INFO 2450: Networks, Publics, and Surveillance Comprehensive Review

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the concepts, theories, and empirical research of INFO 2450 Weeks 5 through 9, including networked individualism, context collapse, public goods, information environments, political movements, and surveillance.

Sociological Perspective

An analytical framework that investigates how technology and social structures shape large collectives, communities, and organizations, rather than focusing primarily on individual psychological processes.

Networked Individualism

A social operating system identified by Rainie and Wellman in which individuals navigate life by managing ties across multiple, loosely knit, person-centered networks rather than relying predominantly on a single tightly bounded, group-centered community.

Partial Membership

A condition characteristic of networked individualism where individuals belong to several diverse social networks simultaneously without being completely embedded in or constrained by any single one.

Triple Revolution

The convergence of three structural transformations—the Mobile Revolution, the Internet Revolution, and the Social Network Revolution—that reorganized modern social connection from group-based ties to networked individuals.

Hierarchical Bureaucracy

An organizational structure defined by centralized authority, formal division of labor, and primarily vertical communication moving up and down an established chain of command.

Networked Organization

A decentralized organizational structure characterized by direct, horizontal, and flexible communication links among autonomous members and units.

Strong Ties

Close social relationships marked by frequent communication, deep emotional intimacy, significant time investment, and mutual reciprocity, which provide social support, accountability, and substantial favors.

Weak Ties

More distant, acquaintanceship-level social relationships that serve as bridges between disconnected social clusters, providing access to novel information, opportunities, and specialized resources.

Embeddedness

The degree to which a social tie is surrounded by overlapping, mutual connections among shared peers; higher embeddedness enhances interpersonal trust and accountability while increasing information redundancy.

Redundant Information

Knowledge or news that an individual already possesses or can readily access because it circulates repeatedly within a densely connected, highly embedded social circle.

Propinquity

Physical or geographical proximity between individuals, which historically served as a primary structural determinant for the formation of social ties.

Warranting Through Gossip

The informal process of assessing or confirming someone's reputation and credibility through mutual acquaintances, a mechanism that functions effectively in dense networks but weakens in sparse ones.

Job Transmission Curve (Rajkumar et al., 2022)

The empirical finding from LinkedIn data showing that the likelihood of securing employment through a contact peaked when sharing approximately $9\text{--}10$ mutual connections, demonstrating that moderately weak ties transmit opportunities more effectively than either extremely weak or highly embedded ties.

Imagined Audience

The mental conceptualization of the specific group of people an author or speaker envisions seeing, reading, or hearing their communication.

Invisible Audience

The unintended or unnoticed individuals who consume an online message without the communicator being actively aware of their presence.

Ought Self

An individual's understanding of the traits, responsibilities, and behavioral standards that social norms and outside observers expect them to embody.

Context Collapse

A social media dynamic described by Marwick and Boyd where communication technologies flatten disparate social spheres, merging diverse audiences with conflicting behavioral expectations into a single communicative space.

Nightmare Audience

An audience segment whose norms, values, or expectations are violated by an individual's communication, leading to potential social, professional, or personal reprimand.

Self-Censorship

A strategy for coping with context collapse where an individual deliberately refrains from posting content that could offend or alienate the most sensitive or restrictive segment of their collective audience.

Balance

A strategy for managing context collapse by circulating a varied portfolio of personal and professional updates across different posts to cater to separate audience expectations over time.

Polysemy (Strategic Ambiguity)

The practice of crafting a single communication containing multiple layers of meaning, allowing distinct audience groups to decode the message differently based on their insider knowledge.

Impression Management

Erving Goffman's concept describing the conscious or unconscious expressive techniques individuals use to influence the perceptions that others form about them during social interaction.

Frontstage

In Goffman's dramaturgical sociology, the social space where individuals engage in polished, deliberate performances tailored to the explicit expectations of an observing audience.

Backstage

In Goffman's dramaturgical sociology, the informal, unobserved setting where individuals step out of their performative roles, relax social pretenses, and act candidly.

Lowest-Common-Denominator Effect

The communicative outcome of context collapse wherein social media users restrict their public expression solely to neutral, uncontroversial topics that are acceptable to their broadest and most conservative followers.

Micro-Celebrity

The practice of viewing one's social media following as a fan base to be actively cultivated, maintained, and monetized through strategic content curation and personal branding.

Informed Citizen

A democratic participant who possesses sufficient factual knowledge, critical awareness, and context regarding public issues to make reasoned, competent civic decisions.

Doxa

Unexamined public opinion, popular belief, or conventional wisdom within a society that is widely accepted despite lacking empirical evidence or rigorous justification.

Technocracy

A system of governance or decision-making administered primarily by technical experts and specialized authorities rather than through popular democratic deliberation.

Technological Determinism

The reductionist perspective arguing that technological innovations function as autonomous forces that dictate changes in human behavior, institutional design, and societal development.

Partial Information

An informational state where an individual encounters strictly accurate facts but remains deprived of countervailing evidence, resulting in an incomplete and systematically skewed understanding.

Misinformation

Information that is empirically false, inaccurate, or misleading, which leads individuals toward mistaken beliefs regardless of whether an intention to deceive exists.

Selective Exposure

The individual tendency to actively seek out, consume, and attend to media, viewpoints, and political information that corroborate one's pre-existing attitudes while evading challenging perspectives.

Cross-Cutting Content

News reports, social discussions, or editorial commentary that present political views, ideologies, or factual assertions contrary to an individual's own worldview.

Super-Sharers

A highly concentrated, hyper-active minority of social media accounts identified by Grinberg et al. (2019) who are responsible for transmitting a disproportionately large percentage of fake news content across digital networks.

Public Good

A communal resource or commodity defined by two structural characteristics: non-rivalry (consumption by one person does not deplete supply for others) and non-excludability (individuals cannot easily be barred from accessing it).

Functional Non-Rivalry

A condition where a resource technically has finite physical limits, but an additional participant's consumption causes no noticeable reduction in quality or availability for other users under normal operating loads.

Free-Rider Problem

A collective action failure occurring when individuals enjoy the benefits of a non-excludable public good without contributing their fair share of labor, money, or information to its creation and maintenance.

Critical Mass

The minimum threshold of participant contributions, active engagement, or resource investments required to establish and perpetuate a sustainable public good.

Connective Public Goods

Communication systems identified by Fulk et al. (such as postal networks or telephone exchanges) whose primary public utility lies in enabling two-way interactive linkages directly between members.

Communal Public Goods

Shared repositories of information and knowledge (such as Wikipedia or searchable databases) whose collective value stems from providing group members open access to an accumulated corpus of data.

Network Effects

A dynamic in which the economic or practical value of a platform or communicative good increases systematically for each participant as the total number of users expands.

Discretionary Database

A shared information pool whose contents depend on voluntary, discretionary inputs of specialized knowledge and data contributed by individual members of an organization or community.

Heterogeneity of Resources and Interests

The diversity of motivations, capabilities, and assets present within a group, which can either foster collective action if a small elite funds the critical mass or hinder it if broad cooperation is required.

Public Sphere

The discursive social domain wherein private individuals assemble to openly discuss topics of shared civic concern, exchange rational arguments, and coordinate political actions.

Counterpublic

A parallel discursive arena developed by subordinate or historically marginalized social groups to invent, circulate, and sustain oppositional interpretations of identities, interests, and needs.

Networked Public Sphere

The hybrid communication environment combining online social platforms, independent digital channels, and offline spaces through which citizens organize, deliberate, and influence public discourse.

Resource Mobilization

The structural process through which a social movement gathers and manages the vital inputs—people, logistical expertise, physical goods, funding, and public attention—necessary to execute political campaigns.

Political Opportunity

External institutional vulnerabilities, political divisions, or changing policy conditions (such as upcoming elections or weakened regimes) that signal to citizens that contentious collective action stands a viable chance of succeeding.

Pluralistic Ignorance

A cognitive and social bias wherein members of a collective privately share a specific belief or grievance but mistakenly assume the majority of others hold the opposing view, which suppresses public action.

Expression Threshold

In Granovetter's threshold model of collective behavior, the specific number or proportion of peers an individual must observe publicly advocating an issue before being willing to openly voice support themselves.

Expressive Utility

The intrinsic psychological satisfaction an individual attains by asserting their authentic beliefs and values openly, which serves to lower their expression threshold.

Reputational Utility

The social benefits gained or losses avoided by conforming to the perceived expectations of one's peers, which tends to raise an individual's expression threshold when expressing unpopular stances.

Threshold Model: Hidden Support

The initial state in Granovetter's networked threshold sequence where widespread private alignment remains unexpressed and politically dormant because sparse network connectivity prevents members from seeing enough supporters to meet their activation thresholds.

Threshold Model: Networked Visibility

The transitional state in Granovetter's threshold model where digital tools and network linkages make early adopters (such as threshold-$0$ and threshold-$1$ actors) visible across distant clusters, satisfying the thresholds of adjacent peers.

Threshold Model: Collective Expression Cascade

The mature phase in Granovetter's threshold diffusion model where successive rounds of visible public alignment sequentially trigger the higher activation thresholds of broader network members, generating widespread collective action.

Imagined Communities

Benedict Anderson's concept describing how individuals who will never meet face-to-face nonetheless conceptualize themselves as belonging to a unified, cohesive collective through shared media and symbolic systems.

Slacktivism

Low-barrier, low-risk digital actions (such as liking, retweeting, or using campaign hashtags) that give participants a subjective feeling of civic contribution while requiring little tangible effort or sacrifice.

Network Internalization

The development of robust internal organizational infrastructure, leadership hierarchy, and consensus procedures that enable a social movement to coordinate complex logistical strategies, negotiate authoritatively with institutional adversaries, and endure political shifts.

Censorship

The overt, direct suppression, prohibition, or regulation of speech, text, artistic expression, or communications enforced by a governing authority or institutional power.

Chilling Effect

The self-imposed restriction or silencing of one's own speech, writing, or conduct stemming from the subjective apprehension of surveillance, punishment, or social retaliation.

Privacy Paradox

The systematic mismatch between individuals' self-reported commitments to safeguarding personal data privacy and their actual daily behavior of freely surrendering private details to digital platforms.

Information Asymmetry

A condition in surveillance relationships where the monitoring institution possesses extensive data regarding an individual's comparative habits and movements, while the individual remains entirely uninformed about what records exist or how they are evaluated.

Endowment Effect (Privacy)

The psychological bias wherein individuals place a significantly higher valuation on privacy protections and data confidentiality when they already possess them compared to when they are required to actively obtain them.

Implied Reciprocity

The cognitive assumption that because an entity or corporation has formally requested sensitive personal information, it will handle and steward that data responsibly in good faith.

Implied Concern

The misplaced trust that an organization is actively protecting a user's confidential information prompted merely by the superficial presence of a privacy statement or security badge.

Present Bias (Tangibility Bias)

The human tendency to heavily prioritize immediate, concrete gratifications (such as effortless mobile app access) over delayed, abstract future consequences (such as downstream privacy loss).

Privacy Dependency

The structural reality that an individual's personal data confidentiality is inherently dependent on the behaviors, disclosures, and digital footprints of other network members.

Tie-Based Dependency

A form of privacy dependency where an individual's private records or identity are compromised directly by personal social relations who disclose data, such as a friend uploading photos, sharing contact address books, or submitting familial DNA.

Similarity-Based Dependency

A form of privacy dependency where surveillance algorithms infer unobserved personal traits, tastes, and behaviors about an individual by aggregating the disclosed activities of demographic and behavioral peers.

Difference-Based Dependency

A form of privacy dependency where an individual's deliberate adoption of protective security or privacy measures (such as encrypting files or spoofing gait) deviates from group norms, marking them as an anomaly and attracting heightened surveillance.