technosociology

I wanted to like the Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains” a lot more than I did. I was excited that the book started with referencing Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, two intellectuals who I believe deserve much  more attention as we grapple with the Internet’s impacts, and by comparing the current shift to the transition from orality to literacy, which I think is the apt comparison.

I think the real story might be a bimodal distribution in which some people benefit greatly from the riches of engaged conversation on the Web while others find themselves subject to even more passive consumption in the mode of television, since, surely, the Internet also delivers that experience.

I am really hoping for more discussions of the shaping power of technology. I’ve heard many people, especially in academia, state that “it’s not the technology, it’s what you do with technology.” I think that is a fallacy understatement. Especially among academics there is a strong desire not to be seen as adherents of “technodeterminism,” the idea that technology shapes or strongly influences societies. Instead, many academics have adopted what is called a social-constructionist approach that privileges user agency.

I disagree. I do think technologies have strong impacts. While social constructionist view definitely has a point and people are not empty vessels at complete whims of technology, I do agree that, as Carr puts it, every technology carries with it an “intellectual ethic” that exert strong influence on patterns of learning, discussion, debate and knowledge. You simply do not have the same society, same relations of power, and same options after the spread of the printing press and this is clearly true for the Internet. Unfortunately, Carr’s book falls short in analyzing the deep impact the spread of networked information exchange that characterize the web because it leaves out some of its key features out the discussion.

While social constructionist view definitely has a point and people are not empty vessels at complete whims of technology, I do agree that, as Carr puts it, every technology carries with it an “intellectual ethic” that exert strong influence on patterns of learning, discussion, debate and knowledge.

I will summarize key points of Car’s  argument, as I understand them, very briefly. Carr argues that uninterrupted and meditative thinking is crucial to worthy intellectual creation, and that books specifically encourage such deep thinking because they are linear and enclosed – you sit down and work through the argument. On the contrary, Carr posits, the Internet as a medium is prone to disruptions, shallow reading, surfing without understanding – it is somewhat a kin to a slot machine that keeps you engaged while essentially wasting your time. He makes a parallel argument that net surfing taxes short term memory (rather than relieving it the way pen and paper do when doing arithmetic, for example) and that discourages the brain from forming synthesized long-term memories which he believes are key to intellectual achievement.

I see three major flaws in the book. One, Carr is fundamentally underplaying the participatory and interactive nature of the Internet and the impact of that on intellectual engagement and deep thought. All evidence suggests that many more people are reading, writing and crucially responding to each other a lot more since the advent of the Internet. That said, it’s possible that the impacts Carr is talking about may be more visible on some portions of the population –especially kids– who may end up spending a lot more hours consuming video and gaming on the Internet, especially if parents let children have their own unmonitored use of computer (similar to allowing a TV in a child’s bedroom).  I think the real story might be a bimodal distribution in which some people benefit greatly from the riches of engaged conversation while others find themselves subject to even more passive consumption in the mode of television, since, surely, the Internet also delivers that experience. However, there isn’t that much of that discussion in the book and more examples of people like him who I think are, frankly, the wrong target for this concern.  Second, his argument from brain science is very weak. If you don’t disagree that neuroplasticity does not shut down in early childhood and that our brains get better at things they practice a lot, there isn’t much more there. It’s not completely his fault as the science is where it is, but why try to hang so much of the argument there? It isn’t even necessary, in my opinion, to his point. Third, he talks at length about how exteriorizing our memory to computers will come at great cost to us. Carr proceeds to explain how many people (including, famously, Socrates) thought writing and the printing press would do just that (which, indeed, they did), with similar predictions of negative consequences for thinking which did not come true, but this time they will because … and he lost me. The only argument I could see was that the Internet somehow has a different effect on short term memory which causes knowledge not to be transferred to long-term memory. However, everywhere I look, I see people who know a lot more about a broad range of topics and I simply need real evidence for this claim. Such a strong claim needs to be based on empirics based on people, not studies of what mice remember or how we perform very artificial tasks when distracted. I agree that we should study this.

Carr is fundamentally underplaying the participatory and interactive nature of the Internet and the impact of that on intellectual engagement and deep thought. All evidence suggests that more people are reading, writing and crucially responding to each other a lot more since the advent of the Internet.

Primarily, the book has little discussion regarding the engaged, participatory side of the web. As Carr points out, reading a book is so intellectually productive in so far as it forces you to engage the author in your own mind. Indeed, being distracted by irrelevant interruptions while reading a book is likely harmful to such engagement. However, being distracted by barking dogs while reading a book is very different than being distracted by links in the article while reading it on the web. The hyperlinks Carr so laments are not irrelevant distractions; rather, they are invitations to engage the topic further and deeper.

As Carr points out, the best books invite us into a conversation with the author — and the Internet is the superb medium for such conversation! Everywhere on the web, you see sustained exchanges of ideas, information, tidbits, big discussions, informal talk. If anything, the Internet has clearly expanded the number of people who can participate in the kind of intellectual inquiry that used to be the domain of the few. His point is that deciding to click on each link taxes our memory and distracts us. Perhaps. But it also draws us into lively intellectual waters and that is not acknowledged.

Clearly, Carr has a point about the irrelevant distractions and that issue does need to be addressed better, and software will likely be a part of the solution (such as Fred Stutzman’s “Freedom” software suite which alternatively turns of social Internet or all of Internet for prescribed periods of time to guard against distractions). Unfortunately, Carr spends a lot of time attacking the very part of the Internet, its networked, linked and participatory nature that makes it intellectually richer, not poorer.

Which brings me to another common complaint which Carr does not highlight as much but which I have been hearing more often lately. What about all the “crap” on the Internet? The silly cat pictures, the trivial Twitter updates, the banal Facebook postings, the million Youtube videos of pets, kids, household accidents, pranks, etc.? Surely, that is evidence of intellectual decline?

That, my dear friends, is called humanity. That’s what humans do. We are a deeply social species and we engage in “social grooming” all the time, i.e. acts that have no particular informational importance but are about connecting, forming, displaying and strengthening bonds, affirming and challenging status, creating alliances, gossiping, exchanging tidbits about rhythms of life. I personally doubt that there is substantially more social grooming going on today, on average, compared to the pre-Internet era. The only difference is that the Internet makes it visible. What used to be spoken is now written and published potentially for the world to see. That’s it. There isn’t more or less of it. What has happened has resulted in the shuffling of the traditional understandings of private and the public, and as such, it has enormous consequences but it does not signal that we are dumbing down. We were always this dumb.

Further, I believe Carr is misunderstanding the point people make about using the Internet as an “outboard brain” as when he quotes Clive Thompson saying how he has “given up an effort to remember anything,” since he can always retrieve the information online. He quotes a bunch more people saying a similar thing. All the people he quotes in this regard with whom I am familiar are superb intellectuals! I had the opportunity to have a lengthy conversation with Clive Thompson last month and he managed to talk for couple of hours without stopping to look up anything. We had a couple of “oh, yeah, what was the author of that study” moments where we both wanted to dive for a laptop but what Clive and others clearly mean is that it is easier concentrate on developing complex thoughts if one has easy access to broad range of information. Once again, I believe that Carr is taking a feature of the Internet that actually strengthens one’s ability to intellectually deepen and painting it as a force towards the shallows.

In fact, that’s the main weakness of Carr’s book. It is mainly about how intellectuals, like him, are more finding themselves less deeply engaged because of the Internet. Yet, the people he talks about are part of the richest conversations that humanity has ever been able to have in such a broad manner! Imagine how many of us have blogged about Carr’s book. This is a conversation with perhaps thousands, if not tens of thousands of writers and many more readers! What would deep look like to him?

Would having to hold more information in our heads help us develop better arguments and deeper thoughts? By that logic, clearly, pre-writing era should have had more intellectualism. I think Carr needs to separate his argument about “deep reading” from the argument about the benefits of “having to keep more things in one’s memory.” I think the former is a real issue while the latter is not supported by much evidence I can see.

And I’m genuinely curious how many people read this long essay all the way through and how many people just glanced at its length and surrendered to Tweetdeck’s beckoning!

Speaking of evidence, I really was not impressed by the brain studies on mice and monkeys. I don’t doubt that distracted mice have harder time out of mazes. That hardly helps me understand the impact of the Internet. This is not Carr’s fault per se as this is a very difficult topic to study neuro-physiologically but to me, that means, that he should make his case without requiring this line argument. This part reminded me how it has become de rigueur in serious court cases, like capital-murder cases, to mount a phsyical-brain defense as juries seem to be most compassionate to “he had blunt trauma to his head” rather than “he was repeatedly abused by his parents.” As a society, we are least favorable to sociological arguments, slightly more favorable to psychological ones and most enamored of more directly biological stories. (Genes for risk-taking! Brain-food! A disorder for everything!). However, as often is the case, when you see the real level of brain science, you realize that it is not yet very helpful in figuring out complex phenomenon. (I think such science is valuable, fascinating and will likely yield better insights with time but I think we are far away from a point where we can point to brain scans as evidence for anything as complicated as the features of our intellectual milieu).

Let me conclude by saying that the issues he raises –attention in face of distractions, dealing with information in text that do not have traditional boundaries (beginning-middle-end) and sense of enclosure, entrusting more and more of our judgment to automated systems, and in general, the profound shift that is taking place in our intellectual life are very worthy topics. I think Carr deserves credit for his contribution to the conversation. A good polemic is always a worthy spark. I just wish it was a deeper polemic based on broader, more solid evidence that considered all the aspects of intellectual life in the Internet era.

And I’m genuinely curious how many people read this long essay all the way through and how many people just glanced at its length and surrendered to Tweetdeck’s beckoning!

I suspect the number will not be too high but still it will likely be orders of magnitude higher than if I had published this in an academic journal available only in print, left to gather dust in a few libraries, with only proof of its existence a line on my vita…

I am going to be speaking at the following event in NYC at the Austrian Cultural Forum (11 E. 52nd St.):

Panel: 1984 Today, Tomorrow. Surveillance, Privacy and Human Rights, seen from Media and Social Sciences perspectives

My co-panelists are: Michael Freund, senior research professor at Webster University Vienna and editor and writer for the austrian daily newspaper Der Standard, Steve Lohr, author as well as reporter for the New York Times,and Matthias Karmasin, professor and chair for media and communications at the University of Klagenfurt.

I am very much looking forward to this event! New York is one of my favorite cities in the world (after Istanbul) and the topic of the panel is really close to my heart and my research!

There is a growing debate about whether people should leave Facebook and whether there should be government regulation. I’d like to argue that it is very difficult for most people to leave Facebook three reasons: network externalities, social norms and technical competence. Network externalities, which I discuss below, means that the first to become a standard has an enormous advantage that can make it very hard for competitors. Plus, I believe that users of sites such as Facebook, Google, and even Ebay, Amazon, Craigslist and Wikipedia (a non-profit), have solid  reasons they can make moral, legal and perhaps even regulatory claims on these companies. Such companies exist by the virtue of the work their users have put in without monetary compensation. Also, they deal with often intimate personal information that deserves protection irrespective of claims about ownership.

Network externalities is economist-speak for the tendency of the value of certain types of products or services to increase as more people use them. The more people own fax machines, for example, the more useful each one becomes. That is also why there is a single standard for fax machines — would you switch to a brand new, faster fax machine standard if there was nobody else you could fax with your machine? Research shows that the presence of network externalities trumps product preference or quality; many people will chose a service that has more users compared to the one that is otherwise better for them. Such platforms, such as Facebook, tend to quickly dominate their market and become near-monopolies. This is also why everyone lists their wares on Ebay, where all the buyers are, and advertises on Google, where all the eyeballs go. The fact that a lot of people already have Facebook accounts means that considerations of network externalities will result in existing people staying put, or new people joining in anyway, even if they have qualms about the privacy issues.

People understand this. In my research, I asked many young adults why they are on Facebook if it causes so much trouble. “Because everyone else is.” Many people have laboriously constructed networks of far-flung friends, family, school-mates and colleagues and can count on others to find them on Facebook.

Facebook is a social norm in many settings, especially among young adults and increasingly among other groups. On a typical college campus not having a Facebook profile is tantamount to going around with a bag over your face; it can be done, but at significant social cost.

Also, while the tech-elite don’t have any problems up-and-moving to a new social network or tool, for many people, there are steep investment costs to mastering one more application. I don’t think that most people in the chattering classes who tend to be tech-savvy understand how little competence most people have in navigating their computer or the web. I am not blaming them; it is not a user-friendly environment. It takes time, effort and familiarity and most people don’t have either. This contributes to the issue of network externalities. Plus, I think most people are not aware of the implications of the privacy settings and how visible their information may be. And, really, why should they? For most people, the  privacy settings are not that relevant (or easy to understand) until something goes wrong — and then it is too late.

Network externalities mean that whoever becomes established first has a huge advantage, as a critical mass of users pull in others in a positive-feedback loop. Early users often choose sites that offer a solid product and reasonable terms, and so the initial “terms-of-service acts” as an implicit social contract. It is this social contract that is being broken, and that is not okay.

Initially, Facebook had a reasonable, and transparent, privacy policy. But the frequent unilateral changes have forced a great deal of information to be visible and created tedious and difficult-to-use privacy controls. This bait-and-switch tactic is one reason many are so upset.

Exposure online has real costs; more than half the subjects in my research on online sociality report negative consequences, including job loss and stalking, from social-network profile information finding its way to unintended audiences. And that is the tip of the iceberg as my respondents were reporting only on what they knew. Some describe spending an hour a day to make sure that nothing untoward –an unwelcome photo, an explicit comment on a wall — is seen by the wrong pair of eyes.

In a nutshell, Facebook is the new social commons, at least as important for fostering social interaction as the office water-cooler or the neighborhood park. This controversy reminds us that we must deal as a society with the fact that our commons has moved online and into privately-owned domains.

It is time to stop telling people “don’t share anything online if you don’t want the world to see it” or dismiss all concerns by reminding people that having an account is voluntary, as Facebook recently did. That simply won’t do as it is unfair, unrealistic and misses the larger point about human sociality. Sociality is a core human need not easily abandoned. Being able to socialize is both a need and a right. And the larger point is that increasingly, we socialize online.

People do want to share information online, but not necessarily with the whole world but with their own chosen audiences of friends, family, and acquaintances. Given that ample research shows the importance of robust social networks to health, well-being, longevity, economic achievement, civic life and a healthy democracy, it is time to stop treating the infrastructure of sociality as a mere commodity controlled by the whims, and profit motives, of large corporations.

Users of sites like Facebook (Google and YouTube are other examples) provide valuable infrastructure that captures and monetizes work its users put in, be it in terms of rich social data or search keywords or auction items or video production. Users of these sites are “prosumers,” who produce as well as consume; as co-creators of these sites, they have a strong moral claim to treatment with respect and to a role in determining the rules by which they operate.

Finally, ownership does not provide a blank check to freely do what one wants with personal and often quite intimate information. The European Union already has regulation, and other countries may follow suit. In other spheres, U.S. law also recognizes that dignity trumps property rights; in most states, tenants in rented dwellings have a right to privacy which landlords are not allowed to violate at will. Why can’t we have such rights in our online dwellings?

For now, Facebook should follow the lead of Google and roll back all its changes, offering them as options to be chosen freely. But even if companies do the right thing, it’s past time for a broader social discussion about our rights in the new digital commons.

Do people have any grounds to complain about the latest changes to the rules of publicness of various elements of a Facebook profile? Or is the only legitimate response “love-it or leave-it?”

Lately, Facebook has been pushing a dual strategy of “public-or-nothing” with some profile elements and “public-by-default and good-luck-figuring-out-the-settings” with others.  Some influential industry analysts and Facebook’s own publicity officer have taken a “nobody is twisting your arm to use Facebook; leave if you don’t like it” approach.

The correct analogy to the current situation would be if tenants had no rights to privacy in their homes because they happen to be renting the walls and doors. This week, you are allowed to close the door but, oops, we changed the terms-of-service.

At face value, it seems like a fair point. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Facebook or any other online social network service. At most, it seems, we have a right to complain about obscure terms-of-service and demand for better language and better heads-up of changes. At most, the strongest demand that is seen as legitimate seems to be that we should be allowed to opt-in.

I argue that this is too limited a view. We have to stop looking at the “Facebook – lone individual” transaction and look at what’s going on at the systemic level. This isn’t just about Facebook, either. This is about the fact that increasing portions of our sociality are now conducted in privately-owned spaces. The implications of this are still playing out.

The latest developments appear to be the next stage to the historical trend of privatization of our publics. Examples of those include the dominance of corporate-owned media over the civic public sphere, outsourcing of many government functions to less-accountable contractors including some aspects of war, increasing reduction of our public spaces to malls and privately-owned town-squares, such as downtown Silver Spring, MD where first-amendment does not apply, etc.

What is currently happening is the privatization of our privates, not just our publics. And this is not a mere question of legality but a lack of legal protections being carried over to a new medium. In some sense, this parallels the lack of carrying of wiretap protections on the phone to the Internet – the social relations did not change but the medium changed allowing for a gap in legal protections.

The correct analogy to the current situation would be if tenants had no rights to privacy in their homes because they happen to be renting the walls and doors. This week, you are allowed to close the door but, oops, we changed the terms-of-service. No more closed doors! You had locks last week but we don’t allow them as of this week. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Further, it is as if all the housing in the major city with the jobs was owned by a single company so the choice was either leave that town or surrender control over your private life. “Don’t like it, leave!” the bosses of the company town (and other people in positions of privilege would say.) And shake their heads over the inability of people to read the terms-of-service on their ever-changing lease. The value of Facebook is that people have created their networks through its infrastructure, and they have done so with the understanding that the network would be under their control because that is what Facebook said initially. Instead, all of a sudden, they’ve found themselves in a company town. This cannot be a viable strategy, ethically or commercially.

There is a reason the law recognizes the right of the tenant to privacy within her home regardless of ownership. People are not businesses, sociality is not a mere transaction, and our social interactions are more than opportunities for monetization.

There are four key points to the infrastructure of sociality:

1- Being social is not optional. It is a core human need and a requirement for being a part of society. It is legitimate to argue that the infrastructure of sociality cannot be just about priorities of businesses and intricacies of ownership.

2- Every society has “commons” – shared infrastructure that makes it possible for the society as a whole to function. Internet is now a part of that commons in general and many social applications such as Facebook are part of the “social commons.” That is why Facebook, the corporation, is so valuable and people who own it are very rich. It would not be wise of them to ignore that fact.

3- These commons function to the degree that they do because they are shared. You cannot merely withdraw because the value is in the network. Thus, claims of ownership of the network cause tension because of the dual-nature of this network: it is created by the people and consists of the people while the infrastructure is privately controlled. Currently, the infrastructure-owners want to claim primary control. That is the tension we are witnessing.

4- The “transaction between parties” approach is not illuminating because first, the transaction is not between equals. Power has to enter into this analysis. Further, people do have a claim to the network because they created it. Facebook wants all the control because it owns the infrastructure.

Historically, the private sphere tended to be intimate/hidden/personal while the public sphere was civic/visible/impersonal. The internet has shuffled those distinctions quite radically in ways that are too long to explore in one already-too-long blog post. Our cultural toolkit, the ways we know how to act, regulate, maintain and explore those boundaries, has not caught up to the new reality. Sociologists talk about primary (intimate, core, face-to-face) and secondary (larger groups) social relations. While the second may involve a larger audience, they are both still delimited. Facebook is forcing elements of that sociality to be effectively globally-public.

As a society, we understand that ownership of infrastructure does not constitute a blank check to publicize and monetize private interactions. We should carry over that principle to new technologies because what matters is our social contract, not whether the interaction now takes place over silicon and wire instead of through sound and air.

Should shopping malls have the right to surreptitiously record every word you say to the person you are with and sell it to whomever? Do they have a right to put cameras in the lavatories? Do tenants have a right to privacy? If I am on a bus, or a train, or business, or anywhere that I do not own, have I forfeited all rights and expectations of control over my words and interactions? Indeed, law recognizes that the fundamental dignity of the person means that we do not just surrender those rights in privately-owned spaces. Facebook should recognize and honor those principles.

Can Facebook still make money? Sure. I believe there are many ways that Facebook could monetize the work that its 400 millions have put into its system without trampling over the basic social contract.

Ultimately, I think they are the biggest threat to themselves because affordances of the Internet do mean that people could self-organize and take the network elsewhere with a lot more ease than Facebook seems to think. I suspect Facebook is betting that people have too much invested in their profiles. It may well be true at the moment but Facebook would be wise, commercially and ethically, to keep in mind the ease with which cascades can self-organize in networks.

My co-author Nathan Jurgenson and I submitted a paper to First Monday assessing the potential impact of the iPad. We co-wrote this article after being similarly  startled by the turn to the old ways of consumption that the iPad seemed to represent. (We had both independently blogged about this days after the original the launch in January). I’ve noticed that other commentators have made similar points and there seems to be a growing debate about what this means for the future of the Internet.

I’m posting our abstract below*. If you would like a copy of the full paper, drop me a line at zeynep at umbc.edu.

The iPad: The “Jesus Tablet” and the Resurrection of Consumer Society

Apple’s much-discussed iPad fits squarely within the logic of consumer society and is directly opposed to the logic of the participatory Web, or Web 2.0, and the logic of prosumption, whereby users produce that which they consume. Instead of prosumer society’s focus on active participation, diminishing corporate control and a trend towards free products and services, the iPad channels passive consumption, corporate control via “closed” systems and a renewed focus on traditional, top-down “paid” media. The iPad is engineered to enforce this passivity, for example through lack of a tactile keyboard, and facilitates it most fundamentally by way of spectacle, in the sense of theorists of consumer society like Baudrillard, DeBord and Ritzer.  The iPad is indicative of Apple’s Disneyfied approach which attempts to create a “walled garden” that seeks to enchant while monetizing more and more of the interactions within the system.

*  Since First Monday is single-blind this does not violate peer review.

My paper on who makes new friends through social media got accepted to the 4th  International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. The full paper, Who Acquires Friends Through Social Media and Why? “Rich Get Richer” versus “Seek and Ye Shall Find,” can be found here.

In this study, I examined whether acquiring new friends through online interaction fit a “Rich get Richer” or a “Social Compensation” model. In other words, are the naturally gregarious making new friends online, or does the Internet allow the introverted catch-up? According to my data, neither seems to be the case. The odds of making new friends online is not related to being in either group.  On the other hand, the population in my study was almost evenly divided between those who absolutely must look someone in the eye, directly, before they can feel a connection and those who feel the opportunity to communicate without the burdens of appearance to be liberating and more conducive to bonding. It was people with that latter disposition who were more likely to make new friends online, and whether one was in this group was simply not related to number of friends in the offline world.  Thus, “Seek and Ye Shall Find.” As I said in my abstract:

This study contradicts the idea that people who are more social offline are more social online, as well as the notion that it is only the social misfits who use social media to make new friends as there was no difference in the number of offline friends between those who made new friends online and those who did not.

The quality of social interaction over the Internet seems always to give rise to heated debate. It’s clear that a lot of people find mediated communication to be lacking. On the other hand, the way we live now necessitates that a good portion of our sociality is not conducted face-to-face. Obviously, This is not a 21st century phenomenon either. It starts with the earliest separation of the message from the messenger: writing. Plato famously lamented the invention of the  writing as complained that  ”once a thing is put in writing, it rolls about all over the place, falling into the hands of those who have no concern with it.”  He found written material to be  a “ghost” of the original, devoid of the “genuine knowledge in the soul of the learner.”  Indeed, you cannot look a sentence in the eye. Or, can we? We have millennia of passionate, soulful, brilliant writing that evokes awe and deep feelings among generation after generation of readers.

This study contradicts the idea that people who are more social offline are more social online, as well as the notion that it is only the social misfits who use social media to make new friends as there was no difference in the number of offline friends between those who made new friends online and those who did not.

With those questions in mind, I conducted a survey which asked 817 students whether they thought one could become friends with someone they met online, and also whether they themselves had made a friend that way. I also asked  about their offline sociality — how many friends they regularly spent time with.  I asked them, qualitatively, to expand upon their answers because I wanted to go beyond the yes/no dichotomy.

The results were quite surprising. First about half the population thinks it is possible to make online friends, while the other half strongly disagrees. This was a rolling sample lasting a little more than a year and the proportion was remarkably stable from semester to semester, suggesting a stable trait. And making friends online was not correlated with offline sociality, i.e. how many friends a person had in the physical world. Unsurprisingly, amount of time on the Internet in general did not matter, but amount of time on social networking sites did.  With the exception of race, which I will talk about in a moment, what mattered most was whether people believed in the possibility of such friendships. And best I can tell, this wasn’t just a post-hoc effect either, i.e. people who found such friendships then developing this belief as only 10 percent of the “believers” indicated having witnessed such friendships as the reason for their conviction. Analysis of the reasons why people felt the way they did revealed some fascinating results. Potential for deceit and lack of face-to-face communication was the main turn-off for the “doubters.” That much is unsurprising.  However, I found the reasons brought up by the “believers” in online friendship to be very interesting. They mostly emphasized that lack of face-to-face communication made for better, deeper connections. This harkens back to a theory developed by Joe Walther called hyperpersonal communication. Basically, Walther argued that the lack of visual cues and immediate co-presence can be a plus for developing intimacy. We are not distracted by appearances, we can give the benefit of the doubt to the other person, we can reflect and be more thoughtful in our self-presentation, and we thus can find ourselves in a virtuous cycle where we can bond more easily with the other person. As I said in my paper:

Those who emphasized the “hyperpersonal” characteristics of online sociality did not appear to view them as either inferior or as substitutes for lack of offline skills, but rather as a form of communication that spotlighted a different kind of interaction, one based on conversation and sharing of thoughts rather than being judged on physical appearances. Although many online interactions include awareness of physical appearance through pictures, it seems that the word can be more important when physical copresence is not an option. The prevalence of responses indicating the “hyperpersonal” nature of cyberspace as an affordance of close friendship suggests that this factor has not faded from importance even though the Internet has changed greatly since it was first proposed by Walther (1996). The results indicate that that some young people are still looking for refuge from the demands of physical appearance and are seeking to make deep connections through conversations. On the other hand, there is a group of people who absolutely cannot imagine intimacy or close social interactions unless they are regularly in the corporeal copresence of the other person.

Well, plus ça change… The Internet has changed dramatically since Walther’s original 1996 paper, but it seems that for some, mediated sociality retains its character of being a refuge from demands of appearance and remains a place for more thoughtful, considered interaction. So, rather than a rich get richer or social compensation, it seems that making friends online is just … different.

Finally, the only other variable that jumped out in my analyses was whether the respondent was an African-American. All else equal, Black students were a lot more likely acquire new online friends compared to their White counterparts.  (I ran logistic regressions so I am controlling for variables such as age, gender, time spent online, time spent on social networking sites, years they have been on the Internet, number of offline friends — this is an all-else-equals model). Since I don’t know the character of these new friends, I can’t really be sure what’s going on but it is certainly intriguing.  Are Black people more likely to use new media to connect with other Black people they otherwise don’t know? Given the continuing dominance of spatial segregation in the United States, could this be a way to diversify one’s network? I can’t tell from just this data.

I will present my paper at the 4th ICWSM conference on May 24th. I am definitely looking forward to talking about all these issues and get feedback and ideas from my co-panelists and the audience.

While many people are understandably upset that Google Buzz was implemented through an opt-out process, and with auto-follow (email contacts as followers unless explicitly unfollowed), I would like to argue that there is a bigger, underlying issue that would not be solved if Google had introduced an opt-in feature: our social commons on the Internet are now mostly corporate controlled. It would certainly be preferable if decent privacy controls were implemented but this would be an individual-level solution and would not avoid the systemic issue as most people would, reasonably, not bother with fine-tuned privacy controls. The sum of individual actions, however, creates a consequence at the societal level which can be quite undesirable. And that is why Google’s CEO Mark Schmidt’s statement that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” just does not address the issue at all.” (Besides, who wants everything they do to be known by everyone? That is not the same as having secrets that must be guarded at all costs).

the totality of these interactions creates a tragedy of commons – actions that may be reasonable  for individuals creates an environment which has dramatic consequences for everyone. In our case, the consequence we are headed for is a world of near-complete surveillance of everyday actions that is searchable, permanent and public.

Many online environments (Facebook, now it seems Google) force an architecture that allows for meaningful participation only if you play by rules that are designed for maximizing profit, not optimum social and personal interaction. Most users go with the flow and use the system as designed even if it is possible to change the settings. For most people, most of the time, that does not create major issues (even while creating dramatic consequences for few), but the totality of these interactions creates a tragedy of commons – actions that may be reasonable for individuals creates an environment which has dramatic consequences for everyone. In our case, the consequence we are headed for is  a world of near-complete surveillance of everyday actions that is searchable, permanent and public. We are slowly but surely creeping into this world and it is high time for a serious public discussion to take place.

The answer cannot be: well, people who are unhappy shouldn’t use those services. Presence on the Internet is effectively a requirement for fully and effectively participating in the 21st century as a citizen, as a consumer, as an informed person and as a social being. Further, many such services are natural monopolies: Google, Ebay, Facebook, Amazon, all benefit greatly from network externalities which means that the more people on the service, the more useful it is for everyone. This makes it very hard for a market leader to be challenged. (Wikipedia is also such a natural monopoly but it is not corporate controlled).

Facebook or Google are optional in the sense that electricity, telephone, modern medicine are optional. Don’t like the medical establishment? Don’t use antibiotics! Don’t like how deregulated electricity markets are run? Well, don’t use electricity! Hey, solar panels are available. Telling people to opt-out of major streams of sociality, information and markets on the Internet makes almost as much sense. While I’ll readily concede the urgency of antibiotics differs from the urgency of social interaction, sociality is a fundamental part of being. It is not optional. It is not a coincidence that solitary confinement is the most severe legal punishment –short of the death penalty—that is legally imposed on people.

The next argument is: well, use an alternative service! That too is as valid as telling people to use a different cable company or an electric utility if they don’t like the current one. In most markets, there is only one or two such utilities, and for good reason. The investment in laying cables and connecting doors is large enough that most markets cannot support multiple, truly alternative services. Similarly, especially in the lives of young people, Facebook acts like a phone directory used to and opting out of Facebook during college would significantly constrain social options for many. Facebook has become de facto social commons, especially in college but now has spread to other cohorts. It takes effort to maintain a profile and people are unlikely to duplicate that effort in multiple services the same way multiple electric companies don’t put down parallel cables to each neighbor to compete with each other. Google is such an environment for searching and for many people who do not have an institutionally-supplied email account they can freely use for personal matters, Gmail makes a lot of sense.

The trick is that architecture matters in shaping social interaction. Anyone who has taken a class in a lecture classroom where everyone faced the teacher versus a seminar classroom where you sat around a table can tell the difference the organization of space makes. In online environments, the architecture of the space is the design and the terms-of-service — in the sense Lawrence Lessig argues. Design choices constrain and structure sociality. For example, profitability often goes along with maximum visibility which is what many corporations are pushing, from Facebook’s recent changes to Google’s Buzz.

Let me explain the issue from a non-online example. Why do lots of teenagers hang out at the mall? Because in modern cities, there are few other alternatives, and once some kids start hanging out at there, the mall becomes the place to see and to be seen so others also hang out at the mall. Soon, it’s the place to be. Schools have very little time in the schedule for socializing and are highly controlled spaces. Homes have parents in them; hardly need to explain why that’s not so attractive to teens. Also, homes can only hold so many people at a time. You can’ talk or eat at the library. The park, if you have one nearby, is rarely designed for hanging out (some places like Central Park in New York are obvious, wonderful exceptions). Corporatized culture and brands are already deeply integrated into the adolescent experience. So you go to the mall.

The problem with the mall is that it is a controlled environment designed explicitly to sell you crap commodities. It encourages shopping, browsing for future shopping and  eating crap Mccrap. You will not see protestors or homeless people because they would be quickly escorted out as you would be trespassing on corporate private property. You will not see ads for local small business or a used car on the bulletin boards. Nobody will strum a guitar or have a drum circle; you will instead be subject to crap muzak piped through loudspeakers. Nothing that interferes with the shopping experience will be allowed and everything will be designed to entice you to shop.

I am not saying all those things that won’t be there are always great, or always worth preserving. I’m just saying they won’t be there because this is a controlled environment. And increasingly, such private malls are also becoming the main outdoor spaces available to hang out. Downtown Silver Spring in D.C. is such an example. It feels like a town square except it’s not. It’s all privately owned, even the streets, and it is the only such space within many miles. Hence, on many weekends, you can find hundreds of people who go there to hang out and not realize they are in a privately-owned space — even when walking on the street! Malls and corporate-owned spaces have become de facto social commons in many cities.

Such a process is now taking place online. It usually goes unnoticed until someone makes a change that causes people to realize they are not in control, like with Google Buzz or with Facebook terms-of-service changes or redesigns. Our social commons have moved online, and into corporate-controlled spaces. It is better to have opt-in and it is better to have meaningful privacy controls. However, as we see with Facebook, many people will use the system as the it is designed and that will create a particular type world. I hope the debate will move beyond fine-tuning privacy controls and also include what kind of world we are creating.

I will be giving a talk at NASA Goddard this Wednesday (February 10th). Details here.

Of course, having just received 30 inches of snow in my area over the weekend, I should rather say that I’m scheduled to give a talk! More snow is forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday. We’ll see.

UPDATE: My talk was indeed cancelled and will be rescheduled most likely for April 7th.

What does the iPad mean for the future of the Internet? I’ll leave aside how cool the screen is (I am sure it is) and how crisp the colors are (I am sure they are). The iPad strengthens two worrisome trends: the move towards a closed platform and the consumptive turn. (The closed platform has been discussed at length by Jonathan Zittrain: Read it here, or watch him make the argument here.

I’d like to instead  talk about the consumptive turn. The key here is that the iPad has no functional, integrated keyboard and it has a great crisp large screen optimized for media consumption. A keyboard can be added (or the on-screen keyboard can be used) but that is not what the device is for. It is for reading, not writing. It is for watching, not typing. As the NY Times writer noted:

“The iPad’s promise was hinted at before Mr. Jobs hit the stage. The set was dominated by a large, comfy chair. Since the birth of the personal computer, we have been hunched over, squinting at screens — great big terminals, laptop displays, tiny screens on PDAs. With the iPad, the screen has come to us as we lean back in ease.”

If the iPad becomes the primary means of accessing the Internet, many people’s participation channel will become narrower and shallower. The interface matters.

That, to me, is the core peril of the iPad. Hunched back and squinting, and uncomfortable, indeed.  That’s how Wikipedia was created. That’s how millions of people post on their blogs and write their comments on others; compose emails and go down in flame wars;  all do all the things that make the Internet such a great, messy, unhinged place for exchange of ideas, opinions and rants. That’s how it works: hunched backed, squinting, a tad uncomfortable … and typing.

Devices such as the iPad discourage participation through writing. With an iPad, you can tweet a tweet, send an “call me when you arrive” text, and look up the price of an item with ease. Those are very important and useful functions, sure.  If the iPad becomes the primary means of accessing the Internet, many people’s participation channel will become narrower and shallower.

The interface matters. Lack of a keyboard has consequences beyond aesthetics.

I am not advocating bad ergonomics. I like to sink into a comfy chair with a book (or an e-book device) as much as the next book-lover, and you will occasionally find me slouched in a couch, watching television with a rapidly diminishing bowl of snacks on the side.  That is a consumptive mindset and before the Internet, that was the most easily available way of spending free time. Over the years, as the Internet has taken over my world, I have done less and less of that and I suspect that is true for many people.  I find it hard to just consume without being able to say something. I want a keyboard nearby.
A large part of what made the Internet such a breakthrough for the public sphere that was previously dominated by one-way conversation from the powerful, the rich and the slickly-produced is the fact that interactivity through writing was built into the device that we used to access it. Computers came with keyboards, not touchscreens and not speech recognition . So, the issue is not just that typing on a screen is clunky. And I suspect soon these devices will come with speech and natural language recognition. That’s fine if you want to tell your mobile device to call home or pull up recipes for oatmeal-raisin cookies. Not so fine if you want to comment on a blog post, fire off a tirade, or write a lengthy email. Very few people can dictate as if they were writing — and often those rare types are professional writers.

Writing, especially writing at length is a different modality of thought than talking and it also allows a different kind of exchange and discourse. (I refer specially to the scholarship of Neil Postman and Walter Ong.) As Postman argues, writing and the spread of the printed word through literacy and the printing press created a culture in which it is possible to debate ideas at length and produce analytic thought which can be produced, advanced, discussed, refuted, rejected, improved and otherwise churned through the public sphere. As Postman writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death: “almost all of the characteristics we associate with the mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively, and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; and abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.” (p.63).

I’ll grant you Postman is exaggerating somewhat and all is not rosy in print-world. I’ll also grant that privileging written literacy devalues and hides the value and knowledge in the spoken domain that is often produced by the less-powerful. And, yes, there is great visual creativity on the Internet. It has been wonderful to see the world of visual talent break free from the corporate-controlled bottleneck. True, a lot of the material out there is lacking in brilliance, but as far as I’m concerned, mass-produced mediocrity is actually a sign of democratic participation, so, hurray.

However, as great as it is to see increased participation in visual means of exchange, a visual public sphere is a lacking public sphere. The visual will always be evocative, emotional and visceral compared to writing. A visual-only channel cannot sustain the kind of public sphere that could match the complexity of our world.

Besides, the iPad does not even have a camera which is really interesting. While they might add one in the future, I think this is not just an accident that they left that off when faced with space constraints.  I think the concept is not to do anything with the iPad. The iPad is an immobilizing mobile device. You sit and watch; you slouch and read; and at most, you tweet and go. It is for consuming the world through a crisp, clear screen.

As it stands, the iPad is another big step in the bookification and televisionification of the Internet. I say, let’s hang on to our keyboards.

What can a bunch of volunteers do with spirit, know-how and infrastructure? A lot, it turns out. Last weekend’s series of  Crisis Camps resulted in a series of amazing new tools, which are being refined and deployed as I write, for coordinating post-disaster relief in Haiti.

Much of social media’s potential is in the way it can enhance how we cooperate, coordinate and collaborate.  This is a story of swift, efficient and consequential global citizen-action in response to the Haiti earthquake.

Current level of diffusion and technological abilities mobile devices is uniquely suited to address a very important problem in crisis response: coordination, coordination, and coordination.

Around January 12th, the usual, light-hearted trending topics on Twitter suddenly got serious. First, news spread that Miep Gies, the woman who probably did more than anyone to try to save Anne and was only able to save her words, died at the age of 100. Then, in the afternoon, a 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti, one of the most impoverished nations in the world. As estimates of hundreds of thousands of deads began flying around, the chatter on global streams social media turned into a mix of appeals for help, prayers, shock, horror, anguish and well-wishes. For a few hours, it seemed, the world was somber in unison.

In the last few years, three major transformations in the post-disaster experience have taken place:

1- Citizen journalism: The Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, Haitian earthquake and all recent major disasters and crises, such as the Mumbai killings, all were reported first and foremost through messages from affected people. Pictures, videos, sounds flew around the world, first mostly through Twitter, but also through Facebook, other social networking sites, as well as “social media” streams of most major news organizations which retweeted, rebroadcast and resent citizen reports.

2- Social media driven financial aid: Red Cross, Unicef and other organizations collected massive amount of donations by text messages, as they had for the Tsunami. These donations were quickly texted and generally portioned as $10. The democratization of aid had started with the the Asian Tsunami when many organizations recorded their highest level of donations by the public, and reached a new high. (Incidentally, this micro-financing of macro causes is not limited to disasters. The election of Barack Obama was another recent example. It is yet unclear whether the micro-financers will find a way to translate this into influence the way traditional financiers, corporations, foundations, etc. do quite succesfully).

3- Information technology powered relief: This is often less noticed than the above two, but it is probably a very significant development and the one I intend to write about at some length.

Current level of diffusion and technological abilities of mobile devices is uniquely suited to address a very important problem in crisis response: coordination, coordination, and coordination. Relief efforts after disasters are hampered by lack of supplies, loss of key people, insufficient machinery, blocked roads, bottlenecked transportation and the like. Hovering over all of this is lack of coordination and efficient information flow that results in anguish, wasted effort, and an increase in the death toll. Rapid flow of supplies and personnel is only half the equation. Without coordination, much gets wasted.

Why aren’t there existing tools to address this issue? A group of people from the tech community asked themselves the same questions and decided to do something about it. A series of “Crisis Camps” were organized around the United States. These are day-long event that bring together a largely techie crowd who collectively and quicky work on new tools, refine existing ones, and plan for the future. I attended last weekend’s Crisis Camp in D.C and want to explain why such efforts are really important and what is being done.

I was on the ground for two weeks with rescue teams in the immediate aftermath of the 1999 Earthquake in Izmit and experienced the issue first hand. Many rescue teams had arrived hoping certain amount of minor things could be provided locally. Everyone has extra of something, while most groups are missing a piece here or there as it is almost impossible to anticipate and transport everything you may possibly need ormay break. This one needed lamps; that one needed fuel; this one had no transportation arranged; that one needed some bolts to fix their jackhammer. In the meantime, there might be extra fuel sitting in the back of the truck somewhere, if only someone else knew about it.

This is a matter of life and death as everything is running on generators: the jack-hammer that is cutting away concrete trapping the child under rubble, the light at operating room at the remaining functioning clinic, the bus that is ferrying the wounded. Coordinating this is not easy because you have a population that has experienced a massive loss and is shell-shocked; you have rescuers from dozens of different countries who have just landed and most of whom have not slept in the past day, and will not for the next; and there is no central authority, government, or institution that is aware of everything. By the way, maps are mostly useless because not all roads are passable. Cell phones work intermittently, landlines often don’t, and satellite phones are available but limited to the foreign groups.

And that’s when you wish there was a little local, accessible, Craigslist: I have this, I need that. Wouldn’t it be great if it operated through twitter, text-messaging, and whatever else was available and all the groups had access to it? “We need an extra stand-alone lamp.” “We have some extra antibiotics we can share.” “Does anyone have a spare tire fixing kit?”

Yes, why isn’t there something like that? Isn’t it painfully obvious by now that this is needed after every disaster?

Next time, there might be one because that’s one of the projects undertaken at Crisis Camp last weekend: an I need/ I have app. That is not the only application that is being created. Another is a layered map of Port-au-Prince which gets updated as people in Haiti text (via a free text message) location-specific information. That, too, is a matter of life and death. Rescue teams spend as much time looking to find someone alive as they do extricating them. It will be immensely useful to have that kind information diffused quickly. There is another layer to the problem, though: people whose loved ones are under the rubble often think they have heard sounds when there might not be any. This is part of the devastating tragedy of an earthquake: hope lingers on, often in vain, but sometimes miraculously vindicated. Most teams use dogs or special equipment to listen for sounds of life. Perhaps this new tool, haiti.ushaidi.com, can also be used to identify buildings that have been thoroughly checked so that the teams can move on to buildings that have not. This is no easy task: family members will cling to each and every rescue team, insisting they have heard noices. (Veterans of post-disaster operations call this ghost chasing). Remember this is in the middle of a devastated city and there is no central coordinating authority. A building may thus be checked many times, sadly spending time repeating hopeless efforts when there might still be survivors under another collapsed structure, waiting to be discovered. Now teams could use this tool to mark where they have been and to identify places which need attention.

Other applications that were quickly developed include a Creole-English translator that can work in mobile devices. A centralized missing-person finder was also developed and launched. The problem was that a multitude of missing persons lists were started by most major news organizations, the Red Cross (two days after the earthquake so there was a gap which was filled by other groups), mom-and-pop blogs, twitter streams, citizen websites and the like. Most of these were merged over the last week and a widget was developed that can be embedded on any website which then places the data in a single depository hosted by Google. This, too, is incredibly important as you can imagine how harrowing it all must be for survivors searching for their loved ones. Anything that speeds up and coordinates that process is valuable. Currently everyone from the State department to the New York Times is using that widget and the depository is all in one place.

A team mostly from Colorado is creating a standardized hashtag format for Twitter (Tweak the Tweet) so that the stream of messages that pass through twitter, which range from prayers and well-wishes to urgent requests such as water for children in an orphanage or a report of a survivor under the rubble, can be sorted through quickly. In another project, a wiki is being organized for crisis related information, but this will be no ordinary wiki. It is being shaped through a semantic web approach so that when the next crisis hits, the organizers will be able to quickly pull relevant information by using an appropriate template for the type of crisis and its location. For example, a hurricane wiki will have different organizations compared to an earthquake wiki, and a crisis in South America will pull regional organizations as well as multinational groups.

These are just some of the projects. For a full list, check out the  Crisis Commons web page. There is a lot that can be done, even by people who are not techies. This Saturday, there will be more Crisis Camps, in Boston, Boulder, Los Angeles, Miami, Montreal, New Orleans, Portland, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., New York and Bogota, Colombia. (Follow it on twitter via hashtag #cchaiti or follow @crisiscamp). These are great events to experience and most people will find something useful to do regardless of their skill level but developers are especially useful. Be warned: it’s all business all day and not a good place for people with egos that can’t be put aside, at least for a day.

I think the Haiti earthquake will be a turning point. Next time a disaster hits, these tools will already be there. And all of this happened because a group of people took it upon themselves to do it. I am well aware of all the ways in which the Internet has not changed everything that the utopians among us have us believe. But this is one instance in which what has happened is just, well,  awesome.

I can only wish for a similar level of energy, cooperation and solidarity among the global community as it hopefully finds the resolve and the spirit to stand with Haiti, as this battered nation, the only one in the world where the slaves freed themselves, struggles to recover, heal and stand tall.

—-

Jan 24: P.S. As an example of the cost of  lack of coordination, check out this paragraph in Friday’s New York Times:

“American rescue teams were among the first to experience the knot of troubles. Usually, when they set down in a country after a natural disaster, the local government has already identified buildings where there are known survivors so they can race to the scene. But here, without government input, they had to drive through the city themselves, making snap assessments about where survivors were likely to be found.

They had trouble getting their equipment; its arrival at the airport was delayed for several days. Then they faced a shortage of vehicles, gas and drivers at the United States Embassy.”

The rescue team from Miami Dade is first stalled because it doesn’t have vehicles, gas and drivers, and then, it is driving around the city, making “snap assessments” about where survivors might be. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, there might be a person trapped under the rubble who was heard calling for help but cannot be dug out without equipment. Miami Dade may be working on a building that the Czech team already looked at yesterday. If these tools had been up before the quake, people and rescue teams could have coordinated via text messages which would appear on a layered map of Haiti.