The Virtual Revolution – Part Four
February 21, 2010
Part Four – Homo Interneticus sees the good Doctor approaching some of the more interesting questions regarding the internet, though she still doesn’t really do any digging into the whole shared cognition/nature of reality connundrum which is one of my current favorites.
So just to go through some of the points raised;
Has Facebook change the nature of friendship ? It turns out that no, its just re-branded it.
Your friends and social group are still the same number and mostly the same people that they would have been without the software.
Which begs the question; why is it so successful if it offers no new reach to your social circle ?
Prof Robin Dunbar casually dropped the bomb that apart from the 150-ish people that you can claim as your clan/social circle/address book everyone else on your friends list is probably just a voyeur. So has Facebook replaced the soap opera as the acceptable face of curtain twitching ? Find your own surrogate family to watch out of interest, only now its not the Duckworths or the Fowlers. In the UK we’ve seen soap opera viewing figures decline by 50% over the last 10 years or so, it’d be interesting to know how much is direct replacement activity.
Update – No, not soap operas, reality TV shows. Those surplus friends are our own personalised Big Brothers.
We had Sherry Turkle (great name !) talking about the consumption of the private person as a result of the action of ubiquitous sharing of thought and activity, and about feeling obliged to openness in the networked society.
I’m not sure what to think about that comment. I’m not sure if that is simply a misunderstanding of the type of openness that the net engenders or an attempt to big up the profession of the psychologist (of which she is one) as professional listeners, or am I confusing them with psychiatrists ?
For myself I’m only open to the degree that I want to be. I feel no compunction about not answering personal questions if asked on the web. I don’t volunteer my deepest and darkest secrets. I treat this form of mediated interaction as I would a conversation in a pub, and assume that the interested will continue to read and the rest will slope off to the bar and find a more apposite conversation.
Information overload and associative vs linear data storage/retrieval was the next big topic. One that is close to my heart. Here the programme missed a big opportunity in not addressing one of the fastest moving sectors of quantitative neuroscience and its philosophical implications for fields as diverse as democracy & law and the nature of the mind. I’m not going to delve into all that right here right now, that’s for a later date. Suffice it to say that the Obama web campaign is small fry if a mathematical model of mind can be shared.
I’m going to follow up with a bit of reading around Vannevar Bush and Prof David Nichols because I don’t know their work.
In her summary the doctor passed two comments that I’ll paraphrase as;
At its best the internet may be an equivalent to the serendipity of the city – meaning that the melting pot of ideas and beliefs that has produced most of modern world’s innovation in science, technology, art and commerce is there to be had in a free and open web. I agree utterly and completely, its just a shame that in its efforts for global reach it has become fragmented and balkanised, as subsumed by commercial and political interests as any piece of prime real estate.
And second; the the web has the power to liberate humanity. I’m not sure what from though, presumably the commercial and political interests, but it might be more interesting if it were to free us from the constraints of our own inhibitions and provide an opportunity to evolve our thoughts past division and towards unity. The global mind as it was suggested.
The Virtual Revolution – Part Three, finally we’re getting there
February 14, 2010
At last the BBC’c Virtual Revolution Series series is starting to deliver with Part Three – The Price of Free.
I get the feeling that this is ground that the presenter is much more confident on. Away from that pesky technical detail which for some reason she still characterises as West Coast techno-utopian and on to the developing sociology of the world wide web. I’m sorry but you can’t say that the body of the web is independent of its internet bones. But I’ll stop flogging that particular horse as I’ve dealt with in in parts one and two of this four parter.
The first half of the programme is a pretty decent historical analysis of the development of the commercial internet, from the faltering steps of the Dot.com boom/bust (enter Martha Lane Fox of lastminute.com) and Amazon’s winning model, through Google’s idealistic beginnings and on to the global trade in personal information.
The central position of this episode is that we don’t actually know what the current winning commercial model of ‘targeted advertising using mass surveillance of web activity in order to support free at the point of delivery services’ will cost in socialogical terms in the long term. Its a good and relevant question given the relative youth, the relatively-unregulated nature of and global pervasiveness of the web, but one that you can pose about any commercial or even institutional activity.
Lets have a look at that statement; The other big ‘free at the point of delivery’ services that we get are more often supplied by government (in the UK). A few examples being the police, the health service, the armed forces & the legal system. We pay generalised taxes to support those services and the government decides how to apportion that money to those services. We don’t currently pay an Army tax which goes up every time the UK fights a war and down when peace comes (that could really change the political dynamic of war fighting, no ?), nor do we pay an explicit police tax (though much of the UK’s policing is supported by locally raised taxation rather than generalised taxation), we definitely don’t pay an NHS tax.
No, we pay income tax and VAT (purchase tax) that is raised by the government knowing about financial transactions that we as individuals choose to make. We accept that the services provided cost us money, and are willing to forgo some privacy in order that the money may be collected by an authority that is not partial or commercially oriented.
And that is the answer that this program seems to come up with; the bargain that we make with the commercial entity that is today’s web is ‘information for service and we, the service providers, will use the information however we want’. If internet users don’t know that this is the bargain that they are making they should, but at the end of the day targeted advertising is a form of taxation. The big issue with that transaction is that since the entities collecting the information are not governments accountable to electorates, they cannot be relied upon to treat the information with the respect that it deserves. Indeed as commercial organisations they cannot be relied upon to exist from one year to the next, so any regulation of data collection has a built-in trans-generational issue to get over as companies ‘inherit’ on another’s databases.
Its perhaps interesting to note that direct the parallel of this argument, the mass surveillance of web traffic by governments, is one that is massively contentious. It is challenged by legislators and civil society alike and portrayed as the end of responsible government by many and the beginning of it by some.
Next week’s program is going all psyche major and looking at a global shift in the ethics and understanding of privacy could mean. I’m going to set some homework – please read the PEW centre’s report on Teenagers use of social networks.
The Virtual Revolution – Part Two, better
February 7, 2010
The second of the BBC’s Virtual Revolution season was much better than Part One.
This episode directly contradicted the first episode on several occasions, which is a good thing for reasons that I spelt out in my previous post on this subject.
One of my continuing gripes though is this strange meme that the internet is unregulated. Communications traffic is regulated in almost every nation state in the world. The reporter managed to tear herself away from West Coast USA for a few moments, so could easily have asked around to discover this for herself.
Provision of the physical means of communication is regulated in most states and the routing infrastructure is certainly subject to regulatory oversight. Just because you don’t sign a specific ‘internet traffic’ contract with your telecoms service provider doesn’t mean that this traffic is not covered under the contract that you have with them and hence the regulations that they come under.
One of the strangest comments was that ICANN wasn’t subject to national control !? OK, there is no longer a direct chain of command eminanting from the US government, but so long as ICANN is an incorporated entity under US law it is subject to US government oversight. Its only 3 years since they actually let that chain of command slip somewhat, so don’t fool yourself that its gone entirely.
As a former mobile telecoms professional I used to install new national scale mobile phone systems around Europe. Each country had its own stance on control of telecoms; from the former Russian states that only had one provider and which required all handsets and phone lines to be registered to named individuals, to the liberalised markets where only the handset identifier was required to enable pay-as-you-go users to log on. The traffic through both models were equally subject to regulation, only the degree of specificity to a individual’s comms traffic is different.
So again the techno-utopian view was put forward again, that the net subverts and opens, only this time some more realistic downsides were addressed. Don’t misunderstand I like that tech can be used to pry open closed networks, but the thing is that every sub-network has a gateway that can be shut, so to say that what we have now is anything but a learning period for govts is (agreeing with the programme here) premature. That you can get round Iran’s IP filters is no great trick, all that means is that you know more than the Iranians about the technology that is in place. You have to remember that every nation still has access to the big off switch, they can still turn the routers off. So I’ll repeat what I said in my last review – until there is an entirely new infrastructure that is not regulated or government controlled the idea that the WWW is a free space is simply not true. A combination of satellites and dynamic mesh networks would do the job. Anyone fancy clubbing together to buy a constellation of broadband satellites ? I reckon 20 or so would probably do.
I wish that folks who talk about science & tech in the media would sometimes actually try and seek out people really involved with the deep and dirty bits, not just the headline acts and talking heads. Just because you started a fight 10 years ago it doesn’t mean that you are still up to date on the weapons being employed. Just as the net can become Balkanised, the self-reinforcing argument of automatic internet freedom has also become an unrealistic meme.
Twitterstorms
October 31, 2009
Unashamedly focussed on a single news article this one, but it is very close to my heart and my area of academic interest.
Read this link to a story at The Guardian, think about it then get back to this blog if you want to.
OK. So we understand the concept. A technologically and socially adept set of first adopters have a tool that is globally visible, but exclusionary since not everyone can use it and not everyone can read or write meaning in 140 characters. What the article doesn’t mention is that twitter is also socially exclusionary since not everyone can use their phones at work, not everyone can afford to access it, some people sleep at different times and it is language specific (discourse is in the local language).
Right now, as the article correctly identifies, the twitterati are dominated by younger, liberal-minded, outward looking, technically and media savvy people. There is not a full representation of political and social diversity. You have to pay your way into the scene by learning ‘the language’ and buying the service and, of course, spending time interacting.
I’ve tried it, same as I tried Facebook and MySpace. They all take a great deal of effort to maintain at a level where you gain credibility (or friends or followers or disciples or whatever) outside your existing social circle. Whats different with micro-blogging is the speed and fluidity that the few million users can jump on and off emotive topics and the willingness that they have to transfer those emotions to offline actions.
Don’t have any delusions about the changing of minds happening within the twittersphere. No sane person changes an opinion that is already formed based upon a 140 character message or two. However what it could motivate is action on extant opinion.
Like the guy at the pub who suggests the curry. We all like curry, we’re all hungry after a few pints, we just hadn’t considered a curry tonight, but it sounds like a good idea. Lets do it.
Of course there could be downsides to this rapid response. To stretch the curry analogy; we’d be £20 lighter the next morning (we have spent time, money and effort participating in the twitterstorm) and may have a bad stomach (the results of the twitterstorm may not be what we personally wanted).
So there are risks attached to crowd-sourced actions based upon reactions to events. In that it is similar to democracy, but it is a very skewed democracy where information access is asymmetrical and the demos is selected.
Most times in a democracy the group takes collective responsibility for collective action until such time as it is no longer immediately relevant who suggested that action. If we can find out who initiated an action within a day or an hour of that action, what does that say for the quality and breadth of debate in such a speedy ‘democracy’ ?
I like to think about actions which I know will have consequences for others before I take them. I am analytical and make no apologies for that, but in the blink of an eye a twitterstorm seems to be able to effect superficial change. What does that say to me as someone who prefers to think for a day or two before I act ? Are my opinions irrelevant ? Is analysis dead and the wisdom of the crowd the only way forward ? Do we really believe that only emotion-led opinions are worthy of action ?
Hyperbolae of course. No-one is suggesting that everyone be given a twitterset and asked to opine on every option their elected government has, you’d be completely overloaded. As an individual in such a society you’d have to automate the routine decisions to reflect your already formed opinion, or tacitly approve through abstention.
We’re rapidly approaching the point where that automation is possible, but what about the opinion ? Do we set it through software user preferences ? Do we let a program learn our opinions by watching our real-world actions ? How would we sanction a program that failed to express our true opinion ?
I’ll leave you with this. I already automate my news gathering through an RSS aggregation tool. Its the only way that I can keep on top of the international scale topics that I look at. But that means that it excludes other news without consulting me. Am I forming my opinion ?
The Openness Bug Revisited
June 15, 2009
I am reminded of the other meaning of openness – that of openness to new ideas, to new challenges and to play.
I don’t think that it is coincidence that some of the core ideas behind being creative use the same term as the discourse of truth. When was the last time that you played ? I don’t mean on a Nintendo playing Super Mario (yes I’m that old). I mean, really had unstructured fun with something or someone, where you tested boundaries in a naive way, where you threw an idea into the mix that was just plain silly, where you built something with no realistic use.
The last time that I remember was while struggling with a group project. We all had different points of view, everyone was compromising in order to retain group cohesion, we were all being pragmatic, but we were failing to reach the goal of producing an innovative exploration of systemic change in technical systems. We’d tried looking at theoretical analyses, historic studies, gap analysis, all sorts of approaches, but each came to a dead-end because one or more of us didn’t buy-in or because it was just plain dull.
So we started to play instead. Random ideas, quickly pitched ( a few seconds), silly things, we were laughing and having fun with it. We took one of the ideas, thinking ‘Well, we didn’t come up with anything great, but at least it’ll be fun’. Once we started working on it seriously it became more and more obvious that, in fact, the fun idea was actually quite a good one. We developed it and researched it to the point where we eventually found that a major international company had already sunk $10′s millions into developing the same idea to prototype. OK, we didn’t get there first but our hydrogen-powered fuel cell agricultural vehicle was born of openness to play and to new ideas.
