Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Michael Zimmer, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of
Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and
codirector of the Center for Information Policy Research. With a
background in new media and Internet studies, the philosophy of
technology, and information policy and ethics, Zimmer's research
focuses on the ethical dimensions of new media and information
technologies, with particular interest in privacy, social media, Internet
research ethics, and ethical design.
Zimmer serves on numerous advisory boards, including the Wash-
ington, DC-based Future of Privacy Forum policy think tank and the
NSF-sponsored Values-in-Design Council. He is on the editorial advisory boards of the scholarly
journals
Internet Research
and the
International Review of Information Ethics,
and is coeditor of
The Infor-
mation Society
book series for MIT Press. He has participated in various public interest activities, and
provided expert advice and consultation for projects at the American Library Association, the New
York Public Library, Google, and Microsoft.
You've become known for your critique of the “Tastes, Ties, and Time” (T3) research project.
Please give us an overview of the T3 project.
The explosive popularity of online social networking platforms such as MySpace, Twitter, and Face-
book has attracted attention from a variety of researchers and disciplines. However, most studies rely
on external surveys of social networking participants, ethnographies of smaller subsets of subjects, or
the analysis of limited profile information extracted from what subjects chose to make visible. As a
result, the available data can often be tainted due to self-reporting biases and errors, have minimal
representativeness of the entire population, or fail to reflect the true depth and complexity of the in-
formation and connections that flow across social networking sites.
Recognizing the data limitations faced by typical sociological studies of online social network dynam-
ics, a group of researchers from Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles, set
out to construct a more robust dataset that would fully leverage the rich data available on social net-
working Web sites. Given its popularity, the researchers chose the social network site Facebook as their
data source and located a university that allowed them to download the Facebook profiles of every
member of the freshman class. This was repeated annually until the study population graduated, pro-
viding four years of data about this collegiate social network. Each student's official housing records
were also obtained from the university, allowing the researchers to compare Internet-based connec-
tions and real-world proximity.
The resulting dataset is unique: it was collected without relying on participant self-reporting, repre-
sents nearly an entire real-world social network of college students, includes valuable demographic,
cultural, and relational information about the subjects, and provides four years of data for robust lon-
gitudinal study.
The sociologists didn't reveal the name of the college where they had collected the data.
How did you determine that the subjects were Harvard College students?
When the researchers released the dataset, it was noted, “all the data is cleaned so you cannot connect
anyone to an identity.” This assertion caught my attention, since this dataset potentially includes
