A Connection is Made

“We're living in a world of connections – and it matters which ones get made”

Haraway (quoted in Kunzru (1997) as quoted in Angus et al (2001)).

Pedagogically the automated influences on users of social spaces offer a peculiar blend of opportunity and threat. Prompts, encouragements and rewards for participation are all valuable tools for motivating active participation by students in the learning process - particularly where a cognitive, experiential or socially critical pedagogical approach is taken (Toohey 1999) - and encourages the formation of communities of praxis beyond set modules or periods of study. However the manipulative effects of algorithms which aim to boost activity in general, rather than being tailored to specific pedagogical or professional modes of interaction, pose a significant threat to the emergence of academic communities. Social spaces which provides updates to users (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc) algorithmically select the priority of updates. They may rank immediacy over all other factors (e.g. Twitter) but they may also use less transparent rules to organise and filter information so that it appears to be most relevant to the user (e.g. Facebook, Google). Bayne (2010) talks about the sense of ghostliness in online spaces, of being simultaneously present and absent, of a sense of the digitally uncanny. Online social spaces seem can be a key contributor to this sense of the uncanny with the appearance, and the selective ordering and the unpredictable timeline of personal updates all playing a role. The latter is a particularly peculiar component since it can mean an action from days ago appears equal in importance and currency to a message posted only a few minutes or hours ago creating a disquieting sense of the uncanny and/or giving the sense of particularly active or inactive students or peers.

The design and automated prompts of social sites may additionally force dynamics of existing offline relationships as danah boyd et al (2008) discuss in the context of US teen use of MySpace:

“The process of articulating and ranking Friends is one of the ways in which social media take what is normally implicit and make it explicit... it creates or accentuates hierarchies where they did not exist offline, or were deliberately and strategically ambiguous, thus forcing a new set of social-status negotiations.”

Automated (or automatically prompted) filtering also builds a positive feedback loop: you may be connected to many more people in an online social space but you may actually be unconsciously muting those you interact with less often. The imperative of social sites to gain new users may prevent such sites from becoming autopoietic systems (Hayles 1999) though in the near ubiquitously used structure of Facebook the system could become self-making, closed and insular. To give this a physical analogy one would have to imagine a party or classroom or office in which one was only able to perceive and bump into the most talked-to contacts or friends. Strong connections will be reenforced but weak connections may be lost rather than maintained or altered by serendipitous moments. Creating an effective pedagogical “space of enclosure” (Lankshear et al (1996) quoted in Usher and Edwards (1998)) is potentially threatened by such feedback loops triggered by automated prompts, as well as by the distribution of presences across many parallel online social sites.