Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

Are there boundaries for behavior on social networking sites?

Posted on by

A sociologist argues that social networking sites have all sorts of deviant behaviors because of a lack of boundaries:

“Society’s sometimes obsessive use of social networking sites has led to the development of several long term social affects stemming from the idea that these virtual communities often minimize the importance of face-to-face social interaction, while enabling a tendency for users to be inherently comfortable with isolation,” said Coleman.

Coleman goes on to point out that society’s widespread use of social networking sites has also contributed to the creation of virtual worlds and online communities in which there are no boundaries, and often no regard for truth or the regulation of behavior.

“Offensive and threatening language becomes normalized, while photos of and statements by people engaged in dehumanizing acts are not condemned, but instead encouraged, ‘liked’ and commented on.”

I would agree that this negative and deviant behavior happens online but I would be interested in seeing some data. Some data I’ve seen from emerging adults suggests there are plenty of rules and norms governing SNS behavior. These emerging adults were well aware of these issues and most suggested they didn’t violate the boundaries.

One issue here might be what SNS we are talking about. Facebook, for example, is fairly regulated both by the platform and by users even as users can express a wide range of opinions. Other SNS offer more latitude. Other areas of the Internet, such as comment sections or personal blogs or chat rooms, offer all sorts of opinions and actions. Yet, many of these Internet places are not SNS in the technical sense.

New SimCity expansion pack moves toward dystopian cities

Posted on by

I still haven’t played the latest version of SimCity but there is now an expansion pack that portrays a bleaker urban future:

If this sounds like the setup for a disturbing science fiction novel, you’re not far off: This is actually the premise for SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow, a deeply cynical expansion pack for the SimCity game, set to be released November 12. The original SimCity game, of course (along with its most recent fifth edition), allowed players to act as mayors and design the ideal modern city. But the evil genius behind the game play was always that sustainability was illusory: even the most well-designed cities eventually imploded. Players thought they were all-powerful mayors, but they were merely delayers of the inevitable. The best they could do was stave off their city’s collapse…

It’s impossible to miss the socioeconomic and political commentary embedded within Cities of Tomorrow. That the affluent live in the epicenter and the poor are relegated to the suburban fringes feels like a direct commentary on the demographic inversion cities like Chicago, New York and San Francisco are currently experiencing. The concentration of wealth calls to mind what’s left of the Occupy movement. The Sims’ addiction to Omega despite its negative effects on the environment mirrors the developed world’s dependence on oil. Even the MagLev is nearly identical to Elon Musk’s proposed Hyperloop (especially since it only seems plausible within the construct of a video game)…

Whether inspired by real or fictional events, the expansion pack has an inescapable, soul-crushing pessimism. Any idealists who try to a construct a pollution or poverty free utopia are engaging in a Sisyphean task. And this is out of necessity, Librande explains.

“Utopia, in general, is boring for game play. So if we set up a utopian city there’d be nothing for the player to do,” he says…

Librande doesn’t worry about the game’s bleak view of the future turning off any prospective gamers. If anything, they’ll be attracted to the challenge. SimCity has a notoriously die-hard fan base, and what he thinks will make the expansion pack so alluring is not what the game play says about society, but what it says about each player. Players must divide their faith and resources between two purposefully ambiguous entities: OmegaCo and The Academy. OmegaCo’s goal is profit, and The Academy’s motive is to make its technology ubiquitous. What players choose will reveal their attitudes toward capitalism, class, and the balance between privacy and utility.

Utopia is boring! Well-being is overrated! Bring on the morally impossible choices and decaying cities! SimCity has always had a little of this built-in into its gameplay. I clearly remember the scenarios in the original that asked the player to rebuild a city after some sort of disaster, whether an earthquake or Godzilla. I didn’t take much joy in this but other players did; it can be fun to destroy a city with no real consequences.

Perhaps this says more about our current mindset: we’d prefer to deal with decay than positive construction. Cities aren’t “real” until they are clearly gritty and suffering is around the corner. (I’ve heard presentations from urban sociologists on this: there are some gentrifiers who want to “live on the edge” and have to keep moving to find that line between nice neighborhoods and neighborhoods with problems.) Again, there are no consequences for the player for having a dark city where either capitalism or the NSA has run amok. Compare this to the real problems faced in poor neighborhoods in the United States or in the slums in Third World cities where real lives are affected and life chances are severely diminished.

Studying religiosity by text messages and three minute surveys

Posted on by

A new study of religiosity utilizes text messages and short surveys:

After signing up on soulpulse.org, users receive text messages twice a day for 14 days that direct them to a 15 to 20-question survey. These questions gather data on daily spiritual attitudes and physical influences at points during the day, such as quality of sleep, amount of exercise and alcohol consumption. The average length of time required to complete the survey is around three minutes and is designed with the ideas of simplicity and ease of use.

At the end of the two-week testing period, the reward for participants is a comprehensive review of their data that allows them to see and learn more about their spiritual mindsets. In return, the research team is given the opportunity to analyze the information that they have collected. Wright said they have already found that people report the greatest feelings of spirituality on Sundays and the least amount on Wednesdays.

A collection of three-minute surveys however, took months of collaboration across the country to complete. 18 months of planning and 10 trips to Silicon Valley were necessary, as well as a team of people who each contributed a unique skillset to the group. The Soulpulse team consists of four computer programmers, three public engagers and six academic advisors – including UConn professors Crystal Park and Jeremy Pais.

Measuring religiosity is well established in sociology but it often relies on people reporting on their past behavior. For example, some sociologists suggest church attendance figures are regularly inflated. Using text messages would allow more up-to-date data as the goal is to quickly interrupt people’s activity and get their more accurate take on their religious behavior.

Generally, I would guess sociology and other social science fields are headed in this direction for data collection: less formal and more minute to minute. In the past, some of this was done with time diaries or logs. But, even these posed problems as at the end of the day a person might misremember or reinterpret their earlier actions. Utilizing text messages or pop-up Internet surveys or other means could yield more better data, utilize newer technologies respondents are regularly engaging, and perhaps even take less time in the long run.

Lampooning modern life: “Pottery Barn Catalogue Descriptions Written by an Aspiring Crime Novelist” and 20th Century History in Linkbait Headlines

Posted on by

Taking some time to laugh at our modern times is a necessary part of survival. So, two recent examples:

1. xkcd rewrites some major moments in the 20th century in the style of today’s Internet headlines. An example from 1912: “6 Titanic Survivors Who Should Have Died.” One of my first thoughts on reading these headlines: how long until we get history textbooks that follow this style?

2. McSweeney’s rewrites descriptions from a Pottery Barn catalog in the style of an aspiring crime novelist. An example:

The door to the Farmhouse Armoire stands slightly ajar, revealing room for a 60-inch television and something more sinister. Look closely at the Morgan Cachepot across the room, and you will see reflected in its gentle curves the silhouette of an escaped maniac hiding inside the wardrobe. Quick thinking and a rustic iron latch will hold the madman until the police arrive. The solid pine doors can withstand the pounding fists of a captive lunatic, but not ammonia-based cleansers.

This would make the Pottery Barn catalog a lot more interesting.

This is one redeeming quality of the Internet: the ability to harness and make accessible lots of examples of wit. If the Internet can’t rally to save Wikipedia or we can’t stop ourselves from obsessively interacting with smartphones and social media, at least we can chuckle a bit along the way. At the same time, it is odd that I came upon this humor through a chain of websites and others who selected it as worthy of their reader’s attention (or clicks). Why bother making light of my own circumstances when I can rely on others to provide a quick laugh?

Argument: the problem isn’t technology as it is our choice how to respond

Posted on by

One writer suggests humans can no longer escape technology so we had better get used to resisting it:

The phone isn’t the problem. The problem is us—our inability to step away from email and games and inessential data, our inability to look up, be it at an alpine lake or at family members. We won’t be able to get away from it all for very much longer. So it’s vitally important that each of us learns how to live with a persistent connection, everywhere we go, whether it’s in the wilderness or at a dinner party.

I still love the wilderness, and I can’t wait for my next trip to the backcountry—to walk for miles without crossing a road, without fielding a call or an email or a tweet. To once again drink deeply from a mountain stream. And to stretch out under the open sky at night, gaze up at the stars, and use my phone to name each and every one.

The argument here is that the technology itself is not the problem but rather how it is used that matters. Used well, it can enhance our experiences, bringing knowledge or social connections that otherwise would be impossible. Used poorly, it can become addicting and distract us from what is going on in front of us.

Two possible issues with this line of thinking:

1. Those who are younger, even right after birth, only know a world immersed in technology. They may never see technology is bad or really not know of scenarios when it is unavailable.

2. This ignores the social pressure of having to have and use technology. Sure, individuals can make choices but the people around you will push you to use what is available. Perhaps the trick is to find friends who also don’t want to use technology much.

At the least, many of us will need to be taught how to resist technology. What might we gain, or perhaps even more importantly given loss aversion, why don’t we lose by not using technology? Given our society’s emphasis on efficiency and progress, this is becoming harder and harder.

Can Wikipedia rally the common good to improve?

Posted on by

MIT Technology Review gives an overview of the troubles at Wikipedia and how the limited group behind the website wants to improve it:

Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-­ranking quality scores.

The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

In response, the Wikimedia Foundation, the 187-person nonprofit that pays for the legal and technical infrastructure supporting Wikipedia, is staging a kind of rescue mission. The foundation can’t order the volunteer community to change the way it operates. But by tweaking Wikipedia’s website and software, it hopes to steer the encyclopedia onto a more sustainable path…

Whether that can happen depends on whether enough people still believe in the notion of online collaboration for the greater good—the ideal that propelled Wikipedia in the beginning. But the attempt is crucial; Wikipedia matters to many more people than its editors and students who didn’t make time to read their assigned books. More of us than ever use the information found there, both directly and via other services. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has either killed off the alternatives or pushed them down the Google search results. In 2009 Microsoft closed Encarta, which was based on content from several storied encyclopedias. Encyclopaedia Britannica, which charges $70 a year for online access to its 120,000 articles, offers just a handful of free entries plastered with banner and pop-up ads.

So if Wikipedia was created by a collective, can it be saved by a collective? The story goes on to describe a common process for human groups: as they grow and over time, they tend to take on bureaucratic tendencies which then make it more difficult to change course.

The larger question may be whether modern humans can regularly pursue the common good on the Internet. If it can’t be done on Wikipedia, what other hope is there? The average comments section at a major news website? Reddit? YouTube? Are we at the point when we can say that big corporations have “won” the Internet?

Portraying the Internet in stories on-screen

Posted on by

A look at the new movie The Fifth Estate highlights the difficulties of portraying Internet action in film:

“[It’s] almost like going back to the basics of silent filmmaking – you are going to do some reading in this,” Condon told WIRED about his use of the cyber-visuals. “The question is: How to make that as immersive as possible. I think one of the things about a dramatized version as opposed to some of the very very good [documentaries] – Alex Gibney’s was wonderful – is that this is meant to give you an experience of, a sense of what it was like to be in the room.”Ok, sure. But does the room have to be a metaphorical representation of the internet when the actual apartments/cafes/hacker spaces where the WikiLeaks team worked suffice? Probably not. In fairness, there is one moment when the aforementioned fake office is shown going up in flames as Domscheit-Berg (played by Daniel Brühl) deletes troves of WikiLeaks files that is poignant, even if a bit much, but simply showing the disappearing files got across the same message. And there is more than enough drama in the hurried scenes set in hacker conferences, the radical underground world of Berlin’s Tacheles, and the newsrooms of the world’s most prestigious newspapers to go around — dramatizing online chat doesn’t feel necessary…

But that doesn’t save it from the trap that has plagued modern cyber-thrillers from Hackers to The Net. The internet — and documents and troves of data it transmits and contains — are not characters. They don’t have feelings or personalities, and it’s hard to make drama out of what happens on them.

The Social Network is one of the few films to do it well, and even though it took its own liberties; the amount of time we actually spent watching Mark Zuckerberg program was minimal and it managed to depict the internet and tech culture in a way that didn’t induce the sort of eye-rolling from tech-savvy viewers that Fifth Estate likely will. While the film ostensibly took place in the world of Facebook, it sidestepped the pitfalls of the online thriller by never taking its gaze off of the sometimes funny, sometimes brilliant interactions between Mark Zuckerberg and his cofounders and partners (“A million dollars isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? … A billion dollars.”) The Fifth Estate attempts to do the same with Assange and his cohorts, but it gets muddled in explaining things and introducing unnecessary characters and loses its way. It’s a shame.

So The Social Network used the Internet as a prop in order to tell more common stories about human relationships, specifically the difficulty a young man has in building strong relationships with females. In this way, the star of the film is not really Facebook – it is the people involved in its making. People don’t have to care about or know about Facebook at all to know the familiar contours of a film about relationships. I’m also reminded of how The Matrix tried to show an always-on, connected data source: a screen of scrolling numbers and bits, representing information. But, again, that trilogy didn’t spend much time in those scenes and instead told a familiar story about oppressed people – and a chosen one – fighting back.

While this is an interesting analysis, how exactly could a film display the Internet without relying more on relationships? What would be a proper cinematic portrayal of the Internet?

Older adults like bigger things, like McMansions; younger adults like smaller things, like skinny jeans

Posted on by

Here is an example of tying consumption of things like McMansions or skinny jeans to certain generations:

If there’s one thing today’s young people know it’s this: size doesn’t matter.

From watching movies on cell phone screens to driving micro-cars like the Honda Fit, less is more with this generation.

Known as millennials, people born in the years just before and after 2000, believe in small carbon footprints and short attention spans. They don’t watch television episodes, they watch YouTube clips. Even email is too cumbersome for them. Millennials prefer to communicate with more instantaneous social media like Facebook chat and text-messages.

Compare this with people from Gen X and older and you see how wide the size-gap has become.

We Gen X’ers wore baggy jeans, flannel shirts and puffy hair. Many (too many) of us have oversized televisions and drive Hummers as big as tanks. We live in McMansions and super-size our lunches while today’s younger people wear skinny jeans, live in small apartments, and eat more salad.

We had record and compact disc collections with gigantic stereo speakers. They have iPod Nanos and ear buds.

The conclusion of the argument is that doing more with less is probably better on a crowded planet. Comparing the consumption of a McMansion to a tiny house (a comparison made a few paragraphs later) is one way to measure things: one house is bigger than the other and requires more resources. But, how do you compare a McMansion to an iPhone? The McMansion might require more resources (though all that goes into making an iPhone is more hidden) but can’t the consumption of an iPhone still be a problem (if younger adults are spending hours and hours with the device – and at least some are)? Plus, if you consume smaller objects, theoretically you might do it more often and collect a lot of stuff in the long run, even if it is more in the form of digital files. And then skinny jeans versus baggy clothes? Is this more about aesthetics rather than the size of consumption objects?

All that said, making sweeping claims about consumption patterns across generations can be difficult. We might be on safer ground by arguing that younger generations today are buying different kinds of products (digital, in particular) and may not be valuing “traditional” American consumption (cars, bigger houses).

College change: syllabi requiring students to check email every day

Posted on by

As technology shifts, college syllabi must as well: there are syllabi that ask students to check email each day.

How to get students, some of whom consider their school e-mail accounts so irrelevant that they give their parents the passwords, to take a look?

At the University of Southern California, Nina Eliasoph’s Sociology 250 syllabus reads: “You must check e-mail DAILY every weekday,” with boldface for emphasis…

When job offers arrive, Ratliff often has excited students turn up in her office only to realize they have forgotten a form they need to send to the company. Using e-mail to get the form or to send it apparently does not cross their minds.

“Some of them didn’t even seem to know they had a college e-mail account,” May said. Nor were these wide-eyed freshmen. “This is considered a junior-level class, so they’d been around.”

That is when he added to his course syllabuses: “Students must check e-mail daily.” May said the university now recommends similar wording…

 

The next step would seem to be having students and faculty and college staff all start using text messages or social media. However, this leads to other issues. Asking people to switch to new technologies which could then require training and practice. Privacy concerns could arise, particularly compared to more impersonal emails. There might be the argument that doing this means getting on a technology treadmill that goes faster and faster – students switch to the next big thing and everyone else must follow.

Another interesting question to ask is what kind of interaction aided by technology best leads to improved learning outcomes? Needing to communicate information is important but what exactly boosts learning? In The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein argues new technologies don’t typically boost learning even as they might improve engagement. Yet, colleges are moving to moving to more online learning. This can lead to learning at different paces, cuts down on costs, and makes classes available to more people. But, does it lead to more learning?