Thesis preproposal

New research question: How does the process of authenticating humanness affect the perception of organizational presence in social network sites?

Literature review (and an unrelated resolution)

Here are the categories I'm looking into for my literature review:

1. Identity. Background information on how people view themselves in relation to others and to organizations.
2. Social presence. How individuals and organizations establish presence (via technology) in social network sites like Twitter.
3. Social interaction. Background stuff from sociology (Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life—I really need to read this) and linguistics (material on how impressions of individuals are formed via dialogue).
4. Authenticity and authentication. Investigation of why people need to identify each other. Using the abridged Turing test in Blade Runner as a metaphor for human-computer interaction and the reason why/process for determining whether another being is human. Some background information on the uncanny valley (physiological response generated by robots). Judith Donath's "Being Real": examples of chat room encounters. Foucault and the panopticon (used as a metaphor for social network sites): The urge to punish in a community that watches itself.
5. "Intelligent agents" and organizations. Turkle?

I just realized that I have to have a draft of this done by February 1—next Sunday. Eek! Looks like I'll be writing every night this week.

In other news, I've decided to run the Chicago Marathon in October. I'm starting off with a half-marathon program on the Nike+ site, which should enable me to complete that distance by the end of April. Then I'll do the 28-week (or so) marathon program or join a running group to get me ready for the event. Aly and I just joined (re-joined in my case) the National Capital YMCA in downtown DC, and I'm really psyched to have an indoor track available to me. We'll see if I can balance all this training with my volleyball league and my thesis. Oh, and work (which is going pretty well these days).

I can already tell that getting adequate sleep will be the key to all of this increased activity. With that, I'm off to bed.

Recovering

I made it through inauguration! It was very cold -- especially once the cold from the frozen ground started seeping through my shoes and socks. Also, leaving the Mall was challenging. But things went amazingly well overall. I've very glad I went.

And now I'm going to get back to my regularly scheduled life. (With a renewed sense of purpose, however.)

Inauguration expedition prep

Because I like to bounce wildly from school-related posts to banality:

I'm preparing to head down to the National Mall to witness the inauguration festivities on Tuesday. The plan is to get down to the Lincoln Memorial, where a jumbotron will be set up at the steps of the memorial. It's far from the Capitol and the parade route, but I'm just looking to be among the hundreds of thousands of people who are heading into D.C. to be a part of this event. It's at my doorstep, so I know I'll regret it if I don't make the effort to trek downtown.

It's going to be cold (about 25-30 degrees with a stiff wind + wind chills in the teens, or at least that's what a recent forecast predicted), so I'm trying to prepare myself for standing in the cold for hours. We went to a Dick's Sporting Goods in Fairfax, Va. yesterday -- as far as I know, most of the outdoor stores inside the Beltway were completely sold out of long underwear and hand warmers -- to pick up some base layers for the event. The long underwear was offered in three weights: lightweight, midweight, and expedition-strength. Although I briefly considered the expedition-strength ("Standing for hours among a huge crowd of people in a barren, windswept swamp qualifies as an expedition, right?"), I stuck with the midweight. I also picked up a pair of heavyweight wool hiking socks -- my first pair! Handwarmers and granola bars were also procured.

We'll see how all this gear works out on Tuesday. I might be hilariously over-outfitted for this "expedition," but better safe than sorry. (Feel free to make fun of me and my outdoor-passive ways, Morgan.)

Initial stab at my thesis topic

Here's some material I posted as my preliminary thesis topic last night. I would absolutely love feedback on this -- does it make sense? Where do I need to provide explanation/explication? Does the whole thing seem doable as a project?

How do individuals assess the humanness of an organizational avatar in a social network site, and what factors determine the suitability of these avatars within the context of their chosen site?

A couple years ago, college admissions offices started having freshmen blog about their experiences for the benefit of prospective students. Having worked in university communications, I feared that the resulting blogs would be tightly controlled by public relations offices and generally stripped of their humanity. Although I was pleasantly surprised by the freedom afforded these admissions bloggers, I started to think about how individuals visiting these sites constructed a mental impression of the personalities represented there. I found a paper describing an encounter between an individual and a chat bot particularly interesting—could the act of determining humanness become the crux of marketing, given that humanness is no longer assured when dealing with online interaction?

Fast forward to the present day, when organizations (really an automated program, an individual or a team of individuals) are establishing presence on Twitter, a social network site. Organizations do not have the same level of control over their presence as they would on their own website; they must work within the milieu of the social network site to convey their reputation. This can be challenging because Twitter does not distinguish between accounts representing an individual and accounts representing an organization.

How does an individual determine—via a sort of Turing test—whether a human, several humans or a computer program is behind an account on Twitter? If an account is judged to be human (or not), what causes an individual to choose to connect to that account, and what factors (such as social utility) influence whether or not that connection is maintained over time?

Recently, signaling theory (from biology and game theory) has been used to evaluate reputation and trust in virtual communities. A large amount of messages sent on Twitter are publicly available, and it is possible to reconstruct (or at least quantify) exchanges between two accounts. I plan to use signaling theory to identify the different cues provided by organizations on social network sites and how they are interpreted by individuals connecting with those organizations.

3.1, rinse, repeat

I'm trying to go running on a regular basis in 2009. This sounds kind of silly, but my interest was piqued by the following description of Obama's exercise routine:

In his 1995 autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," Obama said he was a casual drug user and an underachiever until he decided to start running three miles each day.

(As Duties Weigh Obama Down, His Faith in Fitness Only Increases")
Running is something the Nike+iPod system made palatable to me only a few months ago, when a friend convinced me to run a 5K. I had never really run before (excepting gym class), but figured I should be able to handle 3.1 miles. The first race was tough, but things rapidly got easier from there. Since that first race, I've run another two 5Ks and a 10K. (Here's a photo taken by Aly of me in the home stretch of a hilly course at the National Arboretum.) Over the last two months, though, I've stopped running on a regular basis as the weather got colder and my load at school and work increased.

I've set a modest goal of running 18 miles in January. (3.1 miles down, 14.9 to go!) I'm going to try to adhere to a regular running schedule despite the fact that I'm doing my thesis along with continuing full-time work. I thought I'd be bored during runs, but they've proven to be a great chance to clear my head after a long day. Now if I could only get up early enough to go running before work ...

Finishing what I start

I'm trying to slowly work up to the New Improved Me (tm). Today's focus is on finishing what I start—a notoriously weak area for me. I tend to go off in fifteen different directions at once; I thrive on multitasking. The problem, though, is that very few (or sometimes none!) of those things that I start simultaneously ever get done, and I'm not good at going back and working incrementally on the outstanding items until I can check them off the list. (I'm much better at just making newer and ostensibly better lists.)

So today I'm trying to make sure I close the loop on the things I have to do around the house. (Yes, it's a way to procrastinate on the more difficult tasks I have to do—such as working on my thesis proposal and tackling some stuff for work—but I'm trying to start with the little things and gain momentum from there.)

The other thing I'm working on is to constantly refer back to the list of tasks I have in Things, and to make sure that those tasks are doable items and not amorphous tasks like "finish thesis proposal" or "clean house."

Two (interesting!) recent articles on the topic of productivity:

Diary of a Self-Help Dropout: Flirting With the 4-Hour Workweek (Wired)
New Year, New You? Nice Try (The New York Times)

Congee!

I'm trying to replicate a breakfast dish—congee, or a kind of rice porridge—I had growing up. Like most things, I didn't really appreciate how much I like this dish until I moved out of my parents' house and didn't have access to it on a regular basis. I've had congee at dim sum (Cantonese), but I think this might be a Thai version of the dish. Hard to say.

To make the congee in a rice cooker:

1 cup of jasmine rice
6 cups of water (less or more depending on how soupy you want the rice)

To top the congee off, put a fried egg or two on top. I think you can add some oyster sauce to make things a bit saltier. I've also added turmeric and green onions (scallions) on top.

I'm waiting for the rice to finish cooking this morning so I can start frying up some eggs. Mmm.