social media | writing notes

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

Social Media – Control & Communication in Healthcare: Notes on a lecture

Busy playing catch-up with my notes (what are train rides for?), these notes come from a lecture I gave last week were the focus was on social media use in healthcare. I was (and am) excited about this subject as it touches on several sensitive difficulties like privacy, patient security, freedom of speech, professionalism and censorship like acts.

I chose to begin in an odd place – with planking. Remember planking? Wikipedia defines it as:

“an activity consisting of lying face down in an unusual or incongruous location. Both hands must touch the sides of the body and having a photograph of the participant taken and posted on the Internet is an integral part of the game. Players compete to find the most unusual and original location in which to play. The term planking refers to mimicking a wooden plank. Rigidity of the body must be maintained to constitute good planking.”

My point in beginning at this point was to show that there are many strange fads. These fads may be seen as silly – but are they harmful? Silly may be permissible but harmful acts may need to be controlled. Naturally planking wasn’t taken totally out of the blue but the in 2009 several members of staff at a UK hospital risked being fired for planking on the job.

From this point I showed several examples of Social Media & healthcare related acts that created a point of departure for the rest of the short presentation. My point was to widen the discussion from the bad apple theory to a wider group of neglectful individuals. Take for example the situation where a hospital worker has his picture taken with an anesthetized patient and posts this to Facebook.

The first error is to think of taking the picture, the second is asking someone else to take the picture, the third is to take out the camera, the fourth is that nobody else in the room reacted, the fifth is to post the image to Facebook, the sixth is all the positive comments people left on Facebook and the seventh is all the people who silently witnessed the process.

The question I want to explore is: WTF? How is this even possible? Then I put forward three ideas. (1) The people are ignorant of their acts and their consequences, (2) the people are stupid, (3) it was all an accident or mistake.

Obviously this story has too many stages to happen accidentally or by mistake. People doing stuff like this must obviously be stupid but are they really stupid people? I don’t think stupidity really covers these acts. If you ask healthcare workers about patient security or privacy I am sure they will be able to give a long and well-discussed answer to the topic. Can it be that people are ignorant of the consequences of their acts? This seems to be too odd, even people who only have a rudimentary understanding of social media will know the effects of their acts. So what’s left?

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.

To this we must add the fact that bad news travels fast and is spread widely. This means that scandals spread faster than good news. To quote Winston Churchill “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.”

So healthcare organizations are struggling to handle the situation where people are surrounded by sensitive information that if put online spreads faster and causes great harm to the individuals and damages the reputation of the organization. To handle this many organizations are creating policies. However, many of the policies are not really paying attention to the realities of the situation they attempt to regulate.

Many policies focus on protecting the organization rather than enlightening the individuals. The goal is to minimize any damaging effects of a damaging spread of information rather than helping individuals understand what social media is and how it should or could be used.

Social media very often leads to performance lifestyle where the individual works to present him or herself in an interesting way. As most individuals have ordinary lives the challenge is to present the ordinary as something extraordinary. In many cases this results in using superlatives. In social media we don’t (for example) just drink coffee but we drink excellent or horrible coffee. As social media demands activity of its users it does not work to help us to recognize or be aware of excessive or harmful spreads of information but rather encourages us to do more.

It is important to remember that on Facebook we are not customers or clients – we are the creators of the raw material (our data).

“If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold”

So the design encourages us to share, the licenses limit the responsibility of the platform (for example Facebook) and a lack of social responsibility ensures we will not be interrupted in our sharing (even of harmful information). Basically we see that we are in a situation were local laws are not in control of the infrastructure we use to communicate and therefore its efficiency is eroded.

On the topic of social responsibility it noteworthy that the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has been quoted saying: privacy is no longer a social norm and “A Squirrel Dying In Your Front Yard May Be More Relevant To Your Interests Right Now Than People Dying In Africa”. It is ideas like these that shape one of the greatest information infrastructures ever devised. It’s obviously not about creating a more responsible world but about a radical new transparency were corporations mine us for our data.

In the light of this we must realize and remember two things: Firstly, policies are not enough – their focus is on protecting organizations in the face of human errors. Even if “everyone” in an organization knows things are being done wrong – the moment a major error occurs the policy may be used as a defense of the organization to the detriment of the user. The secondly, in a network silence is acquiescence. In other words by allowing information to be spread without comment is the same as passive agreement to the information.

What organizations need to ensure is that there is an ongoing discussion on the role and effects of social media.

Here are the slides I used for my presentation

Posted on February 22, 2012 by mklang

Looking for Orwell, missing Huxley, or Why privacy law is failing: Notes from a lecture

Being invited to talk somewhere else is always thrilling. Being asked to go to Berlin was even more so. The event was part of Internet und Gesellschaft Co:llaboratory who have been working on Internet & Human Rights. The event was a full day of talk (admittedly a lot in German but I had wifi and work to do so I was happy) followed by an open seminar with three talkers. These notes are from the presentation I gave at the seminar.

The lecture opened with a look at three historical highpoints of privacy regulation and thought. First was 1890 which was the year where Warren & Brandeis published their seminal paper The Right to Privacy which attempts to create a new right in society. Today, living in a rights-focused society arguing for rights seems natural (or banal) but what was it like to be the first to argue the right to privacy?

To exemplify the situation I showed the killer app of the 1890s. It was the Hollerith Tabulating Machine

Hollerith Tabulating Machine

The legal protection of privacy did not immediately spring to life and the next great step came in the 1970s where first the Lander of Hesse in Germany and the in 1973 Sweden created data protection legislation. The idea was to protect against the abuses of data collection but the state and large corporations.

The killer app of the 1970s is the impressive UNIVAC computer

UNIVAC image from Musée de l’Informatique

Kind of looks like the communal laundry room in my apartment building.

The next step was the European Data Protection Directive which attempted to harmonize data protection across Europe. It came in 1995 which as a killer app had the Windows95 operating system (couldn’t resist it!) and more importantly the first browser wars between Netscape and Internet Explorer (Microsoft released versions 1 and 2 in 1995). The browser wars are incredibly interesting as they show the importance of controlling the flow of information to the end user was not dependent on the hardware or operating system. It also shows that power consists of inserting oneself between the information and the end user – but I digress.

Before continuing I wanted to remind the audience that the law (and lawmaker) is behind the times so I quoted the late great Douglas Adams from his book The Salmon of Doubt

“Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Following this I added a theoretical dimension to the lecture. The regulatory pyramid is intended to show that we focus on the law – this is what I was taught at law school. But the law is a self-sustaining system that ignores (or struggles to) the realities of social norms/rules and architecture. Social norms, not law, are what control most of our behavior the law is often too expensive, too drastic, too formal to be an efficient mode of conflict resolution. When someone “steals” “your” parking space, you don’t sue or call the prosecutor. You apply social norms. Your reaction depends on your upbringing and context – you may smile sweetly, flip them off or become verbally or even physically violent. Architecture is how the world works. It controls us by the rigidity of its being.

Regulatory Pyramid

If you want to slow down cars from speeding the law could be applied (a traffic sign will remind us of a pre-existing rule), or we use social norms by reminding drivers of accidents or children playing in the area. By implementing architecture we remake the physical environment and, for example, add bumps in the road – at this all cars must slow down. It is, however, important not to confuse the equal treatment with fairness. Architecture will prevent even an ambulance that may have good reasons to drive faster in a slow area.

As an example of my theory I show this wonderful/awful park bench in Tokyo.

image from Yumiko Hayakawa essay Public Benches Turn ‘Anti-Homeless’ (also recommend Design with Intent)

The bench is an example of outdoor public furniture known as anti-homeless technology or anti-bum benches. In order to prevent an undesirable group of people from using a public space we could create a rule against it – but by creating a law we need to accept the democratic constraints in rule making. Someone could remind us that in a democracy excluding people is inherently wrong. By choosing a bench that is unsuitable for sleeping the democratic process is bypassed. Additionally the park officials can always claim to have made an aesthetic choice i.e. we like this bench, rather than being against homeless people. This is control through design choice – imagine the control that may be created in manipulating communications technology.

The next segment is surveillance theory. As individuals we constantly leak and spread information. Most of us attempt to create strategies of control for our information flows. The most common is the process of compartmentalization which means that we present different information to different groups. I.e. the information you give about what you did over the weekend may be different when presented to your boss, wife, mother, children, best friend or lover. This is not necessarily lying but it is an attempt of controlling flows of information. Technology, and in particular social media, is all about losing the ability to practice this control.

Traditional surveillance theory is based upon Michel Foucault’s developments of Jeremy Bentham’s plans for the Panopticon prison. The concept is basic – if we are unaware of being watched we will internalize our own surveillance and become our own jailers. This is the whole premise of George Orwell’s book nineteen eighty-four: Big Brother is watching you. People under constant surveillance can be controlled. But is this really true? The control by the state is under constant refinement and yet citizens still attempt to cheat and steal – violent crime in general remains constant despite cctv. Could it be that Foucault (and Orwell) got it wrong?

The next step is technology. For me it’s the radical Huxleyian shift. What Orwell feared was totalitarian control via surveillance technology. But Huxley premised a more base society. Give people enough sex and drugs and they won’t care who controls them. Enter the convenient, comfortable, entertaining world of social media.

Social Media Timeline

Our newfound joy of communications technology has already changed our behavior in a major new way. Patterns of behavior that were deemed amoral, antisocial or even illegal have now become acceptable. Spending an evening looking at pictures of your ex-partners new partner would have been a textbook case of voyeurism and stalking. Today, its just Facebook. This reminds me of this early cartoon:

Additional changes in our behavior which should concern us are the fact that we can no longer refuse, ignore or exclude social media from our lives. Many claim they don’t have time for such nonsense but this will not be an efficient information control strategy. Even individuals outside social media use are being photographed and tagged by users and therefore identities are being created of them. These “friends” will also ensure that opting out is not a viable option.

The final level of surveillance is autoveillance. This is the self-chosen role of spreading information about ourselves. This is not the fact that my telephone stores and communicates my location information and more. This is part of the performance lifestyle which has created a performance anxiety, a need to present interesting inspiring activities from an ordinary lifestyle.

This may be silly, but is it harmful? Here it is not enough to study the moves of individuals (even millions of individuals).

Basically we are being seduced by technology, locked by licenses & killed by a lack of social responsibility. This creates four harmful outcomes that need somehow to be countered: Privacy, Personalization, Information obesity, & mind control.

As with the Japanese park bench above, understanding the users will not enable us to see the intentions of the manipulators. We must look to those with influence in social media and who can be more influential than Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying privacy is no longer a social norm

Which is interesting given the fact that he has created a system which helps us to forget our inhibitions about sharing personal information and that his business model is premised on our sharing. He has a stake in the removal of protections against privacy.

Zuckerberg on the topic of personalization of technology: “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa” (Pariser NYT)

Sure there have always been gatekeepers choosing which information is important for me or not. But these gatekeepers did not create a personal information resource only for me. The daily newspaper is created to appease a society of readers. I may chose to ignore an article but at least it’s there in front of me. In a personalized world I will no longer be confronted by any kind of information that does not fit my profile.

The Holy Grail of many Internet providers is to give us this kind of personalization. The problem occurs when this kind of convenience and service removes our ability to control our flows of information. We lose the ability to read information that we may need – because we are constantly being bombarded by the information Facebook thinks we want.

Information obesity: Our bodies crave sweet and fatty foods. One way of looking at this is through the lens of evolution. Finding fatty and sweet foods was key to our survival but these were not to be found everywhere or everyday. Today we are surrounded by fatty and sweet foods so access is not the problem. The problem is overindulgence and obesity due to accessibility. This forces us to think about diet, to think about exercise. Self-control is essential to our survival.

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 final concern is of mind control. This is all about what happens when a social media is told that you are interested in a certain thing. Say, for example, you have a secret pleasure in seeing videos of kittens being kicked. You would never say this aloud – and if you did your social group would correct you by telling you this is an unhealthy impulse. You may even manage to convince yourself that you have no sadistic urges in this area. However, social media knows the truth and will continue to give priority to information about kitten kicking. You may resist some of it but if you have an urge you probably will click on some of the information. By clicking you re-enforce the information algorithm and you will be sent even more kitten kicking information. A question of moral responsibility can now be posed: While your latent sadistic tendencies are being reinforced and enhanced – what is the moral responsibility of the provider? This is akin to asking whether a drug pusher has any moral responsibility to his clients. In your answer consider that many users of social media are very young and there is no general awareness or discussion on the harms of social media.

So what about regulation? Well the problem is that we are considered to be autonomous. In other words we are old and wise enough to live our own lives. Indeed we have all agreed to the terms of use of social media sites. We may not have read them, maybe not understood them, they may have changed drastically since we read them – but legal fiction is that we agree to them.

This shouldn’t be a problem. If society deems an activity harmful enough it can, and should, legislate against it – even if some may protest this regulation. There have been protests against: motorcycle helmets, seatbelts, hitting children and the right to smoke (makes you lose faith in human intelligence) but the social cost was deemed greater than the loss of individual autonomy. The problem with social media is that the social costs are not particularly visible.

Finally on the question of gatekeepers and Orwellian or Huxleyian control it is interesting to note that typical Orwellian control is easier to see and therefore easier to protest against. Therefore the cost of maintaining it against the wishes of the people is too high to bear in the long run. But Huxleyian control is based on making me happy, fulfilling my desires. Counteracting this requires that I first become aware and then exercise self control. This is difficult on an individual level and close to impossible on a social level.

Here are the slides which accompanied the lecture.

Posted on February 22, 2012 by mklang

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

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