Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

Twentysomething: “What people in the past might have gotten from church, I get from the Internet and Facebook”

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In a small segment of a larger interesting article about “twentysomethings” (known in some academic circles as “emerging adults”), one twentysomething blogger talks about the role the Internet plays in her generation’s lives:

Thorman suffered the post-college blues. She worked in an entry-level job, was in a so-so relationship, and wondered if this was all there was to life. Her existence, she says, felt inconsequential: “You graduate from college and you want to matter and be a part of something bigger.”

Then she launched her blog, and all of a sudden she was engaging hundreds of people from around the world in a discussion. The Internet gave her a place for connection and community much like neighborhood bars and churches did for previous generations.

Thorman is part of the 25 percent of twentysomethings today who say they have no religious affiliation. “What people in the past might have gotten from church, I get from the Internet and Facebook,” she says. “That is our religion.”

I have read a number of articles about SNS and Facebook use among emerging adults but I’ve never quite seen this idea before: religion has been replaced by Internet communities.

Additionally, the motivation for being part of these communities is different:

But blogging isn’t just about community and connectivity. It’s fundamentally about the individual. “I like blogging because I feel like a mini-celebrity,” Thorman says.

She’s not the only one to express that sentiment. “Attention is my drug,” Julia Allison told a New York Times writer. Allison is a Georgetown grad who became an Internet celebrity in her twenties and whose photo landed on the cover of Wired magazine with the headline GET INTERNET FAMOUS! EVEN IF YOU’RE NOBODY—JULIA ALLISON AND THE SECRETS OF SELF-PROMOTION. A Pew Research poll asked 18-to-25-year-olds about their generation’s top goals, and 51 percent responded with “to be famous.”

But Thorman doesn’t want fame in the Paris Hilton way—famous for being famous. She wants to be recognized, on the Internet, for her insights and ideas.

These online communities are different than traditional religion then in that the focus is on the individual users and their accomplishments rather than a transcendent power or a totem (in Durkheimian terms).

Where will this all end up? Some options you will hear in the popular discourse:

1. Disillusionment. This article talks a lot about twentysomethings looking for fulfillment and the Internet helps provide this. But is this ultimately satisfying? What if one can’t find a fulfilling long-term career? What if the other choices that were not taken always look more attractive? This argument tends to come from older generations – is there a way that twentysomethings can avoid this?

2. This is just another sign of secularization as organized religion drops in influence among younger generations.

3. The America celebrity culture, literally at everyone’s fingertips both as consumers and producers, will continue to grow. This celebrity culture will make it difficult to have intellectual discussion and debates in an online realm where even the most traditional news organizations have to cater to celebrity-hungry web surfers.

4. If these are the goals of this generation, who will tackle the big issues like dealing with poverty in the world, paying for Social Security and Medicare, etc?

It will be fascinating to watch how this all shakes out.

Facebook also building profiles for non-users?

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A complaint recently filed in Ireland alleges that Facebook is collecting information about non-users:

Eight hundred million users are not enough. Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, is now building profiles of non-users who haven’t even signed up, an international privacy watchdog charges.

The sensational claim is made in a complaint filed in August by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner. It alleges that users are encouraged to hand over the personal data of other people — including names, phone numbers, email addresses and more — which Facebook is using to create…

European law carries heavy penalties for companies that violate “information privacy” laws — in contrast to the relatively lax U.S. laws. But the U.S. has issues with Facebook as well: Privacy rights litigation is proceeding in Mississippi, Louisiana, Kansas and Kentucky. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is also probing complaints about Palo Alto-based Facebook, while Congress is calling for an inquiry.

Kubasta noted that — for better or for worse — Facebook’s best defense may be a good offense. After all, it’s not alone: Several other websites are undertaking this kind of tracking as well.

“Regardless of what Facebook is doing, many websites collect and propagate personally identifiable information about individuals who have not entered into any agreement with the website. Just a few examples include Spokeo, iSearch, WhitePages.com,” Kubasta told FoxNews.com.

Three quick thoughts:

1. Doesn’t it really depend on what Facebook actually does with this data? If other companies are also doing this, what is so insidious about Facebook doing it? Is Facebook held to a different standard because people voluntarily give their information to them?

2. This sounds like it could have some interesting legal ramifications as companies have to comply with both European and American regulations.

3. I’ve said this before: if you are really worried about your information being collected anywhere on the Internet, the best solution is to not use the Internet at all.

“The Steve Jobs Anti-Eulogy” raises some interesting points

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Now that the media blitz following the death of Steve Jobs has slowed, there is more space to consider the coverage. Here are five interesting observations from one writer who also wins points for invoking “Victorian sociologist Herbert Spencer” and Malcolm Gladwell:

1. People write about Steve to write about themselves…

2. Individuals do not make history. Populations do…

So the idea that Steve Jobs changed history is just plain bad analysis. Victorian sociologist Herbert Spencer argued that attributing historical events to the decisions of individuals was a hopelessly primitive, childish, and unscientific position. After he published these views in The Study of Sociology, the case was closed. At least for professional historians.

3. You can tell a lot about a society by the people they honor…

4. Steve Jobs sheds more light on the nature vs. nurture debate than he does on the history debate…

5. Espousing the glories of genius gets us nowhere.

What I like the most about these is that they try to place Jobs within his context. They also raise larger questions including “what does it mean to be a genius,” “what values does society promote,” and “are societal or group trends more important than individual actions.”

Look for the new, important company to come out of a “low road building”

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While suburban office parks and city skyscrapers often gleam, one commentator suggests that important innovations tend to come from less attractive “low road building[s]”:

The startup lore says that many companies were founded in garages, attics, and warehouses. Once word got around, companies started copying the formula. They stuck stylized cube farms into faux warehouses and figured that would work. The coolness of these operations would help them look cool and retain employees. Keep scaling that idea up and you get Apple’s ultrahip mega headquarters, which is part spaceship and part Apple Store.

But as Stewart Brand argued in his pathbreaking essay, “‘Nobody Cares What You Do in There’: The Low Road,” it’s not hip buildings that foster creativity but crappy ones.

“Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover,” Brand wrote. “Most of the world’s work is done in Low Road buildings, and even in rich societies the most inventive creativity, especially youthful creativity, will be found in Low Road buildings taking full advantage of the license to try things.”

Brand’s essay originally appeared in his book, How Buildings Learn, and has just been re-released as part of The Innovator’s Cookbook, a new Steven Johnson-edited tome of great essays about inventing stuff. It couldn’t come at a better time. The aesthetic of innovation now dominates the startup scene, but it’s like the skeleton of a long-dead invention beast. The point of a Low Road building isn’t that it looks any particular way but rather that you could do anything with and in them. “It has to do with freedom,” as Brand put it.

The argument here is that the particular design of a building, ordered, new, and stately versus bland, functional, and drab, leads to different creative outcomes. If this is the case, why then do successful companies move from their “low road building” to corporate complexes? This likely has to do with status signals – a successful company has to look to look the part such as having an impressive lobby to intimidate visitors and upscale offices for executives. But do the new buildings necessarily slow down innovation or is it more of a function of a growing bureaucratic structure?

I wonder if there is empirical evidence about where great companies get their start and how soon it is before they move to more traditional corporate offices.

Another take on this essay is to think about where these kinds of “low road buildings” tend to be located. In the suburbs, I would think they tend to be in rundown strip malls or in faceless industrial parks. In the city, they might be in old manufacturing facilities or more rundown neighborhoods. On the whole, people would probably not want to leave near such places. Such places could often be considered  “blight” and not the best use of the land. If something more attractive was to be proposed for such sites, many cities would jump at the opportunity. Does this mean we need to protect such spaces, particularly since they are often cheaper and could be used by start-ups who have limited capital?

The “functional religion” of Steve Jobs, Apple

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After seeing the response to Steve Jobs’ death, a commentator at the Washington Post looks at some sociological research on Apple and concludes that Jobs was the leader of a religion-like movement:

In a secular age, Apple has become a religion, and Steve Jobs was its high priest.

Apple introduced the iPod in 2001, and that same year, an Eastern Washington University sociologist, Pui-Yan Lam, published a paper titled “May the Force of the Operating System Be With You: Macintosh Devotion as Implicit Religion.” Lam’s research struck close to home, quite literally — her husband has a mini-museum of Apple products in the basement…

And what it stands for, apparently, is more than just gleaming products and easy-to-use operating systems. Lam interviewed Mac fans, studied letters they wrote to trade magazines and scrutinized Mac-related Web sites. She concluded that Mac enthusiasts “adopted from both Eastern and Western religions a social form that emphasized personal spirituality as well as communal experience. The faith of Mac devotees is reflected and strengthened by their efforts in promoting their computer of choice.”…

If that sounds like academic gobbledygook, consider how Apple devotees see the world. Back when Lam’s paper was published, there was a palpable sense of a battle between good and evil. Apple: good. Bill Gates: evil. Apple followers, Lam wrote, pined for a world where “people are judged purely on the basis of their intelligence and their contribution to humanity.” They saw Gates representing a more “profane” world where financial gain was priorities one, two and three.

This is an argument based on the work of Emile Durkheim. The argument is one that can be applied to many things that take on the functions of religion such as providing meaning (Apple vs. other corporations, beauty vs. functionality), participating in common rituals (buying new products), and uniting people around common symbols (talking with other Mac users). For example, some have suggested that the Super Bowl also is a “functional religion”: Americans come together to watch football, united in their patriotic and competitive beliefs while holding parties to watch the game and the commercials. Or baseball can be viewed as a “primitive religious ritual.”

While the comments beneath this story suggest some people think otherwise, this is not necessarily a slam against Apple or Steve Jobs. Durkheim argued that individuals need communal ties and we can find this in a number of places: the relationships formed in religious congregations, team-building activities in the office, and at bars and coffee shops where we try to connect with others during our daily routines. This does not mean Apple was necessarily a “false religion”: of course, we could talk about whether people could or should find ultimate meaning in a brand or products but we could also acknowledge that the social aspects of Apple made it more than just a set of technological product.

Considering Steve Jobs and the role of cultural context in innovation

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David Brooks explores the “innovation stagnation thesis” and one of the ideas of this argument is that cultural context matters for innovation:

Third, there is no essential culture clash. Look at the Steve Jobs obituaries. Over the course of his life, he combined three asynchronous idea spaces — the counterculture of the 1960s, the culture of early computer geeks and the culture of corporate America. There was LSD, “The Whole Earth Catalogue” and spiritual exploration in India. There were also nerdy hours devoted to trying to build a box to make free phone calls.

The merger of these three idea networks set off a cascade of innovations, producing not only new products and management styles but also a new ideal personality — the corporate honcho in jeans and the long-sleeve black T-shirt. Formerly marginal people came together, competed fiercely and tried to resolve their own uncomfortable relationships with society.

The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

If you want to be the next Steve Jobs and end the innovation stagnation, maybe you should start in hip-hop.

So what exactly is Brooks saying? People who want to be innovators need to embrace or immerse themselves into diverse cultural systems so that they can then synthesize different ideas in new ways? Or is it that innovators like Jobs are only possible in certain cultural contexts and our current cultural context simply doesn’t push people into these different ideas or doesn’t promote this?

Sociologists of culture would have something to say about this. While Jobs clearly had unique individual skills, the production approach would emphasize how his combination of cultural contexts was made possible. He came of age in an era when individuals were encouraged to seek out new ideas and learn how to express themselves. He started a computer company in a field that didn’t have many dominant players and two guys working in a garage could create one of the world’s most enduring brands. He was alive in an era when information technology was a hot area and perhaps ranked higher in people’s interests that things like space exploration and medical cures. (One way to think about this is to wonder if Jobs could have been successful in other fields. Were his skills and context translatable into other fields? Could Jobs have helped find a cure for cancer rather than create personal computing devices? Should he have tackled their other fields – what is the opportunity cost to the world of his choice?) He had the education and training (though no college degree) that helped him to be successful.

In the end, we could ask how as a culture or a society we could encourage more people to become innovators. Is studying hip-hop really the answer? What kind of innovation do we want most in our society – scientific progress or self-expression or dealing with social problems or something else? When we talk about pushing math and science in schools, what innovations do we want our students to produce?

“Home is where the hub is”

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A recent study looks at how being connected through the Internet and other gadgets at home changes what home is:

What the web has inspired, then, is a postmodern understanding of what “home” is: a de-physicalised, conceptual and psychological phenomenon that externalises its invisible meanings. And interaction designers recognise this: the web is another castle that the Englishman can live in, and he seeks to create virtual places that have as much effect on pride, self-esteem and identity as the bricks and mortar version where he sleeps…

I am constantly connected when I’m at home. It is my companion when watching a movie, it is my entertainment system when listening to the radio, it is my connection to the family and friends I speak with on VoIP. Sociologist Kat Jungnickel and anthropologist Genevieve Bell suggest that my over-networked experience isn’t unusual in Home is Where the Hub is? Wireless Infrastructures and the Nature of Domestic Culture in Australia: “Some read their emails and Google for news in front of the TV while others breastfeed while surfing the net. In the kitchen, they look for recipes or talk with friends via IM. In bed they write emails or shop on eBay.” The rooms once allocated for specific purposes have been co-opted by other (digital) tasks.

This isn’t always welcome. In one of Jungnickel and Bell’s case studies, a participant describes the conflicts that arise from home-multiplicity: “Sal tells of the congestion zone caused by the chameleonic characteristics of the kitchen table,” they write. “During the day it is her new computing space, and at night it is the social, cooking washing-up space for both of them.” Each online activity has imposed itself on our home-practice. We are experiencing a domestic transition as the web collaborates and competes with old “new” technologies such as the TV, the researchers argue. It “complicates” characteristics of the physical space.

We are adaptable creatures and will work within the confines of our existing homes to integrate this new creature into our lives. We have already made the web part of our domestic ecologies and we continually imbue it with a sense of place. Perhaps its malleability is why it has been so successful and why we are willing to bring this interruptive technology into our most intimate worlds.

In recent decades, commentators have suggested that Americans have retreated into their large homes and lost their connection to their communities. But this may be suggesting that while Americans may have withdrawn, they are still interested in being connected. However, this connection looks different than it has in the past. The connection now happens at the times of the individual’s own choosing, it is done at a distance, and it is unclear how much this translates into offline world action.

I don’t think we should be too surprised that the concept of home is changing. Our current understanding dates back roughly to the mid 1800s when homes were built with separate rooms to separate uses: sleep in one room, eat in another, cook in another, etc. Before that, homes were more multi-use as more people used their home for work as well as family life. It would be interesting to think about how the quick expansion of Internet connectedness might lead to new designs for homes or introduce interior spaces that enhance this connectedness. Already, we have more static gadgets that have been adapted, such as televisions including Internet apps, so why not dining rooms, bathrooms, and front porches plus back patios?

Righthaven loses in Colorado

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Last week, Righthaven was flirting with bankruptcy due to legal fees associated with a Nevada case.  This week, the fees keep piling up, this time in Colorado:

Righthaven’s only interest in the Work is “the right to proceeds in association with a Recovery.”  The Copyright Assignment Agreement defines “Recovery” as “any and all sums . . .arising from an Infringement Action.”  Thus, when read together, the Assignment and the Copyright Assignment Agreement reveal that MediaNews Group has assigned to Righthaven the bare right to sue for infringement – no more, no less.  Although the assignment of the  bare right to sue is permissible, it is ineffectual….Accordingly, Righthaven is neither a “legal owner” or a “beneficial owner” for purposes of § 501(b), and it lacks standing to institute an action for copyright infringement….I convert Mr. Wolf’s Rule 12(b)(1) motion to a Rule 56 motion and GRANT him SUMMARY JUDGMENT.  Furthermore, in light of the need to discourage the abuse of the statutory remedies for copyright infringement, I exercise my discretion under Section 505 of the Copyright Act and ORDER that Righthaven shall reimburse Mr. Wolf’s full costs in defending this action, including reasonable attorney fees. [emphasis added]

More coverage from Ars Technica, Techdirt, and the EFF (h/t).

Sociologist considers “Humanity 2.0”

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A sociologist who is “Auguste Comte chair in social epistemology in Warwick University’s Department of Sociology” discusses his new book titled Humanity 2.0. In my opinion, here is the most interesting part of the interview:

Let’s put it this way: we’ve always been heading towards a pretty strong sense of Humanity 2.0. The history of science and technology, especially in the west, has been about remaking the world in our collective “image and likeness”, to recall the biblical phrase. This means making the world more accessible and usable by us. Consider the history of agriculture, especially animal and plant breeding. Then move to prosthetic devices such as eyeglasses and telescopes.

More recently, and more mundanely, people are voting with their feet to enter Humanity 2.0 with the time they spend in front of computers, as opposed to having direct contact with physical human beings. In all this, it’s not so much that we’ve been losing our humanity but that it’s becoming projected or distributed across things that lack a human body. In any case, Humanity 2.0 is less about the power of new technologies than a state of mind in which we see our lives fulfilled in such things.

Wouldn’t someone like Archimedes describe us as Humanity 3.0 compared to his era?

Yes, Archimedes would probably see us as pretty exotic creatures. He would already be impressed by what we take for granted as Humanity 1.0, since the Greeks generally believed that “humanity” was an elite prospect for ordinary Homo sapiens, requiring the right character and training. Moreover, he would be surprised – if not puzzled – that we appear to think of science and technology as some long-term collective project of self-improvement – “progress” in its strongest sense. While the Greeks gave us many of our fundamental scientific ideas, they did not think of them as a blueprint for upgrading the species. Rather, those ideas were meant either to relieve drudgery or provide high-brow entertainment.

What is considered “normal” for human beings has changed quite a bit over the centuries. This reminds me of something I read months ago about the concept of “normal” in medicine: we tend to focus on more unusual circumstances so don’t know as much what the possible ranges of “normal.” When first introduced, many technological changes were not “normal” but humans adapted. As Fuller suggests, perhaps we need to have a conversation about what is “normal” and how much change we are willing to accept and how quickly it might be implemented.

Were Archimedes and the Greeks correct in focusing more on “character and training” rather than scientific progress?

When people talk about these sorts of topics, readers start thinking about things like robots, prosthetics, and computer chip implants and don’t think so much about eyeglasses or common crops. Indeed, the book cover plays off these common stereotypes with its “futuristic” look at a human head. Does this jump to future technology and the potential problems immediately turn some possible readers off while a cover that played around more with “safer” ideas like eyeglasses would be attractive to more people?

Facebook moving toward users being able to “treat their life as a 24/7 reality show”

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Wired looks at some of Facebook’s recent changes and future plans and summarizes their intentions:

Combined with other Facebook recent announcements — “friend lists” that help you classify your contacts into groups, a Ticker that gives updates from your cohorts as they happen,  and changes in the newsfeed to make it more reflective of what your close friends are doing — Facebook is not so subtly doubling down on its ambitions to enable people to shed the pre-digital cloak of isolation and treat their life as a 24/7 reality show, broadcast to those in their social spheres.

Remember when Time named “you” as the person of the year for 2006, before Facebook had swept across the planet? Here is how the story described the effect of the Internet:

It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

This is a more hopeful vision than what Wired offers where individuals can produce and star in their own reality show.

The fulcrum on which Facebook’s future might hinge is whether it is able to help people forge new connections  or whether people continue to hunker down in their existing social groups. The desire that Facebook users would forge new connections is not surprising if you have read sources like The Facebook Effect that highlighted the company’s goals of opening up the world. While research studies still suggest that the majority of Facebook contact and relationships exist between people who already know each other prior to Facebook, perhaps this will change due to Facebook’s interface changes as well as the growing cultural acceptance of conducting our social lives through this online realm. Or perhaps we are destined to live in a world where our highest goal is to become individual celebrities.