My First Attempt to Deliver my Sticky Message

With the help of my 6th grade sister, I made my own account of this social network popular among young kids.

This is what the social network site LIVLY looks like. My pet is the black hog-like animal. Seems like those young kids communicate via these so-called cyber pets, and these pets deviler emails to other pets. So it seems like I need to write my message and hand it to my pet hog, and the hog will send my message to my sister's friends, and hopefully her friends would send my message along to other kids in school who use this site. Seems easy, but the hard part is that this pet thing will die if you dont feed and play with it (oh bother). My personal goal for now is to try not to kill my little messenger.

My first chainmail will have a short message, and a funny illustration / comic strip attatched to it so that the message will be entertaining and hopefully more children will decide to pass it along. It may look something like this:

Message: 最近日が落ちるのも早くなり、すっかり秋ですね！下校時間が遅くなるときは友達と帰るか、人通りの多い明るい道を通って帰ろう！変質者には注意してね！

Comic: どうしても一人で帰らなきゃいけない時は・・・迫力のある顔をすれば大丈夫かも！？

If I have time, I might be able to make this into a series with different illustration sent periodically, to remind the children during this term.

My Sticky Message

My Message
1. What is your sticky message? (Barabasi 3) What is the idea you wish to promote or issue/problem you want to try to 'solve'?

Warn young age elementary school kids that kidnap incidents happen frequently these days, and tell them to watch out when they are out on the streets alone.


Knowledge of social network.
2. Who is your strategic social group? Can you identify and define the organisational base you will need to develop and/ortap into?

Mainly kids aged 6- 12 will be my target. I will try to get access to some local elementary schools.


Strategy for network building.
3. How will work to create your organisational base? How will you spread and encourage others to take up your message?

Firstly, I will find out from my siblings (two of them are within my target area) what is popular among them in school. According to my younger sister (age 11), kids in her class use a social network site called Lively where they pick a cyber pet and use them to communicate with their friends' pets online. I can get my own account there and deviler my message (along with illustrations maybe) and make it like a chainmail. Also I can post the message on the Lively board.

Questions and My Answers

1. What is the principle of six degrees of separation? What number of social links does any one person need to be connected to global society? p. 30

The principle is the idea that we are all a part of a really dense web called society and that it doesnt take much to connect anyone to any other one living in this world right now. (tk)

2. How is the fabric of society today different from pre-internet society? p. 31

It is different in a way that it is a lot easier to have access to information we need, and also a lot quicker. (tk)

3. How many more links separate any pair of web pages compared to people in society? What can explain the difference? p. 34

According to Barbasi, the average from a website to another is 19 links. This is partially because a webpage of one thing is more likely to be connected to sites that are similar or with the same topic, while human in society can have connection to multiple types of people. Also, the number differs.

4. So far, what ranges of separation have network scientists discovered in different kinds of networks? p. 34

5. What does research suggest about the fundamentals of networks? p.34-35

The more the webpages, the lower increase rate of the average links of seperation.

6. What is your estimate of your personal number of connections to society? What connections are your strongest?

My personal strongest connections will be young kids, due to many younger siblings I have and the English classes I teach. Also, I guess I can have access to Medical Institution and Political groups from my parents' and grandparents' connections.

The Third Link: Six degrees of Separation

A Brief Summary
In 1967, Stan Milgram, a professor at Harvard did a research to discover the distance between any two people in the United States. According to his research, he found that the median number of intermediate persons was 5.5. However, when John Guare made this into a Broadway musical (and eventually it was made into a movie), he applied this "six degrees of separation to the whole world, changing it from the research of Milgram, which was limited within the United States. This created a myth among the people.
However, while the six degrees theory maybe a myth considering the whole world, Milgram's theory made one thing clear; that our world is connected in which no one is more than a few handshakes away. Barbasi claims our world is small "because society is a very dense web".

To see if the web society works in a similar way, Barbasi cooperated with Reka Albert and Hawoong Jeong to research how many clicks of the mouse it would take from one web page to another. They found that it took "19 degrees of Separation" for this task.


Personal Reaction
This theory of "six degrees of separation" was extremely interesting, and although it is still hard to believe the medium is 6 people, (personally I think 42 letters out of 160 is too small to make the assumption a theory) it certainly proved that our society is much denser than I'd have thought it to be.

Reading Summary and Reaction

Summary
A 15 year old boy from Canada (who decided to call himself Mafiaboy online) surprised the world by hacking numorous computers and attacking the world widely known site, Yahoo. Barbasi compares this situation with Paul, a man who went from place to place to spread Christianity, and made this his life-long activity. Barbasi insists that the similarity between the two is that they "both use the power of social or computer networks" to achieve what they had done.


My Reaction
I thought this reading was very much interesting in the way that it compared two people who were different in age, achievement, and the time they lived in, and yet saught similarity between the two for using social network. I thought this vision was very unique. I agree to Barbasi that we do live in a world where we can not exist without interacting with someone else, and the strange thing is that most of the people who we interact with today may be people who we have never met or seen. Back in the days when Paul lived, the people who they interacted with might have been people they see everyday in the market place....but how many of us today know who made the wheat and corn of the cereal bowl we had this breakfast? Who was the person driving the bus that we rode to school this morning? We are all linked, and we all co-exist with the help of others. But I feel that we barely know anything about these links we are connected to. Now with the internet spreading over the world, it is even easier to achieve something with the help from another who you dont know about - and we may not even have to move from our seats! What we trade and move around is information, data, and paper money. But before we get too involved with these, I think we should stop for once, and reconsider the dangers that may lie ahead, and also learn more about our social community/ network we belong in.

Techno Biography

I currently use several SNS sites including myspace, xanga, Facebook, and mixi....although for mixi, I barely use it and strongly feel that it lacks in interesting functions. I use these SNS sites to keep in touch with my friends who went abroad and friends who live oversea.

Ive always been the family 'photographer' role ever since I can remember, and I use Photo Impression and several other editing software to edit the photos. I sometimes draw illustrations and edit them with these software as well.

I also do video editing with (oops, I forgot the software name) and burn them onto DVDs.



I guess that's pretty much it.

Getting Started...

I just wanted to know how this will come out in my blog.