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What Happens After We're All Connected?
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ABC The Drum Unleashed - Why I quit Facebook (and you should too)
Find More Stories2 June 2010
Why I quit Facebook (and you should too)
On Friday evening, under a full moon, I lit a candle, gathered my thoughts in a moment of silence, and clicked on the big blue button. It felt odd - and made me giddy, perhaps a bit lightheaded. I crossed over, entering a digital bardo, becoming a ghost. I had successfully committed Facebookicide.
What made me want to delete myself from the planet's most popular social network, just as it sits on the edge of acquiring its five hundred millionth member? This was not a decision I made lightly. I'd been mulling over the pros and cons for some weeks, as I watched people I respect, such as Cory Doctorow, make the decision delete themselves.
Finally, on Friday the 21st of May, the Wall Street Journal published the results of a stunning bit of investigative journalism: Facebook had been caught sharing confidential user data with advertisers, data they were bound to hold in closest confidence. That was the last straw.
Facebook, with its 400-million plus members constantly adding their thoughts and wishes to an ever-expanding commonweal, already sits on the largest and most valuable mound of marketing information ever collected by humanity. This, apparently, was not enough. Facebook had to go beyond what we had already given them freely, to open other, darker boxes. Nothing uploaded to the site, no matter how closely held, or carefully locked down with the confusingly broad range of privacy settings, seemed safe from the clutches of Facebook's partners.
Yes, Facebook needs to make a buck - I get that. But Google manages to do just fine without peering into my sock drawer. Facebook should be able to run rings around Google; it's now one of the busiest websites in the world, its advertising revenues are north of a billion dollars a year, and it has detailed demographic information on everyone who logs in. Yet, despite all this, Facebook could not resist the temptation to steal. That's not merely unbelievable - it's nearly pathological.
But then, what else can we expect of an organisation born in chaos and fury? Mark Zuckerberg, founder and poster boy for Facebook, lifted the idea from some friends, then joked about the 'dump f--ks' who eagerly handed over all of their private data. Zuckerberg has publicly stated that he believes in a world without privacy, a beautiful new place were we all live our lives utterly revealed in the blinding light of day. It's an interesting thought - and philosophically worthwhile to entertain - but that's not really what Zuckerberg means. Don't look at what he says; look at what he does.
Facebook is one of the most secretive companies operating on the Internet. The idea of privacy clearly has appeal to Zuckerberg and Facebook. Zuckerberg is really working toward an asymmetric state of affairs, where individuals lose their privacy while corporations and governments retain theirs. There's a word for that: slavery.
Privacy is the foundation of freedom. Without private space to think, to reflect, and yes, to share, we can have no private action, no individual agency. Privacy is dangerous, but privacy is not criminal. It is necessary for the healthy functioning of a democracy. We should resist anyone who proclaims 'the death of privacy', because they are a proxy for interests who would seek to control us, to corral us by our needs, or separate us by whom we choose to conspire with.
If all this sounds theoretical, let me bring it down to earth: it's well established that individuals start and quit smoking in groups, that is, these behaviors spread through social networks. What would a tobacco company do if it had access to Facebook's user data, and it wanted to slow the rate at which smokers' quit, or perhaps up the rate at which teenagers start? They'd have the perfect tool to do their dirty little deeds - and perhaps they already have. We don't know, and Facebook isn't telling.
So leave already.
I know, I know, Facebook is where all your friends are, where you've spent hours and hours building up your social graph, forging connections with long-lost school buddies, far-flung relatives, and former work colleagues. You have an investment, and you're reluctant to leave that behind. Facebook knows this, too, and has made it nearly impossible for you to take your social graph elsewhere, another perfect example of how they really value secrecy over openness. Facebook is a bit like the Hotel California: you can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.
Knowing all of this, it was easy to press the self-destruct button, a genuine release. Oh, my profile will float around in limbo for two weeks as Facebook gives me a 'cooling off period' to rethink my decision. Should I choose to log in again, all will be forgiven, and my profile fully restored. But that's not going to happen. I will deny Facebook the most important things I have to offer - my presence and my energy - and use both in a search for another way of sharing with the people I like and trust, one which doesn't leave me open to a mind-rape.
I don't expect many of you will leave today. There's almost nowhere else to go. But a few of you will do the sums, and understand, as I do, that no website, no matter how useful, is worth this. We need to start over, with some important lessons learned about privacy and the intrinsic value of human connections. I take heart in the fact that every one of the Internet's 'walled gardens' - of which Facebook is merely the latest incarnation - have eventually collapsed. Facebook is having its day, but memento mori.
In the meantime, those of us who quit Facebook have a job before us: we need to forge a path to a connection that does not come at the cost of ourselves, a path that all our friends and families and colleagues will eventually follow.
Mark Pesce is one of the pioneers in Virtual Reality and works as a writer, researcher and teacher.
via abc.net.au
Facebook, you've been sent a message . . . Angry users quit over privacy fears | The Australian
MARK Pesce likens Facebook to the Hotel California of the old Eagles song. To paraphrase: You can check out any time you like, but can you ever leave?
On Friday night the inventor, writer, theorist and panellist on ABC TV's New Inventors put his considerable technological savvy to the task of removing his profile from the social networking site but as of yesterday he was still only almost out.
"Now my account is in some kind of limbo for two weeks," he says. "If I log in, the account immediately springs back to life . . . It's so easy to accidentally trigger it." Following the fortnight-long "cooling-off" period, Pesce's profile should be erased.
"But whether that means all my data entirely goes away -- Facebook isn't entirely transparent about that," he says. "It will probably live on in the back of a server somewhere."
Tens of thousands of other disaffected former Facebook fans are also due to commit mass account suicide today, which has been declared "Quit Facebook Day" in a grassroots campaign started by two tech guys, Joseph Dee and Matthew Milan. Motivating them in part are the increasing privacy concerns surrounding the world's most popular networking site.
As of yesterday afternoon, about 24,000 Facebook users had committed to leaving, according to the tally on QuitFacebookDay.com. That's about 0.006 per cent of the site's approximately 400 million active users.
However, surveys show growing dissatisfaction with the site, with users complaining settings make it too hard to restrict who can view their personal information and too easy for them to inadvertently share details with third-party websites, which mainly use the information to better target them for advertising.
In one online poll, run by security firm Sophos, 60 per cent of the more than 1500 respondents said privacy concerns would at least make them consider quitting.
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's co-founder and chief executive, nodded to the public backlash by announcing new privacy settings which he says give users more and simpler ways to control use of their information.
But that doesn't wash with quitter Nigel Grier, owner of Townsville eco-consultancy zingspace, who says he has "more peace of mind" since leaving Facebook a few weeks ago.
"When I joined it was more of a professional networking site . . . and I found it a useful tool," he says. "But Facebook changed. As my profile has grown there has been a lot of blending of my private and professional networks."
Grier says his decision to abandon his 950-odd Facebook "friends" was driven primarily by concerns over privacy.
"I didn't really have control over the posting of information and tagging of photos and what people chose to communicate on my profile page," he says.
"Ninety per cent of the photos where I have been tagged were (of) me out at dinner parties or nightclubs. My professional contacts could look at that and think . . . 'Nigel's a party animal'. People can create a story about one aspect of your life."
Another factor was the amount of time Facebook soaked up, Grier says. "People, who may have been acquaintances from 20 years ago, were demanding communications through Facebook with private messages, the chat function and writing on walls."
Pesce, who had about 650 Facebook "friends", says he never found the site particularly useful.
He adds: "Over the last several months I have become increasingly aware I didn't like the organisation behind it and I'm not comfortable with it."
The last straw was this month's report in The Wall Street Journal claiming Facebook and other social networking sites had been surreptitiously sharing users' personal data with advertisers. "Facebook has violated its duty of care," Pesce says. "They are a bad parent and I'm like DOCS. I'm taking the child out of the situation."
Among the alternatives he intends to look at is Diaspora, the "privacy-aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, distributed, open-source social network" being developed by four New York University students.
Even Zuckerberg has donated money to the project, which has been dubbed the "anti-Facebook", saying: "I think it is a cool idea."
Pesce is convinced there is interactive life after Facebook: "In 18 months there will be really good, and safer, alternatives to Facebook. One reason I'm going is to force me to find (them) and to help those alternatives develop."
Hyperconnected Health | the human network
I: My Cloud
This is the age of networks, and we are always connected. If that seems fanciful, ask yourself how often you are parted from your mobile, and for how long? All of our hours – even as we sleep – the mobile is within arm’s reach for almost all of us. A few months ago a woman asked me when we might expect to have implants, to close the loop, and make the connection permanent. “We’re already there,” I responded. “It’s wedded to the palm of your hand.” In a purely functional sense this is the truth, and it has been the case for several years.
Connection to the network is neither an instantaneous nor absolute affair. It takes time to establish the protocols for communication. We understand many of these protocols without explanation: we do not telephone someone at three o’clock in the morning unless vitally important. Three o’clock in the afternoon, however, is open season. Lately, there are newer, technologically driven protocols: I can look at a caller’s number, and decide whether I want to take that call or direct it to voice mail. The caller has no idea I’ve made any decision. From their point of view, it’s simply a missed call. Similarly, I have friends I can not text before 10 AM unless it’s quite urgent, and I ask my friends not to text me after 10 PM for the same reason. We set our boundaries with technology, boundaries which determine how we connect. We can choose to be entirely connected, or entirely disconnected. We can let the batteries run flat on our mobile, or simply turn it off and put it away. But there’s a price to be paid. Absence from connection incurs a cost. To be disconnected is to cede your ability to participate in the flow of affairs. Thus, the modern condition is a dilemma, where we balance the demands of our connectedness against the desire to be free from its constraints.
Connectedness is not simply a set of pressures; it is equally a range of capabilities. As our connectedness grows, so our capabilities grow in lock-step. What we could achieve with the landline was immeasurably beyond what was possible with the post, yet doesn’t compare with what we can do with email, mobile voice, SMS, or, now, any of a hundred thousand different sorts of activities, from banking to dating to ordering up a taxi. The device has become a platform, a social nexus, the point where we find ourselves attached to the universe of others. Consider the address book that lives on your mobile. Mine has about 816 entries. Those are all connections that were made at some point in my life. (Admittedly, I haven’t been weeding them out as vigorously as I should, so some of those contact are duplicates or no longer accurate.) That’s just what’s on my mobile. If I go out to Twitter, I have rather more connections in my ‘social graph’ – about 6700. These connections aren’t quiescent, waiting to be dialed, but are constantly listening in to what I have to say, just as I am constantly listening to them.
No one can give their full-time attention to that sort of cacophony of human voices. Some are paid more attention, others, rather less. Sometimes there’s no spare attention to be given to any of these voices, and what they say is lost to me. Yet, on the whole, I can maintain some form of continuous partial attention with this ‘cloud’ of others. They are always with me, and I with them. This is a new thing (I view myself as a sort of guinea pig in a lab experiment) and it has produced some rather unexpected results.
At the end of last year I went on a long road trip with a friend from the US. On our first day, we struck out from Sydney and drove to Canberra, arriving, tired and hungry at quarter to six. Where do you eat dinner in a town that closes down at 5 pm? I went online and put the question out to Twitter, then ducked into the shower. By the time I’d dried off, I had a whole suite of responses from native Canberrans, several of whom pointed me to the Civic Asian Noodle House. Thirty minutes later, my American friend was enjoying his first bowl of seafood laksa – which was among the best I’ve had in Australia.
A few days later, at the end of the road trip, when we’d reached the Barossa Valley, I put another question out to Twitter: what wineries should we visit? The top five recommendations were very good indeed. Each of these ‘cloud moments’, by themselves, seems relatively trivial. Both together begin to mark the difference between an ordinary holiday and a most excellent one.
Another case in point: two weeks ago today, my washing machine gave up the ghost. What to replace it with? I asked Twitter. Within a few hours, and some back-and-forth, I decided upon a Bosch. Some of that was based on direct input from Bosch owners, some of that came from a CHOICE survey of washing machine owners. I was pointed to that survey by someone on Twitter.
As I experiment, and learn how to query my cloud, I have sbecome more dependent upon the good advice it can provide. My cloud extends my reach, my experience and my intelligence, making me much more effective as some sort of weird ‘colony individual’ than I could be on my own. I have no doubt that within a few years, as the tools improve, nearly every decision I make will be observed and improved upon by my cloud. Which is wonderful, incredible, and – to quote Tony Abbott – very confronting.
Let me turn things around a bit, to show another side of the cloud, specifically the cloud of my good friend Kate Carruthers. Last year Kate found herself in Far North Queensland on a business trip and discovered that her American Express card credit limit had summarily been cut in half – with no advance warning – leaving her far away from home and potentially caught in a jam. When she called American Express to make an inquiry – and found that their consumer credit division closed at 5 pm on a Friday evening – she lost her temper. The 7500 people who follow Kate on Twitter heard a solid rant about the evils of American Express, a rant that they will now remember every time they find an American Express invitation letter in the post, or even when they decide which credit card to select while making a purchase.
Hollywood has been forced to take note of the power of these clouds. There’s a direct correlation between the speed at which a motion picture bombs and the rise in the number of users of Twitter. It used to take a few days for word-of-mouth to kill a movie’s box office: now it takes a few minutes. As the first showing ends, friends text friends, people post to Twitter and Facebook, and the news spreads. After the second or third showing, the crowds have dropped off: word has gotten out that the film stinks. Where just a few years ago a film could coast for an entire weekend, now the Friday matinee has become a make-or-break affair. An opinion, multiplied by hundreds or thousands of connections, carries a lot of weight.
That amplification effect has been particularly visible to me over the last week. I’ve been participating in a ‘social review program’ sponsored by Telstra, who sought reviewers for the handset du jour, the HTC Desire. I received a free handset – worth about $800 – in exchange for a promise to do a thorough, but honest review. This is the first time I’ve ever done anything like this, and when I started to post my thoughts to Twitter, I immediately got a big pushback. Some of my cloud considered it an unacceptable commercialization of a space they consider essentially private and personal. I spruik The New Inventors on Twitter every Wednesday. That’s just as commercial, but Telstra is held out for particular contempt by a broad swath of the Australian public, so any association with them carries it own opprobrium. I’ve come to realize that I’ve tarred myself with the same brush that others use for Telstra. Although I did this accidentally and innocently, some of that tar will continue to stick to me. I have suffered the worst fate that can befall anyone who lives life with a cloud: reputational damage. Some people have made it perfectly clear that they will never again regard me with the same benevolence. That damage is done. All I can do is learn from it, and work to not repeat the same mistakes.
This marked the first time that I’d been ‘chastised’ by my cloud. I’ve always operated within the bounds of propriety – the protocols of civilized behavior – but in this case I found I’d stumbled into a minefield, a danger zone filled with obstacles that I’d created for myself by presenting myself not just as Mark Pesce, but as Telstra. I’ve learned new limits, new protocols, and, for the first time, I can begin to sense the constraints that come hand-in-hand with my new capabilities. I can do a lot, but I can not do as I please.
II: Share the Health
Social networks are nothing new. We’ve carried them around inside our heads from a time long before we were recognizably human. They are the secret to our success, and always have been. We’re the most social of all the of the mammals, and while the bees may put us to shame, we also have big brains to develop distinct personalities and unique strengths, which we have always shared, so that our expertise becomes an asset to the whole of society, whether that is a tribe, a city, or a nation.
Others have been studying these ‘old-school’ human social networks, and they’ve learned some surprising things. Harvard internist and social scientist Dr. Nicholas Christakis has published a series of papers that illustrate the power of the connection. In his first paper, he studied how smoking behaviors – both starting and quitting – spread through social networks. It turns out that if a sufficient number of your friends start to smoke, you’re more likely to begin yourself. Conversely, if enough of your friends quit, you’re more likely to quit. This makes sense when you consider the reinforcing nature of social relationships; we each send one another a forest of subtle cues about the ‘right’ way to behave, fit in, and get along. Those cues shape our choices and behaviors. Hang out with smokers and you’re more likely to smoke. Hang out with non-smokers, and you’re likely to quit smoking.
Dr. Christakis also found that the same phenomenon appears to hold true for obesity. Again, people look to one another for cues about body image. If all of your peers are obese, you are more likely to be obese yourself. If your peers are thin, you’re more likely to be thin. And if your peers go on a diet, you’re likely to join them in slimming. The connections between us are also the transmitters of behavior. (It may be the secret to the success of other groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous.) This is a powerful insight, one which caused me to have a bit of a brainwave, a few months ago, as I began planning this talk: what happens when we take what we know about our human social networks as behavioral transmitters and apply that to our accelerated, amplified digital selves?
I can take any bit of data I like and share it out through Twitter to 6700 connections, and I frequently do. I post articles I’ve read, interesting films I’ve watched, photographs I’ve taken, and so forth. My cloud is an opportunity to share what I encounter in my life. Probably many of you do precisely the same thing. But let’s take it a step further. Let’s say that my doctor wants me to lose 15 kilos, in order to help me lower my blood pressure. I agree to his request, and perhaps see a nutritionist, but after that I’m pretty much own my own. I could spend some money to join a ‘group’ like Weight Watchers or whatnot; essentially purchasing a peer group with whom I will connect. That will work for the duration of the weight loss, but once the support ends, the weight comes piles on.
Instead of this (or, perhaps, in addition to it), what I need to do is to bind my cloud to my intention to lose weight. I need to share this information, but I need to do it meaningfully. This is more than simply saying, ‘Hey, I need to drop some pounds.’ More than posting the weekly weigh-in figures. It means using the cloud intelligently, sharing with the cloud what can and should be shared – that is, what I eat and what exercise I get.
When I say ‘my cloud’ in this context, I doubt that I’m speaking about the full complement of 6700 souls. Although all of them wish me well, this sort of detail is simply noise to many of them. Instead, I need to go to a smaller cohort: my close friends, and those within my cloud who share a similar affinity – who are also working to lose weight. These connections – a cloud within my cloud – are the ones who will be best served by my sharing. I now keep track of what I eat and how I exercise, using some collaborative tool developed an some enterprising entrepreneur to track it all, and everyone sees what kind of progress I’m making toward my goal. I also see everyone else’s progress toward their own goals. We reinforce, we reassure, we share both new-found strengths and our moments of weakness. As we share, we grow closer. The network is reinforced. All along, my friends (and my GP) are looking in, monitoring, happy to see that I’m on track toward my goal.
None of this is rocket science. It’s good social science, and plain common sense. It needs to be supported by tools. At this point, I began to think about the kinds of tools that would be useful. First and most useful would be a food diary. Rather than a text-based listing of everything eaten, I reckon this will be a bit more up-to-date; there’ll be photographs, taken with my mobile, of everything that goes into my mouth. As a bit of an experiment, I tried photographing everything I ate from the beginning of this month. I always got breakfast, mostly lunch, and by dinner had forgotten completely. My records are incomplete. That wouldn’t do for any sharing system like this, and it points to the fact that technology is no substitute for effective habits, and those habits don’t develop overnight. They require some peer support.
As I was beginning to think through the requirements of such a hypothetical system – so that I could share that system with you– I learned that someone had already implemented a real-world system along similar lines. Jon Cousins, an entrepreneur from Cambridgeshire recently launched a website known as Moodscope. This site allows individuals who have mood disorders to track their moods daily, and then shares those daily updates with a circle of up to five trusted individuals.
It’s known that individuals with mood disorders can be supported by a network – if that network is kept abreast of that individual’s changes in mood. I decided to give Moodscope a try, and have been charting my daily moods (which average around the baseline of 50%) for the past 26 days, sharing those results with a close friend. Although it’s early days, Moodscope is showing promise as a tool that can support people in their struggle for mood regulation and overall mental health, and might even do so better than some pharmaceutical treatments.
In these two examples – one imaginary and one wholly real – we have a pattern for health care in the 21st century, a model which doesn’t supplant the existing systems, but rather, works alongside them to improve outcomes and to keep patient care costs down, by spreading the burden of care throughout a community. This model could be repeated to cover diabetics, or hypertensives, or asthmatics, or arthritics, and so on. It is a generic model which can be applied to every patient and each disorder.
We’ve already seen the birth of ‘Wikimedicine’, where individuals connect together to try to learn more about their diseases than their treating physicians. This is sometimes a recipe for disaster, but that’s because this is all so new. Within a few years, doctors, nurse practitioners and patients will be connected through dense networks of knowledge and need. The doctor and nurse practitioner will help guide the patient into knowledge using the wealth of online resources. That’s not often happening at present, and this means that patients fall prey to all sorts of bad information. In our near future, medical knowledge isn’t simply locked away in the physician’s head; it’s shared through a connected community for the benefit of all. The doctor still treats, while the patient – and the patient’s connections – learn. From that learning comes the lifestyle changes and reinforcements in behavior that lead to better outcomes.
We have the networks in place, both human and virtual. We merely need to institute some new practices to reap the benefit of our connections. As the population ages, these sorts of innovations will seem both natural – relying on others is an essentially human characteristic – and cost-effective. The population will adopt these measures because they find them empowering (and because their GPs will recommend them), while governments and insurance companies will adopt them because they keep a lid on medical costs. The forces of culture and technology are converging on a shared, hyperconnected future which aims to keep us as healthy as possible for as long as possible.
III: The Ministry of Love
I have a good friend who was diagnosed with a mood disorder sixteen years ago. A few months ago he decided his psychiatric medication was doing him more harm than good, and took himself off of it. Although it’s been a difficult process, so far he’s been reasonably stable. When I found Moodscope, I told him about it. “Sounds good,” he responded, “I can’t wait until they have it as a Facebook app.” I hadn’t thought about that, but it does make perfect sense: your social graph is already right there, embedded into Facebook, and Facebook applications have access to your social graph: why not create a version of Moodscope that ties the two together? It sounds very compelling, a sure winner.
But do you really want Facebook to have access to highly privileged medical information, information about your mental state? That information can be used to help you, but it could also be used against you. Sydney teenager Nona Belomesoff was lured to her death by a man who used information gleaned from Facebook to befriend her. Consider: If someone wanted to cause my friend some distress, they could use that shared mood data as a key indicator which would guide them to time their destabilizing efforts for maximum effectiveness. They could kick him when he was down, and make sure he stayed down. Giving someone insight into our emotional state gives them the upper hand.
Were that not dangerous enough, just last Friday the Wall Street Journal reported the results of an investigation, which revealed that Facebook was sharing confidential user data with advertisers – data which they’d legally agreed to hold in closest confidence. The advertisers themselves had no idea that this information was provided illegally. Facebook, the supreme collector of marketing data, simply didn’t know when or even how to restrain itself.
With that in mind, let’s imagine a situation bound to happen sometime in the next few years. You and your Facebook friends decide that you want to quit smoking. It’s too expensive, it’s too hard to find a smoking area, your clothes stink, and you’re starting to get a hacking cough in the mornings. Enough. So you tell your friends – over Facebook – that you’re thinking of quitting. And they think that’s a great idea. They want to quit, too. So you all set a date to quit. That’s all well and good, but then an invitation arrives to a very swanky party in the City, an exclusive affair. You go, and find that the whole space is a smoking area! All of these elegant people, puffing away. Because smoking is glamorous. And you begin to reconsider. Your resolve begins to weaken.
Or you want to lose weight. You even add the Facebook ‘Drop the Fat’ app to your account, to help you achieve your weight loss goals. But, just as soon as you do that, you start seeing lots more Facebook advertisements for biscuits and ice cream and fresh pizzas. That has an effect. It weakens your willpower, and makes those slightly-hungry hours seem more unbearable.
This is the friendly version of ‘Room 101’ from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In that room, you met your greatest fear. In this one, you meet your greatest weakness. When a tobacco company has access to a social network which is trying to quit smoking, it will be tempted to disrupt that network. When a soft drink company has access to a social network which is trying to lose weight, it will be tempted to disrupt that network. Our social networks are too potent and too powerful to leave exposed to anyone, for any reason whatsoever. Yet we leave them lying around, open to public inspection, and we allow Facebook to own them outright, to exploit them as it sees fit, to its own ends, and for its own profit. Hopefully that will come to an end, unless we’re too far down the rabbit hole to pull out of Facebook and into something else that preserves the integrity of our social graph while granting us control over how we share our inmost selves.
This is where you come in. You’re the policy folks, and I’ve just thrown a whopper into your lap. Securing the safety and prosperity of our social future means that we need to establish clear guidelines on how these networks can be used, by whom, and to what ends. As I’ve explained, there is enormous potential for these networks to lead to breakthroughs in public health, disease prevention, and medical cost management. That’s just the beginning. These same networks can organize toward political ends. We got just a taste of that in the Obama presidential campaign, but the next decade will see its full flower, whether in America or in Iran or in Australia. As social networks become identified with power networks, all of the conservative and power-seeking interests of culture will work to interfere with them as a means of control.
As public servants and policy makers, you will see the politicians, the doctors, and the advertisers come to you crying, ‘Can’t we do something?’ All of them will want you to weaken the protections for social networks, in order to make them more permeable and less resilient. In this present moment, and with our current laws, social networks have no protections whatsoever. They used to live inside our heads, where they needed few protections. Now they live in public, and with every day that passes we come to understand that they are perhaps our most important possession, the doorway to ourselves. First you must protect. Then you must defend.
Protection is not enough. It’s not clear that any commercial interest can be trusted with the social graphs of a community. There’s too much potential for mischief, particularly right now, when everything is so new and so raw. Government must play a role in this revolution, encouraging government-affiliated NGOs and other not-for-profits to foster networks of connections to spring up around communities which need the empowerment that comes with hyperconnectivity. In the absence of this sort of gardening, the ground will be ceded to commercial forces which may not have the best interests of the citizenry foremost in mind. By doing nothing, we lay the foundation for a new generation of grifters, criminals, and brainwashers. But if these networks are built securely – by people who believe in them, and believe in what is possible with them – they become hyper-potent, capable of transforming the lives of everyone connected to them. It’s a short path from hyperconnectivity to hyperempowerment, a path which will be well-trodden in the coming years.
The 21st century will look very different from the century just passed. Instead of big wars and major powers, we’ll see different ‘gangs’ of hyperempowered social networks having a rumble, networks that look a lot like families, towns, or nations. We’ll all be connected by similar principles, for similar reasons, and we will use similar tools to rally together and mobilize our strengths. As is the nature of power, power will seek to use power to undermine the power of others. Facebook is already doing this, though they seem to have stumbled into it. The next time it happens it will be more deliberate, and more diabolical.
That’s it. The future is much bigger than hyperconnected health, but as someone who will be a senior in just 20 years, hyperconnected health means more to me than whatever might happen to politics or business. I need the support that will keep me healthy long into my sunset years, and I will join with others to build those systems. If we build from corruption, corruption will be the fruit. We must be honest with ourselves, acknowledge the dangers even as we laud the benefits, and build ourselves systems which do not play into human weaknesses, or avarice, or megalomania. This is a project fit for a culture, a project worthy of a nation, a people who understand that together we can accomplish whatever we set our sights upon, if we build from a foundation of trust, respect and privacy.
Tags: behavior, freedom, health, IPAA, obesity, public health, smoking
This entry was posted on Friday, May 28th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Australia, Facebook, Google, Iran, Telstra, Twitter, Wikipedia, business, commerce, community, crowdsource, digital social networks, emergent digital social networks, health, hyperconnectivity, hyperempowerment, hyperintelligence, hyperpeople, hyperpolitics, law, mob, mobile, network, politics, sharing, social networks, trust. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.
Facebook's Culture Problem May Be Fatal - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review
Facebook's imbroglio over privacy reveals what may be a fatal business model. I know because my students at Parsons The New School For Design tell me so. They live on Facebook and they are furious at it. This was the technology platform they were born into, built their friendships around, and expected to be with them as they grew up, got jobs, and had families. They just assumed Facebook would evolve as their lives shifted from adolescent to adult and their needs changed. Facebook's failure to recognize this culture change deeply threatens its future profits. At the moment, it has an audience that is at war with its advertisers. Not good.
Here's why. Facebook is wildly successful because its founder matched new social media technology to a deep Western cultural longing — the adolescent desire for connection to other adolescents in their own private space. There they can be free to design their personal identities without adult supervision. Think digital tree house. Generation Y accepted Facebook as a free gift and proceeded to connect, express, and visualize the embarrassing aspects of their young lives.
Then Gen Y grew up and their culture and needs changed. My senior students started looking for jobs and watched, horrified, as corporations went on their Facebook pages to check them out. What was once a private, gated community of trusted friends became an increasingly open, public commons of curious strangers. The few, original, loose tools of network control on Facebook no longer proved sufficient. The Gen Yers wanted better, more precise privacy controls that allowed them to secure their existing private social lives and separate them from their new public working lives.
Facebook's business model, however, demands the opposite. It is trying to transform the private into a public arena it can offer advertisers. In doing this, the company is breaking three cardinal cultural norms:
- It is taking back a free gift. In order to build profits, Facebook has been commercializing and monetizing friendship networks. What Facebook gave to Millenials, it is now trying to take away. Millennials are resisting the invasion to their privacy.
- Facebook is ignoring the aging of the Millennials and the subsequent change in their culture. Older Gen Yers want less sociability and more privacy as actors outside their trusted cohort enter the Facebook space in search of information and connection. These older Millennials want more privacy tools for control of their information and networks.
- Facebook is behaving as though it owned not only its proprietary technology platform but the friendship networks created on it. It doesn't. Millennials believe that ownership of their networks of friends belongs to them, not Facebook, and resist their commercialization.
Facebook, under intense pressure, is belatedly agreeing to streamline and strengthen its privacy tools. That will lower the anger of its audience but increase the anxiety of its advertisers. The brand value of Facebook has already taken a hit and competing social media platforms that promise privacy are beginning to appear.
What lessons can we draw from the Facebook flameup? Lifecycle changes can trump generational change and cultural values perceived as crucial at the age of 13 can be very different at 20. A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs.
Ownership in the social media world of networks is different from selling products and services in the traditional marketplace. Understanding the underlying cultural context of "free," "gift," and "creation" is important to businesses, including and perhaps especially high tech companies. It is not impossible to monetize that which is free. Apple did that with 99 cent songs on iTunes. But it is difficult.
Giving economic value to social networks is the new holy grail in advertising and the media. An army of economists and mathematicians are at work on this task. To date, most of the work has focused on metrics — how many friends, how many linkages, how much influence. Facebook's problems with privacy highlight the need to understand culture as well.
Bruce Nussbaum, former assistant managing editor for Business Week, is professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons School of Design.
via blogs.hbr.org
Facebook users 'don't want complete privacy': Zuckerberg
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the opening keynote address at the f8 Developer Conference. Photo: AFP
The Facebook privacy flap has deepened after it was revealed the social networking site has been sending personal and identifiable user information to advertisers without consent.
The site's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, broke his silence over the recent privacy storm in an email to well-known tech blogger Robert Scoble over the weekend, admitting he had made a "bunch of mistakes" and promising changes.
But that may be no consolation to the swarms of users who have pledged to quit Facebook, saying the site has continually pushed its friendships by opening up more user information to the public and advertisers without consent.
The Wall Street Journal reported that advertising companies, including Google's DoubleClick and Yahoo's RightMedia, were receiving information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the information a user has made public, include such things as a person's real name, age, hometown and occupation.
The practice, outlawed by social networking sites' own privacy policies, had been adopted by both Facebook and MySpace but both moved to make changes after being quizzed by the Journal. The information was being sent to advertisers whenever users clicked on an ad.
Governments around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about the way websites are collecting sensitive information about users and then using it to target ads.
Last week, the Australian Privacy Commissioner, Karen Curtis, said she would be discussing privacy concerns with Facebook "over the coming days" and asking the site to answer several questions. This website is seeking comment from her office over the content of those discussions.
In his email to Scoble, which Zuckerberg agreed could be published, the 26-year-old social network kingpin said he had yet to respond to the recent privacy furore because "i'd like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do".
"We're going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we've built this week," he wrote.
"I know we've made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve."
An online poll has suggested as many as 60 per cent of Facebook users are considering deleting their accounts over fears the site is making valuable personal data public and available to advertisers without users' consent.
May 31 has been declared "Quit Facebook Day", with just under 14,000 committed Facebook quitters signed up so far.
The bad PR for Facebook looks set to continue with the impending release of The Social Network, a Hollywood film produced by Kevin Spacey that implies Zuckerberg is an insecure computer nerd who started the site to meet girls.
The Guardian reported that a routine executive meeting at Facebook's headquarters earlier this month turned into an emergency discussion about privacy, with some staffers feeling that the company had "gone off the rails" and could be damaged permanently if the privacy issues weren't sorted out.
In a recent interview with Time magazine, Zuckerberg said people did not want complete privacy online.
"It isn't that they want secrecy. It's that they want control over what they share and what they don't,"
The comments may be read with a hint of irony for some users who have battled to seize control of their profile pages due to the sheer complexity of the privacy settings. The current privacy policy has 50 different settings and 170 options.
Further, some have questioned Zuckerberg's sincerity as he has continually played down privacy problems with the site and reportedly said in leaked chat logs that users who trusted him with their information were "dumb f---s".
Still, despite all the furore, it will now be difficult for many of the site's more than 400 million users to jump ship, relegating all of their photos, videos and connections on the site to the virtual scrap heap.
via smh.com.au
Facebook users revolt against Mark Zuckerberg over privacy | Technology | The Observer
via guardian.co.uk
BBC News - Facebook challenged by ambitious upstarts
By Jonathan Frewin Technology reporter, BBC NewsFacebook has come under increased scrutiny over its privacy policies
The controversy over Facebook's privacy policy is helping those developing alternatives to the social network.
Funding and users are flowing to services that claim to put members in charge of their personal data.
The rivals range from start-ups to more established firms working on the specifications for an ecosystem of open social networks.
Experts say Facebook may have little to worry about, despite 11,000 people pledging to quit Facebook on 31 May.
"Nobody has reached anything like critical mass in the same social platform area," said Lee Bryant, from social technology consultancy Headshift.
"Facebook is like an entire web operating system," he said.
Old rivalsThere are already many well-established alternatives to Facebook.
Fans of the microblogging service Twitter might argue that it is poised to steal the site's crown. It entered the world's top 100 websites only last year, and is now sitting around tenth position globally, according to Alexa, a web information company.
But Twitter is more a micro-blogging site than a social network, where friends follow each other's daily activities by default.
Alongside are a whole host of other early high profile innovators in social networking.
But many, including Bebo, Friendster and Myspace have seen their popularity decline in the last 24 months. None of these are still in Alexa's global top 20.
The Diaspora team hopes to change social networking Young upstarts
The latest round of privacy issues with Facebook has provoked considerable interest in some more embryonic social network projects.
Mr Bryant said: "Many people are looking to Diaspora as a new model - something which is standards-based, open-source and distributed."
Diaspora was founded in early May year by four New York University students who aim to create "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open-source social network".
It also caught the eye of investors on the Kickstarter website, which aims to find funding for creative projects. In just a few weeks, the Diaspora team has received pledges of $175,000 (£122,000). They started out asking for just $10,000.
Max Salzberg, one of the founders, told BBC News: "Facebook is not what we are going after.
"We are going after the idea there are all these centralised services where people are giving up their personal information. We want to put users back in control of what they share."
But Diaspora's software is still in the early stages of development, and it's not yet clear exactly where the project might go.
Another fledgling social network is OneSocialWeb that has the backing of mobile giant Vodafone.
Its designer, Alard Weisscher, told BBC News "We believe social networking is becoming so important ... that users should have the right to choose their provider, be able to switch between providers ... whilst owning and being in full control of their data."
Common standardsMr Weisscher said that rather than try to create a new social network, the OneSocialWeb team is trying to define a common language, called protocols, for communication between social networks.
This is an idea common to many such projects.
Continue reading the main storyMichael Chisari Appleseed founderI compare it to the 1990's, when AOL and CompuServe were both very popular, but were 'walled gardens'
Michael Chisari founded Appleseed in 2004, to try and build a simple social network. The question he pondered at the time was "If two sites were running my software, why couldn't they interact?"
Like Diaspora, Appleseed's approach is one of a growing band of "distributed social networking" projects, where anybody can set up a social network, and the different systems should be able to interact with each other.
Mr Chisari said: "I compare it to the 1990's, when AOL and CompuServe (early Internet Service Providers) were both very popular, but were 'walled gardens'".
"Users on AOL could only e-mail other AOL users, same with CompuServe. Then, e-mail started getting popular and some people switched, but it forced people to ask why they were being walled off," he said.
Mr Chisari pointed out that both AOL and Compuserve "were forced to open up ... so that their users could participate with the rest of the world."
Both companies have since faded considerably, and Mr Bryant at Headshift thinks something similar might happen at Facebook: "It's a real and present danger. What people are looking for as a sign of that is a flocking behaviour.
"It was a flocking behaviour that built Facebook, and it's a flock of people saying they're going to a different social network that could lead to its decline."
Competing standardsSo can the new social networks establish a set of standards that they all stick to?
Mr Bryant said it is a sensible goal in the long term. "But over the short term, it will be a real battle."
The founder of Appleseed has discussed universal standards with OneSocialWeb, because the software he developed has some similarities to their social networking language.
But well-funded Diaspora has indicated that it might use its cash pile to implement a different set of open standards called OStatus.
Those are being developed in part by yet another potential rival to Facebook.
That company is called StatusNet, which itself has created social networking software in use by 25,000 sites, with more than 1.5 million user accounts, according to Evan Prodromou, the company's head.
"Any StatusNet site lets people from other (OStatus standards-compliant) sites follow the users there", he said.
"The open protocols that we use mean our software works with much higher-profile services, like Google Buzz, Posterous, LiveJournal, WordPress, and Tumblr."
Is there any chance that Facebook might sign up to such an open model as well, just as AOL and Compuserve did with E-mail?
Mr Bryant from Headshift thinks not: "The valuations we've seen for rounds of investment in Facebook mean they have to focus on making money soon.
"If they go down the open standards route, they would lose much of the lock-in that gives them value," he said.
Closed meetingAnd any such move would also assume that a common, open language can be established in the first place.
According to Mr Prodromou from StatusNet, a "federated social web summit" is planned in July to try and build momentum for one around OStatus standards.
However, he said, it would be "invite-only".
via news.bbc.co.uk
xkcd: Infrastructures
Teens and social media sites: Kids develop bonds and identities online, studies suggest
Teenage social media butterflies may not be such a bad idea
Kids most likely to spend a lot of time texting and on Facebook, among other networking sites, may be more well-adjusted, studies suggest.
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By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles TimesMay 18, 2010
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With his gaze fixed on a tiny screen, hearing plugged by earbuds and fingers flying, the average teenager may look like a disaster in the making: socially stunted, terminally distracted and looking for trouble. But look beyond the dizzying array of beeping, buzzing devices and the incessant multitasking, say psychologists, and today's digital kids may not be such a disaster after all.Far from hampering adolescents' social skills or putting them in harm's way, as many parents have feared, electronics appear to be the path by which children today develop emotional bonds, their own identities, and an ability to communicate and work with others.
In fact, children most likely to spend lots of time on social media sites are not the least well-adjusted but the healthiest psychologically, suggests an early, but accumulating, body of research.
In one new study, 13- and 14-year-olds were found to interact on social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace simply in ways that were consistent with their offline relationships and patterns of behavior. And of the 86% of children who used social media sites (a number that reflects the national average), participants who were better adjusted in their early teens were more likely to use social media in their early 20s, regardless of their age, gender, ethnicity or their parents' income.
Adolescents are largely using social networking sites to keep in touch with friends they already know, not to converse with strangers, said the author of that research, University of Virginia psychologist Amori Yee Mikami."So parents of well-adjusted teens may have little to worry about regarding the way their children behave when using social media," Mikami added. "It's likely to be similarly positive behavior."
Megan Mills, a Los Angeles eighth-grader, and her mother would agree. Megan cut her digital teeth on the 'tween social networking site Club Penguin.
Now 14, she has graduated to a Facebook account. She counts her mom among her many "friends" — a status that gives Donna Schwartz Mills access to her daughter's ongoing electronic chatter and a condition that Mills laid down before allowing her daughter's foray into teen social networking.
Mills, 54 and herself a blogger, says she's seen little to fret about — and much to cheer — on her periodic visits to her daughter's Facebook page. The teen, who has scaled back a once all-consuming commitment to gymnastics, keeps in touch with friends and coaches from that phase of her life, as well as with current friends that Mills knows well.
"People are always worried about the Internet making it easier for strangers to hurt your children," Mills says. But she points out, "The dangers are the old dangers of who they hang out with."
In studies of teenagers and young adults, Cal State L.A. psychology professor Kaveri Subrahmanyam has also found that children's online worlds and friendships strongly resemble their relationships offline, with overlapping casts of characters and similar hierarchies of closeness.
"I think the majority of kids use it in ways that don't jeopardize their well-being," she said.
Ultimately, it seems, the digital world is simply a new and perhaps more multidimensional place to conduct the age-old work of adolescence — forming identities separate from those of parents.
Every waking hour
Just how outsized is digital media's presence in a child's life? In January, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that for more than 7 1/2 hours a day, American children ages 8 to 18 are tethered to computers, plugged into MP3 players, watching TV or playing video, computer or handheld games — and for much of that time, doing several at once.
Add to that tally time spent texting by cellphone — an activity the Kaiser study did not include — and for most children, the daily log of media immersion would surpass time spent sleeping. A report by the Pew Research Center released in April found that 72% of U.S. teens text-message regularly, a third of them more than 100 times a day. As a means of keeping up with friends daily, teens are more likely to text than to talk by phone, by e-mail or face to face.
But a recent study in the journal Developmental Psychology underscores the point that it is largely the child, not the technology or even the time a kid spends using it, that seems to influence how safely he or she will navigate the digital world.
Certainly there are dangers online, says Subrahmanyam, also the associate director of the Children's Digital Media Center in Los Angeles. But the new media "is ultimately a tool" for children, she says. Most will use it constructively.
Those teens who struggle with depression or with aggressive or delinquent behavior are more likely to find the online world to be full of digital landmines. Mikami's research found that they were more likely to harass, bully and take online risks such as "sexting" or "MIRLing" (text-speak for "meeting in real life" a stranger one has chatted with online), or to be vulnerable to others who harass, bully and coerce.
In the end, says Mikami, these risk-takers were more likely than healthier children to abandon public social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace for online scenes such as chat rooms, where their behavior is less subject to scrutiny.
Parental worries
All of this research comes on the heels of two task force reports that combed the evidence on children and their online world and found that, on balance, that world is far less frightening than many parents believe.
A three-year Digital Youth Project, undertaken by researchers from schools including USC and UC Berkeley, urged adults to "facilitate young people's engagement with digital media" rather than block it, begrudge it or fear it.
"The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, to explore interests, develop technical skills and experiment with new forms of self expression," the group's 2008 white paper concluded.
The second task force, commissioned by state attorneys general to gauge the dangers that children face in socializing online, found last year that children are far more likely to be bullied or sexually propositioned by peers they know than they are to be preyed upon by a stranger on the Internet.
That report, drafted by Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, concluded that on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook and Friendster, strangers — let alone strangers seeking sex — are routinely locked out and readily rebuffed. Where children do stray into dangerous territory with strangers, it is generally knowingly, in chat rooms and online forums intended for adults.
It follows from these findings that the proliferation of digital media hasn't changed the definition of good parenting much either: "The whole thing is knowing your own child," says Cornell University researcher Sahara Byrne, who studies the factors that make children more or less amenable to parental limits on their media use.
Her research has found that children who think they can go to a parent with a problem — any problem — are more willing to accept parental limits on their media use and appear to be less likely to seek out trouble online. That belief, added Byrne, was a more powerful predictor of a child's healthy Internet use than a family's income, education, church attendance or political leaning.
And although she often has to "calm parents down" when she speaks to groups of adults about their children's digital lives, ultimately, she's found, they come around.
Whether their adolescent selves talked to friends on the phone for hours, hung out and flirted at a neighborhood meeting spot or made mix-tapes to play at parties, Byrne says, most parents can see that "many of the things their kids are doing are kind of like what we did."
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
Comments (5)
Add / View commentsNavydad at 4:22 PM May 18, 2010The article references reports based on a number of long term studies. Comments like "I completely disagree with this article" or "How could this article be true?" are worthless unless backed up with some evidence.
I'm a psychologist with two kids and I have worked with college students for the past 29 years. The conclusions reported in this article are consistent with my own observations. Social networking technology can be used well or misused. I know middle aged adults who do dumb and risky things online that my 15 year old daughter would never do, precisely because she is familiar with the technology and its risks, and she is a smart and sensible young person. These technologies are not going away, so it behooves all of us parents to help our kids navigate the online social world safely, just as we help them learn to drive safely.
Anemic-Royalty at 2:50 PM May 18, 20105. Some children/teens are very shy in real life. Developing an online persona can help them gain the confidence to break their shyness and start forming relationships with their peers online and eventually in real life.
6. Believe or not, but you can learn alot from the internet. I believe teens who use the internet and browse the web everyday, are generally less ignorant and more worldly then teens who do not.
7. internet usage can improve your spelling. Believe me, If you post a youtube comment full of misspellings, the grammar&spelling nazi's will let you know.
8. I may be biased given that I am 17 and use the internet daily, but i have a feeling that the comments below are biased as-well(no offence intended). So perhaps open your mind and give your kids and the internet another chance. I will now get off my soapbox and stop ranting/spamming.
Anemic-Royalty at 2:47 PM May 18, 2010I completely disagree with the comments below. The whole point of myspace and facebook is to add your actual FRIENDS, not people who you "compete" with. If you find yourself becoming depressed and humiliated on facebook, then you probably aren't using it right or more likely, didn't add true friends. Texting is still a healthy form of communication. I can understand that yes, it does remove the element of body language/facial expression (with exception of the expressive emoticons provided *sarcasm*) however, its better then no communication. A law was passed in most of the US that prohibits texting while driving. So that element is not a huge problem. Im running out of characters so i will fnish my rant after i post this.
via latimes.com
