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4 Jun 2011

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You
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When those of a certain generation first hear of the "Filter Bubble," they might reflect on that brief two weeks in the mid-'90s when the band Filter was kind of popular. These days, the Filter Bubble, according to former MoveOn.org executive director Eli Pariser, is the means by which the Information Superhighway functions more like a private driveway upon which only targeted and personalized information travels at the expense of the broader range of knowledge. This shift to personalization raises as many questions about one's online privacy as it does about censorship, whether it's intentional or the result of an algorithm trying to give you what it thinks you might like - or buy. As Pariser explains in his book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You, a personalized world is one that only serves to confirm our existing beliefs as determined by the digital breadcrumbs we've left along the way. When we only receive information aligned with our religious or social or political beliefs, "It's difficult to maintain perspective," suggests Pariser. Or, as he whimsically put it during a recent chat at Seattle's Town Hall Center for Civic Life, "When you step to the side for a new perspective, it's as if the world moves to meet your gaze." In an Amazon Q & A, in which Pariser credited the bookseller for its relative transparency as regards its product suggestions with the apropos example, "We're showing you Brave New World because you bought 1984," the Internet activist explained, "Research psychologists have known for a while that the media you consume shapes your identity. So when the media you consume is also shaped by your identity, you can slip into a weird feedback loop." "The technology is invisible. We don't know who it thinks we are, what it thinks we're actually interested in," Pariser said to The Atlantic. "It locks us into a set of check boxes of interest rather than the full kind of human experience." Of course, the Filter Bubble is more the unintended consequence of a business strategy than an insidious plot on the part of a gaggle of geeks in Silicon Valley to control your Internet experience and by extension your thinking. The fact is, in some cases, we're censoring it ourselves. As Pariser recently explained on KQED's Forum, "Because Facebook mainly uses how many people 'like' something as a means of figuring out what they should show other people, what that means is that you see well-liked news on Facebook." Google, however, has 57 different ingredients in its secret sauce. Even when logged out of your account, Google gleans signals from your online behavior and applies them to a profile that it uses to tailor results more to your liking. Consequently, like a fingerprint, no two search results are the same for different users. Try it - it's spooky. It should be noted that the sources for this piece came entirely from links presented through the various mechanisms Pariser describes, so it's likely only part of the story - the part the robots intended to be seen by someone in the media to be shared with those it knows are reading that media. When I asked him personally what content producers could do to override the algorithm, Pariser essentially said we're SOL: "Content creators are at its mercy." Time to crank the Filter.
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17 Dec 2010

Take Myspace, please
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[caption id="attachment_3095" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="My Identity Crisis,"]

[/caption] For sale: Social network, recently renovated, barely used. $580 million OBO. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation acquired the beleaguered Myspace for over half a billion dollars to complement a media empire comprising newspapers, a film studio and TV channels, including Fox News. News Corporation continued to spend millions on Myspace to capture a finicky youth market, only to find itself groping for relevancy as Facebook came to dominate the social space. One shouldn't expect Murdoch to understand kids these days, seeing as he hasn't been a teenager since 1950, which not only predates the notion of a mass "youth culture," but its original soundtrack, rock 'n' roll. But the site's current woes go beyond bridging a simple generation gap, and not for lack of trying. These days on Myspace, one is presently greeted by a video of the Black Eyed Peas pontificating about how they would "rock it" if they "hijacked" Myspace (Fergie is apparently into rainbows). This attempt by Myspace to lease some cred from the band diminishes both the reenvisioning of the site and the musicians themselves, who do their best to inject enthusiasm into the prospect of a "social entertainment" destination with little more substance than their own lyrics. The whole premise seems nebulous, which is underscored by the fact that the site doesn't even have its own name in the masthead. Rather, the page is helmed by "my_____," which invites the user to fill in the blank. You know, like Mad Libs. Perhaps Rupert's reads "my $580 Million Write-Off." With its "we beat Friendster" sheen long worn away by Murdoch's fretting fingerprints, Myspace, some speculate, is headed to the bargain bin. An acquisition, however, likely won't make much noise in a social space dominated by Facebook and Twitter. Big spenders like Google come to mind, though it's already in the social space (Orkut, right? No, wait, Google Wave? Um, Google Buzz?). Still smarting after being left at the altar by Microsoft, Yahoo isn't in a shopping mood but is working on its own Twitter clone, Yahoo! Meme. Theoretically, Microsoft could graft Myspace into its search initiative Bing so one could search for friends and find them, well, on Facebook. Perhaps the best possibility for Myspace is to be acquired by Elon Musk, cofounder of PayPal, electric carmaker Tesla Motors and SpaceX, the independent aeronautics company. Call it "MyspaceX," which would combine all of Musk's business pursuits into the first off-world colony. Recruit the outer-space colonists on Myspace (yes, that's why the sign-up is so damn inquisitive—they're gauging your space-worthiness) and catch a ride on a SpaceX rocket. The colony itself would be powered by Telsa Motors technology since, in space, there are no countries to exploit for natural resources (yet). Tickets would be paid for through Paypal, unless the underground hacker horde Anonymous launches another denial-of-service attack, which they unleashed upon the online payments site, as well as the respective sites of Visa and Mastercard, after the creditors rescinded service to Wikileaks in the wake of Cablegate. What's a denial-of-service attack? Ask the former chief security officer for News Corporation's digital properties, Hemu Nigam, who once ridded Myspace of pedophiles and warded off other online miscreants before splitting six months ago to start his own internet security consultancy. "If you are a home-computer user," Nigam says, "the only way denial-of-service attacks succeed is if the consumers are allowing their computers to be used as a zombie so that it wakes up and turns it into an army soldier at the command of a hacker out there." To prevent you computer from joining the undead, Nigam suggests you actually click "OK" the next time your computer suggests a security update. "A hacker group like Anonymous will go out there and find computers that are not updated, drop a little code in there that basically owns the computer and that sits there waiting for a command from the mother ship to these zombie computers, thousands of them in all parts of the country or the world, that says 'Wake up. It's your time.'" Perhaps this is Murdoch's evil plan for Myspace—he's using it to create an army of zombie machines to launch a massive attack on his many rivals. But isn't that what his Fox News is for? Originally published @ Bohemian.com
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30 Aug 2010

Unfriend Me
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How to be a Social Medea and give "friends" the axe
Credit must go to Facebook for turning "friend" into a verb, as in "Friend me on Facebook," or perhaps "Go friend yourself," should one choose to decline the invitation. When it became appended with the antonymic prefix "un-," the new verb took its place in the New Oxford American Dictionary last November as the lexicographer's choice of "word of the year." "It has both currency and potential longevity," senior lexicographer Christine Lindberg of Oxford's U.S. dictionary program told CNN at the time. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for word of the year." Of course, new entries into the lexicon can't be truly integrated into the language until some daft, first-year journalism student attempts to use it in a dreaded "dictionary lead" á la "The New Oxford American Dictionary defines 'unfriend' as 'To remove someone as a friend on a social networking site.'" Likewise, "retweet" is also a pitch-perfect neologism: if to "tweet" is to post something on Twitter, then to retweet, one can easily intuit, is to repost (not to be confused with "riposte," a fencing term used to describe an arch reply dipped in wit—which often accompany retweets) that tweet. Of course, "retweet" sounds like what Elmer Fudd would say at Waterloo, but in cyberspace no one can hear you scream, so what does it matter? Long a verb in its own right, Google is said to be cooking up its own Facebook-killer, "Google Me," which apparently makes one's self-absorption sharable online with the masses you might eventually unfriend. To "Ungoogle Me" would likely be the result of an online restraining order. The fine folks at the Oxford American Dictionary will likely leave that one, well, undefined. From the get-go, public relations professionals have hitched their wagons to Facebook lest they be made irrelevant by the bumper crop of social-media marketing professionals (and otherwise) once everyone realized the platform combined the worst aspects of open-mic night and a social disease. Everyone has a shot at infecting their friends with the message; now advertisers, corporate and individual brands and causes are considered so-last-century if they're not represented on what was quaintly called "the" Facebook until its fateful name change in 2005. Among those trying to refract a little of the site's limelight is Know Me Social Media Marketing, which is simultaneously based in San Diego, Calif., and Nashville, Tenn. The company, whose "head geek" Don Lowe could pass as a stand-in for Dan Aykroyd circa My Stepmother Is an Alien, is promoting its Facebook-inspired-brainchild "Worldwide 1st Annual Delete a Friend Week on Facebook." Represented by a fan page on the site entitled "Delete a Friend Week," the campaign, as of this writing, boasts 2,266 fans. "This fall, fall out of touch with seven of your most annoying friends. Starting Sept. 1st, join us in deleting seven Facebook friends who drive you nuts," reads the fan page. "Maybe it's that they never comment or maybe it's because they write posts that are 19 paragraphs. Let us know what made you decide to delete them as well." The fact that joining a Facebook page while unfriending friends is akin to taking seven steps forward and one step back in terms of managing one's online relationships hasn't seemed to bother the "movement's" adherents. The call to post one's reasons for dropping people is the campaign's secret weapon: it provides a forum to justify what others might construe as an antisocial act. One can cut a cretin with a clear conscious by posting that one has tired of "those people who post about their 'awesome' mac & cheese" as one woman wrote. Participants aren't so much cutting friends, however, as redirecting their energies to another corner of Facebook's walled garden while bolstering a marketing company's portfolio. That the gauge of Know Me Social Media Marketing's success lies within a body count of ended online relationships is not as peculiar as the fact that it has been so embraced prior to its official launch next week. It's a queasy catharsis, for sure, but "digital dharma" has yet to enter the dictionary. Alas, "frenemy" already has. Unfriend me here.
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14 Aug 2010

The Wheel of 4Chan
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Online community gets spin from Fox to Anonymous
For some, like Fox News, the online community known as "4chan" is a terrorist training camp. For others, including a growing cadre of Sonoma County teens—particularly those who are male, live with their parents and are practiced in navigating the backwaters of the web—4chan is a graffiti-tagged playground where the proverbial soapboxes of free speech are stacked like an endless game of Jenga. "It depends on where you go," said an 18-year-old Sonoma man, who, like the de facto identity setting when one logs on to 4chan.org, prefers to remain anonymous. "Some places are the armpit of the internet; other places are a great place to share information, photos and generally waste time."

In its current iteration, the board offers little more in the way of user interface than the assiduously utilitarian Craigslist. Though 4chan may look like a reliquary for ancient HTML code, it functions as the primordial soup from which many of the internet's memes erupt virally into public consciousness, from Rick-rolling (punking people with cloaked links to a certain Rick Astley video) to "LOL cats," photos of kitties captioned with poor grammar (and later the cornerstone of a media empire launched Ben Huh, who was featured here in May). Like much of the internet's quirkier mutations, 4chan was birthed in the bedroom of a 15-year-old high school student. It's putative father, the now 22-year-old Christopher Poole, who uses the online handle "moot," sought to create an American version of the popular Japanese board, Futaba Channel, which itself was an offshoot of 2channel, another Japanese site thought to be the largest online forum in the world. 4chan offers a bevy of forum topics, from Japanese culture and creative pursuits (origami, art criticism, fashion) to weapons and the paranormal and, predictably, most shades of pornography, animated and otherwise. As with any community, 4chan has its own culture and protocols with different permutations for each topic forum. It even has an orientation procedure of a sort. According to the Sonoma teen, most people begin their 4chan odyssey in a forum simply called "/B/." "If you're in /B/, you're probably an immature asshole. Most people who start out in /B/ are about between the ages of 11 and 18, like my age, and it can go higher and lower, but it doesn't really matter," the teen explained. "It's just the way it works—it's like your growing-up period. It's that stage of puberty." It follows then that one's online pubescence comes besotted with juvenile humor, especially as regards the use of one's identity. "If you put a name in the name field, you're called 'name fag,' which most users don't mind. They're usually not douche bags or people who are likely to get flamed," explained the Sonoman, who made ample apologies for the board's use of hate language. First timers are advised to "lurk," online parlance for lingering in a forum and absorbing its ethos before eventually daring to post something. The blowback for not respecting the culture of a board can result in an online tongue-lashing or worse. Some 4chan participants, under the loose moniker "Anonymous" (what else?), have allegedly organized campaigns of harassment against organizations and individuals that have raised its ire. Last month, the group virtually shut Gawker.com down, swamping the massive aggregate's servers. Last spring, Brian Mettenbrink of Nebraska was sentenced to a year in federal prison and ordered to pay $20,000 in restitution to the Church of Scientology after being convicted of participating in such cyber-attacks. Other allegations have been lobbed at the group, which isn't so much an organized body as a highly motivated evolutionary offshoot of crowd-sourcing. Perhaps someday their collective energies will further coalesce and spring new variations on activism, protest or even candidacy. Until then, as the Sonoman explained, "We're basically the quintessential geek culture, you know." But it's the geeks who shall inherit the earth.
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7 Mar 2010

And the Tweet goes to…
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Oscars & Twitter: A Cast of Thousands but only 140 Characters

Come February of every year, scads of entertainment journalists engage in a ritual peculiar to their beat. They apply for press credentials to cover the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Academy Awards. An awards ceremony for motion pictures presented on television epitomizes traditional media. If the gold statuette was wrapped in newspaper like a fish, perhaps the event could be even more quaintly 20th century. Despite its antiquarian trappings, this year Oscar is poised at the nexus of traditional and social media. In addition to the usual questions used to vet journos' credibility in the online credential application, a new query appears: "Tell us about how we can find you online—blogs, Twitter, Facebook, other social media platforms." Social media like Twitter have been a boon for journalists, and not merely for those upgrading their bylines to brand names. (The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism cited the "personal branding" of journalists online as a major trend in its State of the News Media Report for 2009.) Social media tools have also enabled journalists laboring under repressive regimes to bypass censors and transmit reportage to the world, if only at 140 characters at a time.

For some media critics, freedom of the press coupled with free blogging services have resulted in either a free-for-all or a free fall. Consider the so-called citizen journalists, whose training consists of little more than glossing the "Terms of Service" agreement on a video-sharing site and who routinely break stories via social media. In an era when an anonymously posted YouTube video depicting the death of 26-year-old Iranian activist can put those who produced it in the company of New York Times and New Yorker reporters when winning journalism's prestigious George Polk Award, the redefining of what a journalist is must be under way. In its own way, the Academy Communications Department, which dispenses Oscar credentials, has contributed to this process. In short, professional journalists are now expected to have a social media presence—just like the amateurs. ABC, which broadcast the Oscars this Sunday, has yet to reveal an official policy regarding tweeting at the Oscars, whether that be by journalists, attendees or even nominees (Up in the Air director Jason Reitman seems to be the only nominee with an active Twitter account). Rival network NBC, however, has had to contend with the social media factor head-on as some of its current XXI Olympic Winter Games broadcasts are released on taped delay; it is hopeless to prevent medal results from being tweeted to the world. There is, as yet, no such thing as a tweet-delay, though the Iranians are surely working on one. The International Olympic Committee speaks to this, in part, with its "IOC Blogging Guidelines for Persons Accredited at the XXI Olympic Winter Games, Vancouver 2010," a four-page document intended to police the social media habits of accredited attendees. "It is required that, when Accredited Persons at the Games post any Olympic Content, it be confined solely to their own personal Olympic-related experience," it states, suggesting that no news is good news, but writing of one's aspiration to appear on a box of Wheaties is acceptable. Moreover, "the IOC considers blogging, in accordance with these guidelines, as a legitimate form of personal expression and not as a form of journalism." Micro-blogging, fittingly, was addressed via tweet on the Olympics' official Twitter account where athletes were encouraged to share the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat: "Athletes go ahead and tweet, as long as it's about your personal experience at the games." As a live event, the Oscars have little fear of its winners being revealed prior to some celebrity saying, "The envelope, please." At worst, entertainment journalists will offer a deluge of online snark, which they will later recapitulate online, in print and wherever else news goes to die. If Oscar winners tweeted their acceptance speech à la "You like me, you really like me. #Oscar," that might warrant a re-tweet or two. But, alas, no.
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