vizster; visualizing online social network

presentation and article written for the class, advanced media aesthetics
Referred article, vizster, visualizing online social network, (pdf file link).

Summary

In my personal view-point, this paper concentrate on 2 important concept. The first one is visualization. If so, what is the information visualization? Though it’s hard to make clear definition of visualization, I believe the most important purpose of visualization is to understand something better. Undoubtedly, through the simplification and emphasis, the information visualization help for us to understand and comprehend the object better. Then, in this article, what is the object for understanding?
It is friendster. Friendster.com is a social network service. And this is another main subject in paper. Like cyworld in South Korea, friendster helps people to mange their relationship in internet. The description page of friendster.com will be more helpful.

• Friendster is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them.
• Online adults, 18 and up, choose Friendster to connect with friends, family, school, groups, activities and interests.

The essential concept is very simple. From now on, we’ll cover how it works in short.
You can make your account through the invitation or sign-up. And the first page shows your current profile. Your bookmarks, groups and your friends, too. But, If you signed up by yourself, you would have no friends at the first time. To make friends, you can use various ways. You can type your offline friends’ e-mail address or their name. Or you can browse the member list by their photos or videos. Also, you can search by keywords in the pre-determined criteria such as hometown, movie, music, books and so on.
That’s vizster. In this paper, the authors said vizster is a visualization system that end-users of social networking services, friendster, could use to facilitate discovery and increased awareness of their online community. And from now on I want to show how the authors accomplish their goal.

See slide # 13. This is the screenshot of vizster. In the left panel you can see the structure of the lines and icons which consists graph. Each icon, the authors call it node, represent the member of friendster. And the line, I mean edge, show the relationship between the members. In the right panel, you can see the individual information about the selected member. Each time you clicked the member icon, the right panel exchange, and will show you the member’s information. But I think the essential function of vizster is to show the connection between the members. Who is who’s friend? That’s the main concern.

First, you can find one member’s friends by the different saturation of member icon with mouse over action. Or, it’s possible to know the connection between two specific members. You can type the desired keyword to the text field by yourself. [See slide #16].
Or you can choose the keyword in the given criteria at the individual information panel on right side. Then, you can see the highlighted member icon which answers with your keyword. In this slide, you can see the members for the keyword, “student”.

See slide #17. Here is the different mode of visualization which is called x-ray mode, to visualize attribute values such as age, number of friends, gender, relation status, or time since last log-in. Now, you can see the gender difference at here. You can happen to know whether someone is male or female among Amanda’s friends. And the distribution of gender, too. Through the clustering close members, you can see the overview of the community structure. And with the dragging the community slider, you can change the state of clustering as you want.

After development of vizster, the authors test their work through the public installation and informal laboratory setting. The public installation was took in San Francisco with the group of party-goers and early-adopters of friendster. The test in lab, the participants were also friendster members. The authors found that both group enjoyed exploring social network and playing with this tool. And during the process of discovering the pattern of the community, the participants re-produce the story about the community. In this way, they tends to give a higher level of sophistication to the community analysis that is shown. As a result, the end-users of vizster use this tool to explore and play with their networks.

Topics

topic 1. the information and its visualization in the sociological context

higher level patterns of community

it can be regarded as the characteristics or meaning of information. Shannon and Wiener also said that the we can get information from the extracting pattern from something in his book, The Human use of Human beings: Cybernetics and Society. the interesting thing is the Wiener and Shannon derive their definition from the theory of the signal processing theory in the communication theory. Though, as I think, the partial concept of the visualization is obtained from the practical situation, the central concept is based on the other related studies, such as sociology, communication theory and cybernetics. For this reason, the coupling of the sociological data-set and the visualization of the technical regeneration is not a strange at all. In other words, the discovery is not a technology-based concept rather it occurs in our everyday life in spite of our unawareness. I want to insist that the discovery of the pattern as a process of producing information exists in the social perspective of our culture as well as in the individual context.

topic 2. virtual subjectivity

The most difficult part for reasoning about subjectivity is the sense of alienation between one’s representational subjectivity to public and his own sense of subjectivity or subject. One’s representational subjectivity in real world is out of subject’s control, or most of us believe that this proposition is true. On the contrary, in the virtual world or the online social networking service, the members assume that they can detach their own subjectivity which is generated during his online social behavior. That is to say, the created subjectivity in the online social networking service, i.e. the virtual world, is the different aspect of subject. Or it is possible to say that the virtual subjectivity has nothing to do with his real world subject. Like we need to have a set of several masks for our social behavior, the online subjectivity is the another set of our masks to live in the virtual society.

topic 3. information visualization and database

As a whole system, the platform for online social networking service imitates the real world. During this imitation, the complex system of real world is simplified by the generalization. And this generalization needs judgment. Because, during generalization, you should judge which factor in given dataset is necessary or not. For there is no photo-realistic method to represent or imitate the snapshot of online social activity, to grap the flash moment of virtual world, or to log the whole data-transfer, we have to judge which part of human activity has to be converted to the data in server. With this judgment, the architect who design online social network service represents the dynamics of the real world. Then, as a framework which represents the human activity, the database is a result of the judgment and representation. This premise can be a start of the asethetic discourse on the database. Further, we can think about the connectivity between the database as a structure of selective data and the information visualization as a reflection of real wolrd.