Inhibitions are thrown to the wind, insecurities are easily dismissed, and a majority of users reveal a side of themselves that is essentially non-existent in their normal daily lives. Ninjas, warriors, penises, creepers, loners, paired alongside with characteristics of loud, obnoxious, aroused, and defiant cause this atmosphere to be unique and unpredictable. This is a place where you can encounter people exuding authenticity, no longer being bound by the social constraints that society has indirectly implemented. People are no longer concerned with their immediate surroundings and that leads to the genuine interactions which often occur.
Part of the thrill of using ChatRoulette and the reason why people express their sexuality freely is the anonymity of being on the website. You don’t have to use your real name and you will likely never have met most of the people on ChatRoulette. To top it off, the kind of privacy that ChatRoulette allows, along with the one-time occurrence, allows a sense of freedom from social boundaries and rules, instigating a more casual and relaxed environment for online socializing. It is because of the anonymity, privacy, and one-time occurrence, that you see so many male body parts on the website. There isn’t a rule to exhibit self control on CR – you can let your imaginations run wild and say whatever you want, and no one will judge you because, well, they can’t. They don’t know you and will never see you ever again.
Actions based on gender are a bit puzzling on ChatRoulette, and both take very different routes. The majority of men love to expose their genitals yet hide their face. This coincides with the sense of freedom ChatRoulette bestows on its users. Shame is no longer a factor in the world of ChatRoulette, allowing men to be more daring and bold. But by hiding their faces, they also attempt to circumvent shame most likely so they will have a clear conscience and no lingering feelings of guilt or embarrassment. There is no clear cut answer to why men act the way they act, but one can assume that this is an innate desire, suppressed by the everyday social boundaries that society has created and upheld. Another plausible theory is that men have adapted the habit of acting rashly, and without considering proper consequences. Since there are no negative backlashes on ChatRoulette, men feel no need to be concerned with any of their actions, indirectly empowering them with the ability to do almost anything. Dressing up in ridiculous costumes, masturbating, and screaming profanities are all part of ChatRoulette and the answer to why they do it might be as simple as ‘because they can and want to’.
In general, however, women did not openly express their sexuality on ChatRoulette. Single females who were on ChatRoulette were seeking attention and admiration from the opposite sex, mostly because they felt that it was easier to acquire online rather than in person. They can more easily speak their mind and attain what is usually frowned upon. Talking with a lot of guys can earn girls the label of ‘flirt’ or ‘tease’ in the social realm, but in ChatRoulette, the privacy that is available changes the circumstances drastically. Girls stated how much more comfortable they felt, being in their own surroundings rather than something that was completely unfamiliar to them. They also noted that they felt empowered by the ability to choose who to talk to, how long they wanted to talk to you for, and were not afraid to ‘next’ someone, which is clicking a button to talk to a different person, without feeling remorse. A few women mentioned that in real life, it is quite difficult to tell people that you want to stop dating or stop talking, but in ChatRoulette, dismissing someone is just part of the game. Many do not take it too personally; everyone has been ‘nexted’ at one point or another, which makes the practice routine rather than cruel.
The differences between how females and males use ChatRoulette are extreme, especially in terms of how sexuality is expressed unreservedly on ChatRoulette. There is less consensus among females to express their sexuality as freely as males do; most females have their clothes on when browsing for a partner to chat with, and if they did take off their clothes later, it would just be for a selected person to see. It is in this way that females treat ChatRoulette in a vastly different way than males. Males treat it as a personal outlet for sexual intimacy, while females are much more discreet on ChatRoulette. Even though you can do whatever you want on ChatRoulette, it’s interesting to note that females do not express their most primal desires that males do. Many females retain a sense of propriety--although it’s difficult to tell what would happen if the girls did not next us, and there is the occasional woman having sex on camera with another man—and they also enjoy going on ChatRoulette in groups.
Groups of girls are always looking for conversation and are on ChatRoulette out of boredom or curiosity. One group we spoke to was just curious about ChatRoulette and talked to us quite extensively about themselves and Canada, the country they were from. They also expressed displeasure at seeing all the penises on ChatRoulette. All in all though, females are a little more subtle and a little more mysterious with their intentions on ChatRoulette than men.
So why are males so much more expressive and open about their sexuality on Chat Roulette than females? Society and cultural norms actually can be linked back to behavior on ChatRoulette. Females in general, due to societal constraints and cultural values, tend to be more submissive and subtle. They are supposed to be the quieter, gentler, but more emotional sex, while males are thought to be the dominating, more controlling ones who express no emotion. The use of ChatRoulette by people corresponds with the gender stratification in society. The expectation of males to be how they are—rude and horny—is indeed expressed on ChatRoulette. Most of them do not show their faces either, which can be interpreted as another compliance with the social norm that men are not allowed to show emotion. Males take control of Chat Roulette, doing whatever they want just because they can, while females, although they need not, either consciously or subconsciously direct their actions in a more understated way. The female subtlety is seen on ChatRoulette through the repeated ‘nexting’ and the small number of females on ChatRoulette that openly express their sexuality. The differences in female and male behavior on ChatRoulette go hand in hand with how men and women are treated differently in society. For example, if a man sleeps with many women, he is applauded, while a woman who sleeps with many men is deemed to be a “slut”. Although men use ChatRoulette improperly, there would likely be a very different attitude toward ChatRoulette if women used ChatRoulette the same way men did.
Security:
Social media security favors strict security/privacy over moderate restrictions, however, there are positive reasons for both levels of security. Strict security increases user control, which is better received by marketers, parents, and allows programs to be used in a more “productive manner.” On the other hand, lax security creates a more expansive use of the internet that shows the extent of internet uses/abuses. ChatRoulette in general is a open-ended program with a scant amount of underlying regulations that are enforced by a system of lenient penalties that have no long-term punishment to violators. In ChatRoulette, everyone is anonymous and users decide what they would like to discuss or showcase, as opposed to Facebook where everyone is required to be identified and are able to privatize their profiles. Moreover, the anonymity of the ChatRoulette framework is currently being exploited by third-party programs such as ChatRouletteMap to further decrease user security and privacy.
First, ChatRoulette encourages users to be at least 16 years old, and prohibits pornographic behavior. Furthermore, it is important to stress that it “encourages,” meaning that there is no real age limitations because nothing states it on front page, nor does it even ask for a birthdate (not that someone can’t fake their age but it is a small step that a majority of websites take towards regulating the type of content that can be seen by minors). If a user fails to obey the rules, the connecting user can “report” the individual, and if they gets an additional two reports within five minutes then they are banned for 10-40 minutes. This might not seem like much for a site that is not only occupied by both minors and adults, but which is also prevailing of pornographic conduct. Nonetheless, it allows people to randomly connect to others around the world, creating a private and personal communication experience.
The less “hands on” approach of ChatRoulette means less liability in the law. The terms and conditions are not even listed and is based on what is “suggested” by word of mouth. There is no punishment because there is nothing tangible to argue against. For all they know it is a free market. In contrast, Facebook’s terms and conditions are heavily documented on their website, conveniently listed at the very bottom of every page under “Privacy” and “A Guide to Privacy on Facebook.” These help educate users of Facebook’s privacy functions and policies which allow you to limit who can see your profile and what they can see. Currently, Facebook has been facing many disputes regarding its ever-changing and increasingly complex privacy settings. This is a clear example of how more rules and functions may seem like a better idea, but can possibly create more problems for the developer and users alike.
Another question to ask is does the website’s anonymity have an advantage over other websites? It lessens the constraints that a standard conversation holds and opens up the value of “random conversation.” Would someone be less inclined to say or do something if the other partner didn’t know their true identity? From experience this was indeed true because the types of conversations and content seen were widely ranged from personal to sexual. All over ChatRoulette, there are those who enjoy masturbating to someone watching them. With ChatRoulette being so free-form, users take advantage of this all of the times. Yet even with this “anonymity,” people differ in how they present themselves. Some show just their private parts, some show their whole body, and some show their whole body and face. Are people still scared of what they are allowing others to see, even if they don’t know who they are? The answer to this may be because of technology and third-party applications.
ChatRouletteMap is a website that takes pictures of users currently using ChatRoulette and plots the exact location using their ip address. The user is not aware that their photo is captured and posted, but the only way to take it off is to show proof of identity. This not only infiltrates the feeling of security of anonymity, but takes it beyond to another level of safety. User complaints about the invasion of security in ChatRoulette can be compared with negative remarks about one of the more recent developments of Google, Google Buzz. Google buzz, like ChatRoulette encroaches on the privacy of the user and provides public information about the user without their consent. When you first go onto Google Buzz, it automatically sets you up with followers and people to follow. The problem though is that by default, the people you follow and the people who follow you are made public to anyone who looks at your profile, which in other words allows someone to go into your profile and see who you email and chat with most frequently. Furthermore, according to an article by Miguel Helft titled “Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service,” unauthorized permissions to allocate users' personal information has resulted in even bigger issues, one of which involves a woman who discovered that a list of people, which may have included her ex-abusive husband or people who sent hostile comments to her blog, were automatically following her and her comments on Google Reader. (Helft 1) As opposed to the legal actions that Google has taken to alter their security measures on Google Buzz, ChatRoulette has done nothing of the sort. While ChatRoulleteMap is a third-party application as opposed to Google Buzz's direct association with the Google Company, ChatRoulette's inaction can be an indicator of the future of developments in the future.
VISUALS:
Back in the day, people had to resort to analog chat rooms to meet people. Conversation may have been great, but you were always bogged with the worry that the person on the other end may not be all that they seem. With the advent of ChatRoulette, the visuals modern day webcam's provide gives people the opportunity to see who they are talking to, adding another dimension to the anthropology of chat room interaction.
Chatroulette offers varying degrees of visuals. As a whole, participants show either their whole face, the lower half of their face, just their body, just their penis or breasts, their whole body, or their lap. Though showing genitalia is normally deemed an intimate act, on ChatRoulette, it is routine. I've talked to many users, some who masturbate without showing their face and some who do. Some also engage in small talk beforehand but most are already doing so while others ask up front. Those who don’t show their faces hide their identities to keep from being recorded. Still, many claim that they would show their faces if their partner "seems ok", or engages in the mutual masturbation. Seeing someone’s face seems to be a privilege that can only be earned. It is the only point of self-conscious users worry about. To next someone based off physical appearance can be more damaging than nexting someone who is naked. All the while, they never asked for my name or get try to get to know me at all as if distances themselves further from a real person. Furthermore, they rarely ask to meet partners outside of chatroulette. If anything, they exchange emails but it rarely turns into a real relationship. when asked why they are so aroused by the image of someone else masturbating with them, some claimed to like being with someone because masturbating alone was too lonely. Some claimed that having the ability to arouse a partner so much that they climax is the greatest satisfaction. Others like the thrill of having strangers watch them (You never know what you will get). In addition to people masturbating alone, we've also witnessed couples having sex for the camera. They claimed to like it when others watched, but when asked to comment on why, they nexted us or continued to have sex. Only one female observer talked to these particular participants so the results might vary if they had been talking to a male or a group of people.
Chatroulette’s set up allows strangers to interact with one another through webcams (as mentioned earlier). With this comes an endless possibility of how people visually present themselves. The access to cyberspace and information leads to “the freedom to reinvent oneself and to construct entire social worlds free from the limits of embodied reality in everyday life,” (Bernal 661). In many aspects, this relates to the freedom of ChatRoulette. Users are given a “visual” first impression of other users from various parts of the world. This allows users to present themselves differently from their daily appearances and to divulge into fantasies.
Through various sessions of observations, there were prominent themes in bodily presentations as mentioned previously. However, since the sample of participants observed were from randomization, it would be difficult to generalize for the whole ChatRoulette audience. Rather, the observations collected offer one take on visuals.
Often times many present themselves with different angles revealing certain parts of the body. Many of these users present themselves in ways that they want to be perceived. As mentioned by Walther, “Online users can organize the information flow and enhance self-image by strategically selecting how and what to convey to the receiver," (Walter 32). Although Walther was making this comparison to facebook, the same can be said for ChatRoulette. Users are able to present themselves the way they want the other person to perceive them. For instance, if there were blank black screens on their end, it would usually signify a hesitation to show their face. During my interview, I would often times question their hesitations and found that many were scared to show their face out of fear.
In an interview with a one user, I asked if the guest purposely hide their face. The response was like typical responses from others. But was I found interesting was his reason for not showing his face. They responded by stating that "some freaks might record it,"showing obvious fears in displaying his face. There could potentially be suggestive images of users, which could later on affect their work, family, etc. So, hesitation in showing one's face is a prevalent theme. Most interviewers tend to become comfortable in the conversation and eventually show their face.
Often times, black screens get “nexted”. Users have the ability to skip to the next randomly generated person. Different reasons for nexting may be because there is no one there, the person isn’t attractive, etc.Your appearance becomes the reason for being “nexted” As Walther mentioned, “People judge the authenticity of self-presentation online," (Walther 28). Unfortunately for ChatRoulette, appearance is often times judged and being nexted occurs if deemed unattractive.
Users typically like the reassurance of being able to visually see the other person they talk to. Some have found ways to protect their identity while still physically showing their bodies. Some ways would be by only showing angles of their body (such as a missing head), while others wear some form of disguise, like a mask. These are just some of the ways that people visually present themselves.
CONCLUSION
As short as these short snippets of conversation are, every action, every look, and every visual is loaded with a subculture of sexual tension, dissociation of identity, and risk of exposure. Although the technology gives people a window to a diverse population of people and cultures, we've noticed that many users forgo this opportunity to act upon their most basic animal urges. While it is possible for ChatRoulette's user base to expand beyond it's current masturbating population, the current trend seem to be growing at an alarming pace with more users asking to see our breasts rather than ask our names. One can not help but to question how this reflects current society now? Without social norms to guide social interaction, ChatRoulette provides a free flow plateau for users to speak and act as they feel without fear of judgment. Still, users attribute every hello and "next" to new set of social norms, breeding a brand new culture which is bound to evolve over the next generations of users. Although we can only speculate what rules will form next, it is always possible for a 180 degree shift in population and entertainment. It all depends on you.
Bibliography :
1.Helft, Miguel. "Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service - NYTimes.com." www.nytimes.com. New York Times, 12 Feb 2010. Web. 9 Jun 2010..
2.Bilton, Nick. "The Surreal World of Chatroulete - NYTimes.com." www.nytimes.com. New York times, 19 Feb 2010..
3.Stone, Brad. "Chatroulette's Creator, 17, Introduces himself -NYTimes.com." www.nytimes.com New York Times, 13, Feb 2010
4.Walther, Joseph B et al. “The Role of Friends’ Appearance and Behavior on Evaluations of Individuals on Facebook: Are we Known by the Company We Keep?” Human Communication Research, 2008, pp.28-49.
5.Bernal, Victoria. “Eritrea on-line: Diaspora, cyberspace, and the public sphere.” American Ethnologist, 2005. Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 660-675.
Charles Huynh
Jennifer Katanyoutanant
Jennifer Nguyen
Lillian Nguyen
Sharon Lin
Intro:
The internet offers people the opportunity to interconnect like never before. Every day, the world gets smaller and smaller, yet can these connection really be meaningful if they are made from such far distances? Can it ever be intimate? Chatroulette gives you the opportunity to chance upon any random stranger with a webcam. Some may change your life, some may not have pants on. Either way, risking a glance at an engorged penis seems like a small price to pay for the opportunity to learn about different cultures from people all over the world. Chatroulette has empowered people to embrace their animalistic behavior rather than subdue them due to lifted social boundaries. Both genders have approached chatroulette with different mindsets which results in vastly different behaviors. With the current progression of technology and society, social media has been met with an army of legal disputes attacking the validity of the site's privatization and user security. This new internet phenomenon is breeding its own culture and this team aims to uncover exactly who partakes in it, why they find it so engaging, and what the real risks may be.
ChatRoulette is one of the latest social websites that pairs up strangers from all over the world. Through webcams, users are able to visually see, talk, or type to their partner. These interactions are randomly generated.
Seventeen year old Andrey Temovskiy created ChatRoulette to stay connected with his friends. “I decided to create a little site for me and my friends where we could connect randomly with other people,”(Stone), stated Ternovskiy in an interview with the New York Times. Similar to speed-dating, users are given a quick first impression and can decide on whether to continue talking with that person or initiate conversation with another stranger. “Entering ChatRoulette is akin to speed-dating tens of thousands of perfect strangers — some clothed, some not,”(Bilton).
Although initially created for social interactions, ChatRoulette’s fame has attracted many users that exploit the site for their own sexual desires. Rather than condemning these sexual exploitations, we want to explore the various cultures within ChatRoulette.
Gender:
In the virtual realm of chat roulette, the gender roles and overall actions and demeanors of users are taken to extremes. Inhibitions are thrown to the wind, insecurities are easily dismissed, and a majority of users reveal a side of themselves that is essentially non-existent in their normal daily lives. Ninjas, warriors, penises, creepers, loners, paired alongside with characteristics of loud, obnoxious, aroused, and defiant cause this atmosphere to be unique and unpredictable. This is a place where you can encounter people exuding authenticity, no longer being bound by the social constraints that society has indirectly implemented. People are no longer concerned with their immediate surroundings and that leads to the genuine interactions which often occur.
Part of the thrill of using ChatRoulette and the reason why people express their sexuality freely is the anonymity of being on the website. You don’t have to use your real name and you will likely never have met most of the people on ChatRoulette. To top it off, the kind of privacy that ChatRoulette allows, along with the one-time occurrence, allows a sense of freedom from social boundaries and rules, instigating a more casual and relaxed environment for online socializing. It is because of the anonymity, privacy, and one-time occurrence, that you see so many male body parts on the website. There isn’t a rule to exhibit self control on CR – you can let your imaginations run wild and say whatever you want, and no one will judge you because, well, they can’t. They don’t know you and will never see you ever again.
Actions based on gender are a bit puzzling on ChatRoulette, and both take very different routes. The majority of men love to expose their genitals yet hide their face. This coincides with the sense of freedom ChatRoulette bestows on its users. Shame is no longer a factor in the world of ChatRoulette, allowing men to be more daring and bold. But by hiding their faces, they also attempt to circumvent shame most likely so they will have a clear conscience and no lingering feelings of guilt or embarrassment. There is no clear cut answer to why men act the way they act, but one can assume that this is an innate desire, suppressed by the everyday social boundaries that society has created and upheld. Another plausible theory is that men have adapted the habit of acting rashly, and without considering proper consequences. Since there are no negative backlashes on ChatRoulette, men feel no need to be concerned with any of their actions, indirectly empowering them with the ability to do almost anything. Dressing up in ridiculous costumes, masturbating, and screaming profanities are all part of ChatRoulette and the answer to why they do it might be as simple as ‘because they can and want to’.
In general, however, women did not openly express their sexuality on ChatRoulette. Single females who were on ChatRoulette were seeking attention and admiration from the opposite sex, mostly because they felt that it was easier to acquire online rather than in person. They can more easily speak their mind and attain what is usually frowned upon. Talking with a lot of guys can earn girls the label of ‘flirt’ or ‘tease’ in the social realm, but in ChatRoulette, the privacy that is available changes the circumstances drastically. Girls stated how much more comfortable they felt, being in their own surroundings rather than something that was completely unfamiliar to them. They also noted that they felt empowered by the ability to choose who to talk to, how long they wanted to talk to you for, and were not afraid to ‘next’ someone, which is clicking a button to talk to a different person, without feeling remorse. A few women mentioned that in real life, it is quite difficult to tell people that you want to stop dating or stop talking, but in ChatRoulette, dismissing someone is just part of the game. Many do not take it too personally; everyone has been ‘nexted’ at one point or another, which makes the practice routine rather than cruel.
The differences between how females and males use ChatRoulette are extreme, especially in terms of how sexuality is expressed unreservedly on ChatRoulette. There is less consensus among females to express their sexuality as freely as males do; most females have their clothes on when browsing for a partner to chat with, and if they did take off their clothes later, it would just be for a selected person to see. It is in this way that females treat ChatRoulette in a vastly different way than males. Males treat it as a personal outlet for sexual intimacy, while females are much more discreet on ChatRoulette. Even though you can do whatever you want on ChatRoulette, it’s interesting to note that females do not express their most primal desires that males do. Many females retain a sense of propriety--although it’s difficult to tell what would happen if the girls did not next us, and there is the occasional woman having sex on camera with another man—and they also enjoy going on ChatRoulette in groups.
Groups of girls are always looking for conversation and are on ChatRoulette out of boredom or curiosity. One group we spoke to was just curious about ChatRoulette and talked to us quite extensively about themselves and Canada, the country they were from. They also expressed displeasure at seeing all the penises on ChatRoulette. All in all though, females are a little more subtle and a little more mysterious with their intentions on ChatRoulette than men.
So why are males so much more expressive and open about their sexuality on Chat Roulette than females? Society and cultural norms actually can be linked back to behavior on ChatRoulette. Females in general, due to societal constraints and cultural values, tend to be more submissive and subtle. They are supposed to be the quieter, gentler, but more emotional sex, while males are thought to be the dominating, more controlling ones who express no emotion. The use of ChatRoulette by people corresponds with the gender stratification in society. The expectation of males to be how they are—rude and horny—is indeed expressed on ChatRoulette. Most of them do not show their faces either, which can be interpreted as another compliance with the social norm that men are not allowed to show emotion. Males take control of Chat Roulette, doing whatever they want just because they can, while females, although they need not, either consciously or subconsciously direct their actions in a more understated way. The female subtlety is seen on ChatRoulette through the repeated ‘nexting’ and the small number of females on ChatRoulette that openly express their sexuality. The differences in female and male behavior on ChatRoulette go hand in hand with how men and women are treated differently in society. For example, if a man sleeps with many women, he is applauded, while a woman who sleeps with many men is deemed to be a “slut”. Although men use ChatRoulette improperly, there would likely be a very different attitude toward ChatRoulette if women used ChatRoulette the same way men did.
Security:
Social media security favors strict security/privacy over moderate restrictions, however, there are positive reasons for both levels of security. Strict security increases user control, which is better received by marketers, parents, and allows programs to be used in a more “productive manner.” On the other hand, lax security creates a more expansive use of the internet that shows the extent of internet uses/abuses. ChatRoulette in general is a open-ended program with a scant amount of underlying regulations that are enforced by a system of lenient penalties that have no long-term punishment to violators. In ChatRoulette, everyone is anonymous and users decide what they would like to discuss or showcase, as opposed to Facebook where everyone is required to be identified and are able to privatize their profiles. Moreover, the anonymity of the ChatRoulette framework is currently being exploited by third-party programs such as ChatRouletteMap to further decrease user security and privacy.
First, ChatRoulette encourages users to be at least 16 years old, and prohibits pornographic behavior. Furthermore, it is important to stress that it “encourages,” meaning that there is no real age limitations because nothing states it on front page, nor does it even ask for a birthdate (not that someone can’t fake their age but it is a small step that a majority of websites take towards regulating the type of content that can be seen by minors). If a user fails to obey the rules, the connecting user can “report” the individual, and if they gets an additional two reports within five minutes then they are banned for 10-40 minutes. This might not seem like much for a site that is not only occupied by both minors and adults, but which is also prevailing of pornographic conduct. Nonetheless, it allows people to randomly connect to others around the world, creating a private and personal communication experience.
The less “hands on” approach of ChatRoulette means less liability in the law. The terms and conditions are not even listed and is based on what is “suggested” by word of mouth. There is no punishment because there is nothing tangible to argue against. For all they know it is a free market. In contrast, Facebook’s terms and conditions are heavily documented on their website, conveniently listed at the very bottom of every page under “Privacy” and “A Guide to Privacy on Facebook.” These help educate users of Facebook’s privacy functions and policies which allow you to limit who can see your profile and what they can see. Currently, Facebook has been facing many disputes regarding its ever-changing and increasingly complex privacy settings. This is a clear example of how more rules and functions may seem like a better idea, but can possibly create more problems for the developer and users alike.
Another question to ask is does the website’s anonymity have an advantage over other websites? It lessens the constraints that a standard conversation holds and opens up the value of “random conversation.” Would someone be less inclined to say or do something if the other partner didn’t know their true identity? From experience this was indeed true because the types of conversations and content seen were widely ranged from personal to sexual. All over ChatRoulette, there are those who enjoy masturbating to someone watching them. With ChatRoulette being so free-form, users take advantage of this all of the times. Yet even with this “anonymity,” people differ in how they present themselves. Some show just their private parts, some show their whole body, and some show their whole body and face. Are people still scared of what they are allowing others to see, even if they don’t know who they are? The answer to this may be because of technology and third-party applications.
ChatRouletteMap is a website that takes pictures of users currently using ChatRoulette and plots the exact location using their ip address. The user is not aware that their photo is captured and posted, but the only way to take it off is to show proof of identity. This not only infiltrates the feeling of security of anonymity, but takes it beyond to another level of safety. User complaints about the invasion of security in ChatRoulette can be compared with negative remarks about one of the more recent developments of Google, Google Buzz. Google buzz, like ChatRoulette encroaches on the privacy of the user and provides public information about the user without their consent. When you first go onto Google Buzz, it automatically sets you up with followers and people to follow. The problem though is that by default, the people you follow and the people who follow you are made public to anyone who looks at your profile, which in other words allows someone to go into your profile and see who you email and chat with most frequently. Furthermore, according to an article by Miguel Helft titled “Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service,” unauthorized permissions to allocate users' personal information has resulted in even bigger issues, one of which involves a woman who discovered that a list of people, which may have included her ex-abusive husband or people who sent hostile comments to her blog, were automatically following her and her comments on Google Reader. (Helft 1) As opposed to the legal actions that Google has taken to alter their security measures on Google Buzz, ChatRoulette has done nothing of the sort. While ChatRoulleteMap is a third-party application as opposed to Google Buzz's direct association with the Google Company, ChatRoulette's inaction can be an indicator of the future of developments in the future.
VISUALS:
Back in the day, people had to resort to analog chat rooms to meet people. Conversation may have been great, but you were always bogged with the worry that the person on the other end may not be all that they seem. With the advent of ChatRoulette, the visuals modern day webcam's provide gives people the opportunity to see who they are talking to, adding another dimension to the anthropology of chat room interaction.
Chatroulette offers varying degrees of visuals. As a whole, participants show either their whole face, the lower half of their face, just their body, just their penis or breasts, their whole body, or their lap. Though showing genitalia is normally deemed an intimate act, on ChatRoulette, it is routine. I've talked to many users, some who masturbate without showing their face and some who do. Some also engage in small talk beforehand but most are already doing so while others ask up front. Those who don’t show their faces hide their identities to keep from being recorded. Still, many claim that they would show their faces if their partner "seems ok", or engages in the mutual masturbation. Seeing someone’s face seems to be a privilege that can only be earned. It is the only point of self-conscious users worry about. To next someone based off physical appearance can be more damaging than nexting someone who is naked. All the while, they never asked for my name or get try to get to know me at all as if distances themselves further from a real person. Furthermore, they rarely ask to meet partners outside of chatroulette. If anything, they exchange emails but it rarely turns into a real relationship. when asked why they are so aroused by the image of someone else masturbating with them, some claimed to like being with someone because masturbating alone was too lonely. Some claimed that having the ability to arouse a partner so much that they climax is the greatest satisfaction. Others like the thrill of having strangers watch them (You never know what you will get). In addition to people masturbating alone, we've also witnessed couples having sex for the camera. They claimed to like it when others watched, but when asked to comment on why, they nexted us or continued to have sex. Only one female observer talked to these particular participants so the results might vary if they had been talking to a male or a group of people.
Chatroulette’s set up allows strangers to interact with one another through webcams (as mentioned earlier). With this comes an endless possibility of how people visually present themselves. The access to cyberspace and information leads to “the freedom to reinvent oneself and to construct entire social worlds free from the limits of embodied reality in everyday life,” (Bernal 661). In many aspects, this relates to the freedom of ChatRoulette. Users are given a “visual” first impression of other users from various parts of the world. This allows users to present themselves differently from their daily appearances and to divulge into fantasies.
Through various sessions of observations, there were prominent themes in bodily presentations as mentioned previously. However, since the sample of participants observed were from randomization, it would be difficult to generalize for the whole ChatRoulette audience. Rather, the observations collected offer one take on visuals.
Often times many present themselves with different angles revealing certain parts of the body. Many of these users present themselves in ways that they want to be perceived. As mentioned by Walther, “Online users can organize the information flow and enhance self-image by strategically selecting how and what to convey to the receiver," (Walter 32). Although Walther was making this comparison to facebook, the same can be said for ChatRoulette. Users are able to present themselves the way they want the other person to perceive them. For instance, if there were blank black screens on their end, it would usually signify a hesitation to show their face. During my interview, I would often times question their hesitations and found that many were scared to show their face out of fear.
In an interview with a one user, I asked if the guest purposely hide their face. The response was like typical responses from others. But was I found interesting was his reason for not showing his face. They responded by stating that "some freaks might record it,"showing obvious fears in displaying his face. There could potentially be suggestive images of users, which could later on affect their work, family, etc. So, hesitation in showing one's face is a prevalent theme. Most interviewers tend to become comfortable in the conversation and eventually show their face.
Often times, black screens get “nexted”. Users have the ability to skip to the next randomly generated person. Different reasons for nexting may be because there is no one there, the person isn’t attractive, etc.Your appearance becomes the reason for being “nexted” As Walther mentioned, “People judge the authenticity of self-presentation online," (Walther 28). Unfortunately for ChatRoulette, appearance is often times judged and being nexted occurs if deemed unattractive.
Users typically like the reassurance of being able to visually see the other person they talk to. Some have found ways to protect their identity while still physically showing their bodies. Some ways would be by only showing angles of their body (such as a missing head), while others wear some form of disguise, like a mask. These are just some of the ways that people visually present themselves.
CONCLUSION
As short as these short snippets of conversation are, every action, every look, and every visual is loaded with a subculture of sexual tension, dissociation of identity, and risk of exposure. Although the technology gives people a window to a diverse population of people and cultures, we've noticed that many users forgo this opportunity to act upon their most basic animal urges. While it is possible for ChatRoulette's user base to expand beyond it's current masturbating population, the current trend seem to be growing at an alarming pace with more users asking to see our breasts rather than ask our names. One can not help but to question how this reflects current society now? Without social norms to guide social interaction, ChatRoulette provides a free flow plateau for users to speak and act as they feel without fear of judgment. Still, users attribute every hello and "next" to new set of social norms, breeding a brand new culture which is bound to evolve over the next generations of users. Although we can only speculate what rules will form next, it is always possible for a 180 degree shift in population and entertainment. It all depends on you.
Bibliography :
1.Helft, Miguel. "Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service - NYTimes.com." www.nytimes.com. New York Times, 12 Feb 2010. Web. 9 Jun 2010.
2.Bilton, Nick. "The Surreal World of Chatroulete - NYTimes.com." www.nytimes.com. New York times, 19 Feb 2010.
3.Stone, Brad. "Chatroulette's Creator, 17, Introduces himself -NYTimes.com." www.nytimes.com New York Times, 13, Feb 2010
4.Walther, Joseph B et al. “The Role of Friends’ Appearance and Behavior on Evaluations of Individuals on Facebook: Are we Known by the Company We Keep?” Human Communication Research, 2008, pp.28-49.
5.Bernal, Victoria. “Eritrea on-line: Diaspora, cyberspace, and the public sphere.” American Ethnologist, 2005. Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 660-675.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)