A British psychiatrist addressing the Royal College of Psychiatrists states that Facebook can increase the likelihood that teenagers will kill themselves
It may be possible that young people who have no experience of a world without online societies put less value on their real world identities and can therefore be at risk in their real lives, perhaps more vulnerable to impulsive behaviour or even suicide.
A paranoid, luddite psychiatrist – who would have guessed?
(via Infocult)
Clicked on a link and ended up here! Been online for a long time now – never seen this one before…
I have erased the name of the site to protect those involved 🙂
Since I put many of my photo’s on Flickr I was disturbed to read the following story. The more I thought about it the more I realised that it was obvious that Flickr would have the same types of rules as all the other social networking sites but it is still a reason for concern.
Photographer Maarten Dors (his Flickr Profile) received the following email from Flickr concerning a picture if a young boy smoking (Would like put it online here if I had permission… hint hint).
====
case354736@support.flickr.comHi Maarten Dors,
Images of children under the age of 18 who are smoking
tobacco is prohibited across all of Yahoo’s properties.
I’ve gone ahead and deleted the image “The Romanian Way”
from your photostream.
We appreciate your understanding.-Terrence
====
According to Reason Magazine, Dors argued that the photo was not a glorification of smoking but a documentation of living condition in less prosperous countries. This somehow was motivation enough for Flickr to return the photo online. Then, apparently, another employee who was unfamiliar with the exception took it down again. Which was followed by someone else from Flickr returning the image again.
Even though I know better I sometimes get fooled into thinking that sites and services on the Internet are public “goods” services which we all can use and abuse on an equal and fair footing. Naturally this isn’t so. Flickr is, like all other online businesses, online for profit. They have no interest in protecting user rights – in fact if user rights conflict with profits they have a duty towards the shareholders to maximize profits and damn the users.
Naturally we as users have legally agreed to the rights of companies such as Flickr to behave in this way when we clicked on the “I Agree” button.
But, and this is a big but, the legal status of these agreements can be questioned.
I have commented the inequality, injustice and the ways in which we could argue against such agreements in my research but it can all be summed up in the with the idea that the agreements we sign cannot be binding if they are the product of a mix of encouraged misunderstanding and misdirection. By creating an environment of openness the companies should not be allowed to impose draconian user terms on their own customers.
However this is an argument from a human rights perspective and no matter how much we like them, most courts still prefer the security and predictability of contract law. So until the courts develop a sense of courage they tend to praise but not emulate the users of all technology are at risk through the licensing agreements they are forced to sign.
Take a look at the Jörgen SkÃ¥geby’s recent PhD thesis “Gifting Technologies: Ethnographic Studies of End-users and Social Media Sharing” where he has studied the phenomenon of file sharing (to simplify everything a tad!)
In his thesis Jörgen Skågeby has studied the classical questions posed in gift theory: why gifts are given? what gifts are given? To whom are gifts given? How are gifts given? in relation to file sharing.
File sharing was earlier seen as a way for young people to recieve free media however J̦rgen thesis argues that there is a growing social interaction developing which replaces the download focused view of file sharing with a focus on sharing. Contrary to popular views J̦rgen argues that on the Internet it is clear to see who are friends and who are not Рmuch more so than in the offline world.
from the abstract:
This thesis explores what dimensions that can be used to describe and compare the sociotechnical practice of content contribution in online sharing networks… Gift-giving was used as an applied theoretical framework and the data was analyzed by theory-informed thematic analysis. The results of the analysis recount four interrelated themes: what kind of content is given; to whom is it given; how is it given; and why is it given? … A general methodological contribution is the utilization of sociotechnical conflicts as units of analysis. These conflicts prove helpful in predicting, postulating and researching end-user innovation and conflict coordination. It is suggested that the conflicts also provide potent ways for interaction design and systems development to take end-user concerns and intentions on board.
After blogging for a couple of years, yesterday I realised that I could no longer continue in ignorance and finally got to the bottom of the difference between tags and categories. Actually I have been using tags on other sites for some time but never on my blog so it was time to understand (once again) what I was doing. And like many things that have been put off for too long it wasn’t that difficult. Thanks to Lorelle on WordPress for helping me sort this out.
Categories categorize: they help the readers find similar material. Tags help search engines organize the information found online.
Categories help visitors find related information on your site. Tags help visitors find related information on your site and on other sites. Categories can have unique names. Tags need to be known names. Categories can have long wordy names. Tags should have short one, two, or at the most, three words. Categories generate a page of posts on your site. Tags can, too, but often generate a page of off-site posts on an off-site website. Categories are not tags. Tags can be categories. Categories don’t help search engines find information. Tags help search engines and tag directories catalog your site. Posts are usually in one to four categories. A single post can list as many tags as you want.
So now that I have learned the difference and begun using Simple Tags to help me with my new-found tagging skills then maybe this will make a difference.
Freshome has a list (with pictures) of different, cool, strange, weird speakers. Among them I came across these
I don’t think I have ever wanted any speakers as much as I wanted these Munny speakers from instructables! Which says a lot about my music and my taste 🙂
In less than three weeks from its launch Firefox 3.0 has been downloaded 28 million times (BBC report). Stop for a while and let that number sink in. 28 million downloads in three weeks. That translates to a lot of passionate users. But why? Why did so many people bother to download a new browser?
So OK, I downloaded a copy. But that still leaves almost 28 million others. Even if we subtract a decent number for the groupies, nerds, early adopters, tecchies and Open Source aficionados that still leaves a very, very, very large number of users who want to be among the first to use 3.0.
But why? It’s just a browser? Or is it? Obviously the tools with which we view the world have a great impact on the way in which the world is presented but it is doubtful that too many users consider this. And yet, can it be that even this group considers Firefox to be more than just a browser. Even though I doubt that all these users are ideologically motivated it is interesting to try to figure out why a browser arouses such interest and activity among users.
The browsers arriving at this blog are:
Internet Explorer 49%
Firefox 41%
Others 10%
Providing cameras and video cameras to different groups is not an uncommon method which allows the subjects to bring their own lives into focus without the direct mediation of the “outsider” camera/filmmaker. Naturally all uses of technology contain risks of bias and slanted views – nobody still believes that the camera never lies? Even if many still believe that fashion images are “real”.
In January 2007, B’Tselem launched Shooting Back, a video advocacy project focusing on the Occupied Territories. We provide Palestinians living in high-conflict areas with video cameras, with the goal of bringing the reality of their lives under occupation to the attention of the Israeli and international public, exposing and seeking redress for violations of human rights.
In projects such as these technology in the form of the cameras and Internet as a distribution medium can be used to empower those involved in a conflict while still providing a preaceful alternative way of coping with everyday violence.
Media Culpa is an interesting media blog which also includes following Flickr. Since I use Flickr in lectures I find this very helpful. Here is the latest on Flickr growth from Media Culpa.
On May 17, 2008, the 2,500,000,000th photo was uploaded to Flickr (photo here). If we look at previous milestones, it appears that the growth of Flickr could be slowing down. In November last year I wrote that the first billion photos took three and a half years while the second billion took three months. Now we can assume that it took six months to get the next half a billion photos.
I have compiled the graph below out of data directly from Flickr by checking a series of photos to find the date they were uploaded and hopefully they are correct. Regarding the growth, we know that much of the explosive increase during mid 2007 (from June and three months forward) was due to the migration of photos from Yahoo Photos. But despite the fact that Yahoo Photos supposedly had 2 billion photos, the figures suggest that far less than 1 billion were migrated into Flickr.
So, while I don’t have any official figures from Flickr, it does not seem that the organic growth is keeping the same pace as it did in the fall last year. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the development the coming six months for Flickr.
Footnote: The series of data I used was the following:
22-okt-04 1000000
20-apr-05 10000000
15-feb-06 100000000
22-sep-06 250000000
15-maj-07 500000000
19-jul-07 850000000
20-aug-07 1180000000
06-okt-07 1500000000
13-nov-07 2000000000
17-may-08 2500000000
Stealing wifi is an old subject but it remains an interesting one. That some people have been prosecuted for stealing wifi in different parts of the world is also old news.* Still most of us have no problem checking for open networks when we need to access. I have also known users to be on their neighbours wifi without knowing or meaning to – they just don’t understand the difference. But this may be a minorty.
The availablity of open networks is either intentional, unintentional or even accidental. Accidental occurs when people don’t know about wifi and unintentional happens when people don’t know what they are doing. Then there is the group who intentionally shares their wifi.**
Some would prefer to share because sharing is good. Bruce Schneier has written about the added good of openness.
Similarly, I appreciate an open network when I am otherwise without bandwidth. If someone were using my network to the point that it affected my own traffic or if some neighbor kid was dinking around, I might want to do something about it; but as long as we’re all polite, why should this concern me? Pay it forward, I say.
The attitudes about freeloading and sharing vary. Some are scared of intrusion, some support the openness and others could not care less. Unfortunately the latter group is growing. I say unfortunately since the default settings on more wireless routers, especially those provided by ISPs, are closed.
This is the equivalent of the house advantage in roulette. Slowly and surely their will be no openness left other than those few activists who strive to ensure open networks. This means that the struggle for openness will go from the commonplace to the realm of the activists.
—
* Arstechnica reports that an Illinois man was arrested and fined $250 in 2006 & in Michigan man who parked his car in front of a café and snarfed its free WiFi was charged this past May [2007] with “Fraudulent access to computers, computer systems, and computer networks.” In a similar case from Singapore (Engadget) a 17-year old recieved 18 months of probation under the Computer Misuse Act for stealing his neighbours wifi. In the UK one man was been arrested and two people have been cautioned for WiFi theft or “dishonestly obtaining electronic communications services with intent to avoid payment.”
** Sharing wifi will in most cases violate the contract terms for most internet service providers.
