web2.0 | writing notes

From Words to Wordfeud: notes on a lecture

There is a strange idea that we are living in the information age and that this age is something bright, shiny and new. Now I don’t mean that we are not in the information age but my concern is the idea that information is something new and exciting.

From Words to Wordfeud & What it Means

View more presentations from Mathias Klang

When talking economics it may be true that we have been in the information age since the 1960s or 70s but this is not what people seem to mean when they use the term as an everyday concept.

“The idea is linked to the concept of a digital age or digital revolution, and carries the ramifications of a shift from traditional industry that the industrial revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on the manipulation of information, i.e., an information society.” Wikipedia

We have always been immersed in information. Information about which mushrooms are edible can be life or death knowledge but for most of us today its just trivia. However, we do not raise ourselves by trivializing their vital knowledge.

The lecture opened with a discussion of language and writing. Despite our interest and focus on writing it is relevant to remember that writing is “only” 6000 years old (Wikipedia). Which means we spent 190 000 years without writing. This means that we have evolved in speechless and oral environments. On that topic, check out the Gutenberg Parenthesis lecture by Thomas Pettitt where he explains:

… the way in which he uses the term the Gutenberg Parenthesis: the idea that oral culture was in a way interrupted by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and the roughly 500 years of print dominance; a dominance now being challenged in many ways by digital culture and the orality it embraces.

And in the same way as we have, through evolution, an interest in finding energy rich foods (high fat, high sugar) we have evolved to view stored information as scarce, important and valuable. Therefore, on an evolutionary scale, things like the Gutenberg press, telegraphs, telephones, fax machines, computers and the Internet are all recent history.

Therefore recent changes like the book and the Internet are still impacting the ways in which we act and react socially. Technology is both an agent and effect of change.

This was followed by an introduction to social media and a discussion to why it is seen as social. The argument here is that we now have an infrastructure to allow us to enact basic communication rights established 300 years ago. With the platforms available to us theoretical rights become inevitable practice. The technology is also challenging many of our legal, ethical, social, economic, political (etc) norms.

One aspect of social media is pretty obvious: Now that we have an endless supply of valuable and important information – we mainly focus on trivial stuff. Facts are a given. The comparison I make is that since we have evolved in information scarce environments we seem to be instinctively drawn to energy rich information. Entertainment and trivia is the fatty and sugary, calorie rich, version of information – the question is what do we do when we are moving towards information obesity?

I offered an example from my schooldays where the focus was on fact knowing. Questions like what is the capital of Burkina Faso (which when I went to school was called Upper Volta)? But is this useful knowledge when everyone has access to the source of information? Schools have been successful since they offered the promise of jobs once the students were done. Now the jobs are not guaranteed anymore and we have come to realize that the factory vision of schools were probably never successful.

On this theme I highly recommend the brilliant (and funny) Ted Talk by Ken Robinson called Do schools kill creativity?

He argues that we have no idea about what the future will bring and yet we are attempting to educate children to meet that future. One thing we should take home is that creating specialists is less than useful when we have no idea if that specialty is useful in the future. Another argument for the so-called “useless” humanities!

I closed with four problems. (1) are we all stupid? Actually this should be that we are unaware of what is happening around us and this is happening to our detriment. Problem (2): we don’t know what we don’t know. This is important because earlier we may have relied on teachers and librarians to tell us what we should know. But this is not going to happen with the gatekeepers online as they have no interest in social enlightenment. Problem (3): There is a difference between who I want to be and who I am… Since online gatekeepers are interested in keeping us happy through personalization they will feed us with what we want (information obesity) rather than with what we may need. Problem (4): the gatekeepers are aware of this! Their advantage lies in our ignorance and/or interest in their abilities. There have always been gatekeepers but we usually knew their motives (good or evil)

An important role for educators is to enlighten us of the gatekeeper’s desires and motives of gatekeepers. I ended up with a depressing note: You don’t have to be unconscious to be without consciousness.

Posted on November 23, 2011 by mklang

Demonstrations without video are pointless

Fascinating quote from the research of Tina Askanius (recommend that you check out her publications):

You cant have a demonstration without filming it. that makes it pointless… there are riots in Copenhagen, they’ll only go global if there’s video footage. Otherwise its pointless; and you may as well not bother.

I find it interesting that we move from “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (Gil Scott-Heron) to “the revolution will be televised” (does this even have a source?) to the stage where it would be pointless to have a revolution if it isn’t televised.

If a revolution occurs (in the woods) and nobody sees it – does it bring about social change?

Posted on November 10, 2011 by mklang

Wikipedia Reader: new free book

Another book has been added to my growing hoard of CC licensed works that are somehow relevant to my research area.

The Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader is an interesting work featuring research from a large group of exciting and original thinkers. It is, as the blurb states:

About the book: For millions of internet users around the globe, the search for new knowledge begins with Wikipedia. The encyclopedia’s rapid rise, novel organization, and freely offered content have been marveled at and denounced by a host of commentators. Critical Point of View moves beyond unflagging praise, well-worn facts, and questions about its reliability and accuracy, to unveil the complex, messy, and controversial realities of a distributed knowledge platform.

Right now the chapters which have my interest are

The Argument Engine by Joseph Reagle, What is an Encyclopedia? From Pliny to Wikipedia by Dan O’Sullivan
A Brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century by Lawrence Liang, Questioning Wikipedia by Nicholas Carr, The Missing Wikipedians by Heather Ford, and The Right to Fork: A Historical Survey of De/centralization in Wikipedia by Andrew Famiglietti. But this is only a small fraction of the topics covered in this work.

So check out: Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Critical Point of View: A Wikpedia Reader, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011. Its available in online, pdf, or good old dead tree versions!

Also if there are other titles of CC licensed books which should be included in the list please let me know…

Posted on October 5, 2011 by mklang

Is user education a red herring?

The BBC podcast of The Media Show with Steve Hewlett is always interesting to listen to. The latest show I listened to (episode 28 September 2011) contained a segment on the recent changes to Facebook and what these may mean for privacy. Hewlett interviewed Facebook’s Christian Hernandez and attempted to get him to see the privacy effects of the new changes.

Basically the new changes will mean that your friends will see what you are doing online – unless you opt out of showing those specific pages. In other words Facebook will happily announce to your “friends” that you have been looking at pages on weight loss (or whatever) and naturally let them draw their own conclusions from what they see of what I saw.

Hernandez was quick to stress the elements of user control over his/her information. If you chose you may opt-out of showing friends the specific pages you are viewing right now. Additionally if you forget you can remove the pages after the fact.

My problem with the former is that I need to be aware that my Facebook friends will always be looking over my shoulder. I am easily going to forget this. As for the latter – well once my friends know what I have looked at, removing the links/pages/information is not effective… I have already outed myself.

When pressed for a reasoning to why the privacy encroaching changes were made Hernandez talked about Zuckerbergs vision of a social net. When pressed further he returned back to the concept of user control. Eventually he did accept that these changes will require user education.

In other words we, the users, need to learn new proactive, protective forms of behavior. The platform owner has washed their hands – its our problem that they have given us the gift of freedom and control. Wonderful terms like freedom and control become red herrings in the world of data harvesting.

But if we are in danger from social media shouldn’t we be able to expect that the state will somehow regulate to protect us from our own behavior. They did so in areas such as smoking, seat-belts and motorcycle helmets… Sure there is a lot of interest in attempting to update privacy regulation from the pre-social media age – but its tricky. Also not everyone is in favor of regulation.

An example of this is Jeff Jarvis’ recent book Private Parts – Gordon Crovitz reviewed it in the Wall Street Journal

“Congress is considering several privacy bills. But Mr. Jarvis calls it a ‘dire mistake to regulate and limit this new technology before we even know what it can do.’

“Privacy is notoriously difficult to define legally. Mr. Jarvis says we should think about privacy as a matter of ethics instead. We should respect what others intend to keep private, but publicness reflects the choices ‘made by the creator of one’s own information.’ The balance between privacy and publicness will differ from person to person in ways that laws applying to all can’t capture.”

Jarvis is right that it is complex to regulate what we do not fully understand but this means that in the meantime we are losing our integrity rights every time the platform owners make changes – nominally to increase our freedom and control – but in reality to increase their control and profits. Lets never forget what MetaFilter user blue_beetle wrote “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold”.

Profiteers may act to protect access to raw material – not the rights of raw material.

Posted on October 3, 2011 by mklang

Dangerous Bits of Information: Notes from a lecture

Last week was an intense week of lecturing, which means that I have fallen behind with other work – including writing up lecture notes. One of the lectures was Dangerous bits of information and was presented at the NOKIOS conference in Trondheim Norway. Unfortunately I did not have much time in the city of Trondheim but what I saw was wonderful sunny city with plenty of places to sit and relax by the river that flows through the center. But there was not much sitting outside on this trip.

The lecture was part of the session “Ny teknologi i offentlig forvaltning – sikkerhet og personvern” (New Technology and Public Administration – security and data security). In the same session was Bjørn Erik Thon, Head of the Norwegian and Storm Jarl Landaasen, Chief Security Officer Market Divisions, Telenor Norge.

Dangerous Bits of Information – Nokios Trondheim

View more presentations from Mathias Klang

My lecture began with an introduction to the way in which many organizations fail to think about the implications of cloud technology. As an illustration I told of the process that surrounded my universities adoption of a student email system. When the university came to the realization that they were not really excellent at maintaining a student email system they decided to resolve this.

The resolution was not a decision of letting individuals chose their system. But the technical group (it was after all seen as a tech problem) was convened and decided in an either – or situation. The decision placed before the group was whether we go with Google or with Microsoft. The group chose Google out of a preference for the interface.

When I wrote a critique of this decision I was told that the decision was formally correct since all the right people (i.e. representatives) where present at the meeting. My criticism was, however, not based on the formality of the process but rather about the way in which the decision was framed and the lack of information given to the students who would be affected by the system.

My critique is based on four dangers of cloud computing (especially by public bodies) and the lack of discussion. The first issue is one of surveillance. Swedish FRA legislation, which allows the state to monitor all communication, was passed with the explicit (though rather useless) understanding that only cross border communication will be monitored. The exception is rather useless as most Internet communication crosses borders even if both sender and receiver is within the same small state. But this cross-border communication becomes even more certain when the email servers are based abroad – as those of gmail are.

The second problem is that some of the communication between student and lecturer is sensitive data. Also the lecturer in Sweden is a government official. This is a fact most of us often forget but should not. Now we have sensitive data being transferred to a third party. This is legal since the users (i.e. the students) have all clicked that they agree the licensing agreements that gmail sets. The problem is that the students have no choice (or very little & uninformed – see below) but to sign away their rights.
The third problem is that nothing is really deleted. This is because – as the important quote states – “If you are not paying for it you are not the customer but the product being sold” – the business model is to collect, analyze and market the data generated by the users.

But for me the most annoying of the problems is the lack of interest public authorities has in protecting citizens from eventual integrity abuses arising from the cloud. My university, a public authority, happily delivered 40000 new customers (and an untold future number due to technology lock-in) to Google and, adding insult to injury, thanking Google for the privilege.

Public authorities should be more concerned about their actions in the cloud. People who chose to give away their data need information about what they are doing. Maybe they even need to be limited. But when public bodies force users to give away data to third parties – then something is wrong. Or as I pointed out – smart people do dumb things.

The lecture continued by pointing out that European Privacy Law has a mental age of pre-1995 (the year of the Data Protection Directive). But do you remember the advice we gave and took about integrity and the Internet in the early days? They contained things like:

Never reveal your identity
Never reveal your address
Never reveal your age
Never reveal your gender

Post-Facebook points such as these become almost silly. Our technology has developed rapidly but our society and law is still based on the older analogue norms – the focus in law remains on protecting people from an outer gaze looking in. This becomes less important when the spreading of information is from us individuals and our friends.

The problem in this latter situation is that it extremely difficult to create laws to protect against the salami-method (i.e. where personal data is given away slice by slice instead of all at once).

At this stage I presented research carried out by Jan Nolin and myself on social media policies in local municipalities. We studied 26 policies ranging between < 1 page to 20 pages long. The policies made some interesting points but their strong analogue bias was clear throughout and there were serious omissions. They lacked clear definitions of social media, they confused social media carried out during work or free time. More importantly the policies did not address issues with cloud or topics such as copyright. (Our work is published in To Inform or to Interact, that is the question: The role of Freedom of Information & Disciplining social media: An analysis of social media policies in 26 Swedish municipalities)

Social media poses an interesting problem for regulators in that it is not a neutral infrastructure and it does not fall under the control of the state. The lecture closed with a discussion on the dangers of social media – in particular the increase in personalization, which leads to the Pariser Filter Bubble. In this scenario we see that the organizations are tailoring information to suit our needs or rather our wants. We are increasingly getting what we want rather than what we need. If we take a food analogy we want food with high fat and high sugar content – but this is not what our bodies need. The same applies to information. I may want entertainment but I probably need less of it than I want. Overdosing in fatty information will probably harm me and make me less of a balanced social animal.

Is there an answer? Probably not. The only way to control this issue is to limit individual’s autonomy. In much the same way as we have been forced to wear seat belts for our own security we may need to do the same with information. But this would probably be a political disaster for any politician attempting to suggest it.

Posted on September 26, 2011 by mklang

Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Connected

Oscar Wilde wrote A Few Maxims For The Instruction Of The Over-Educated (First published, anonymously, in the 1894 November 17 issue of Saturday Review) this version online here

Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.

The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

The only link between Literature and Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

Most women are so artificial that they have no sense of Art. Most men are so natural that they have no sense of Beauty.

Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.

What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.

A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.

The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious. The result is the Criticism of the Journalist.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.

Dandyism is the assertion of the absolute modernity of Beauty.

The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy.

One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers.

Even the disciple has his uses. He stands behind one’s throne, and at the moment of one’s triumph whispers in one’s ear that, after all, one is immortal.

The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them. They are so far away from us that only the poet can understand them.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Not sure if we have groups of over-educated people online but I am in a bit of a Wilde period right now and I wonder what would be the list of few Maxims for the instruction of the over-connected.

Any suggestions?

Posted on September 13, 2011 by mklang

Information Science and Social Media

TGIF! It’s not that this week has been heavier than usual but it is nice to have the weekend to unwind and … well let’s be honest work on a paper that’s due soon. Sad but true.

The good news is that next week its time for ISSOME (Information Science and Social Media) in Turku, Finland. Check out the program. The papers look really good:

– Behavioural Traces and Indirect User-to-User Mediation in the Participatory Library / Lennart Björneborn

– How to study social media practises in converging library spaces. Making the case for deploying co-presence ethnography in studies of 2.0-libraries / Hanna Carlsson

– Implications of the Web 2.0 Technologies for Public Libraries intending to Facilitate Alternative Public Discourse / Leif Kajberg

– Geo-encoding of local services and information: Virtuaalipolku.fi / Samppa Rohkimainen

– The use of social media technologies in the work practices of information professionals / Sally Burford

– Examining the use of Internet and social media among men at military conscription age / Heidi Enwald, Noora Hirvonen and Tim Luoto

– To Inform or to Interact, that is the question: The role of Freedom of Information in Social Media Policies / Mathias Klang and Jan Nolin

– Designing Games for Testing Information Behavior Theories / J. Tuomas Harviainen

– Critical about clustering of tags: An intersectional perspective on folksonomies / Isto Huvila and Kristin Johannesson

– The creation of a personal space on the Internet: self presentation and self-disclosure in blogging / Jenny Bronstein

– On social media and document theory: an exploratory and conceptual study / Olle Sköld

– Linguistic and Cultural Differences in Content Management – Indexing and titling in multilingual and multicultural blogosphere / Susanna Nykyri

– Writing for Wikipedia as a learning task in the school’s information literacy instruction / Eero Sormunen, Leeni Lehtio and Jannica Heinström

– The Use of Weblogs and Microblogs in LIS Online Courses: A Case Study / Lu Xiao and Diane Neal

– Teaching social media in LIS: a bridging approach / Monica Lassi and Hanna Maurin Söderholm

– A Community-based Learning Approach towards Training Librarian 2.0 / Lu Xiao

– Author disambiguation for enhanced science-2.0 services / Jeffrey Demaine

– A Comparison of Different User-Similarity Measures as Basis for Research and Scientific Cooperation / Tamara Heck

– WikiLeaks Comments: A Qualitative Investigation / Noa Aharony

– Looking for Love in All the Right Places: Defining Success in the World of Online Dating / Christopher Mascaro, Rachel Magee and Sean Goggins

Anyone know what to do in Turku? Anything that shouldn’t be missed?

Posted on August 19, 2011 by mklang

Death, Internet & Law PhD

This is so cool! Almost makes me want to do a second PhD… More info here.

PhD Studentship in

Law

University of Strathclyde – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences – School of Law -– Legal Aspects of Transmission of Digital Assets on Death

The School of Law in the University of Strathclyde invites applications for a PhD studentship which will research the area of how the law regulates the transmission of digital assets on death, including notions of access, control, propertisation, and ownership. These assets might include: Facebook profiles, photos on Flickr, tweets, virtual assets in online game worlds such as Second Life, e-money, blog texts, eBay trading accounts, etc. This is a novel area where the student will be expected to research independently into appropriate areas of private law (eg property, succession, probate, contract) as well as intellectual property law, personality law and privacy law. A back ground in technology law is not essential, nor a technology qualification, but an interest in the information society is probably essential.

Applicants from any jurisdiction (including non-UK EU jurisdictions) are welcomed but English law will most likely form one of the jurisdictions of the study. Applicants should hold a first or upper second class Honours degree or equivalent in an appropriate discipline. A Masters qualification may be helpful. The studentship is funded by the Horizon Digital Economy Research Hub (https://www.horizon.ac.uk/) who are a major interdisciplinary centre for study of the Internet and ubiquitous computing funded by the RCUK Digital Economy programme and based at Nottingham University; the successful candidate will be based within the expanding Centre for Internet Law and Policy at Strathclyde Law School, but will have opportunities to participate in Horizons activities. The student will be supervised by the Director of CILP, Professor Lilian Edwards.

Applicants should submit, by SEPTEMBER 16 2011, a full CV, two academic references, evidence of academic qualifications to date and a covering letter detailing interest in the area of research to:

Janet Riddell (Horizon Digital Economy Scholarship), Graduate School Manager, Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, Room LT205, Livingstone Tower, 26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, G1 1XH

Or by e-mail to: hass-postgrad@strath.ac.uk

Successful applicants will have their fees at home/EU rates only ((sadly)) waived for three years together with an annual maintenance award for three years of £13,590. The scholarship is for one year in the first instance and subject to satisfactory progress, will normally be renewed up to the maximum of a further 2 years.

Visit www.strath.ac.uk/postgrad for general information on postgraduate research study at the University of Strathclyde and http://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/courses/law/courses/lawbyresearch/ for further information on research degrees in the Law School.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to: lilian.edwards@strath.ac.uk

Posted on August 1, 2011 by mklang

Social media madness

So I am still trying to figure out what the best use of Google+ is, and how to integrate it into my information chaos. But today I when engaging in light procrastination instead of editing an article I looked at my circles and was a bit shocked to see this:

A dozen of the people in my circles seemed to have changed the pictures in their profiles. And they had all chosen to use my image! What was this? Intense hero worship? Finally the recognition I desire? An advanced form of anonymity or pseudonymity? A sure sign of my descent into madness due to article editing? Or just a bug?

The most likely theory is that social media really is just a game where high scores are obtained by collecting “friends”. I have obviously progressed to an advanced level of cheating and instead of collecting friends I have begun to make them up and to populate my social media universe with clones of myself.

While questioning my own reality in this way – I ask myself whether Mats, Jenny, Niklas, Alexander, Rickard, Jonas, Chris, Fredrik, Krister, Stefan, David & Natasja know that they are actual people or just figments of my overactive imagination?

Posted on July 25, 2011 by mklang