Together with Marieke I submitted an abstract to the QUIS13 conference in Karlstad Sweden. This abstract got accepted which gives us a great platform to discuss big data in the hospitality industry.

Abstract:

Social media is rapidly becoming a viable way of service marketing and customer engagement in the hospitality industry. Many businesses in the industry have created accounts for popular platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (Kasavana et al., 2010). While many already use the Web as a promotional tool, social media enable the opportunity to directly build customer relationships. Facebook for instance, allows businesses to publish information, multimedia content and engage with their customers to e.g., share their experience, answer questions or learn about their preferences. Being active on social media has become increasingly important for the hospitality industry. Customers turn more frequently to social media and the Web for evaluations of a restaurant before going out to eat there (Lewis & Chambers, 2000). For them: “the most powerful tool is word of mouth from a friend, and social media are an extension of this” (McCarthy et al., 2010).

Uncertainty. Uncertainty about the existing symbolic order, norms and values and which way out to choose. In ‘Life as a construction box’, Swierstra^[1] et al. begin their publication with the conception of ‘way out’ which, in my ayes is a bit heavy (my connotation of ‘way out’ has to do with escape). But then, the publication is a bout the most relevant, current and rather important issues of our days. Issues like privacy, man and machine, ambient and pervasive technology, health and being unhealthy and, as would like to put it, the makebility of reality, an as fundamental as rather intangible confusion trying to surface through solid ethical questions and controversies. Dutch philosopher Peter Paul Verbeek^{[see Swiestra]} questions whether people have the possibility to withdraw themselves from ambient and pervasive technology. And what about our log-time disputed basic right of privacy?

On Februari 16 of this year, Volkskrant published an article called The future of social media is automated sharing; handy but sometimes a bit embarrassing in which the author Heleen van Lier notes that the future of sharing media texts lies in automated sharing. Central theme in her article stands Frictionless Sharing; a phrase introduced by social medium Facebook a couple of months ago. Representatives of Facebook, Reuters, Nokia and Microsoft debated Frictionless Sharing (FS) during the Social Media Week in London. The debate panel came to the conclusion that FS is here to stay. Use of the technology is simple; after agreeing once, the user starts sharing his data with other in linked media.

When I was younger, I used too feel I had to go out. I had to meet my friends in bars, parks and squares to have a drink and socialize. I felt this way because I had the feeling that when I was not there, I was missing out. This feeling of not wanting to miss out was so powerful that for some time I argued with my parents in the middle of the night, because they were not agreeing with me going out yet again. This is called puberty.

This week, researchers at Facebook and the University of Milan published a study which concludes that the degrees of separation between any two people in the world is no longer the famous six degrees of separation. We are actually more connected than ever. The number has been reduced to 4.7. The study, which measured how many friends people have on Facebook, found that the notion of six degrees of separation had been shrinking over the past three years at the same time as the dominant social network bumped up its userbase. The study itself is unique in itself, the researchers used the actual Facebook data, 721 million active users and a staggering 69 billion friendships among them. This is the largest social network study ever released. 

The amount of information available to us has exploded in the last couple of decades. With the enormous amount available comes the need to filter this information. Filtering the information we want to have has become big business. Just look at Google or Facebook. These information giants control a lot of what we see online. Of course we have some influence on what we see. But it’s just the illusion of that total control that’s the problem.
We’ve been talking about media literacy for a couple of years now, and what strikes me is that a lot of people that consider themselves media literate, don’t even know that Google arranges their ads and results based on your previous searches and visited websites. The same thing counts for Facebook. Facebook looks at what friends you interact most with, and puts them on the top of the list. Pretty nifty, and handy. But there’s a problem. If the company’s that control the filters filter everything they presume you like. How are you supposed to get balanced information. In other words, it seems that everyone online surrounding me is talking about the same thing. This is what’s come to be known as the “filter bubble”. Your online life is in a bubble created by filters. This phenomenon is not new. In a way it’s a form of censorship, I believe. Just imagine that a government decided what we find if we search. I bet the American Tea Party would be quite upset if it was the federal government filtering their search results. I imagine some comparisons to socialist regimes, and a couple of Nazi comparisons as a result. I wonder what Glenn Beck would have to say about that. Wonder if he filters information…
I assume that these filters are in place to make our lives easier, to find the information, we probably want to find, faster. And I for one do not object to that. As long as I know that I’m in my bubble. And as long as I can get out of the bubble, there’s no problem, is there?
Ah well, probably only the people interested in the CrossmediaLab will find this blog in their bubble.

As I promised, I’d think about liking. And so it came to pass that I did. For weeks I pondered about liking. I have come to realize that the “like” has a lot of aspects to it. I’ve been thinking about liking. How liking things helps us make sense of the world surrounding us. In a way, what we like defines us. If you are surrounded by things that you like, does it make you happy? I can imagine it will, so we tend to collect likable things and people around us. So we can create a personal utopia, built out of the things we like. We teach our kids to like certain things, so that we can share the pleasure of our liking. We meet new people and friends in places we like. Or we go to places people we like, like. Liking is emotion. 

I like a lot of things. I like snowboarding, I like to have a drink with friends, I like to have a good conversation, I like lobster, I like good wine, and so on and so on. People that know me well, know what I like. The basis of friendship is liking each other and doing things together you both like or love doing. Friendship starts when you’re doing something you like doing and meet someone with the same “likes”, we call the “interests” mostly. The same counts for doing things you loathe doing as well. This of course fits in the day and night equation(if there’s nothing to loathe, there’s nothing to like). This is the basis for fraternity or sorority initiation, make a bunch of people do stuff they loathe and the start liking eachother. This is also known as teambuilding.  My point? Liking or loathing is a very big part of our social life, maybe even the very base of having one.