It’s not right to have that many post-its attached to the beast after only reading the Background Chapter:
academic
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[PhD] Viva preparation advice?
Monday November 16, 2009 @ 09:48 AM (UTC)In seven days, I sit my viva voce, that part of the PhD candidate’s self-imposed intellectual insanity aimed at determining whether s/he has personally created sound original research that contributes something to the academic dialogue. If the viva is successful (given the varying degrees of ‘successful’), the candidate passes and forces everyone s/he knows to call him/her ‘Doc’ for at least a month. We won’t think about what happens if the viva is not successful.
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[PhD] Viva date is set
Tuesday October 06, 2009 @ 07:45 PM (UTC)Gulp. It’s 23 November, right as I’m coasting to a close in the Digital Revolution project.
What on earth shall I do when it’s all done?
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[PhD] How do you spell relief? S-u-b-m-i-s-s-i-o-n.
Monday October 05, 2009 @ 08:09 PM (UTC)I’ve not yet had a moment of gratuitous PhD image pr0n based on the final product that I submitted on 14 August. I guess I’ve not wanted to jinx my viva. Ah, to hell with it. Here are a few key images that give you an idea of what it ended up looking like on the day.
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[Games Theory] Time to press pause before hitting another level
Wednesday August 19, 2009 @ 08:44 PM (UTC)Aleks Krotoski
The Guardian
Wednesday 19 August 2009There are few things more satisfying in life than levelling up. That, after all, is what games are all about. As a long-time player, I have a tendency to look at the world through console-coloured glasses. Recently, I had one of those mini-boosts in XP when I was on a train. I had quite happily, furiously, been scribbling in the margins of a document, drawing spaghetti arrows from one end to the other and back again, jotting down incomprehensible notes for myself and scratching out passages of text, when out of the blue my pen ran out of ink. It wasn’t blocked, it hadn’t dried up: I had used the entire charge of red in my ballpoint pen, from the moment it was first de-capped through to its final stroke. When I realised just what had happened, I heard that telltale little “ding” and knew I had a new trophy for my achievements shelf.
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[PhD] Draft 3: the last one before the big one
Friday August 07, 2009 @ 09:19 PM (UTC)PhD Draft 3: 82,495 words (without footnotes). 85,107 (with).
Pleased to see not much has changed in the process (even though i can assure you that loads has…)
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[PhD] Introduction to the Literature Review
Thursday August 06, 2009 @ 09:22 AM (UTC)Let’s get meaty. Here’s the introduction to the background chapter, in which I set out my stall.
The Internet is a communication medium that has revolutionised information sharing, knowledge ownership and interpersonal interactions (Lazer, 2007). Highly inter-connected social software networks like weblogs, forums and other collaborative online entities like virtual worlds have challenged traditional notions of information ownership, resulting in a reconsideration of online contributors’ involvement in news reporting and other forms of citizen participation. In the four decades since the original ARPAnet was established between four universities, the Internet has transformed from an exclusive technology with few gatekeepers into an open technology that can be used and contributed to by anyone. This brings to bear new questions about existing approaches to social influence that focus on interpersonal attributes like trust and credibility, and group processes like normative influence and social identity, as physically distributed networks of individuals who engage with one another in virtual communities – from different cultures and perspectives – consider which innovative attitudes and behaviours to adopt or to reject.
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[PhD] Introduction to Discussion
Monday August 03, 2009 @ 06:40 PM (UTC)Pulling it all together. It’s only 11 pages tho. It was 22. Hrmm…
This research was carried out to gain insight into the unique contribution social network analytic concepts offer to the prediction of influence above those observed by social psychological analyses. The results of three studies confirmed that network strength, network density, network position and network exposure predicted attitudes and behaviours in the online community Second Life, and that they explained the variance in these outcomes in different ways and at different times than psychological predictors like interpersonal and normative source attributes, perceived attitudes and perceived experiences.
This thesis set out to explore this question by focussing on three component parts: why network strength features have been effective at predicting influence, why the density of a network and the positions of an individual within it predicted personal attitudes and why an individual’s position in a network relative to his/her Friend and the amount of exposure s/he had to an innovation via his/her direct contacts predicted when an individual would adopt the innovation as it diffused through the online community.
To assess these questions, this research tested the relationships between network strength and measures of interpersonal trust, credibility, social comparison and prototypicality, it identified how network density and network position affected perceived attitudes and it followed the interpersonal pathway of an innovation across a nine month period through the Second Life community.
From these analyses, two themes emerged. The first dealt with how social network attributes related to psychological predictors, including the features of network analysis that were proxies for psychological measures that have been associated with social influence in the literature.
The second theme that emerged considered the complimentary relationship between network and psychological measures that went some way in explaining why influence occurred when a social system’s structure did not support it, and when interpersonal and normative features of influence did not predict it. It also explored how network measures established the foundations for psychological influence and the implications for network measures on the development of the perception of norms.
Throughout the thesis, special attention has been paid to the context of the analysis. The literature has argued that the unique interpersonal and structural features of online communities challenge many of the assumptions of offline social psychological theories, which has led to the emergence of influence theories that have focussed on the impact of the leanness of cyberspace on group processes (e.g., Spears & Lea, 1994). However, although this research found that there were some contextual differences, in general, the psychological processes of social influence appeared to function in the same ways as offline. It is argued that researchers should adapt their tools and practices to consider the context, but that the interpersonal and normative experiences in online communities, on the whole, remain the same. -
[PhD] Introduction to Study 3 (Draft 3): why people adopt an online innovation
Saturday August 01, 2009 @ 09:49 AM (UTC)Friends title: The one about what influenced people to use a new service on the Web.
If you’ve followed the line of thought that I’ve laid out in my thesis based on the Study 1 and Study 2 introductions, you might like to complete the set with this introduction, from Study 3. It’s notably different from the previous version of this introduction. That’s what you get for re-writing it (re-imagining it?) x 3…
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[PhD] My new objective
Friday July 31, 2009 @ 08:20 AM (UTC)To finish the thesis before i finish this pencil.The small one.
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