Why I joined Facebook and still regret it

This article argues for a particular understanding of identity and sociality in social media. While there is considerable insightful research about the sociality and subjectivity produced in social media, it is also important to see that such identity and sociality is about creating and maintaining public-private boundaries online that can be different to those divisions of public and private that are lived offline

Evolution of sociality in Anelosimus Spiders

Most spiders are solitary and aggressive towards cohorts, but some have been found to live in groups and forage communally, even sharing in brood care. The benefits of group living outweigh the costs of inbreeding for these spiders, but how sociality has developed in arachnids is yet unknown. In this study I test the neoteny hypothesis for the origin of sociality in spiders in the Anelosimusgenus, which contains many of the known social spiders. The neoteny hypothesis predicts that due to retaining juvenile traits and maturing at an earlier morph, social spiders will have smaller body sizes than their solitary relatives. Using a novel phylogenetic tree of Anelosimusspecies and other outgroups, I used correlative ancestral reconstruction of traits along with analyses of variance to see if body size decreased with an increase in social level. The tree contained 8 evolutionary replicas of sociality (9 social species, 8 independent evolutions of sociality), therefore making it the perfect platform to test the neoteny hypothesis. There was no difference in body size between sociality levels, and the neoteny hypothesis was rejected. I did however, find evidence that social spiders have smaller clutch sizes, as well as a female-biased sex ratio. This supports the hypothesis that social species evolved small clutch sizes with more females to combat extreme oscillations in their population size, and tells us more about how their sociality may have come to be

Social networks as inauthentic sociality

This article argues that social networks constitute an inauthentic form of sociality. The two component concepts of this claim, inauthenticity and sociality, are explored in order to avoid some widespread misinterpretations. Inauthenticity is examined on the basis of the relevant sections in Heidegger’s 'Being and Time', first with respect to its main characteristics, then in terms of what motivates it and its benefits, and finally with respect to its status as a non-normative concept. The second part of the paper explores sociality. Here, a main emphasis is the way in which my body imposes constraints on my social relations in the here and now, which virtuality appears to overcome. Yet such an escape from corporeality is not ultimately possible. The third and final part takes the analysis to the wider level of world, that is, our current historical world which has given rise to such an understanding of sociality

Strong Reciprocity and Human Sociality

Human groups maintain a high level of sociality despite a low level of relatedness among group members. The behavioral basis of this sociality remains in doubt. This paper reviews the evidence for an empirically identifiable form of prosocial behavior in humans, which we call 'strong reciprocity,' that may in part explain human sociality. A strong reciprocator is predisposed to cooperate with others and punish non-cooperators, even when this behavior cannot be justified in terms of extended kinship or reciprocal altruism. We present a simple model, stylized but plausible, of the evolutionary emergence of strong reciprocity.

Life Beneath Silk Walls: A Review of the Primitively Social Embiidina

I review and summarize the scattered information on embiids (Order Embiidina), with an emphasis on details of colony structure and maternal care. I summarize experimental and observational field results from a detailed study on parental and communal behavior of Antipaluria urichi, a Trinidadian webspinner. Topics discussed include the function of maternal behavior, interactions with egg parasitoids, antipredator attributes of communal living, and possible functions of silk. I also compare features of webspinner sociality to other communal insects and spiders. In addition, I discuss promising topics for future study, including male dimorphism, the possibility of higher sociality, and communication systems

Working Consumers: The Next Step in Marketing Theory?

In marketing and consumer research, consumers have been increasingly theorised as producers. However, these theorisations do not take all facets of consumers’ productive role into account. This paper mobilises both post-Marxist economics and post-Maussian socio-economics to develop the concept of working consumer. This concept depicts consumers who, through their immaterial labour, add cultural and affective value to market offerings. In so doing consumers increase the value of market offerings, although they usually work at the primary level of sociality (interpersonal relationships) and are therefore beyond producers’ control. However, given certain conditions, companies capture such a value when it enters the second level of sociality (the market). The concept of the working consumer summarises and enriches extant approaches to consumer (co)production, while challenging right-minded developments, such as the service-dominant (S-D) logic in marketing, which try to create/construct an ethereal marketscape in which consumers and producers live in harmony.Double Exploitation, Gift giving, Immaterial Labour, Primary Sociality, Secondary Sociality, Co- production, Co-creation

Landscapes of Helping: Kindliness in Neighbourhoods and Communities

Increasing geographical mobility, economic change and the rise of an individualist culture in the UK have contributed to the loosening of close ties in communities. Communities need to evolve, to reconnect, so that people cultivate the ‘background hum’ of sociability that has been associated with neighbourliness. This ‘background hum’ is characterised by people’s awareness of each other, by a respect for each other’s privacy and by a readiness to take action if help is needed. In this research we define kindliness as ‘neighbourliness enacted’ and describe the process of reconnection within communities as the ‘reinvention of sociality’. Hebden Bridge’s relative success in melding traditional and more contemporary forms of sociality helps to identify some broader lessons about fostering kindliness in neighbourhoods and communities

When and Where: Predicting Human Movements Based on Social Spatial-Temporal Events

Predicting both the time and the location of human movements is valuable but challenging for a variety of applications. To address this problem, we propose an approach considering both the periodicity and the sociality of human movements. We first define a new concept, Social Spatial-Temporal Event (SSTE), to represent social interactions among people. For the time prediction, we characterise the temporal dynamics of SSTEs with an ARMA (AutoRegressive Moving Average) model. To dynamically capture the SSTE kinetics, we propose a Kalman Filter based learning algorithm to learn and incrementally update the ARMA model as a new observation becomes available. For the location prediction, we propose a ranking model where the periodicity and the sociality of human movements are simultaneously taken into consideration for improving the prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments conducted on real data sets validate our proposed approach

Construing the cultural other and the self: A Personal Construct analysis of English and Italian perceptions of national character

How we perceive other cultures is arguably of increasing importance in contemporary society, impacting on realms such as international relations, business and tourism. The qualitative research reported in this paper was carried out in the UK and in Italy and adopted a Personal Construct Psychology approach. It aimed to explore intercultural perceptions in a sample of people who had some degree of experience with the ‘other’ culture, and a unique feature of the research is that it asked how those perceptions might be affected if people from both cultures are given access to each other’s perceptions. There was considerable commonality in the perceptions of the English and Italian participants, and each culture envied some of the qualities of the other. However, they initially struggled to accommodate how they were seen by the other and endeavoured to resolve difference by construing at a more superordinate level. The findings also suggest that national identity is rooted in the construing of others’ constructions, achieved through relationship and comparison