web2.0 | writing notes

Cybercontrol 2.0

In a continuing discussion (original & response & reply) on the battles over Internet regulation. Both Nicklas & I are taking points from the past and drawing lines into the future, while taking into consideration the changes created by new technologies. In his last post Nicklas summed it up beautifully:

But as technology becomes more and more powerful, the control over technology will slowly converge with control over people.

Actually for me, control over technology has always been about control over people. Control over technology alone is unimportant. But Nicklas’ point is that our technology is creeping deeper into our lives and minds and therefore control over this technology will not only control the bodies but also the minds of the populous.

The point where we disagree is where we are turning at the moment. For Nicklas

The thing that sometimes worries me is that the alternative is not the status quo. It is not tinkering with the net as is. Because the net will continue to evolve and technology will make us even more powerful. The second time around the alternative to Barlow is not Lessig or even Wu&Goldsmith. It is Solzhenitsyn.

The thing is that Solzhenitsyn is too “easily” seen and eventually resisted. I fear a world where the alternative is Rupert Murdoch an intelligent and powerful man who happily(?) feeds the world Fox news and other trash – knowing that by entertaining us with garbage he controls us and our incomes. Increasingly I think we do not need totalitarian states to control us, its much cheaper to feed us garbage, entertain us with varying levels of porn and gossip and debase politics into punchlines. When the majority is busy with this, the minorities of protesters will not have the power to engage us into major social change.

As an aside: I like the fact that online regulation retains the cyber prefix. It’s dated but ties nicely back to the period when the question was still hotly debated.

Posted on April 10, 2012 by mklang

Regulation is everything, or power abhors a vacuum

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.

Posted on April 6, 2012 by mklang

Facebook & the Bad Science Baloney Detection Kit

Michael Shermer has a brilliant Baloney Detection Kit which can “help draw the boundaries between science and pseudoscience”.

But don’t let the science and pseudoscience thing put you off – it has other simpler uses. In a recent lecture I asked my students to apply the detection kit to a particularly bad piece of “research”.

The report was modestly entitled “Sweden’s Largest Facebook Study” it’s available online here. It’s in English with a Swedish summary. There are several easy-to-spot flaws with the report but the first thing that sets the alarm bells off is the fact that the report was not released into academia but was given exclusively to the media. This meant that before anyone could actually read the report the media was gleefully telling us that researchers have proven that “Facebook makes us miserable”, it spreads “unhappiness” and we are even miserable if we don’t logon often enough.

People who disagreed couldn’t do anything since the report was not available. This may be good marketing but its also very bad science. Things did not get better when the embargo was over and the report was released.

The first thing that strikes the reader is that there is a PR company’s logo above the university logo. I’m all for partnerships but PR isn’t research and research isn’t PR. Credibility in the research was not enhanced.

The next thing that hit me was the research location and topic. The report is published at Göteborg Research Institute which is under the School of Business, Economics and Law but the highest ranking researchers where from psychology. Releasing a report to the media instead of peer review is one thing but not publishing within your own discipline is also a bit odd – what are these people attempting to conceal…

Then I looked at the authors’ qualifications. Two PhD students, three undergrads and a PR person. Seriously??? This is not a guarantee for good science! Not that it makes that much of a difference but the undergrads were not even students at the same university. Curious.

The final thing that got me going was the subjects included in the study. Sweden has 9 million people and 52% of them are on Facebook (Olle Findahl Svenskarna och Internet 2011 has an English summary). The “Largest Facebook Study” is based on data from an online survey of 1011 respondents. This hardly qualifies it as largest anything. Getting three undergrads to pester 1000 friends to fill in a couple of bad questions may give you data to play around with but its hardly the basis for making the statements they make in the report. Asking people if they are happy? Seriously?

But we had lots of fun in class – I gave my students the report and the baloney detection kit which is based around 10 questions (more details here):

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?

They tore the report to shreds! They had questions, spotted errors and anomalies after the briefest of readings. I am proud of them all.

The whole thing reminded me of the Martin Rimm affair of 1995. Rimm was a student at Carnegie Mellon who had also carried out “research” and arrived at the fascinating conclusion that 83.5% of images traded on Usenet are pornographic. He secured a publication in a law review (prestigious, but not used to dealing with statistics) and then sold an exclusive to Time Magazine who used it as a cover story

Naturally when the article with the glorious title

“Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway: A Survey of 917,410 Images, Description, Short Stories and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2000 Cities in Forty Countries, Provinces and Territories.”

was finally made available it was torn to shreds, the law review was criticized and so was the editor of Time Magazine. It was not a pretty sight.

So what are we left with? Two PhD students gained some buzz in Swedish media but are viewed with suspicion in academia – this is going to follow them no matter how much they will eventually try to downplay it. The research institute and the School of Economics has sullied its name (why on earth did they let this happen??). I also wonder were the supervisors were in all of this? They may be innocent bystanders but still they have to take some of the heat.

So what we are left with is one happy PR company. What a mess baloney makes….

Posted on March 29, 2012 by mklang

The Extroverted Reader: Notes from a lecture

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.

Posted on March 29, 2012 by mklang

Empowered citizens or Digital dairy cows: Notes on a lecture

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.

The slides I used are here.

Posted on March 15, 2012 by mklang

Social Media: a-social communities? Notes from a short talk

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.

Posted on March 1, 2012 by mklang

Is performance lifestyle harmful?

Many years ago while on holiday at the Versailles palace I noticed an amusing pair of tourists. He was tall, large and filming everything with his camera. She was short and slim and trying to hold the audio guide close to the camera while he panned over the ceilings – the effect was an amusing dance through the gilded halls. What struck me was that neither of them seemed to be enjoying the present but were more interested in producing a record of the trip.

When I talk about social media (which I seem to do a lot) I often refer to Performance Lifestyle. This is the documentation of our lives to an imaginary or perceived audience. One of the minor effects is to create the extra-ordinary in an ordinary life. Online people don’t (for example) simply drink coffee but they either drink terrible or fabulous coffee. Or maybe they create a special interest in coffee and create a type of art or research project around the mundane event of coffee drinking (I’m guilty of this). The point is that since we live normal lives we need to create a supernormal version of everyday events.

Some may find this silly, but silly does not make it pointless. Many find sport silly, but to those with the interest it is hardly silly. Silly is therefore not an interesting measurement. But what if our performance lifestyles could be harmful in some way? In a recent lecture I argued that

One of the interesting things about technology is the way in which it enables us to do things which we normally cannot do. But it is also interesting that technology encourages us to do things differently. For example there seems to be a change in the way in which we react today when we witness an accident or emergency.

1. Photograph the event
2. Tweet the photo
3. Update status on Facebook
4. Call emergency services

Naturally this is apocryphal but it has a sad ring of truth about it.

This is something I would like to study closer but it is difficult to find a methodology to prove or disprove this effect. But take a look at what happened during the Oslo bombing on the 22 July, 2011.

This is a screenshot portion of this page. Click view image to view full size.

Time 15:25 The bomb goes off at 15:25 and 22 seconds. At 38 seconds the blast registers on NORSAR seismic data equipment at Løten. At 45 seconds the tweet “Holy Crap did Oslo just explode?”

Time 15:26 The police receive their first notification

Time 15:28: 10 seconds tweet “Shit! Office window blew up! What happened?”, 21 seconds tweet “Loud band in center of Oslo, what was it?”, 44 seconds tweet “Bomb downtown”

Time 15:29: 3 seconds tweet “Lightning, bomb, terror? What happend at Youngstorget? Our office was crushed!”

This page has a fascinating chronological list of tweets.

This is fascinating stuff but there are several problems here. First is the time – how exact are these measurements, what could or should be the reaction times to expect? Is it fair to make generalizations from the communication of shocked people in an event of this magnitude? What about the more banal everyday accidents that occur in our lives? How could we effectively observe and measure the ways in which our technology changes the ways in which we react to everyday emergencies? It’s all good and well to say things we think to be true but how do we actually conduct research around this topic? Seriously, I’m asking you. Only then could I answer the question posed in the title.

Posted on February 29, 2012 by mklang