session 3: nature vs. nurture and weeds

Readings: nature vs. nurture?

            Are Internet users' actions and frequency of contribution  predetermined by fairly stable personality traits, or can systems/community managers/peers motivate users to take action?

            Ling et al. (2005) found that alerting users about unique information they could add to the system motivated users to contribute more to a movie rating site. One mind-boggling point was that a small percentage of users contributes a disproportionate amount of content. I wondered, who are these "super-users," and what do they have in common? What traits, skills or knowledge do they have that influence this behavior? By understanding this, perhaps we can find ways to develop these traits in other users to ensure stronger virtual communities. Tedjamulia, Olsen, Dean and Albrecht (2005) explored the traits of consistent contributors, looking at factors such as self-efficacy, high need to achieve, intrinsic motivation, and trust, as well as environmental factors and goal setting/commitment.

            This statement also intrigued me: "Surprisingly, subjects in the uniqueness condition also perceived themselves as having views more similar to others in the group than did those in the non-unique group." (Ling et al., 2005).  I wondered whether  subjects who felt valued for their uniqueness then perceived the group as similar to strengthen their already positive feelings.

            Ling et al. also pointed out that users need feedback on how their contributions improve the community. For instance, the system might generate a congratulatory e-mail if a user rates a "rarely rated" movie, or even quantify a user's impact, by saying that the system's  recommendation ability has improved x% due to the user's actions. Alternatively, reviews could have a "like" button, or, like yelp, have a useful/funny/cool button so users can see how others respond to their contributions. This connects well with Tedjamulia, Olsen, Dean and Albrecht's assertion that "Extrinsic awards can be either controlling or informative." (2005, p. 6) This distinction jumped out at me based on my work experience. Having worked as a classroom teacher for 2 years, the issue of how to motivate students without taking away from the intrinsic satisfaction of completing a task was something I thought about daily. Rewards that remind contributors of their importance to the community and acknowledge their efforts can boost intrinsic motivation.

            Another fascinating finding was that users who were reminded that rating movies helps them or helps others reduced their ratings! I interpreted this as saying people have  a holistic, pro-social view of their virtual communities - they think about the benefit to themselves and to others, and appealing to one or the other isn't effective because it doesn't jibe with users' views.

            One question I asked myself after reading Ling et al. was: how do communities support user contribution over time? While these e-mails led to bumps in ratings the week after the e-mail was sent out, what fosters long-term participation?

            In contrast, Ridings and Gefen (2004) did not attempt to manipulate or influence user contributions, but understand why people join virtual communities. They found that friendship and information sharing were predominant reasons for membership, but that people also sought social support and recreation online. This is interesting to look at in light of Ling et al. (2005), as they focused primarily on motivating users to share more information (rate movies) but did not consider in depth the effects of friendship, social support and recreation and how these factors might influence information sharing. I also made a connection to Cheshire and Antin (2010), who argue that some of the current research presents the user as a "tabula rasa - lacking distinctive attitudes and predispositions but inclined to respond to various incentives and motivational feedback." It was no doubt beyond the scope of the Ling et al.'s work, but it would have been interesting to have the e-mail recipients provide some feedback on how they perceived the reminder e-mails.

            Ridings and Gefen pointed out that not every group on the Internet is a community. They used phrases such as  "lasting relationships," "persistently interacting members," and "ongoing exchanges" to highlight how a virtual community comprises a group of people who interact online over time. Despite that, the authors reminded us that "The Internet context is unique in that it provides a way for an individual to observe and learn from a group without the group even knowing that the individual is present."

            They also noted that user motivations for joining depended on whether groups catered to a "freely chosen" interest (like a hobby) or an aspect of their life that may not be voluntary (such as work or health issue).

Experiences: confirmations and extensions 

             My experience is in line with Ling et al.'s point about uniqueness being a motivating factor. For instance, when reading blog posts, I am more motivated to post a comment if I notice, after scanning others' comments, that the aspect of the post I wanted to address has not been discussed. However, if the post has dozens of comments and multiple commenters have made the same point, I usually don't leave a comment.
            One issue I was interested in was not addressed in the readings. While Ridings and Gefen looked at what motivated people to start participating in a virtual community, and Ling et al. and Tedjamulia, Dean, Olsen and Albrecht focused on participation, I wondered about linkages between the two. Because participants are seeking different things, they no doubt use virtual community features in different ways. It would have been interesting to see what features (messaging, search functions, ability to rate messages for usefulness, ability to add friends) users with different motivations used the most and which they ranked as most important. Every community draws people with different motivations, and understanding which features support the largest base of user needs may be key to maintaining a vigorous community.

Online community: Amazon.com's Young Adult Forum           

            The online community I investigated is the one of the forums (called "Customer Discussions") at Amazon.com.  One thing that got me interested me in exploring this community is that it doesn't really seem to be promoted by Amazon. For instance, the forums are not visible from the homepage. Even clicking on "shop by department" and choosing books doesn't lead you easily to the forums. You need to scroll all the way to the bottom before you get a list of the latest posts -- but only for the book forum. I clicked on the "What Are Customer Discussions?" link at the top right and found out that there appears to be no central gateway to see all forums. Instead, discussions must be accessed from product pages.

            I decided to type in a few of my favorite authors and see what kinds of forums popped up, since there was no central page to access a master list. By typing in YA author Markus Zusak, I found that there was a forum dedicated to his novel "The Book Thief," as well as a Textbook Buyback Forum and Young Adult Forum.

            Next  I looked up Haruki Murakami. His author page included his author forum, but clicking on an individual book, such as his latest novel "1Q84," or "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,"  showed no discussions had been created for the  book. This was surprising, particularly as 1Q84 has 537 customer reviews. Looking at the author forum showed that 1 of the 3 discussions had to do with 1Q84 and generated 19 responses.

            I investigated the literary fiction forum, which was suggested as a related forum from the 1Q84 page. I ran a search for "Haruki Murakami" and retrieved 26 results in that forum. Searching with the "search only this forum" limiter clicked off gave me 573 results from all Customer Discussions.

            For this post, I decided to examine the Young Adult Forum.

Modes of participation

•        "add your own message to the discussion" - includes "insert a product link" option (surprise, surprise!) and option to receive an e-mail when a new post is added

•  reply
•   permalink 
•    report abuse
•     x of x people think this post adds to the discussion. Do you? yes/no. 
•     track this discussion - shows how many others are tracking
•      RSS feed
•      search customer discussions with option to search discussion currently viewing

            Clicking on a forum participant's name will lead you to his or her profile page.  Users can display a photo, location, and link to their web site, but there is no built-in messaging option. Profiles can include badges such as "real name" or "top reviewer." Profiles also display the percentage of reviews deemed useful, reviews, interests, and frequently used tags.

Encouraging participation

            One way that participation is encouraged is through the "adds to the discussion" rating. This can be seen as encouraging users by providing some feedback on how others perceive their message, which can motivate posters to do more if their comments are well-received.  As Cheshire (2007, as cited in Cheshire and Antin, 2010) notes, "online interactions do not always have a defined audience, making it difficult to assess how many individuals might benefit from one's contribution." This feature could also be seen as conveying and upholding community expectations by transmitting approval and disapproval. This feature could be effective in theory, but in scanning the posts in the Young Adult Forum it seems that many readers do not take the time to rate others' participation, which limits feedback to users. Perhaps groups could set up a code of conduct that encourages others to rate responses on topics they view or comment on, or the system itself could provide a read/rate ratio and encourage users to rate a certain amount of  what they read. A simple message such as, "You clicked on x posts in the Young Adult Forum in the last week, and you rated x responses," could be helpful. Drawing on Ling et al.'s (2005) finding that talking about both self-benefit and group benefit led to a rise in movie ratings, this message could include a reminder about how rating responses is a quick and easy way to participate and stay active in the forums, while it helps build community and drive meaningful discussion.

            A second way that participation is encouraged is through badges, which Amazon says are used to identify "our best content contributors." (Badges are not visible within Customer Discussions, but can be viewed by clicking on a participant's profile). There are 10,000 people listed as Top Reviewers. This is effective in ensuring quality reviews, in that one component of the Top Reviewer ranking draws on how many people deem a review helpful. However, given that millions of people access Amazon daily, this badge system seems to encourage too small of a group. Thinking about books, it would be useful to have specialized badges such as "cookbook junkie" to highlight participants who focus on certain genres. It could also be useful to allow users to  rate reviews not just on helpfulness, but factors such as organization, accuracy (if the reader has used the same product) and detail. Or -- and I don't even know if the software/program exists for this -- readers could highlight parts of a review that they particularly liked and the program would display these or even analyze them and assign descriptors. What I'm envisioning would be something like a tag cloud, but more sophisticated. Lastly, badges are currently focused on user activity on product pages, but it would be helpful to create badges for forum participation.

            A third feature that encourages participation is users who respond positively to others' comments and extend the conversation (see example below).  I think this is one of the most powerful ways to build virtual community participation. One way that positive connections between forum users could be fostered is through the addition of basic SNS features such as private messaging or adding people as "friends."  

          
           A fourth feature -- if we consider lurkers as participants, as  Tedjamulia, Olsen, Dean and Albrecht (2005) and Ridings and Gefen (2004) do -- is the search function. I think this is fairly effective, as it allows users to limit their search to one forum or search all customer discussions. One improvement I would like to see is an incorporation of these search results with individual book and author pages. For instance, searching all customer discussions for Haruki Murakami brought up 573 results. It would be great to display the 10 most recent or 10 most popular customer discussions from all forums on his author page or on the page for each of his books.

Exploring the Young Adult Forum

            The Young Adult Forum covers 41 pages. I pulled 50 posts from throughout its history, and sought a diversity of posts in terms of content and amount of response. These are the five categories that emerged as most common:

• Request for recommendations (example: "YA futuristic short stories, kind of like Kara Dalkey's 'Hives'"):  18
• Seeking opinion ("should sex be encouraged in YA novels?"):  7
• Stumpers, or posts by people seeking to identify a book when they don't know the title or author ("Need HelpLooking for a YA werewolf book"):  7
•  Self-promotion of books, blogs, giveaways, etc ("Free book download - 'T'Aragam'"):  5
•   Two cents, or general questions that will appeal to a wide range of readers, as they are not specific to genre or authors ("What are you currently reading? (no self promos)"):  3

     

Category	Number (out of 50)	Mean participants	Mean total posts
Request for recommendations	18	26.94	42.88
Seeking opinions	7	14	26.7
Stumpers	7	2.28	3
Self-promotion	5	1.2	4.2
Two cents	3	97.3	1,276

            Three of the five post categories -- request for recommendations, seeking opinions, and stumpers -- indicate that the forum is well-used by participants with information needs. These posts altogether account for 32 of the 50 posts, or 64%.  
           Requests for recommendations were, as expected, the most common posts in the forum. They vary greatly in content, with some people specifying desired literary elements and age of reader
 ("Can you help me find books outside the fantasy genre that have wit or rich characters and stories, without weighty depression/relationship dysfunction themes, or vacuous beach girl mentality? I have a smart, poetic, 14 1/2 year-old who wants to read something interesting and well written. Thanks for your suggestions.") or mentioning a few titles that were liked or disliked ("Looking to buy my daughter some books for Christmas, she is 15 loved hunger games and uglies, hated twilight. I've ordered some of my favorites but not really up on current books, Any ideas?"). Some were very vague, such as "I am looking for some good recommendations for YA fiction for a 13 year old who is an advanced reader. I am looking for clean fic so no sex or swearing please... "

           In my initial classification, 3 of the 7 seeking opinion posts were classified "opinion/values," as they addressed the issue of objectionable content (namely, sex) in young adult books.  Several of these posts were written by parents seeking guidance in determining whether content was appropriate for their child. Other, less volatile, topics in this category included Kindle use and what readers liked and didn't like to see in sequels.

        I was not surprised to see that stumpers, while equally as common as opinion posts, generated low mean participants and mean responses.  These questions fare better on librarian listservs, where the average participant is a skilled searcher and usually has been exposed to many more books than the average reader.    
         Another unsurprising low performer in terms of participation and response were the self promotion posts. However,  I do wonder how effective these promotion posts are. It's impossible to know how many forum users downloaded a free e-book or entered a giveaway after viewing the post. Amazon forum information does not include views of posts, so there's no way to track how many people click on these types of posts.
          While 64% of the posts qualified as information-sharing, it also appears that friendship is a powerful motivator in the Young Adult Forum. While two cents posts accounted for the least amount -- only 3, or 6%  -- of the 50 posts I examined, the number of mean participants and mean responses is amazing when compared to the other 4 descriptive categories. Avid readers want to get to know other avid readers, and posts like these generate a lot of interest and response. It seems that two cents posts may be a good way to draw new members into the forums and build relationships among existing users.    

           

Discussion and evaluation

            Amazon's Young Adult Forum reminds me of a patch of weeds flourishing in the crack of a sidewalk. I'm not saying that the forum is a pest, but choose that term to highlight the resilience and persistence of folks who want to use the forums to connect with others despite the sometimes challenging environment. These challenges include lack of basic social networking site features such as private messaging and friending features and lack of a central access point. As Ridings and Gefen (2004) said, "patrons of virtual communities are motivated primarily not only for information but also because of the friendship and social support these virtual communities can entail."

            Ridings and Gefen offered a few suggestions on how virtual community managers could tailor their communities to better suit users' needs. For instance, communities with an emphasis on information sharing can ensure that bulletin boards are clearly labeled and named and offer strong search features. Because Amazon lacks a central access point for all forums, establishing this in itself would make the forums easier to locate and use. This could also facilitate the creation of subforums; for instance, from scanning the Young Adult Forum, it seems there may be enough interest to support subforums based on YA romance and dystopian fiction. Searching could be improved by adding a breakdown of results by forum of the "all Customer Discussions" search so users could easily determine which forums have the most discussion on their topic.
            Tedjamulia, Dean, Olsen and Albrecht (2005) discussed usability (an environmental factor) as having an influence on the personality factors that encourage contribution. Another environmental factor that Amazon could positively influence is personal responsibility. The "real name" badge is a good first step, but more could be done. Right now, the forums only show the commenter's hyperlinked name. A more information-rich ID that includes how many comments the participant has made, when they joined, and any forum badges earned could encourage more participation. This would be in line with Ridings and Gefen's suggestion that communities focused on friendship and social support make it easy for users to see who's responding to a post and member profiles.
          From what I've seen, it's clear that the forums are somewhat of an afterthought for Amazon. They appear to exist only because they may help someone decide to purchase a product. While I can understand that adding SNS features such as friending abilities may not be desirable for a retail site, I do think simple things like a central forums page and a way to see the forums (maybe latest posts or most active forums in the past hour) from the homepage would support the many users who are already using Amazon to pursue personal interests and build online communities.

session 2: "Things I'm Afraid to Tell You" challenge

** Note: second survey response added to last part of post.

Readings: points of agreement and conflict

                The authors of session 2's readings hold varying views of the value and purpose of information sharing in social networks. Albrechtslund (2008) argues that the traditional concept of surveillance, which presents the information sharer as powerless and ignorant, is not productive to understand the widespread adoption of social media. Instead, Albrechtslund says that a more productive lens is "participatory surveillance," which differs from the traditional concept because it affirms users' identities, is mutual, and views information as something to be shared rather than a commodity to be traded.

                In contrast, Weeks (2009) offers Thordora's experience as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of sharing via social media. Three key parts of this article caught my attention: first, that Weeks quotes BJ Fogg, director of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab, as saying that "Text is an impoverished medium for communicating emotion, intent, real meaning."  This struck me as odd, as humans have been communicating through text - newspapers, books,  letters, to name a few examples - for hundreds of years. Would Fogg say that Shakespeare's plays or Dickinson's poetry fail to communicate "emotion, intent [or] real meaning?" Or does the Internet's instantaneous nature, ease of sharing, and ability to connect with people across place and time, people we don't know in real life,  make Internet texts "automatically inferior" to works produced by more traditional means? Weeks, who calls Twitter, "ditzy" and a "me-me-me medium," suggests that the onus is on the blogger/tweeter who has the temerity to think about using the Internet for genuine communication.  This clashes with danah boyd's work, as discussed by Albrechtslund, in which she asserts that a "complex digital presence" is increasingly commonplace, should not be looked down on, and is nothing to alarm employers such as Tribble, who gnashes his teeth over job applicants with blogs.

                The second part of the article that caught my eye was Thordora's mention of "big sister" in a post published after police visited her home to check on her child's safety. (I was reminded of Mayer, Schuler and Jones (2012) discussion of data re-identification when in this post's comments,  feelslikehome tells Thordora that she had "clicked from your Twitter profile to your blog to your Amazon wish list which does list your full name" to get information to alert Twitter. Only a few comments above, Thordora had said "in order to have my NAME, it WOULD be someone who knows me at least that much. I’m not linked to anything you can trace.")   It is clear that Thordora's experience does not meet the criteria for participatory surveillance. Thordora's subjectivity was not supported; instead, the experience left her feeling angry, under attack, and questioning whether her openness about her mental illness had contributed to the actions taken. Keeping in mind Weeks' assertion that the ultimate responsibility lies with bloggers/tweeters, I read Thordora's following posts  on the incident.  

                While boyd and Ellison (2007) caution that online "friendships" cannot be considered the same as face-to-face friendships, Thordora seems to have stringent expectations of those who "friend" her online.  In this post, she writes that the person who contacted authorities should have "Read the categories dedicated to my daughters. Read the posts about fighting with my illness. Read a little before you judge based on less than 140 characters." In the comments, she also mentions that she would have liked the concerned person to DM/e-mail her, and notes, "Did she consider contacting any of the regulars on this site who may know how to DIRECTLY reach me? No-because I doubt she’s ever even read anything on this site." As Mayer, Schuler and Jones (2012) note, current systems provide "basic access control" of who can see personal information, but do not help people to consider the social inferences that might be made by others.  Users also cannot control or even predict if users will make the "correct" inference when  they put together varying amounts of background knowledge (which may be limited, or incorrectly interpreted) and social media information

                The third part of Weeks' article that intrigued me was the mention of Abraham Biggs. Not knowing much about his case, I Googled his name and "fell down the rabbit hole." Like Thordora, Biggs struggled with mental health issues, and he also seemed to have high expectations of the online community; a New York Times article says that Biggs considered the users of BodyBuilding.com  "like a family." As I read other Biggs articles, I found a link to the case of Amanda Todd (Todd was 12 when she flashed a man over a webcam; the man then used the photo to harass her over Facebook, which resulted in bullying by Todd's peers. Todd killed herself at age 15.)  Todd's case appears to offer a strong counter to Albrechtslund's concept of participatory surveillance. Feminists assert that Todd's case is a stark reminder that "[t]he electronic frontier, has a history, geography and demography grounded firmly in the non-virtual realities of gender, class, race and other cultural variables" (Higgins, 1999: 111, as cited in Koskela, 2004).

Investigation focus: "Things I'm Afraid to Tell You" blog challenge

           It took me several days to climb out of the rabbit hole. As I pondered possible investigations, I remembered that in mid-2012 there had been a blogging challenge called "Things I'm Afraid to Tell You." The challenge began with this post, published on March 29, which was praised and promoted by Ez of Creature Comforts, who designed a button, coordinated a first round of bloggers who would publish their posts on the same day (May 3), and participated as well. The challenge gained earnest coverage from both the Huffington Post and Oprah, as well as much more irreverent coverage from Get Off My Internets, where commenters cynically (or astutely) suggested that it was really just a way to gain more attention and boost blog traffic. 
           Albrechtslund had mentioned Koskela's (2004) discussion of empowering exhibitionism. I looked up the article and the blog challenge seemed to be a good example of both participatory surveillance and empowering exhibitionism. Koskela says of sharing intimate information:
"Conceptually, when you show 'everything' you become 'free': no one can 'capture' you any more, since there is nothing left to capture." (p. 208)

          The blog challenge's name suggested that people were going to take a risk and share intimate details.  I was interested in why people would take such a risk. Our session readings, with the exception of Hodkinson's exploration of goth culture's use of LiveJournal, had provided an "external" view of the information sharer. For instance, while Wagner,  Rowe, Strohmaier, and Alani (2012) considered factors such as how long a user had participated in a board, how many posts they had generated, etc., these were all external, objective, quantitative factors. I was interested in the qualitative and  subjective experiences of people sharing information (particularly "risky" information, as the blog challenge title implies), what they chose to share, why they did it, and what kind of feedback they received. Going back to Wagner, Rowe, Strohmaier, and Alani's (2012) work, I also became curious about how well the challenge post fit the blogs' purpose/usual topics, as their boards.ie study found that depending on the board's focus (narrow, such as golf, or general, such as work and jobs), different types of posts started and sustained conversation. Lastly, did sharing "risky" information lead to long-term changes in blog content, or affect how bloggers related to their readers?

                Round 1 of the blogging challenge included 90 bloggers. The blogs varied greatly in topic and purpose and included crafting/DIY blogs, personal blogs, and business-connected blogs. Likewise, blog posts varied greatly in content. Some chose to share about blogging ("i wish more people commented"), others kept it light by talking about personal idiosyncrasies ("I hate the TV show Friends"). Others shared information that could conceivably garner negative feedback, such as their thoughts about their adoptive child's birth mother, harmful relationships, and health issues.

 
E-mail survey

                I e-mailed approximately a third of the Round 1 bloggers, choosing them randomly.  I asked them the following questions:

•  What motivated you to participate in the TIATTY challenge?
•    Prior to your TIATTY post, how much personal information had you shared about yourself on the blog?
•    Which item of information in your post was the scariest to share?
•    Prior to TIATTY, how familiar were you with the blogs/bloggers featured in round 1? Could you give an estimate of how many of those blogs you were following/reading at the time?
•    Did participation in TIATTY lead you to begin reading/following any bloggers in round 1? If so, which ones and why?
•   How do you think your TIATTY post affected your relationship with your readers?
• Did you get any negative feedback (comments, e-mails, tweets, etc) based on what you shared in your post? How did you deal with this?
• Has participation in TIATTY led to concrete changes in how you blog? If so, can you give examples (specific posts, features, etc)
• Anything else you would like to say about TIATTY?

                Knowing that e-mailing random bloggers and asking them to answer questions might be a recipe for failure, I crossed my fingers and hoped for at least one response, which I did receive. I did get a reply from two other bloggers who expressed interest in answering the survey. I will be adding their information to the post as I receive it.

Participant experiences

                 Natalie, who runs a blog focused on crafting, wrote in her post about being systematically bullied through middle school and how she changed how she presented herself to the world.
                Bailie, who runs a blog that chronicles "the daily life of an American in Sweden" (according to her blog subtitle) and calls herself a "blogging housewife" in the TIATTY post, chose to share a variety of information, mostly dealing with personal likes (TV show "Jersey Shore") and dislikes (Pinterest, red wine).

                Natalie says she was motivated to participate because the challenge coordinator, Ez of Creature Comforts, was someone whose blog she read regularly and she viewed Ez as a "cherished acquaintance" whose "bravery" inspired her to participate. Natalie says that she didn't think her blog gave people the impression of a "charmed life," but that she thought people could relate to her story.

In contrast, Bailie said she decided to participate because it would be "an easy and fun post" as well as a way to support the linkup.

                Natalie says that the post was a departure from usual blog content, as she didn't share much about her personal life on the blog, talking only about her husband and pets "only really in the context of 'pretty pictures' or 'entertaining story'. I didn't want to reveal too much about my personal life, for fear of it haunting me later." She said she hesitated to talk about bullying because "many people, myself included, have grown up to believe that being hurt by bullying equals weakness. It was hard to admit the kind of impact it had on my life."

               Bailie, on the other hand, said that because she runs a lifestyle blog, she shares a "fair amount of personal information." She notes, "While no information I posted was really very revealing it felt like things you would discuss with your best friend not strangers." Bailie says the information that she found scariest to reveal was her clothing size. In disclosing that she wears a size 12, Bailie says in the blog post that she"feel[s] the popular thing to do was to talk about how I should exercise and all sorts of blah blah blah. The thing is though I and my husband love the way I look!" In her e-mail to me half a year later, however, Bailie says that her feelings about her weight have changed and that she is now "actually trying to get my weight down "

             Bailie shared that she practiced self-censoring in the TIATTY post; she says that at first, she wanted to disclose that her husband has type I diabetes. Bailie says her husband's condition, which she has never talked about on the blog, is a "huge part of our life," but in the end she decided that it would be an intrusion into her husband's privacy. Bailie's decision was also motivated by fear of judgment; she noted that if she shares about her husband's condition, she is "afraid of people then commenting when I post about what we had to eat or drink." Surprisingly, Bailie says that she has shared information about her husband's diabetes on Twitter, but says that in regards to the blog, "unless there is a change in his condition I think it is something that will remain mostly private." Bailie's choice of words is interesting - is there such a thing as "mostly private," particularly for people who maintain multi-faceted online identities on a variety of SNSs?
                Natalie says that she received no negative feedback, and that the post is her most read and most commented-on blog post. The post received 28 comments, and Natalie says she also received feedback via e-mail. She was worried about negative comments, but notes that "I worried that I might just incite trolling, but the good thing is that a crafty/creative blog usually doesn't attract those kind of people." Bailie's post received 14 comments, and, like Natalie's, no negative feedback.

                Because 90 bloggers had participated in round 1, I wanted to find out how interconnected they were. Was it an "If you participate, I will too" kind of activity between bloggers who knew each other well? However, Natalie says that she deliberately limits the number of blogs she follows, and that of the round 1 bloggers, she followed less than 5.  Because those 5 blogs posted links to other TIATTY posts, Natalie says she did read quite a few of the round 1 posts.

               Bailie says that of the round 1 bloggers, she only knew of coordinator Ez because she followed her on Twitter, but that she did not read Ez's blog. Similar to Natalie, Bailie reports that participation in the challenge did not lead her to add new blogs to her regular reading list. If she does now follow some of the round 1 bloggers, it is by chance and not because of their TIATTY post, she says.

Changes in blog content/reader relationships

                Natalie said she has not made changes in her blog content, but this is not surprising given that her blog is focused on crafting. She says all the supportive comments "made my blogging experience feel more human and less techy" and that  participating in TIATTY "made me think of my readers in a more personal way, rather than a series of anonymous strangers." Natalie talks more about her change in viewpoint in this TIATTY part 2.  Natalie says the response to her first post made her realize there was a community of people who, like her, had struggled with being "not popular." She asks: "Do we still have to be afraid to say these things? I mean, we’re basically communicating with a whole community of people who get it. And can empathize when we’re insecure. And cheer us on when we do something awesome. It’s become so obvious over the course of the Things I’m Afraid to Tell You challenge that I really, really hope it will have a lasting effect on the blogging community. Because I know that I, for one, am so very happy that I’ve 'met' so many people like me – it almost makes up for the fact that there seem to be so few in real life." Koskela (2004, p. 206) says that sharing information that is supposed to be kept secret allows people to "reclaim the copyright of their own lives," and it seems that the TIATTY challenge helped Natalie do so, as well as realize the commonality of her own experience.

         Bailie says that her TIATTY post made her "feel more of an accountability to them [the readers], especially if something changes from that post and would be reflected in my pictures." While Natalie seems to have found her TIATTY participation freeing, Bailie seems to view the information she disclosed as restricting, in the sense that she has to live up to that information. In her post, Bailie said she did not care for red wine; in her e-mail to me, she said she has since learned to enjoy red wine. Because she had talked about her dislike in her TIATTY post, "I felt almost guilty in real life about it [drinking red wine] and had to mention it on the blog!"

Conclusion
      While my investigation of sharing "risky" information and the outcome is small and limited, it was fascinating to compare Natalie and Bailie's experiences. I was surprised to see that, at least for the two respondents, mutual sharing of "risky" information did not lead to the establishment or strengthening of relationships with participating bloggers. The real value for both Natalie and Bailie seemed to be in reader relationships. Both of them mentioned that the TIATTY post helped them move away from seeing readers as "strangers." Dibbell talked about users moving from anonymity to pseudonymity in establishing an identity in LambdaMOO. My investigation suggests that not only are users actively engaged in crafting their own pseudonyms, but that they construct identities for their readers/audience as well, and that the user's risk-taking, when met favorably by the audience, boosts users' regard for the audience.
         I'm reminded of some of the concepts from my first blog post. While in many ways we desire that the Internet "free" us from our offline selves, the tether between our online and offline identities is stronger than we might like it to be, and fusing aspects of both identities can be beneficial. Also, as Albrechtslund says, it may be fruitful to stop seeing our offline and online selves as separate, and instead see social media as a "mixed world."
            
Works cited

Koskela, Hille. 2004. Webcams, TV Shows and Mobile Phones: Empowering Exhibitionism. Surveillance and Society 2(2/3); 199-215. Retrieved from http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles2%282%29/webcams.pdf.