Jumaat, Julai 15, 2005

Email forwarding amounts to ritual gift exchange

17:26 12 July 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Will Knight


Forwarding a quirky email or an amusing link or video attachment to colleagues may seem innocent enough, but it is the modern equivalent of ritual gift exchange and carries with it similar social implications, say US researchers.

Email forwarding is a familiar part of modern email communications, and has spawned many an internet phenomenon, the Star Wars kid, the Numa Numa dance, and Oolong the rabbit to name just a few.

Benjamin Gross at the University of Illinois, US, and colleagues studied email forwarding behaviour by conducting informal interviews among email users. He says forwarding emails plays a vital role in constructing and maintaining modern social ties, despite the phenomenon receiving scant attention from social scientists.

Forwarding a genuinely amusing or interesting link to a friend, for example, shows that you are thinking of them and are aware of the sort of content they like, Gross says. But passing an irrelevant or out-of-date link on to contacts can be annoying, thus lowering the sender's social status in the recipient’s eyes.

“Viral” marketing

"If they are consistently wrong about what content is of actual interest to recipients their reputation may drop in the implicit system people must apply in order to [prioritise] their email," Gross writes in a paper co-authored with Jeff Ubois at the University of California, Berkley, and Marc Smith at Microsoft Research in Redmond, both in the US.

The power of email-mediated social networks has, of course, already been identified by marketing firms, who often try to exploit them through "viral" marketing campaigns. This involves creating a video clip or website that includes an advertising message and hoping that it gets passed on via email to thousands of internet users.

Gross says email-forwarding networks could prove useful in other ways. He points to a software project called Forward Track, which can monitor email forwarding chains, making it possible for political groups to keep track of those who have forwarded a political message to friends.

Microsoft has also developed software to map the networks created through email forwarding. A prototype program called Social Network and Relationship Finder, or SNARF, can be used to create a picture of the social and business networks constructed through email communications.

The researchers will present their paper at the Second Conference on Email and Anti-Spam in California from 21 July.

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