Research says: On the social web, people want to monetize their own data.

This video accompanied the online article, Who Owns the Social Web?, which also appeared in the May, 2017 issue of Communications of the ACM.

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The video contains an interview with Catherine C. Marshall, a researcher who has been studying the ownership of social media in collaboration with another researcher, Frank M. Shipman. Both researchers are affiliated with Texas A&M University.

In the video, Marshall tells us how her interest in ownership of the social web arose about a decade ago out of research into personal archiving - when people started moving more and more data to online locations, and she provides a brief description of some of her research. Two of the main questions that she poses are: "Who owns the data?" and "What can they do with it?"

To investigate these questions, she and her collaborator have conducted a series of surveys over a period of four years. The survey participants were people who were familiar with social media, but not necessarily familiar with computer science. The findings are described in detail in the article that's linked above, and they receive cursory coverage in the video. For this post, I'll just summarize the video, except to provide these three "key insights," from the article:

• Intellectual property law and social norms concerning content ownership are diverging in conspicuous ways; we find that legally contentious actions (such as downloading and saving content) may seem benign to most Internet users
• Managing rights relies on content owners' ability to envision plausible reuse scenarios, including commercial reuse of their content as data, and predicting which are most likely.
• Everyday reuse of social media content is opportunistic, pragmatic, and highly contextual; users reason about the fairnes of reusing other people's content but do not necessarily trust them to do the same.

In the surveys described in the video, Marshall and Shipman covered 8 different social media types or services. These included:

1. Twitter
2. Photo
3. Review
4. Podcast
5. Video
6. Educational video
7. Multiuser games
8. Facebook

In the surveys, they used a 7-point lichert scale to gauge two aspects of social media use. Those aspects were: How do people think about social media ownership in the abstract, and how do they actually behave? To measure how people think about it in the abstract, they asked questions about how people should behave in 16-28 hypothetical situations that could occur in 2-4 real world scenarios. To measure how people actually behave, they asked how the participant would respond if they, themselves, encountered those scenarios.

Marshall discussed three aspects of their findings: Saving content that was posted by others, commercial sale of user data, and social norms.

Saving content: In media types one through seven, people feel free to save content that they find on the social web. Contrarily, in Facebook-like services, people feel constrained by the boundaries that their connections place on their data.

Commercial Sale of Data: As a steemizen, I thought this was especially interesting. People know that companies like Amazon.com and Facebook are selling their data, but they are generally unhappy about it. Instead, people want to be able to monetize their own data.

Social Norms: Citing the book, Order Without Law, by property law scholar Robert C. Ellickson, Marshall asserts that people converge on social norms that are far more intuitive than copyright law, and that these norms can be as good or better than law for protecting intellectual property.

I hope you enjoy the video. Thank you for your time and attention.

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Steve Palmer (@remlaps) is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

Steve is a co-founder of the Steemit's Best Classical Music Facebook page, and the @classical-music steemit curation account.

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