The British Humanist Association have created a great little video Introduction to Humanism. Its basically a six minute explanation of what humanism is. But what makes it particularly great is the people who do the talking in the movie. They are a star cast: Rumy Hasan, A.C. Grayling, Polly Toynbee, Tim Minchin, Phillip Pullman, Zoe Margolis, Andrew Copson & Richard Dawkins.
Dawkins enthusiasm for science is wonderful and inspiring in the video he says: “Science is the poetry of reality”
Yesterday Clarinette sent out a series of three tweets about the way in which we no longer are able to share culture as we used to. Mostly this is because much of our culture is locked into specific devices or user accounts.
Have you ever thought how much are devices have become ‘indivudualized’ ? Can’t share laptops, phones, iPads, eBooks or music anymore. (5:56 PM – 25 Jul 12).
Culture is becoming ‘individual’, not shared. Can’t pass in books, music, devices. Itunes music dies after death. Even picz stored online. (5:58 PM – 25 Jul 12).
Wondering what we will leave behind after death. I surely print much less picz, write very little on paper, most music is online…. (6:03 PM – 25 Jul 12).
Her comments are interesting as they illustrate the paradox that we probably have access to more cultural material than ever before but this culture is not shared between family, local community or even nationality. We do share culture – consuming is a form of sharing – but not in the same way as we did before. In many cases to share culture almost requires each sharer to have his or her own device (and of course that the cultural expression is not locked-in with DRM).
A friend of mine complained some time ago that it was not enough to buy one e-book reader for the family but each member needed to have their own device. When everyone had their own device the family’s reading habits changed – they no longer read the same book and talked about it. In one sense the sharing of culture within the family broke down.
In the long term this should also have an effect on the collected culture we leave behind (see for example Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books? and Memory in the digital age). Not to mention the amount of stuff we “lose” somewhere on old hard disks.
The increased ability to chose, the diminished ability to share and the decreased ability to leave a collection of culture to the next generation. Will this change who we are?
Family photo’s a thing of the past? My Grandfather & I
To end on a nicely paranoid note: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Chapter 3.
Steve Mann is an amazing person. He is the father of wearable computers and is well worth reading about (Wikipedia for example).
He recently published a recount of an assault he suffered at the hands of some paranoid McDonalds staff. It’s strange, it’s terrible and it deserves to be spread. Obviously McD should be offering apologies and offering to repair his equipment.
Read the full story here: Physical assault by McDonald’s for wearing Digital Eye Glass it will also give you an idea of why Steve Mann is important to tech development in general and to Googles upcoming glasses in particular.
While this tragic and scary it is not really something I was going to blog about. I tweeted it… fine. I was going to post it on Facebook and got this:
Well ok that’s odd but I didn’t use the exact link, how careless of me. So I tried again.
Seriously? Is Facebook blocking Steve Mann’s blog? What is going on here?
Being invited to give an opening keynote is both incredibly flattering and intimidating. Addressing the KDE community at their Akademy is even more intimidating: I want to be light, funny, deep, serious, relevant, insightful and create a base for discussion. No wonder I couldn’t stop editing my slides until long after sundown.
The goal of my talk was to address the problem of the increased TiVo-ization of life, democracy and policy. Stated simply TiVo-ization is following the letter of rules/principles while subverting them by changing what is physically possible (wikipedia on origins and deeper meaning)
In order to set the stage I presented earlier communications revolutions. Reading and writing are 6000 years old, but punctuation took almost 4000 years to develop and empty spaces between words are only 1000 years old. What we see here is that communication is a code that evolves, it gets hacked and improved. Despite its accessibility it retains several bugs for millennia.
The invention of writing is a paradigm shift. But its taken for granted. printing on the other hand is seen as an amazing shift. In my view Gutenberg was the Steve Jobs of his day, Gutenberg built on the earlier major shifts and worked on packaging – he gets much more credit for revolution than he deserves.
Communication evolves nicely (telegraphs, radio, television) but the really exciting and cool stuff occurs with digitalization. This major shift is today easily overlooked, together with the Internet, and we focus on the way in which communication is packaged rather than the infrastructure that makes it possible.
The WWW is one on these incredible packages that was created with an openness ideal. We should transmit whatever we liked as long as we followed the protocol for communication. So far so good. Our communications follow the Four Freedoms of Free Software, Communication is accessible, hackable and usable.
Unfortunately this total freedom inevitably creates the environment that invites convenience. Here corporations provide this convenience but at the cost of individual freedom and, in the long run, maybe at the cost of the WWW.
The risk to the WWW emerges from the paradox of our increasing use of the Web. Our increased use has brought with it a subtle shift in our linking habits. We are sending links to each other via social media on an unimaginable level. Sharing is the point of social media. The early discussion on blogging was all about user generated content. This is still important, but the focus of social media today is not on content generation but on sharing.
Focusing on sharing rather than content creation means we are creating less and linking less. Additionally the links we share are all stored in social media sites. These are impermanent and virtually unsearchable – they are virtually unhistoric. Without the links of the past there is no web “out in the wild” – the web of the future will exist only within the manicured and tamed versions within social network nature preserves (read more Will the web fail?)
On an individual level the sharing has created a performance lifestyle. This is the need to publicize elements of your life in order to enhance the quality of it. (Read more Performance Lifestyle & Coffee Sadism).
This love of tech is built on the ideology that technology creates freedom, openness and democracy – in truth technology does not automatically do this. Give people technology and in all probability what will be created is more porn.
The problem is not that social media cannot be used for deeper things, but rather that the desire of the corporations controlling social media is to enable shallow sharing as opposed to deep interaction. Freedom without access to the code is useless. Without access to the code what we have is the TiVo-ization of everyday life. If you want a picture then this is a park bench that cannot be used by homeless people.
image from Yumiko Hayakawa essay Public Benches Turn ‘Anti-Homeless’ (also recommend Design with Intent)
Park benches which are specifically designed to prevent people from sleeping on benches. In order to exclude an undesirable group of people from a public area the democratic process must first define a group as undesirable and then obtain a consensus that this group is unwelcome. All this must be done while maintaining the air of democratic inclusion – it’s a tricky, almost impossible task. But by buying a bench which you cannot sleep on, you exclude those who need to sleep on park benches (the homeless) without even needing to enter into a democratic discussion.Only homeless people are affected. This is the TiVo-iztion of everyday life.
The more technology we embed into our lives the less freedom we have. The devices are dependent on our interaction as we are dependent upon them. All to often we adapt our lives to suit technology rather than the other way around.
In relation to social media the situation becomes worse when government money is spent trying to increase participation via social networks. The problem is that there is little or no discussion concerning the downsides or consequences of technologies on society . We no longer ask IF we should use laptops/tablets/social media in eduction but only HOW.
Partly this is due to the fear of exclusion. Democracy is all about inclusion, and pointing out that millions of users are “on” Facebook seems to be about inclusion. This is naturally a con. Being on/in social media is not democratic participation and will not democratize society. Why would you want to be Facebook friends with the tax authority. And how does this increase democracy?
The fear of lack of inclusion has led to schools teaching social media and devices instead of teaching Code and Consequences. By doing this, we are being sold the con that connection is democracy.
So what can we do about it?
We need to hack society to protect openness. Not openness without real function (TiVo-ization) but openness that cannot be subverted. This is done by forcing social media to follow law and democratic principles. If they cannot be profitable within this scenario – tough.
This is done by being very, very annoying:
1. Tell people what the consequences of their information habits will have.
2. Always ask who controls the ways in which our gadgets affect our lives. Are they accountable?
3. Read ALL your EULA… Yes, I’m talking to you!
4. Always ask what your code will do to the lives of others. Always ask what your technology use will do to the lives of others…
The slides are here:
Its painful to admit, but it seems that my own University of Göteborg (GU) is anti-humanities. Last year GU axed nine languages (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian and Czech). This year they added Italian, Russian, Greek and Old Church Slavonic.
Surely this is no real big thing you may argue – many universities are killing the humanities and besides what’s the loss of dropping Old Church Slavonic? Well first off I would like to begin with an emotional argument by Heinrich Heine: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.” When we begin to cut, we will cut to the bone and bleed to death.
But more importantly the thoughts that the humanities are unnecessary, or even more stupidly, unprofitable is so obviously foolish that it pains me to see when it is used as an argument.
What are universities for? Most seem to think that they are there to get people jobs. A strange illusion but quite prevalent, the problem is that we have no idea what will be needed in the future so designing universities for this purpose is obviously silly.
But don’t take my ineloquent word for it. Listen to the humorous and thoughtful Ken Robinson (author of The Element: How finding your passion changes everything)
There is an additional problem by streamline, focusing on core competencies and cutting the fat – it’s that we create armies of reasonably identical people who have the same backgrounds and thoughts. And from this we expect them to be innovative and new-thinking. Seriously, could you believe that??
The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum develops these arguments in her wonderful and thoughtful book: Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.
But please don’t get the impression that all of Sweden is a wasteland of real thought and culture. There are several deep and interesting researchers and thinkers. Specifically, I would like to point to the shining example of Ola Wikander, a fantastic example of a young scholar he has eight books (his own and translations) ranging from Canaanite myths to popularizing theories and developments of language. His focus is the epitome of “useless” humanities research (seriously its even called dead languages). But in reality his works affects more people than a whole pile of average MBAs… Yet, he is the odd one.
The problem is that the MBA’s – with their incredible lack of knowledge – believe that they can create more by eliminating that which is not attractive to everyone. Popularity is the order of the day. Unfortunately the MBA’s are the ones who are running the universities right now. Hopefully, this will change before we have pushed our mental gene pool to the point of extinction. In the meantime my university just became a tad more irrelevant, less competitive and more redundant. Thanks guys! How efficiently you create our demise.
In the meantime, while the mental gene pool at my university shrinks, all we can do is rage against the machine.
In an interesting marketing strategy Visit Sweden decided that Sweden cannot be defined by a single voice and began letting “ordinary” Swedes have control over the @Sweden twitter account. It was cute, it was fun – but basically it was boring.
Recently 27 year old Sonja Abrahamsson took over the account and things began to heat up. Her comments are earthy and borderline questionable. None of the ones I have seen are directly racist but they may be seen by some as politically incorrect.
This was too much for several people and the so called scandal was a fact. Just check out the headlines
CNN writes Foul-mouthed Bieber-hating mother takes over @Sweden
Adland writes Sweden – the Worlds most democratic twitter account dissolves into pure anarchy
CIO writes Sweden teaches us how not to do social media
MSNBC writes Swedens democratic twitter experiment goes haywire
But is this really a problem? It feels like the world media is working hard to feel truly insulted over nothing. Sure the author may be non-pc, maybe a person I would prefer not to talk to or read but so what? The whole point of allowing “ordinary” Swedes to take over the account was to demonstrate that Sweden cannot be represented by one voice. Those who would argue that only a specific brand of politically correct Swedes should be allowed to talk miss the whole point. If you come to Sweden you will meet all kinds of people – the same is true if you visit any other country.
The main difference is that instead of a bland mix of picture perfect illustrations that ordinarily bore us with the falsehood this marketing of Sweden shows that ordinary people exist here. The fact that the experiment with @Sweden has achieved little public debate abroad shows that it was not really an exciting thing to do.
Those who argue that Abrahamsson is causing bad publicity for Sweden should think again. How may of those who are insulted (if there are many of those?) are actively cancelling trips to Sweden? Visit Sweden should stand by their choice and behind their idea – in Sweden we believe in freedom of expression. This means that often we hear about stuff we would prefer to avoid.
The critique is more amusing than relevant, a storm in a tea-cup. Unless Abrahamsson has broken any laws then I salute her ability to create a discussion about Sweden that goes beyond the boring stereotypes.
Can we really control the Internet? This is question has been around long enough to be deemed a golden oldie. But like a fungal infection it keeps coming back…
The early battle lines were drawn up in 1996. In an age where cyberspace was both a cool and correct term lawyers like Johnson & Post wrote “Law And Borders: The Rise of Law in Cyberspace” and activists like John Perry Barlow wrote his epic “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace“.These were the cool and heady days of the cyberlibertarians vs cyberpaternalists. The libs believed that the web should & could not be regulated while the pats meant that it could and should. (I covered this in my thesis pdf here) Since then the terminology has changed but sentiments remain the same.
I miss the term cyberspace. But more to the point the “could/should” control argument continues. Nicklas has written an interesting point on the could part:
Fast forward twenty years. Bandwidth has doubled once, twice, three times. Devices capable of setting up ad hoc networks – large ones – are everywhere. Encrypted protocols are of state-defying strength and available to everyone. Tech savvy generations have grown up to expect access to the Internet not only as a given, but as unassailable. Networks like Anonymous has iterated, several times, and found topologies, communication practices and collaboration methods that defy tracking. The once expensive bottleneck technologies have become cheaper, the cost of building a network slowly approaching zero. The Internet has become a Internet that can be re-instantiated for a large swath of geography by a single individual.
So far so good. Not one internet but personal portable sharable spaces. The inability to control will lead to a free internet. But something feels wrong. Maybe its a cynical sadness of having heard this all before and seeing it all go wrong? From his text I get images of Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix basically the hacker hero gunslinger fighting the anonymous faceless oppressive society. Its cool, but is it true?
The technology is (on some level) uncontrollable (without great oppression) but the point is that it does not have to be completely controlled. The control in society via technology is not about having 100% surveillance and pure systems which cannot be hacked. Control is about having reasonable amounts of failure in the system (System failures allow dissidents to believe they are winning).
The issue I have with pinning my hopes on the unregulatable internets is that they are – in social terms – an end to themselves. Who will connect to these nets? Obviously those who are in the know. You will connect when you know where & how to connect. This is a vital goal in itself but presents a problem for using these nets in wider social change. Getting information across to a broader section of the population.
Civil disobedience is a fantastic tool. But if the goal is disobedience in itself it is hardly justifiable in a group. If the goal is to bring about social change: ie. the goal is for a minority to convince a majority then the minority must communicate with the majority. If the nets are going to work we need to find ways for the majority to connect to them. If the majority can connect to them then so can the oppressive forces of regulation.
On the field of pats & libs I think I am what is a cynical libertarian. I am convinced of the power, value, social & individual power of non-regulation of technology but I don’t believe that politicians and lobbyists will leave technology alone. It’s an unfortunate truth: power hates a vacuum.
Actually the lecture was called “The Extroverted Reader” and looked at the ways in which ebook readers are changing the ways in which we consume culture.
Beginning with a bit of history: The technology of writing began about 5000 years ago (Unfortunately in my slides I’m off by a millennium) by the Sumerians. By 2000 BC the Phoenicians had a form of writing – but it did not contain many of the elements we rely upon today:
fndtlvsnvrydctngvrytmsmbdytrnsnthstgntththrrmndrdbk
For example, 1000 years late the Greeks had added vowels
ifindtelevisionveryeducatingeverytimesomebodyturnsonthesetigointotheotherroomandreadabook
and the plays of Aristophanes (446 BC – ca. 386 BC) had punctuation
ifindtelevisionveryeducating.everytimesomebodyturnsontheset,igointotheotherroomandreadabook.
Mixing lower and upper case appeared 700 AD
Ifindtelevisionveryeducating.Everytimesomebodyturnsontheset,Igointotheotherroomandreadabook.
and the humble spaces between words seems to have been developed in Ireland in 900 AD
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
But since then not much has happened. Sure we have changes in materials, production and business models. But the printing press was not an innovation in text – it was an amazing innovation in lowering production costs. So basically for the next millennium not much happened.
It was not until we began to go digital that we realized that we had the potential to fundamentally change the way in which we read. But things did not come overnight and it was not until the 1970s that we cracked electronic paper. This development was fundamental to the development of the ebook reader. The next challenge is to find a point at which to start looking at the developments in the field. Here is my timeline: 1993 Apple Newton, 1999 Franklin EB-500 Rocket eBook, 2002 TabletPC, 2004 Sony Libré, 2006 eReader PRS-500, 2007 iPhone, 2007 Kindle, 2009 Nook, 2010 iPad, 2011 Kindle fire.
This was followed by a brief section on the control of media – the ways in which books could be controlled in the past in relation to how they can be controlled in the present. What you can and cannot read depends on those who control the technology of reading. Prior to ebooks this control was a question of distribution. Here we can see examples of the requirement of censors to permit the printing of books through the system of imprimatur or the attempts to create lists of forbidden books such as the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Catholic Church. These analogue controls have their strengths and weaknesses but they are naturally imperfect controls.
No matter how effective the controls were, they were no match to the control demonstrated by Amazon when it remotely deleted some digital editions of the George Orwell’s 1984 from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them (NYT, June 2009). This act shined a clear light on one of the fundamental questions of ebooks – what is it we have actually bought when we buy an ebook? What do we own or have a right to use? Is the content of our reader ours?
This area is fascinating but what my talk was going to focus on was the issue of connectivity in relation to the reader so I moved along to the growth of connectivity in reading. Reading is always a social activity, in its most basic form the reader is connecting with the writer. We are also connected, in some form, to others who have read the same material as us. By reading similar works we create a common culture and understanding. Our common experiences enable us to have a common starting point in many discussions. This is true of all cultural expressions. Today saying things like double-dip or tie-fighter evoke common ideas and shared experiences but what would these words have meant to someone in 1970?
Today sharing is all the vogue and the technology of choice is social media. There are naturally critics to our new behaviors. Some critics see the end of human culture (Keen 2007) to the rewiring of the physical brain. For the latter I like to use Professor Greenfield who has been quoted as saying:
“My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.”
There is a general criticism that we are using our devices to ensure that we have a constant stream stimuli and the fear is that this will prevent us from having “real” experiences. My take on this is that we are losing certain aspects and gaining others… for example I have written about the negative side of the loss of real boredom in our lives.
By connecting social media and reading we are attempting to ensure that the reader is not unconnected from the rest of the world. One part of this is the highlighting function in readers. First the highlighter is a mimic of analogue technology. We need to be able to highlight sections of text in order to find them again. But this is quickly used in new and exciting ways. First we can share our markings so that while reading you can be informed that 3 readers have highlighted this section. This effects our reading, we want to be accepted by others and not to stand out – so we look more carefully at these sections. Secondly, if we highlight a section this information is passed along but it may not be enough- we are asked whether we would like to share what we are reading. Why? Its all part of the development of performance lifestyle. Of course we want to share our deepest browsing, we need to show that we are extraordinary in some fashion.
All this data is gathered and analyzed. As is the data of which books you buy, when you buy them, when you start reading them, when you stop reading them, where in the book you pause or start and if you actually finish the book. Sure, you may actually have thick books in your bookshelf but in the future your bookseller will know how long it took you to read them – if you ever did!
This is the interesting thing. While we are buying our books we are also taking part in a much larger process where we are providing information about our deepest and most solitary habits. Someone is really reading over your shoulder but they don’t want you content – they want your habits.
The next section looked at changes in the marketplace as the ways in which we read will naturally change the ways in which we create and sell books. Amazon already knows what you browse and what you do, or do not buy, they allow us to write reviews and to use functions such as Facebook’s Like button. Not to mention the ways in which they are using interesting varying pricing strategies to get use to impulse buy. Buying is easier and does not require physical activity or waiting for delivery. This increases the content we have available to us.
Our content is swelled even further buy alternative book markets such as self publishing projects or Project Gutenberg which has 36 000 books available to us. Stop and think about that number! That’s a huge amount of books. Add to this the pirated books which can be downloaded illegally. These alternatives provide any reader with an endless supply of books. Endless if they are intended to be read as well as downloaded.
So in closing I wanted to address the point of the lecture: What will the endless library do to our individual reading patterns, to our collective cultures, to our language, to our libraries?
– Access to endless amounts of books will change the ways in which we read. We will demand more for less from our authors. Readers will generally have less tolerance for the slow read and will want more bangs for their bucks. Writers wanting to achieve large scale fame will have to adapt to this. Publishers will demand they do. Publishers will also know (based from reader data) where and when readers stopped reading and will attempt to “fix” this.
– Our culture will no longer be defined by a common canon of literature but we will become more splintered into interests. Naturally we will still be dominated by the bestsellers but below that we will all read our own interests in a way that we have not seen in books (but we have seen this in magazines and music).
– Many non-English publishers have been attempting to retain control over their markets by excluding or limiting the ebook from their languages. But this is not a long-term solution as self-publishing will force them to change. If not there is the possibility that the smaller languages will suffer (maybe disappear?), especially in the countries where English skills are good.
– Our libraries are often seen by outsiders as bastions of conservatism. This is very much the outsiders view. Librarians are the first to adopt and change. They do not see themselves as repositories for physical books but as place of information exchange. This will continue to develop but it is important that the image of the library as the silent, dusty pile of books and the librarian as the old spinster must change in order for librarians to succeeded in their metamorphosis.
One thing is certain. Culture is inevitable even if copyright is not. Technology will not kill our culture even if the business models which we are used to seeing today may not be around tomorrow. The reader will remain even if trees are no longer killed to feed her habits.
The slides for my presentation are online here.
The purpose of today’s lecture was to familiarize the audience with social media and what they may need to know about it. The lecture began with examples of what the media reports when social media is mentioned. The interesting thing is that media today has turned from the previously optimistic position to being more openly critical. To exemplify this I used three recent examples from Swedish media where the papers reported that research showed: smart phones make us selfish, Facebook spreads unhappiness & the need to be connected causes insomnia among young people.
Generally speaking the extremes of the debate either view social media as revolutionary (and fundamental for the Arab spring) or trivial. Defining the Arab spring as a Facebook revolution degrades the pain, suffering and efforts of the individuals doing the work. My example of the trivial is a response from an older professor when he heard I was working on an article on Twitter:
“Twitter? Isn’t that where everyone talks about what they had for breakfast?” Just as with the revolutionary view of social media this may have a grain of truth. Social media can be used for trivial conversation but it would be incorrect to see social media as only trivial. It may also be important to remember that most conversation is trivial. Trivial conversation is what creates and maintains social relations.
The approaches to social media belong to a longer tradition of techno-optimism and pessimism. My examples of optimism are a quote from Wikipedia:
Social media…At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. (Wikipedia, May 2009)
What does “the democratization of information” even mean? My second optimism example is Time Magazine’s choice of YOU as person of the year in 2006.
My choice of pessimists were a quote from Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture” (2007)
“Out of this anarchy… what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated.”
Say what you like about Keen, but he is extremely clear about his position. The second pessimist quote is from Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield:
“My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.”
From here the lecture moved on to the developments to what led to social media decade and the changes our new toys have caused. Naturally there are profound changes occurring all around us but the small stuff is fun to note.
The Wordfeud app is an interesting example. A couple of years ago admitting of regularly playing Scrabble may have been a form of social suicide – today things have changed and we happily boast of a high score. Similarly, a few years ago looking at pictures of your friends, enemies and other loose ties would have been voyeurism and maybe borderline stalking – today it’s just Facebook. Our use of technology has normalized abnormal behavior.
Our connectivity and our toys have also diminished our need for boredom – a feeling that may have filled an important purpose. I have written about Boredom as source of creativity earlier.
At this point the lecture moved on to some important points about what technology can do. Beginning with my favorite example of the Tokyo park bench read it here.
When we look at the effects of social media the most important point to begin with is the seminal quote by blue_beetle
If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold
I like this quote but I have always felt that there was something missing. We are not really the product – we are the creators of the product, which is data. We are digital dairy cows and the product is digital milk.
A social change caused by social media is our relationship with our contacts. We are the stars in our own performance attempting to present our ordinary lives in extraordinary ways. We document our lives for the entertainment of others – or maybe for the creation of the image of a more exciting life. As an example I showed my coffee project (a mix of entertainment, amusement & sadism – to be explained in a later blogpost).
In order to understand more about what we are doing it is good to know what the controllers of the infrastructure think about. It is important to understand the digital dairy farmers.
One of the main players is Mark Zuckerberg and his position on “radical transparency”
“You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”
There are several things wrong with this position (not even focusing on the fact that his company profits from this position). According to Zuckerberg the days may be coming to an end (which I seriously doubt) but what to do now? The media is full of examples where individuals have been punished (socially or economically or more) for information that may not have been illegal or even immoral.
In addition to this Zuckerberg has claimed that privacy is no longer a social norm. Additionally, Zuckerberg’s goal seems to create a personalized view of the world (check out Pariser’s Filter Bubble or some stuff on personalization I wrote here). In Zuckerberg’s own chilling words:
A Squirrel Dying In Your Front Yard May Be More Relevant To Your Interests Right Now Than People Dying In Africa.
It is worrying that Zuckerberg is profiting from pushing these positions at the same time as he develops a technology that promotes excessive sharing and profits from the same.
So if social media is not going to show social responsibility, then who will fix this problem?
Usually we turn to the law. However the law is all focused on concerns with Orwell’s view of surveillance via Big Brother. But today we are the ones giving away our information for the sake of convenience and entertainment – we are in the controlled world of Huxley’s Brave New World (check out the Orwell/Huxley paradox here).
So we are left to our own devices – in more ways than one. What can we expect of the future? First we will see an increased efficiency in personalization (as I have written earlier):
The same is true of information. The sweet and fatty information in a long historical context was an understanding of who was allied with whom? Who is sleeping with whom? And whom can I get my genes over to the next generation (obviously just a nicer way of thinking about getting laid!). This is why we today have a fascination about gossip. Which minor celebs are attempting to sleep with each other takes up an extraordinary part of our lives. But this was all ok since the access to gossip was limited. Today, however, we are connected to the largest gossip engine ever conceived. Facebook may try to hide it in its spin, but part of our fascination is all about looking at each other. The problem is that there is only a limited amount of time in life and spending too much time on gossip limits our ability for more relevant information. We are becoming information obese and the solution is to decrease fatty information intake and go to the information gym regularly.
The development of walled gardens or information silos… Facebook (and other silos) is branding us like the cattle we are. By attempting to lock our behavior into their site and prevent us from leaving they are diminishing our freedom – a freedom which was originally created in the design of the Internet and is being subverted by the growth of social media (Read Long Live the Web by Tim Berners-Lee).
We are not going to be helped from our locked stalls by either law or corporations. We are left to practice thoughtful self-restraint and hope that the law will eventually catch up with our technology and needs.
Yesterday I was participated in a late night session with every speaker getting 10 minutes and then being part of a panel. The theme of the evening was communities (my bad translation) To live as a person: Legitimacy and qualities in chosen and natural communities.
Among the other speakers were a professor of theology on the connection between space, religion and community and two photographers each involved in different local community/activism projects. They had lovely portraits of people in semi self-organizing communities under threat (a local second hand market and a threated allotment site) from the council.
It was an easy guess that I was there to represent the virtual, and implicitly, shallow communities of social media. This put me into a difficult position, as I don’t like classifying social media as “a community”
Anyhow I began by explaining that I would not be talking about social media in general but about Facebook in particular. The reason for this was two-fold. First, FB is probably what most people associate with the term social media and audience recognition is important, and second, I wanted to introduce a coming FB research area that I want to be work on.
Having established the topic of FB I ranted for half a minute on the problem with comparing all of FB to a community, on weakness of comparing FB to a country and to the awful ignorance of calling parts of the Arab spring, a Facebook revolution. All these, I argue are just very effective FB yarns that their marketing department either started or should have started – either way they are good publicity. And as we all know, good publicity is important but it doesn’t have to be true.
This was followed by an explanation of the shallowness of everyday interaction via FB. It was my goal here not to ignore, but to embrace the silly, everyday uses that make up the absolute backbone of FB activity. As a part of this I expanded on the concept of performance lifestyle – where we are all somehow presenting an edited version of ourselves to the audience (friends, contacts, followers…). If we do not perform we do not have an audience worth having. If we are too ordinary the audience loses interest. So we manipulate our lives, edit out the boring bits and attempt to present our best possible selves.
The groundwork being laid I then moved on to explain that the research project I would be initiating was to look at the ways in which FB is used in bereavement and mourning. This area creates so many questions: can the shallow be therapeutic? Is grief a performance? For whom and how do we communicate death? Etc.
A conflict between off/online in this question that I find particularly interesting is the way in which much of our grief processes the funeral and all its attributes, the mealtime afterwards, the formulaic (archaic?) expressions of support (my condolences) are all very much a form of performance lifestyle. While the interactions about death and mourning online are less ceremonial (rules/forms have yet to be evolved?) and more natural?
Community is about making a connection. Loneliness can easily be experienced when surrounded by family and friends.
Here are the slides I used. No content really, just pictures of “individuals” alone with their technology.