Application of Social Network Metrics to a Trust-Aware Collaborative Model for Generating Personalized User Recommendations

Social network analysis has emerged as a key technique in modern sociology, but has recently gained a lot of interest in Web mining research, because of the advent and the increasing popularity of social media, such as blogs, social networks, micro-blogging, customer review sites etc. Such media often serve as platforms for information dissemination and product placement or promotion. One way to improve the quality of recommendations provided to the members of social networks is to use trustworthy resources. In this environment, community-based reputation can help estimating the trustworthiness of individual users. Consequently, influence and trust are becoming essential qualities among user interactions. In this work, we perform an extensive study of various metrics related to the aforementioned elements, and of their effect in the process of information propagation in social networks. In order to better understand the properties of links and the dynamics of social networks, we distinguish between permanent and transient links and in the latter case, we consider the link freshness. Moreover, we distinguish between the propagation of trust in a local level and the effect of global influence and compare suggestions provided by locally trusted or globally influential users

Fourth Worlds and neo-Fordism: American Apparel and the cultural economy of consumer anxiety

This article examines the strategies of the 'sweatshop-free' clothing company American Apparel in the context of ongoing debates over the cultural turn and cultural economy. American Apparel's key selling point is that it does not outsource: it manufactures in Los Angeles, California, pays 'good' wages and provides health care, yet the workers are not unionized and the migrant labour it depends upon is often temporary. These same employees are used in promotional material to create its brand identity of an irreverent, hip and quasi-sexualized 'community' of consumers and workers. A design- and brand-led company that nonetheless does not see itself as a brand in any conventional sense, and markets itself as 'transparent', the company's ethos turns on consumer anxiety towards the socio-economic injustices of post-Fordism. Indeed, it marks a partial return to Fordist modes of production by aiming to manufacture everything under one roof, whilst deploying modes of informality (and technology) stereotypically associated with the post-Fordist creative industries. This paper considers the complex dynamics of American Apparel's emergence in a reflexive marketplace (in relation to what Callon has termed an 'economy of qualities') and discusses its problematic negotiations with 'fourth worlds', or the zones of exclusion Castells terms 'the black holes of informational capitalism'