Current Projects

Mobile Social Networking for LIFE

Mobile Social Networking for LIFE is an interdisciplinary project with faculty from the Annenberg School, Preventive Medicine, Computer Science, Keck School (Pediatrics) and nursing administrators from Childrens Hospital Los Angeles.

The goal is to use mobile social networking and video sharing to encourage and extend participation in the CHLA LIFE program by young adult survivors of childhood cancer. With a seed grant from the Charles Annenberg Weingarten Program on Online Communities, we will provide approximately 30 young adult former CHLA patients with videocamera-equipped mobile phones and a year of paid access. Our goal is to encourage them to use the LIFE program as their health partner to 1) manage the transition from the pediatric to the adult healthcare system, and 2) acquire the skills, resources and understanding required for successful survivorship. A distinctive feature of the LIFE program is to help survivors understand and deal with potential long-term effects of their illness and treatment such as issues with attention and concentration, visuospatial perception, motor skill, planning, social relations and fertility.

One goal of our intervention is to increase awareness in survivors about advocacy and how to lobby for services and systems of care they would need to accomplish their health goals. Social networks provide an ideal opportunity for grass-roots organizing of advocacy efforts, for example lobbying third party payors to cover preventive health care expenses in childhood cancer survivors because it may reduce costly side effect management.

We chose mobile phones to extend the reach of the LIFE program because cell phones are a core technology for today’s urban youth. Los Angeles has one of the largest urban youth market segments in the US, about 50% of which is Latino, and within this market segment between 50% and 60% have cell phones, and most are using text messaging.

Participants in the program will:

• Become a member of a social networking listserv which distributes and receives messages via SMS and MMS
• Accumulate social capital within a peer network through creating profiles and linking to other network members
• Receive brief, periodic informational text messages with answers to FAQs (frequently asked questions), e.g, “How can I get a copy of my record of treatment that I can take with me when I see new doctors?”
• Receive periodic reminder messages: “did you schedule your next appointment with the LIFE program?” “sign up for the LIFE picnic at Universal Studios?”
• Subscribe to a Successful Survivorship podcast tailored for youth
• Receive messages to increase engagement, such as “test yourself” games in which the participant can test his/her knowledge of strategies for successful survivorship
• Produce video narratives with the integrated camera and post them via MMS. Video assignments will include both unstructured narratives (‘teach us about your experience as a cancer survivor”) and standardized assignments related to medical self-management dilemmas, contact with health care providers, interviews with significant others (friends, family members), and direct speech to the video recorder about their observations of and experiences with being cancer survivors
• Completion and transmission via SMS of brief questionnaires about adherence to recommendations for follow-up treatment, value of social network membership, issues with the technology, in additional to wellness measures, knowledge of own illness, and health risk behaviors.

Mobile Voices

Mobile Voices is a storytelling platform for immigrants in Los Angeles to create and publish stories about their community directly from cell phones. Mobile Voices breaks new ground, allowing those without computer access greater participation in the digital public sphere. We plan to develop handset applications to capture and publish multimedia stories directly from phones; customize Drupal, the popular open source content management system, for mobile content publishing; and train immigrants in LA to use this storytelling system.

The project is a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication (ASC) at the University of Southern California and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), a nonprofit serving low-income Latino immigrants in LA. Using seed funding from the Annenberg Program on Online Communities (APOC), we will work with Latino workers at IDEPSCA's day laborer centers to define the platform's features, build a prototype, and test it. We will then seek additional funding to further develop this platform and offer it to other communities.

Proprietary Methodology for Capture and Mining of Data from Desktop and Mobile Social Networking and Video Sharing

A comprehensive approach to understanding how individuals interact with digital media must take into account the many interconnecting subsystems in the complex ecology that governs individual attitudes and behaviors, including the family, the workplace, the community, cultural values and traditions, and the policy environment. A factor which cuts across many of these subsystems is the individual’s social capital, the access to information, connections, and resources made available through an extended network of personal contacts. Social capital is determined not only by the availability of networks of close personal friends and family, but also through having recourse to so-called “bridging” social capital, as the ties created by “friends of friends” provide exposure to contacts, information, and resources for the formation of new relationships. Online social networks provide not only a means to nurture and maintain existing relationships but also allow their users to avail themselves of the collective social capital of very large numbers of people, many of whom they may never meet face to face.

Effective research on communication in large scale social networks requires the collection and analysis of very large sets of data, and the ability to be sufficiently nimble in one’s methods to respond to opportunities as they arise. For example, one of the most interesting features of social networks is the rapidity with which noteworthy events captured on video are diffused through online spaces such as YouTube. Within a very short period of time everyone has seen the footage of President Bush dancing or otters holding hands. Yet we don’t know very much about how this happens. One of the challenges of doing such research is capturing and mining vast amounts of user-generated data for indicators of emergent and evolving network structures and tracing the flow of information as it is diffused within and across them. To that end a portion of our research activity during the first and subsequent years will be devoted to development of techniques and tools, including proprietary software, for automatic capture of communications data from one or more social networking sites, writing it to a database, and mining the data for raw and derived network indicators. Since it is commonplace for users to maintain accounts on more than one social networking site, we require tools that can capture data very rapidly from sites that have different formats and semantics that can convert the data to a common user-defined format, and can recognize activities by the same user across multiple application domains. Of particular interest is the ability to capture network data from mobile phone user records. Currently available open source software for retrieving and storing call logs, for example, could be extremely useful in our mobile social networking studies but requires modification to be suitable for the next generation of smartphones. Our goal is to develop a set of tools and techniques that we can make available to our students and graduates as well as offer through licensing outside our immediate academic circle.

Study of the Social Networking Industry

One of the most popular types of online communities is the social networking site. Such sites are evolving at a rapid pace. For example, MySpace recently has partnered with news and entertainment companies including Reuters, New York Times, National Geographic and Octane TV to provide online content including video on its social networking site. This move is a step toward becoming a “popular culture portal” (Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2007, B4). Social networking company Bebo is linking to eBay so that users can post items to sell and buyers are automatically directed to eBay (Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2007, B1). The proposed research will examine the history and evolution of the social networking industry.

The research will begin with a review of existing research and historical data on the industry from academic and popular sources. This review will be supplemented with interviews with key informants from a stratified random sample of 40 Web 2.0 companies drawn from the list maintained by TechCrunch. Companies will be stratified by predominant application domain (video sharing, social bookmarking, etc). The goal is to obtain a rich set of data about evolving standards and practices in the industry and to derive implications for training of the next generation of industry professionals. We also seek to understand patterns of migration of users across these sites and how these migration patterns as well as business strategy influence the evolution of the industry as a whole. We will seek to obtain historical data for each site on numbers and types of users over time. The study will draw on the conceptual framework for online communities to be developed in the early part of the APOC research program.

Among the questions in the interview protocol:

Company Strategy

• How did your site get started and what were your initial goals?
• What are the principal components of the company’s marketing strategy? (Internet, print advertising, real-world events, viral marketing)
  How have you sought to create the necessary critical mass of users to continue to attract and maintain a large user base?
• What other application domains can your model be extended to?

Challenges

• What uses are you making of the massive amounts of personal information that you are collecting?
• How are you dealing with troubling issues? (online predators, copyright violation, privacy and trust)
• How are you handling the intrusion of spam (e.g. requests for “friend” status from bands) or other unacceptable material into the basic posting and linking mechanisms?

Success Metrics

• What are some of your metrics for evaluation? (registered users, site traffic, premium memberships, revenues)
• How do users evaluate the quality of the connections they have made through the site? How do you know?
• What external evidence is there of site popularity? (e.g. active trading in site digital goods on e-bay)

Opportunities and Threats on the Horizon

• What do you see as the role of the mobile phone in the social networking industry?
• What are the threats to your business model? (e.g., incorporation of social networking in Vista; inclusion of social networking features in browsers like Firefox means fewer on-site page views)
• What kinds of opportunities do you see on the horizon for new services and/or products for your site? How do you see the industry evolving?

The results of the research will be incorporated into the APOC curriculum. They will also be disseminated via reports available on the APOC website and publications in academic and practitioner journals.