Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

How powerful is the distrust of Facebook among its 900 million plus users?

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A commentator who praises Facebook tries to get at why so many users are suspicious about Facebook and willing to believe rumors like the recent one that Facebook was revealing private messages on walls:

The problem is that when technologists talk about data and privacy, for many of us it is still in the abstract. For technologists and computer scientists, data is a thing that lives somewhere, it has a logic and can be parsed, made sense of, organized into databases. It can be searched and ultimately sold. But as Nathan Jurgenson, a social-media theorist, points out, for most people “data is this weird nebulous concept that somebody knows something about me, but I don’t know what they know.”…

A Democratic candidate for the Maine State Senate was attacked recently by her Republican opponent for her playing of the multiplayer online game “World of Warcraft.” According to her critics, the politician playing a “rogue orc assassin” was unbecoming. This collision of two seemingly different personalities — on the one hand, a social worker and moderate politician, and on the other, a violent assassin (online) who likes stabbing things — is what sociologists have called “role strain.”

“Identities that were cultivated in little tide pools, that were conceived to be separate, come clashing together,” says Marc A. Smith, a sociologist and social-media expert. “The issue now is that all of these other identities, the idea that we can perform them on separate stages and that they had separate audiences, that is collapsing and the sound of its collapse is the sound of people squealing.”

In his 1959 “Presentation of Self In Everyday Life,” the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about the idea of “front stage” and “back stage.” In Goffman’s theory, when they’re “front stage,” people engage in “impression management,” choosing their clothing, speech, and adapting the way they present themselves to their audience. “Back stage” they can be more themselves, which might mean shedding their societal role. In the era of social media, Smith says that “we live in a culture where the back stage keeps disappearing.” We think the conversations we are having are in private, but, in fact, they are publicly accessible and data has a long half-life. When U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke to a select audience about the “47 percent,” he was, in fact, speaking to everyone. What happens in “World of Warcraft” doesn’t always stay in “World of Warcraft.”…

Or perhaps front stage there is a deep sense of unease about Facebook, but back stage we are not half as worried as we seem.

The suggestion here is that the world of audience segregation and impression management, where we can and do craft our actions, words, and behaviors to a particular audience, is slowly fading away. By doing more things online, these different parts of life are coming together in new ways. And I tend to agree with this journalist: there are over 900 million Facebook users, many of whom have calculated that they are willing to at least put a little information out there in return for the benefits that Facebook like keeping in touch with friends, being able to access information about others that was previously unavailable, or even acquiring the status that comes with keeping up with everyone else. A good number of users express complaints or features of Facebook that make them uneasy but relatively few are willing to give it up all together.

Indeed, we might be in the middle of a very important era where slowly individuals are thinking about and practicing new ways to present themselves and see others through mediums like Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has expressed the goal of Facebook being a more open society where even less information on Facebook would be private, hidden, or restricted to friends. We could also look at this from the other angle: isn’t it remarkable that millions of people around the world in a span of less than 10 years have voluntarily put out information about themselves? One key might be that Facebook doesn’t force them to reveal everything; users can still practice impression management by crafting a profile. However, these are not “fake” or “untrue” profiles; rather the information is an approximation of the user’s true self.

Lack of WASP candidate for election due to the Internet?

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Several commentators have picked up on this feature of the 2012 presidential election: neither candidate is a WASP.

Right now, we’re looking at an absence that would have been a startling presence 50 years ago. With all the focus on economic issues in the U.S. presidential race, there’s hardly any talk about the fact that, for the first time, none of the leading presidential and vice-presidential candidates is a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court has no WASPs. These are new phenomena in the United States.

The totally non-WASP tickets signify major political and social shifts in the networked age. As Robert Putnam showed a decade ago in Bowling Alone, organized groups such as churches, political clubs, fraternal clubs and Scouts have declined in importance. People have moved sharply away from traditional, tightly knit groups into more loosely knit networks that have fewer clan boundaries and more tolerance. The rise of the Internet and mobile connectivity has pushed the trend along by allowing people to expand the number and variety of their social ties…

In 1955, sociologist Will Herberg showed how white America was rigidly divided in Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Indeed, one of the authors of this article was barred from college fraternities because he was Jewish.

Now, when Chelsea Clinton marries, no one remarks on the kippa on her husband’s head. This year, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that 81 per cent of those who know Republican Mitt Romney is a Mormon are either comfortable with his affiliation or say it doesn’t matter to them.

I’m not sure I buy the Internet argument; WASPs lost their elite control because of the Internet? I think the process had started way before this. I wonder if the most basic explanation is that there are simply less WASPs overall in the population. Since the 1950s, there has been a sharp uptick in immigration and more people have had access to education and college and graduate degrees.

Argument: George Lucas is the “greatest artist of our time”

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Camille Paglia explains why she believes George Lucas is “the greatest artist of our time”:

Who is the greatest artist of our time? Normally, we would look to literature and the fine arts to make that judgment. But Pop Art’s happy marriage to commercial mass media marked the end of an era. The supreme artists of the half century following Jackson Pollock were not painters but innovators who had embraced technology—such as the film director Ingmar Bergman and the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. During the decades bridging the 20th and 21st centuries, as the fine arts steadily shrank in visibility and importance, only one cultural figure had the pioneering boldness and world impact that we associate with the early masters of avant-garde modernism: George Lucas, an epic filmmaker who turned dazzling new technology into an expressive personal genre.

The digital revolution was the latest phase in the rapid transformation of modern communications, a process that began with the invention of the camera and typewriter and the debut of mass-market newspapers and would produce the telegraph, telephone, motion pictures, phonograph, radio, television, desktop computer, and Internet. Except for Futurists and Surrealists, the art world was initially hostile or indifferent to this massive surge in popular culture. Industrial design, however, rooted in De Stijl and the Bauhaus, embraced mechanization and grew in sophistication and influence until it has now eclipsed the fine arts.

No one has closed the gap between art and technology more successfully than George Lucas. In his epochal six-film Star Wars saga, he fused ancient hero legends from East and West with futuristic science fiction and created characters who have entered the dream lives of millions. He constructed a vast, original, self-referential mythology like that of James Macpherson’s pseudo-Celtic Ossian poems, which swept Europe in the late 18th century, or the Angria and Gondal story cycle spun by the Brontë children in their isolation in the Yorkshire moors. Lucas was a digital visionary who prophesied and helped shape a host of advances, such as computer-generated imagery; computerized film editing, sound mixing, and virtual set design; high-definition cinematography; fiber-optic transmission of dailies; digital movie duplication and distribution; theater and home-entertainment stereo surround sound; and refinements in video-game graphics, interactivity, and music.

Read the entire interesting argument.

Four quick thoughts:

1. This broadens the common definition of artist. It acknowledges the shift away from “high art,” the sort of music, painting, and cultural works that are typically found in museums or respectful places to “popular art” like movies and music.

2. The argument doesn’t seem to be that Lucas is the best filmmaker or best storyteller. Rather, this is based more on his ability to draw together different cultural strands in a powerful way. Paglia argues he brought together art and technology, combined stories from the past and present, promoted the use and benefits of new technologies that were influential far beyond his own films.

3. Another way to think of a “great artist” is to try to project the legacy of artists. How will George Lucas be viewed in 50 or 100 years? Of course, this is hard to do. But, part of creating this legacy starts now as people review an artist’s career though it could change with future generations. I wonder: if technology is changing at a quicker pace, does this also mean the legacy of cultural creators will have a shorter cycle? For example, if movies as we know them today are relics in 50 years, will Lucas even matter?

4. How would George Lucas himself react to this? Who would he name as the “greatest artist” of today?

The first laptop met with distaste because it was associated with the gendered job of secretary

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The “first recognizable laptop” created in 1982 ran into some problems such as its hefty price tag and its association with typing and who did the typing in many offices:

But Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm and Handspring (makers of the Treo), was there in 1982 and he told a different story at the Computer History Museum a few years ago during a panel on the laptop. For him, the problems were not exclusively in the harder domains of currency and form factor. No, sociological and psychological reasons made the GRiD Compass hard to sell to businessmen…

This is an amazing fact. We had this product. It was designed for business executives. And the biggest obstacle, one of the biggest obstacles, we had for selling the product was the fact — believe it or not — that it had a keyboard. I was in sales and marketing. I saw this first-hand. At that time, 1982, business people, who were in their 40s and 50s, did not have any computer or keyboard in their offices. And it was associated with being part of the secretarial pool or the word processing (remember that industry?) department. And so you’d put this thing in their office and they’d say, “Get that out of here.” It was like getting a demotion. They really were uncomfortable with it…

The second reason they were uncomfortable with it is that none of them knew how to type. And it wasn’t like they said, “Oh, I’ll have to learn how to type.” They were very afraid — I saw this first-hand — they were very afraid of appearing inept. Like, “You give me this thing, and I’m gonna push the wrong keys. I’m gonna fail.”

In Hawkins telling at least, there was no way around these obstacles. “We couldn’t solve this problem. It took a generational change, for the next younger group who had been exposed to terminals and computers to grow up,” he continued. “That was an amazing technology adoption problem you would have never thought about.”

This is a great example of underlying sociological issues that might not be considered fully when making and marketing a new product. On one hand, this was an exciting new technology but on the other hand, existing social factors made it difficult for businessmen to grab the opportunity this technology represented. Ideas about gender and who was supposed to be a typist, viewed as a lower status position, influenced technology adaptation.

Also, this story could lead into the history of secretaries and typists. Around the beginning of the 20th century, the field of secretaries started turning away from men to women. Like other gendered occupations with a majority of women, secretary became a lower status position with relatively lower pay.

A lot of web traffic comes through the “dark social,” not through social network sites

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Alexis Madrigal argues that while social network sites like Facebook get a lot of attention, a lot of web traffic is influenced by social processes that are much more difficult to see and measure:

Here’s a pocket history of the web, according to many people. In the early days, the web was just pages of information linked to each other. Then along came web crawlers that helped you find what you wanted among all that information. Some time around 2003 or maybe 2004, the social web really kicked into gear, and thereafter the web’s users began to connect with each other more and more often. Hence Web 2.0, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’m not strawmanning here. This is the dominant history of the web as seen, for example, in this Wikipedia entry on the ‘Social Web.’…

There are circumstances, however, when there is no referrer data. You show up at our doorstep and we have no idea how you got here. The main situations in which this happens are email programs, instant messages, some mobile applications*, and whenever someone is moving from a secure site (“https://mail.google.com/blahblahblah“) to a non-secure site (http://www.theatlantic.com).
This means that this vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL. It shows up variously in programs as “direct” or “typed/bookmarked” traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that’s not actually what’s happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you…
Just look at that graph. On the one hand, you have all the social networks that you know. They’re about 43.5 percent of our social traffic. On the other, you have this previously unmeasured darknet that’s delivering 56.5 percent of people to individual stories. This is not a niche phenomenon! It’s more than 2.5x Facebook’s impact on the site…
If what I’m saying is true, then the tradeoffs we make on social networks is not the one that we’re told we’re making. We’re not giving our personal data in exchange for the ability to share links with friends. Massive numbers of people — a larger set than exists on any social network — already do that outside the social networks. Rather, we’re exchanging our personal data in exchange for the ability to publish and archive a record of our sharing. That may be a transaction you want to make, but it might not be the one you’ve been told you made.

Two thoughts about this:

1. Here is how I might interpret this argument from a sociological point of view: Internet traffic is heavily dependent on social connections. Whether this is done on sites like Facebook, which are more publicly social, or through email, which is restricted from public view but is still quite social, the interactions people have influence where they go on the web. In this sense, the Internet is an important social domain that may have some of its own norms and rules as well as its own advantages and disadvantages but it is built around human connections.

2. This sounds like a fantastic business and/or research opportunity; what is going on in this “dark social” realm? Could there be ways at getting at these activities that would help us better understand and analyze the importance of social connections and interactions and could this information be monetized as well?

Cell phone users now comprise half of Gallup’s polling contacts

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Even as Americans are less interested in participating in telephone surveys, polling firms are trying to keep up. Gallup has responded by making sure 50% of people contacted for polling samples are cell phone users:

Polling works only when it is truly representative of the population it seeks to understand. So, naturally, Gallup’s daily tracking political surveys include cellphone numbers, given how many Americans have given up on land lines altogether. But what’s kind of amazing is that it now makes sure that 50 percent of respondents in each poll are contacted via mobile numbers.

Gallup’s editor in chief, Frank Newport, wrote yesterday about the evolution of Gallup’s methods to remain “consistent with changes in the communication behavior and habits of those we are interviewing.” In the 1980s the company moved from door-to-door polling to phone calls. In 2008 it added cellphones. To reflect the growing number of Americans who have gone mobile-only, it has steadily increased the percentage of those numbers it contacts.

“If we were starting from scratch today,” Newport told Wired, “we would start with cellphones.”…

Although it may be a better reflection of society, mobile-phone polling is more expensive, says Newport. They have to call more numbers because the response rate is lower due to the nature of mobile communication.

As technology and social conventions change, researchers have to try and keep up. This is a difficult task, particularly if fewer people want to participate and technologies offer more and more options to screen out unknown requests. Where are we going next: polling by text? Utilizing well-used platforms like Facebook (where we know many people are turning every day)?

World population in 1804 = Facebook users today

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Here is an interesting, if not misguided, comparison of how many people are now Facebook users:

One billion people. That’s how many active monthly users Facebook has accrued in the eight years of its existence, the company announced today.

It took the population of modern humans about 200,000 years to reach that number, a milestone that was hit, demographers believe, just over two centuries ago in 1804 (bearing in mind that population tabs, then and now, are not exactly precise). Since then, human population has just exploded, enabled and protected by advances in medicine, agriculture, and hygiene. In the past year, it is estimated that the human headcount hit 7 billion.

I think I know what this comparison is trying to do: show the remarkable speed at which Facebook has attracted users. I agree. It has been remarkable.

At the same time, this is comparing apples to oranges. Yes, they are both large numbers of people. But one number is tied to human development, birth rates, life expectancy, technological improvement, and so on. This number reminds us of the broader scope of human history which is longer and progress is relatively slow. Having seven billion people on earth requires a lot of resources, space, and creative energy to tackle everyday and long-term problems. On the other side, you have Facebook, an Internet site that has attracted lots of users. While some of these users may be mega-users, people who are constantly online updating their status, tagging photos, reading other people’s walls, it is still just an online program, a relatively small part of human existence.

Perhaps there would be better ways to make a comparison to Facebook’s user total:

1. Looking at adoption rates compared to other technologies. In other words, is Facebook’s growth something completely new, a sign of the digital world, or does its adoption rate compare more to other technologies? Comparisons can be made here.

2. What one billion people in the world do on a daily basis or how many other objects have such broad appeal. For example, this website suggests there are 5.6 billion cell phone users in the world. (Meaning: Facebook has many more users to attract.)

Driverless cars will lead to increased worker productivity

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Dan Neil writes about the inevitability of driverless cars and brings up an interesting benefit: Americans will suddenly have more time on their hands.

The one brilliant part of the U.S. economic profile is productivity. It turns out, Americans are a little nutty when it comes to work.

If autonomy were fully implemented today, there would be roughly 100 million Americans sitting in their cars and trucks tomorrow, by themselves, with time on their hands. It would be, from an economist’s point of view, the Pennsylvania oil fields of man-hours, a beautiful gusher, a bonanza of reverie washing upon our shores.

In the history of human civilization, has there ever been a society to offer so much uninterrupted head space to so many? Europe’s medieval monastic tradition created scholars, true, but only a relative handful…

It’s possible that all these suddenly idle driver/passengers will waste their gift, texting, watching TV or worse. But many of them, like me, would beaver into work, happy to get a jump on the day.

And here’s the best part. I always get my best ideas in the car—in solitude, watching the unwinding of the road, hearing the thrum of the tires. You know that space, right?

Hurray – more time to work! Neil might be excited about this but I first think of all the opportunities for mixing the boundaries of home and work even further. Thinking more broadly, is productivity something we want to continue to chase as a society? Do Americans really need to be working more?

On the other hand, this could be a big boon for several sectors. Think about media companies: Americans would then have on average something like 40-60 minutes more per day to consume television shows, websites, podcasts, music, etc. Or perhaps it could give rise to all sorts of services and car add-ons; I’m thinking of the Honda Odyssey commercials from a while back showing moms going to the minivan to relax and get a facial.

 

A world where “the city talks back”

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Taking part in a conference in Germany about megacities, sociologist Saskia Sassen makes an interesting comment linking technology and cities:

The effects of the digital revolution shape the urban space and the access of city dwellers to their environs. The focus here is on technologies that allow us, within and with the city, to communicate with buildings and objects. “The city talks back,” says the renowned sociologist Saskia Sassen, one of the most distinguished authors who has published on the sociology of urban development and shaped the term ‘global city’. Felix Petersen, who has recently triggered a trend with his opinion platform Amen, will get together with other innovators to discuss his visions of location-based services. A brief run-down of new technologies will be presented in the “Elevator Pitches” session. Raul Krauthausen provides a new kind of access to cities by way of his Wheelmap application.

I’m intrigued by the idea “the city talks back.” This could simply refer to material objects; city residents and visitors will be able to quickly see more about buildings and objects. For example, Google is working on developing maps of building interiors. Or perhaps all buildings will be equipped with Siri-like voices that can respond to basic questions. However, I wonder how much of this is really about creating another avenue for interacting with other humans in the city. Buildings don’t “talk” – even the artificial intelligence of today has to be programmed.

More broadly, this reminds me of Simmel’s early 1900s ideas about “the stranger” in the city and the general lack of intimate relationships. Through apps and new technologies, we may have more people to “talk to” or “interact with” but are these deep urban relationships or even helpful ones? Or is this just more clutter, another category of urban stimulation that leads to a more “blase” attitude (following up with Simmel)? I suspect Sassen is right that new technology will change how we see cities and the objects and people within them but I also suspect it will have a mix of positive and negative consequences.

Let’s just hope the city talks backs in forms other than advertisements…

Activist charged for downloading millions of JSTOR articles

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Many academics use databases like JSTOR to find articles from academic journals. However, one user violated the terms of service by downloading millions of articles and is now being charged by the federal government:

Swartz, the 25-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. He surrendered in July 2011, remains free on bond and faces dozens of years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted.

Like last year’s original grand jury indictment on four felony counts, (.pdf) the superseding indictment (.pdf) unveiled Thursday accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading millions of documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals that are normally inaccessible to the public…

“JSTOR authorizes users to download a limited number of journal articles at a time,” according to the latest indictment. “Before being given access to JSTOR’s digital archive, each user must agree and acknowledge that they cannot download or export content from JSTOR’s computer servers with automated programs such as web robots, spiders, and scrapers. JSTOR also uses computerized measures to prevent users from downloading an unauthorized number of articles using automated techniques.”

MIT authorizes guests to use the service, which was the case with Swartz, who at the time was a fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics.

It sounds like there is some disconnect here: services like JSTOR want to maintain some control over the academic content they provide even as they exist to help researchers find printed scholarly articles. Services like JSTOR can make big money by collating journal articles and requiring libraries to pay for access. Thus, someone like Swartz could download a lot of the articles and then avoid paying for or using JSTOR down the road (though academic users are primarily paying through institutions who pass the costs along to users). But what is “a limited number of journal articles at a time”? Using an automated program is clearly out according to the terms of service but what if a team of undergraduates banded together, downloaded a similar number of articles, and pooled their downloads?

If we are indeed headed toward a world of “big data,” which presumably would include the thousands of scholarly articles published each year, we are likely in for some interesting battles in a number of areas over who gets to control, download, and access this data.

Another thought: does going to open access academic journals eliminate this issue?