Anita Blanchard

I told you so.

In case you missed it, Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium and Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight among others  correctly predicted the outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election.  And not only “correctly predicted” but predicted to a highly accurate degree the final electoral counts (and how FLA was a coin toss, statistically) and the popular votes.

In case you’re wondering, those screams you’ve heard around Charlotte, NC for the last two weeks have been me every time I’ve heard or read some media report going into the election that it was a close race, a toss up, and we had no idea what was going to happen.  When the statistical analysts are coming back with 90% (Nate Silver) to  99 to 100% (Sam Wang) chance of the president winning, we have a pretty freaking good idea of what the data are saying.

Let’s put it this way, the next time, it calls for a 99% chance of rain, and you don’t carry an umbrella because you really, really want for it to be sunny?  I will have a similar reaction.

So what are the takeaways?

1)  Feelings are not facts.  I got this from a friend who is a therapist when we were discussing what the pundits were predicting versus what the data were predicting.  Somewhere along the way, American society has equated opinions with data.  They are not the same. And in cases, of oh, I don’t know, smoking and health outcomes, climate change, or evolution, you can hold on to your deeply held beliefs, but if they don’t match the preponderance of the data, your beliefs are wrong.

2) Combined data is better than single data sources. Any one data source can have problems.  Indeed, Gallup was off.  WAY off.  Why? Because they significantly overestimated the white turnout.  That does not mean one should ignore data that doesn’t agree with your opinions or even the rest of the data.  The cool thing about data aggregation is that it includes all the data and lets the errors/assumptions/sampling quirks statistically cancel each other out.

3) Learn how to trust and doubt at the same time.  This is an advanced smarty pants move, and something I want to credit the writings and theorizing of Karl Weick.  I also credit Public Image Limited for the same sentiment, but Weick is cited more academically.  What it means is that you should believe your beliefs and be open to them being wrong.  You should use your data, but it may have errors that haven’t been accounted for.  You should, essentially, not believe much as being 100% true and should be open to, if not looking for, information to adjust your beliefs and improve your data.  And if you don’t?  If you are someone who only wants to hear about data that supports your beliefs and purposefully ignore the rest the data?  You scare the crap out of me.  Or, actually, it’s makes it harder to gain the respect of others.

So, there you go.  Data, once again, remain neutral. Science/statistics/math can help us uncover the truth.  We should all try to find some data that don’t support our beliefs and cogitate on them for a while.

One of the first concepts I learned in graduate school, from Dr. Dale Berger, is “The data are what the data are.”

What this means is that the results of your study are neutral and objective.  If they support your hypotheses, they aren’t “good,” and if they don’t support your hypotheses, they aren’t “bad.”  The data simply are essentially an objective snapshot of the world and, as such, they are value neutral.

That doesn’t mean data can’t be wrong.  The sample in your study could be “off” (although this is a rare event) and there is always some systematic (question wording) and random (person didn’t understand the question) error in every study.  So, one of the advantages of meta-analyses (and other methods which combine study results) is their ability to combine the results of similar studies allowing the possible sampling, systemic, and random errors in individual studies to cancel each other out giving a very, very good estimate of the truth of the relationship one is examining.

Which brings me to this year’s presidential election.  There are several sites available that are combining poll data in ways that ought to account for individual poll errors and should give us a good idea of what the current “truth” about voting is out there.  I prefer the Princeton Election Consortium because it uses nothing but recent poll data (either the last 3 state polls or polls from the last week).  Other people like FiveThirtyEight, although I am less enthusiastic about that data because it includes economic data which are probably antecedents (“causes”) along with the polls, which I consider to be the outcomes (“effects”), i.e., the dependent behavior we’re watching. (NB:  Yes, I KNOW those are not really causes and effects, but not everyone got an A in Research Methods.)

Now, I better understand why the 24 hour news sites don’t want to refer to the meta-analysis of the polls.  The latest poll result (singular) allows them to work their readers or viewers up into an emotional state (Despair!  Joy!  Romentum! Anger!  FEAR!!!!!), which simply isn’t the case if you look at the meta-analyses–a more stable and valid assessment of *all* the state polls.

And now I also think I understand why some folks who don’t know stats that well pay more attention to individual polls than the meta-analyses.  From their perspective, I am recommending that they should try and prefer this “chocolate ice cream” as opposed the “vanilla ice cream” they’ve been eating all along.  But that’s the wrong food analogy.  The meta-analyses are more like a vegetable soup (all cooked and combined together) and I want to say “You’re eating a raw onion.  Spit it out and have a sip of vegetable soup.”

What is frustrating to me, though, is people who ought to know better, who have had advanced statistics, and who are still “crossing their fingers” that a standardized combination of polls is more accurate than the last poll they just saw, and which has also been incorporated into the meta-analyses.  I don’t get that.

However,  I do understand that people do not like the results of the data analyses.  As someone who has voted for the losing candidate over 50% of the time (yes, I did just calculate that!), I get being frustrated and angry that the data aren’t going my way.  And good cow, I can’t even possibly calculate how many times that has happened in my research!  HA!  No, I mean.  Wait. ((cough, cough)) My data always supports my hypotheses.  ((Ducking the lightening from the research gods and goddesses))

But remember:  the data are what the data are.  Could these analyses be completely wrong?  Yes, of course!  But the problem would not be in their statistical calculations. The problem would be that the polls are completely inaccurate assessments of people’s statement of what their behavior will be on voting day.  And that would mean we have NO IDEA what is going to happen on November 6.  And more importantly, that the trends up for Obama after the DNC and sharply down after the first debate are simply flukes  of data collection and no reflection at all about people’s opinions about, preferences for or potential voting behavior for the president.  If that’s the case, pollsters are going to have to seriously revise how they collect data. Hello, President Dewey!

At this point, I think it’s more accurate to believe that the data are what the data are.  That’s a hard thing to do.  It involves a controlled emotional response to ignore the hype, the interpretation, and the spin and to form your own opinion.  The data are what the data are.  And we’ll know if they are representative of the actual behavioral “truth” in one week.

This summer, while teaching my Introduction to I/O Psychology course, we had a discussion on different leadership theories.  When we discuss these theories, it helps for me to have examples of different well known leaders so that the kids can see the strengths and weaknesses of each theoretical perspective.  Some observations:  MLK, JFK, and Ghandi have all been useful examples over the years.  Oprah has aged out as a well-known leader for the students.  With a little bit of prodding, students get the idea of Jim Jones.  Certainly, Steve Jobs was quite appropriate for the last year.

This summer, one of my students, in trying to relate to a leader who changed society or started a social movement declared that Katniss Everdeen, from the Hunger Games Trilogy was a transformational leader.  Since I had not read the books at the time, I could not say Yay or Nay.  So I read them, thinking I might be able to use her as another example that Kids These Days could relate to.

Wait.  I did not read the trilogy.  I devoured it. I read the entire trilogy in 10 days.  Then I but them down for 48 hours.  And then I read the entire trilogy again.  I LOVE these books.  Indeed, I spent most of July in Panem.

But here’s the thing:  Katniss Everdeen is NOT a transformational leader.  Yes, she was the inspiration for an entire movement or rebellion, but it seems to me that she inspired based on what people projected upon her.  She is charismatic, but she no rhetorical skills.  Peeta did, but you know, in the third book, EVENTS OCCURRED and he was not so much on the leadership train.

In fact, although I admired Katniss’ physical skills, hunting prowess and ability to quickly analyze a social situation, she annoyed me mightily.  It took me until I was halfway through the third book the second time to figure out why:  she didn’t act; she reacted.  (Well, there was that one big act at the end, but otherwise?  Reacting)  I like my heroines on more of the feminist side (i.e., Buffy).   And yes, with Katniss’ physicality and not being boycrazy (Bella, we are all looking at you, bless your heart), she is a good role model for girls. But I perceive that real transformational leaders have a positive goal for the group that is not imposed upon them and  that they are more active in creating and projecting themselves as the leaders to help their followers reach these goals.

But hey.  I’m open.  What do you think?  I certainly think this could be a great conversation in a class where folks know who Katness Everdeen is.

Last week, for the first week of the first semester for our first year PhD students, I assigned a reading that made my students cry.  Or at least whimper.  Or perhaps merely curse my name.  The article was Feldman and Orlikowski’s (2011) Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory in the journal Organization Science.  I must admit that it produced a bit of mental pain on my part knowing that the students would understand this paper a boatload better in their third year than in their first, but we were reading it now.

My objective in assigning the paper was to demonstrate the outcome of transdisciplinary research, which is an overarching goal of our Organization Science PhD program.  The problem is that it’s difficult to understand the ins and outs of a particular research problem if you have not yet been “in” or “out” of a couple of them.

NONETHELESS, the students and I were able to get excited about the paper by discussing the authors’ call to reject dualisms.  The example the students and I were able to coalesce around the common duality of agency vs. structure.  The students have agency (“choice”) in where they sit in the class along with what and how they respond to the discussion questions.  However, we also discussed the (possibly unacknowledged) structure in the classroom in that no one was sitting in the chairs in the corner of the room, that I sat at the head of the table, and that discussions and topics tended to be generated around the ones I thought were most interesting from the readings.  The authors rejection of duality (as we interpreted it) means that to understand what is actually happening in the class (or in “education”), we need to understand how WE actually live (ENACT) the CLASS within our space/time/culture.  The rejection of dualism means that agency and structure cannot be separated from each other to understand human behavior. Mind-body, objective-subjective, individual-institutional, and free will-determinism dualities should not be separated, either.  (Yes, practice theory extends structuration theory and you should read Feldman and Orlikowski’s article to learn more about it, if you are so inclined.)

Our discussion became lively, light bulbs went off over students’ heads (always a goal in class), and I think we all developed an understanding of this article as moving the discipline forward by challenging old ways of theorizing and presenting new ways to understand human and organizational behavior.

Imagine, then, my surprise when I picked up a theology book I had put down a few months before and started reading about this author’s call to reject dualistic thinking.  ((cue the spit take))  I then recalled a talk I heard by Gary Alan Fine at the last INGroup conference in which he discussed his new book Tiny Publics, in which he proposed that we can understand organization as well as society by understanding the routine small group interactions in situ (i.e., not unrelated to the rejection of dualistic thinking).  Dr. Fine is a sociologist quite apart from Feldman and Orlikowski as well as the theologian I was reading.

I may be going out on a limb here (or I may not!), but I think we are in the midst of a revolutionary new way of thinking about human (and organizational) behavior: one that is more holistic and difficult than before.  We’ve got to stop thinking in dualities (i.e., opposites) and realize that “both” sides are necessary, equal, and essential in understanding What Is Going On.

This is the part of the essay in which I am supposed to explain how we do that, how we stop thinking in dualities and start researching and theorizing non-dualistically.  HA! The best the students and I came up with was that we should take Fine’s approach and study repetitive small group behavior, checking our biases for dualities, and extrapolating to the research question from there.  We also decided this was going to be a lot easier for researchers 50 years from now (when we’ve already worked through these issues) than it is for us now.

Sometimes, I get a little freaked out when the New York Times has stories that seem to be focused all towards issues and interests in my own life.  (I’m sure that’s what all the paranoids say, but I’m way too optimistic to be a paranoid.  I just think how lucky I am the NY Times caters to me!!)

In any case, this Sunday’s New York Times had a very interesting article on open cubicle floor plans that have become popular with some organizations.  What I find so interesting about this topic is not the use of pink noise to drown out one’s co-workers’ conversations, but that organizational scientists have neglected the importance of the built environment in understanding employees and organizations.  I know that some I/O psychologists think this is the realm of human factors, but it is not.  This is the issue that Wanda Orlikowski has been trying to raise: we who study organizations need to look beyond just the social processes and incorporate the physical, built environment into our theories and research.

I don’t know what the answer is here.  Though I am so interested in environmental psychology, even I don’t know what the obvious theoretical approaches would be here much less easy solutions.

Nonetheless, I would approach the study of open cubicles from the perspective of behavior setting theories.  Behavior settings are a unit of analysis (bigger than a group, smaller than an organization) that can be used to understand behavior and cognitions as people interact within each other and the environment. Two other key components I think are relevant here are that behavior settings have boundaries and they have setting programs (i.e., patterns of behavior that accomplish some goal of the setting).

An accessible example would be a coffee shop.   The setting program is the ordering, preparing and consumption of coffee and perhaps some food.  The boundaries are the both real and psychological:  the walls around the space, the coffee counter, the door to the back room.  The physical objects (tables, chairs, counters, coffee makers, doors, cash registers, etc) can facilitate or hinder the setting program.  It’s more complicated than that, but that’s a good introduction.

I think one issue with open cubicle floor plans is that there are there are likely multiple behavior settings in one space that do not have clear physical boundaries between them which affects the psychological boundaries and disrupts the enactment of the necessary setting programs for the employees to accomplish their work. I would imagine some organizations have worked to solve these problems, but others haven’t.  The resulting employee frustration or work facilitation likely has to do with how much the organization has allowed or encouraged employees to modify the environment–and the work processes–to enact the setting program.

I know I do a lot of virtual research, but this would be such a fun and interesting and important study to do.  Any takers!?

The final papers for my writing and thinking class are starting to arrive.  I don’t know whose bright idea it was for the due date for the papers to be two weeks after the last class because I am already feeling the summer schedule.  Oh, yeah.  That was me.  Well, it seemed like a good idea in December.

Anyhoo, I’ve been using the word “aspirational” when I think about this class.  Aspirational is usually used in the context of Pinterest. It suggests a lifestyle that is inspirational to us and that we aspire to (e.g., a clean house, organic cleaning products, densely growing organic garden, yummy food, crafts, knitting projects, and chickens). Or maybe those are just my boards on Pinterest.

This class is  aspirational because we’ve spent the entire semester stressing the importance of in depth thinking and creativity in regards to our research.  We’ve critiqued and supported each other’s research.  We’ve plumbed the depths of the meanings of their constructs and played with all sorts of thought analyses of their research problems. The students have been validated in the importance of their approach to their research.  We’ve read editors from top journals discuss the importance of developmental reviews and why 13 pages of single space comments from a journal editor and three reviewers is a Good Thing.  I feel like every student has expanded their capacity to Think About  Research.  That’s pretty cool, and it goes way, way, way beyond looking for ways to “fill a gap in the research” when making a research contribution.

That’s the good part.  The reason I worry that what I’ve taught them is aspirational and not always “real life”  is that sometimes the pressure to get a publication out the door  interferes with thinking.  Sometimes it’s easier to just claim you’re filling in a hole in the research instead of re-conceptualizing previously problematic constructs  (affective organizational commitment, I am looking at you).  Sometimes reviewers don’t take a developmental approach and just say “this paper needs more theorizing” in a one paragraph journal submission review.

But that’s ok.  To continue the Pinterest analogy, if they have pinned to their Good Research Board ways to think, conceptualize, critique, and review research that is better than they would have done otherwise, how is that bad?  The thing about Pinterest (for me) is that occasionally, I do go back and pick out a craft or recipe I’d like to try or a chicken hint I’d forgotten about and I do it.  Maybe there will be a ripple effect for these students and for other academics who read these articles, so that eventually it becomes the norm and not the cutting edge. Crafts and foods show up in my life that I’ve seen get passed around on Pinterest.  I think the more attention we pay to creativity and clarity in thinking and research, the more likely we will to see projects we recognize as reflecting this principles start showing up to review or read in journals, too.

I hope.

But right now I have to go grade those (brilliantly written and conceptualized!) papers.  And then summer can start.

It has taken me forever to get this post up on my blog!  I am finally being shamed into finishing up this post after drinks, snacks, and dinner with my students last night.  Why so hard to write?  I think it’s because one becomes very self-conscious about writing when one is teaching about writing and thinking.

So, the scoop:  I am teaching a course this semester for our PhD students called “Writing in the Organizational Sciences”.  Although the title says “writing,” what it’s really about is writing and THINKING about research in the organizational sciences. And, as one of my students pointed out last night, critical thinking about research.  I’d also add creative thinking about research.

This course builds off a course I had with Allan Wicker called “Conceptual Framing” and from the philosophy of my main graduate school mentor, M. Lynne Markus who believed that you aren’t actually thinking until you are actually writing.*  In this class, we talk about everything involved in writing and thinking about research from incredibly mundane but fundamental parts of writing research like grammar (Barzun’s Simple and Direct) and scheduling (Pomodoro Technique) to pretty heady activities like having the students analyze their research problems using concept,  process, and  facet analyses, among other conceptual framing techniques.

We’ve read some classics like Davis’ essay on what make research interesting to and Sutton and Staw’s essay on  “What Theory is Not, to my new favorite article by Suddaby on  why construct clarity is lacking in organization science and why it is so important. Along the way, we’ve read some great papers that put creativity and thoughtfulness into writing and thinking about important research  topics like Orlikowski’s article on social materialism (2007) and the brand new article by Klein et al in AMR reconceptualizing organizational commitment.

So, that’s what we did in the class.  What I love is what the students became:  open to sharing their research ideas and taking constructive criticism; able to see the interesting components of others’ research and coaching them on how to develop it; creative thinkers of new ideas and approaches grounded in previous research.

I’d love for this to be a course that is offered in other PhD programs.  I don’t think it needs to be limited to organizational sciences; I think all social science PhD folks could get a lot out of it.  We teach our PhD students a lot about research methods.  I think it’s also useful to teach them how to theorize and to really think about their research.

*How bizarre to link to my  mentors’ wikipedia pages!

Well, that has been an interesting ride since my last post.

First, who knew how many people would be searching the web to try to find out why Dooce is getting divorced? According to my site stats, about 700 have stopped by this site after conducting a web search looking for some more understanding about why Dooce/Heather Armstrong has separated and appears to be divorcing Jon.

I couldn’t have asked for more obvious data to land in my lap to support my argument that people want to understand what is going on.  And even though Dooce gets 100,000 readers a day, most of the 311,000,000  inhabitants of the US do not read her blog.  So what happens when you need someone to discuss her separation with? There are probably not enough people in your face-to-face world to figure it out with. I don’t think any of the people who ended up on my blog read the news and then immediately googled for information about Dooce.

Instead, I think her readers pondered her situation, worried about health, and were curious about why.  I would say it caused enough internal tension that that folks said “What the heck?” and googled.  Did they think they’d find an answer?  No.  Does Dooce or Jon keep a secret blog they could find and read?  No!  But did they think they might find someone else discussing what is going on?  Yes. 700 folks, and that is not counting the 1000 or so hits I got from Slate and Sheknows.  Wow.

I have no data to support my google-as-sensemaking argument, but it’s a plausible explanation.  Your plausible explanations are welcome, too, including the tendency to seek information from the same medium by which we are used to receiving it.   (And I need to blog about the “hate readers” because it suggests to me a couple of  a really interesting study should some psychologist or comm scholar want to study it)

I planned on blogging about this two weeks ago, soon after my last post.  But then my son got sick–apparently, really sick–and had to be hospitalized.  That has relevance here because of the socio-emotional and material support I received through posting about it on Facebook.  I hate to self-cite, but that article I wrote with Tom Horan ages ago proposed that online groups can increase social capital (through networks, norms, and trust) when online networks overlap with face-to-face networks.

That paper did not anticipate social networking technologies like Facebook, and the egocentric communities that develop from them, like Barry Wellman did.   But I think our paper did anticipate how online interactions move offline and provide real, material support–like the meals, snacks and activities quietly delivered to our house and our hospital room.  That was important to us and similar to the sorts of support Rheingold first talked about on the WELL.

I think, however, our paper underestimated the importance of the online support to folks in a needy state.  Hampton et al’s (2012) new report says that people get more than they give on Facebook.  A “like” is a pretty simple button to click on someone’s status update.  But when 45 people like my status update that we are getting out of the hospital?  That has real and significant meaning to me.  I think there are plenty of research opportunities out there for us to figure out why that is so powerful.

And I don’t think anyone has fully theorized or studied about when those offline and online communication media start to overlap.  When a colleague says “Thank you for status updates.  I really wanted to know how it was going and it was important to me.”  And when multiple friends say “HEY! That idea for a bar in a hospital? You are definitely on to something!”  The conversation seems to start up quickly and get deep in my experiences when the offline and online overlap.  It would be worth seeing how online/offline communication processes merge and when they don’t.

Lots of studies I can see here.  Lots of sense to be made.  Lots of gratitude and connection to be felt.

Last week, I was pretty shocked to hear that Dooce (aka Heather Armstrong) and her husband, Jon, have decided to to separate.  No, I’m not accidentally posting on my professional blog a topic that belongs on my personal blog (or maybe I am, but I’m choosing to do it anyway).  What I’m interested in exploring here is the reaction I observed (both surprise and concern among my real life and FB friends), the shock to our reaction by people who do not follow Dooce, other media reactions to Dooce, and Dooce’s own reaction to this announcement.

I need to preface this by referencing some of my previous research on Julie Powell’s blog The Julie/Julia Project (which became the movie Julie & Julia starring Meryl Streep).  My Julie//Julia research started because there was a call for  research on blogs and I wanted to study her blog, which I really  liked reading.  I decided to study sense of virtual community on it because although I liked it very much, I did not believe it was an actual community.  Imagine my surprise when I found that a small group of people on this blog actually did experience a “real” feeling of community on it. The quantitative results are linked above and my recent analysis of the qualitative data, which examines the differences between those who feel community and those who “merely” like it a whole lot is looking for a publication outlet.  This experience has informed much of my research on other groupings in that I should never assume that I know what is going on for people in their online experiences (a assumption that has prompted me in some of my current research on Facebook).

So back to Dooce.  I was honestly so shocked about her announcement that I immediately posted her news to Facebook.  (If you didn’t see that announcement, it means you are on my professional FB list instead of my personal list.  Should you like to see more status updates about personal things, mostly my children, let me know; if you’d like to know less personal info, let me know that, too!)  I needed to understand if my other friends who read Dooce were as shocked as I.  I don’t usually talk about Dooce to my real life friends, although I had a funny experience in which a colleague and I were shopping and noticed a pretty light fixture.  My colleague told me that a friend of hers had recently bought a similar fixture, but she couldn’t remember who.  We both paused for a minute, thinking.  I mentioned that Dooce had recently bought one like that and my friend replied, “Oh, yeah.  That’s who it was.”   We laughed, albeit a bit uncomfortably.

So two things occur to me here:  1) Dooce is stored in the “friend” section in the conceptual map of our social networks, even though we don’t know her.  2) When something unusual happens to her, at least some of us feel the need to sensemake about her experience with “real life” others.

Even more surprising was that Dooce’s separation was covered in mainstream media.  For those of you who don’t know Dooce (and if don’t, you aren’t following Mommy blogs–or even personal blogs–are you?), she gets over 100,000 readers a day, was featured on Oprah and makes $40,000 a MONTH blogging*.  And if you click on those links, you’ll see that that information was posted on the Salt Lake City Tribune and Jezebel.com, only some of the mainstream newspapers (the Globe and Mail) and web sites (HuffPo, Parenting.com) as well as a boatload of other personal and syndicated blogs talking about Dooce’s separation.  Television is even covering it (ABCNews and Dooce’s own local TV Station).  As we say in south, and I mean this will all sincerity and not as a put down: Bless her heart.

So this is a surprisingly big deal that people wan to talk about.  Why?  Is she  like Kim Kardashian or some other reality TV star that we’ve been sucked into following?  That suggestion has gone around and it doesn’t ring true to me.  It may for you, but it doesn’t for me.  Why?  I (like other mothers who are strong willed, earning a living, and potentially difficult to live with) identify with her.  I found this to be very important in Julie Powell’s blog fan base and I think it’s important  here.  But people (whom I don’t know) identify with Kim Kardashian, too. Right?  I think the bigger issue is how mediated Dooce’s blog is compared with Reality TV.  Yes, they are both edited:  all communication is edited.  I am editing right now.  I edit my thoughts when I talk. I think Dooce is a good writer because she edits her posts for truth and clarity. But Reality TV is heavily edited,  for a truth I think that comes from the producers and not the “star.”

Dooce reveals a lot about her mental illness and her  personal disposition that do not put her in a flattering light even if it puts her in a truthful light.  That’s why I’m surprised about the reality TV comparison.  Yes, a blog is a computer mediated technology, but if you can trust that the blog author is being honest, it’s a very personal, intimate form of communication.  (It’s one of the reasons I think CEO Blogs are quite popular with their employees.)

So why is this post here and not my personal blog?  Clearly, there is some overlap.  I am surprised and concerned about her breakup, a reaction that is not “independent and objective” as we psychologists are theoretically supposed to be in our research.  (I don’t believe that is true, but many psychologists do.)  I think it’s interesting that someone’s personal blog is having this much affect outside of her readership.  I think it’s interesting that even in this day and age, we still don’t agree on what a blog is, which I think has to do more with what computer mediated communication (CMC) or information and communication technologies (ICT) someone reads and the purpose they read them for than what the communicators actually experience on any one site.  I think this provides more evidence (do we really need it?) that mediated communication has real effects on people who are distant from each other.  I’m not sure this experience calls for more research on blogs, although I do think much of the research I’ve seen has not fully dealt with   case studies like Dooce (popular, highly personal, and providing a living through multi-media endeavors).  I think it echoes back to my previous research on the Julie/Julia project: I can’t fully anticipate what others feel about her blog and her breakup announcement.  For some, maybe this is reality TV.  For others, a  “friend” we identify is going through a break up.

I’m interested in these outcomes and differences in interpretations. From an organizational science perspective, how does this sort of communication and identity move over to employees, organizations, and professions?  From a social psychology perspective, how does such an experience become integrated into our personal and social lives, when we don’t really have others to make sense about it?  Or just personally, why do I find this so interesting when others find it so remote?  Of course, this is why I like doing what I’m doing.  It’s fun.  I get to think.  And I get to talk about it.

*Should you want to sponsor this or any of my other blogs for even a fraction of that amount, let me know.

One of the outcomes of my recent research has been my belief that online groups can tell us a lot about face-to-face (FtF) groups that we either have not noticed or have interpreted through different lenses–theoretical lenses that can change once we see the behavior in online groups and interpret in a particular way and the realize that the same behavior occurs in FtF groups but we’ve never really thought about it “that way”.

Case in point:  Public versus private interactions.  Online, people will reveal information that is quite personal or intimate, which we could consider “private” but is available for everyone to see–on a newsgroup, on a listserv, even  on a Facebook status update.  Do they confuse their public/private boundaries or locations?

I have spent a great deal of time working at coffeehouses during my sabbatical.  I find them fantastic ways to keep myself focused on my work while still stimulated enough to not get distracted (another topic for another blog).  In the past few weeks, with the remodel of my favorite coffeehouse, I have changed where I have been sitting.  In this new location, I notice that every weekday morning when I am here, there is a group that meets and discusses “issues” for about an hour or so before they go to work or back to their home.  There are a couple of interesting things about this group:  it seems to either be a support group for a middle aged woman (the youngest member of the group) or she simply dominates the entire conversation with issues about her co-workers, church or health problems.  Should I be the gossiping type and If I took notes, I could tell you where she works, what she does, her plans for leaving her Sunday school responsibilities and what medical practice she frequents for one of her ongoing medical issues.

That is actually not what interests me.  What interests me is that this group is clearly having a private conversation in a public location–one that the rest of us at the coffeehouse know is a public location but which this particular group is  enacting what I could consider private behaviors. Many people have meetings at this location and most of them are able to hold their conversations at a level that is quiet enough to still be “private” in public.

I think previously we would just interpret this as being an issue with someone who speaks too loudly for the location (and if *I* am calling someone loud…).  However, I wonder if the more interesting issue is the permeability of psychological boundaries that people create around their FtF groups.  It is obvious in online groups how permeable  these boundaries are, especially when researchers or media expose their contents.  Some online groups make the boundaries less permeable by requiring membership and not allowing the content to show up on google searches.  But they are still completely permeable due to our options to cut and paste content.  For the most part though, however, we let people enact their online public behavior as private.

Just like people are “letting” the groups in this coffeehouse believe they are private and just like the people interacting in these groups believe they are private, when in fact, I could be transcribing everything they are saying.  Of course, I  would be gossiping and eavesdropping should I be doing in to the FtF groups, while just “reading” should I be doing it in an online group.

Perhaps, however, we all create psychological boundaries of privacy in public spaces, boundaries that are highly permeable in both FtF and online environments. Of course, online, the communication is permanent, but FtF it’s no less observable and it’s not less private.

Same behavior, different explanations.  The issue of Public vs. Private conversations are not isolated to online groups.  Perhaps we (or I?) just haven’t thought about it the same way in FtF groups.

Semi-deep thoughts while I try to figure out what the heck the purpose of this group is and why they meet here every morning, which I admit is idle curiosity and not related at all to any research.