Riassunto esame Digital consumers culture, Prof. Caliandro Alessandro, libro consigliato Libri per esame Digital Consumers Culture , Vari

Facebook

Facebook is the most popular social network. Founded in 2003, by four Harvard students, initially allowed users to rate "hot or not" female Harvard attendees. It evolved into Facebook in 2004. Unlike Twitter, users on FB become "friends", in a relationship that has to be reciprocated to exist. Each FB member has a personal profile, known as a "Diary", with a profile picture, where the posts one publishes or is tagged in appear. Pages are public profiles of people, organizations and various entities.

A number of affordances shape the availability of information on personal profiles: for individual profiles, various options are available, including Only Friends, Friends of Friends and Public.

In the News feed all posts of the user's friend and Pages liked appear. A FB post, defined as "status update", is not limited in the number of characters and can take the form of written text, pictures, links or videos. Users can comment on or

like the content, or reshare the post.

In 2013, FB introduced its hashtag functionality. Due to the privacy settings, retrieving information on FB is relatively more complicated. The main tool used is Netvizz, which enables exporting data in standard file formats to map networks of friends, groups, and Pages and analyze them. The most-used services before Netvizz were Ora and TouchGraph, with sensible limitations, since they produced descriptive analyses with network visualizations.

Pages offer tools to marketers for the management of publics and customer interaction, for promotional purposes. Users, however, use FB for a variety of purposes, including keeping in touch with friends, identity construction and self-presentation.

INSTAGRAM

Instagram is the most important photo-sharing application, but the first largely successful photo-sharing digital environment was Flickr, which offered amateur and professional photographers a space to post their works and engage in interaction. In its current

Users can also subscribe to other user's channels, receive updates about new postings and create playlists of videos. The main element of social interaction is the ability to comment on the videos. Users can also like or dislike a video (the latter being a feature that rarely appears in any other social networking site). Today, the business uses of YT are widespread, mainly in relation to marketing and advertising.

The other main platform affordance is the "related" videos algorithm, which suggests content based on a video a user is watching, producing a string of 25 related videos. It works on the basis of a "collaborative filtering analysis": the degree of relatedness between two videos is not a mere computational outcome, but actually a social one, since if many watch a certain video immediately after another, the likelihood that this specific video appears as a suggestion increases.

The associations among related videos can be translated into a graph wherein a

Algorithms are crucial affordances that intervene as nonhuman actors, on more or less visible features, mediating relationships among users as well as the capacity of users to see and access certain content. Algorithms have a number of social implications: for instance, think about the number of likes, retweets or mentions to a post, and the extent to which this indicates the level of attention around it; this can be very useful for the measurement of the effectiveness of a campaign, especially if paired with the analysis of the number and quality of comments.

One of the most well-known ways in which algorithms intermediate is when they are involved in the measurement or approximation of a user's feedback and reviews, a very common feature that pertains to a variety of platforms, such as eBay or Amazon. The "Online Reputation Systems" generate a score on the basis of other users' feedback and reviews. Their

An API (application programming interfaces) consists of a set of routines, protocols and tasks that can be interrogated (query) to obtain a set of data, located on the software platform they belong to. Each social media has at least one API publicly available. Each API has access limitations.

Twitter, for instance, offers various APIs, the most relevant are the Search API (allows users to retrieve the last 5000 tweets related to a given keyword, within a seven-day time frame) and the Streaming API (allows users to access 1% of all the available tweets in real-time).

Concerning FB, the most important ones are the Graph API, the Public Feed API and the Keywords API, alongside with the Atlas API and Marketing API, for marketing-oriented uses. Through the Atlas API one can manage a campaign, pull a report or assign ads, while the Marketing API serves the

The purpose of audience management and ad management is to effectively manage and target specific audiences for advertising purposes.

The Graph API is the primary tool used to retrieve and manipulate data in and out of Facebook. It allows for data queries in the form of:

1. NODE - representing a user, a photo, a page, or a comment
2. EDGE - representing the connection between two nodes
3. FIELD - representing the overall set of information about the nodes, such as the name of a page or personal demographic data

There are restrictions on the type of data that can be accessed, but fewer limits on the frequency of requests.

Google provides a variety of APIs, including:

• Six Cloud APIs
• Six Maps APIs
• Seven Apps APIs
• Four Social APIs
• Three YouTube APIs

Instagram has a public API that allows for the retrieval of data on tags, popular photos, specific locations in real-time, and user activity. The rate limit for this API is 5,000 requests per hour.

Many blogs and forums also have public APIs, such as the WordPress API and the Tumblr API.

It is important to note that some APIs may require authentication in order to run queries. APIs that can be accessed without authentication are preferable.

As this allows one to avoid bias related to one's own personal computer's search history on the platform.

3. DIGITAL METHODS FOR QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

*Digitized methods and digital tools for research

Digitised Methods (or Virtual Methods) consist in the adaptation (the virtualization) of offline research techniques such as surveys, interviews and focus groups to the online environments. The point here is to reflect on the opportunities and constraints posed by the affordances of digital media.

Consider for example conducting virtual interviews, for example via online chat: on one hand, this eliminate the spatial-temporal boundaries between the interviewer and interviewee; on the other hand, it make it impossible to grasp the non-verbal, facial and emotional language of the interviewee, as well as to check for his/her authentic identity.

There exists a plurality of digital tools that researchers can use in their research practice, including:

• Google Scholar (for searching and
1. organizing bibliographic references
2. Google Drive and Dropbox (for sharing documents)
3. Google Docs and Trello (for enabling collaborative reports)
4. Google Calendar and Asana (for managing team work)
5. Skype (for enhancing communications)

Another fundamental approach in the study of digital environments is the Digital Methods paradigm, that invites researchers to follow the medium, approaching the Internet as a source of methods, taking advantage of, and learning from, the native methods the Internet applies to its flows of communication.

Digital Methods, online groundedness and follow the medium

Virtual Methods translate traditional research techniques onto the Web; Digital Methods, on the other hand, take the nature and affordances of the digital environments that are used as methodological strategies and techniques for social research. We can define DM as techniques for the study of societal change and cultural conditions with online data.

The DM framework was developed by Richard Rogers,

Professor at the University of Amsterdam. The epistemological principle of DM is to follow the medium, that is, to conceive the Internet as an environment where natural methods of research are built into online devices (such as social media) and functions (Twitter hashtags or retweets).

According to Rogers, the idea of the Internet as a virtual realm is no longer tenable since the two pillars of the virtual (cyberspace and anonymity) have broken down. To conceive the online as a placeless cyberspace means framing it as a realm in which all the spatial-temporal boundaries cease to exist, and where social relations take place via computer-mediated interactions between users with similar purposes, scopes and meaning as offlines.

Since the mid-1990s, sociologists and anthropologists have contested the concept of the Internet as a virtual, anonymous cyberspace. With regards to the notion of cyberspace, Daniel Miller and Don Slater conducted an ethnographic on the use of the Internet in Trinidad.

showing how Trinis use the Internet as a platform to perform their local culture, re-territorializing it. Slater also investigated the issue of anonymity through a cyberethnography of an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for sharing sexpics, showing how participants appeared to be interested in discussing and detecting the others' authentic identities.

Then, we consider for instance Google Flu Trends, a service able to predict an outbreak of flu in a geographical area by matching user queries of terms such as "flu" with the geolocalized data related to the queries.

Concerning anonymity, FB profiles may be regarded as digital ID cards. Another example is the MTV show Catfish, in which the two hosts bust people who create false identities on the Internet to deceive other people, using Google searches to retrieve key information about their real identity, such as telephone numbers, addresses, yearbook photos... The point here is that the number of traces left online about what we do

On the Internet is massive, a