26.05.2011 Last.FM study in ScienceDaily news!
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110318091137.htm
Our original press release:
Music Choices Change When
They Are Published
Giving out information on your music consumption publicly
can change it. A study finds that people are willing to put a lot of effort
into maintaining a desirable public image of their music consumption. When
information about music listening is published automatically, youth and young
adults retain a notion of truth in presenting themselves: they rather change
the music they listen to than “cheat” digitally.
Suvi Silfverberg,
Lassi A. Liikkanen and Airi Lampinen from Helsinki Institute for
Information Technology HIIT studied the experience of maintaining a profile in the
online music service Last.fm. Twelve Finnish youth and young adults where
interviewed on their use of this music-focused social network service and its
extension, called “the scrobbler”, that publishes information of music listened
to by service users.
The researchers found that people make active efforts to
control the image their online profile gives of them, especially when their
music listening is published automatically. While automated sharing of behavior
information provides new opportunities for online music services, it also affects
the people listening to music:
“When an
online service publishes behavioral information automatically, it is important
to give users a chance to express and explain the meanings of their actions.
Listening to a song doesn’t necessarily mean that one likes it – or wants to be
known as the kind of person who does”, says Liikkanen.
The study will be published in
the internationally renowned 2011 ACM Conference on Computer Supported
Cooperative Work in March in Hangzhou, China. The presented research was
conducted as part of the Academy of Finland funded research project Musiquitous
(http://musiq.fi). HIIT is a joint institute of Aalto University and University
of Helsinki and is located in the capital region of Finland.
The publication is available for
preview at http://www.musiq.fi/publications
Original news item:
