Message from Michael - Censorship - May 17, 2010

Message From Michael                                 

                                                                                                                                    May 17, 2010                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

      DO YOU WANT TO KNOW A SECRET

      500 FRIENDS AND NO ONE TO CALL

      LET ME WHISPER IN YOUR EAR

      MEDIA METHADONE NEEDED

      FROM CUTTING EDGE TO MAINSTREAM

 

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      DO YOU WANT TO KNOW A SECRET.  Apparently lots of people do.  But the question is will they promise not to tell.  Many people are concerned they will.  No surprise, it all revolves around the growth of social networking which many consider a ‘game changer’ in the Internet world, but which privacy advocates say are becoming a dangerous game when it comes to privacy rights.  The latest controversy centers on Facebook and one, little word – “like.”  As in, I ‘like’ the Beatles.  Facebook has introduced ‘like’ buttons to other sites ranging from CNN to Pandora to Yelp but which also link back to your Facebook site where status updates tell your friends and followers what videos, music or news articles you like.  It’s called “instant personalization.”  The problem comes when what you ‘like’ becomes part of a behavioral targeting mechanism for advertisers, and you start getting specific advertising messages.  Or is it?  According to an online interview by The New York Times with Facebook’s vice president for public policy, Elliot Schrage, they are “anonymized geographically targeted ads.”  But privacy advocates worry that much of your personal information, along with your friends’ personal information and their friends’ personal information, is now being made available to advertisers or third parties.  Along with the introduction of ‘like,’ Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced the companion part of the deal – an expanded Open Graph which then links all that information into one big social network in which all the likes and recommendations along with who likes what and who recommends what across multiple websites are brought together instantaneously in one location.   

Reviews have ranged from hyperbolic effusiveness (it’s going to change the Internet forever) to hyperbolic horror stories (nobody will have any privacy any more) – all dependent, it seems, on whether you are a fan of Facebook or not.  But with more than 400 Million members worldwide, there is no doubt that the changes made by Facebook will have an enormous impact.  There is also little doubt that we have entered what writer Natasha Singer, in an article in the New York Times,  calls the “post-privacy society” where “we have lost track of how many entities are tracking us” and where “advances in data collection are far outpacing personal data protection.”  By the way, if you want to opt out of “instant personalization,” you can go to the Accounts section of your Facebook page and go into the privacy settings.  Actually, even if you don’t want to opt out, it is interesting to go through the various options you have.  Despite the critics, Facebook does provide numerous, if somewhat complicated, choices.

      500 FRIENDS AND NO ONE TO CALL.  That’s the headline on a study about Facebook that raises questions about how friendly you and your Facebook friends are.  The survey by Danish research firm Red Associates found that 90% of the people on Facebook expected it to “deepen or strengthen” their friendships, but in reality only a little more than a third (39.9%) say people they’ve met online have become friends they can count on offline.  More to the point, people see Facebook as a “relationship management tool.”  Most of those surveyed (58.3%) saw Facebook that way while less than half (40%) saw it as deepening relationships.  Interestingly (at least to me), even fewer (25%) of the young people surveyed (18 to 30) see Facebook as deepening relationships.  The people surveyed said they befriended 40% of their friends simply because it was easy to do, not because they were actually close friends.  Now, I should add a caveat here.  The survey was of people who are fans of the Facebook page of Fast Company, not exactly a mainstream, general audience.  In keeping with that audience, not surprisingly, four out of five (82%) says Facebook did increase their social and business networks faster and easier.  (Makes you wonder whether they should do a survey of Fast Company’s LinkedIn audience.)    

      LET ME WHISPER IN YOUR AREA.   According to a report by Google, governments around the world want Google to say the words they want to hear.  The mega-search engine site says one country in particular has made more requests for data and more requests for removal of data than any other country.  Want to guess which one?  No, not China.  Google didn’t even include China in its listing.  Apparently it’s too bad to even consider.  No, the ‘worst offender’ is Brazil which had 3,663 data requests and 291 removal requests last year.  That’s more than the U.S. (3,580 and 123).  The number is even more dramatic when you consider that Brazil has a population of 199 Million (compared to the U.S.’s 307) Million, but with an Internet penetration (according to Internet World Stats) of a third (36.3%), it has an Internet population of only 72 Million compared to the U.S.’s 76.3% penetration and 234 Million Netizens.  The Google website (google.com/countryrequests) does not provide an explanation of the numbers, although it does note that the requests do not include child pornography (because Google works on its own to remove them) or removal for copyright information.  The U.K. is the next highest in terms of data requests, but it is significantly lower (1,166), followed by India (1,061) and France (846).  India also had the third highest requests for removals (142) which, even though it has 1.1 Billion people, it has an Internet penetration of only seven percent but that does translate into 81 Million Netizens.  Despite France’s high data request, it had one of the lowest removal requests – less than ten.  Lastly, I should note that after crunching all these numbers and looking them up on different sites, I found out that the Tech Editor for The Guardian newspaper, Charles Arthur, has done the same thing.  That tells me that I have to add him to my must-read list.  And you can read more about this in his article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/apr/23/google-censorship-country-uk .      

      MEDIA METHADONE NEEDED.  Just as some drug addicts need methadone to wean them off their habits, it appears that some young people would need something similar if they were to be weaned off their media habits.  In a test by the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda and the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, many students literally described their need for media as an addiction.  The study authors asked 200 students to go ‘unplugged’ for 24 hours – no cell phone, iPod, television, radio, or computers, and that means no IM-texting or Facebook.  The study website (http:withoutmedia.wordpress.com) poses the question – could you do it; and then answers – if you are an American college student today… not really.  Going without media translated to going without friends or family for the students.  The 18-21 year olds are constantly texting and on Facebook, according to the study, with calling and emailing a distant second in terms of staying in touch.  The study called the cell phone this generation’s Swiss Army Knife, with students using it for calling, texting, emailing and playing games. The study confirms an earlier one by the Pew Research Center which found that American teens between 12 and 17 are more likely to text friends via cell phone rather than actually calling them.  The Maryland study found that while students could possibly live without television and newspapers, they could not live without their iPod and the constant music in their ears.  The report noted an upside to the experiment.  Students who gave up their iPods for a day reported having actual conversations with people they did not know… which brings me to the other study.  This one by two psychologists at California State University, Los Angeles and U.C.L.A., raise questions about how online communication affects ‘offline’ communication in teenagers.  Writing in the Journal, The Future of Children, the authors say “society’s traditional adolescent issues – intimacy, sexuality, and identity – have all been transferred to and transformed by the electronic stage. 

A Footnote to the Maryland study.  The students can though live without news in its traditional form.  The study says students have only “a casual relationship to the originators of news and in fact don’t make distinctions between news and more personal information.”  They get their news in what the study called “a disaggregated way” often via friends.  That’s the bad news.  The ‘good news’ is that they still value news and information.

      FROM CUTTING EDGE TO MAINSTREAM.  The annual Webby Awards always represents some of the best examples of Web design and Internet culture.  And this year is no exception; But (personal opinion here) this year, the majority of award winners appear to be mainstream, or traditional, or established, or whatever word you want to use, businesses, with very few new, innovative upstarts. There are 70 categories with a Webby Award winner and a People’s Choice winner in each category.  This year, a third (21) of the categories were dual winners.  For example, in the Broadband category, Hulu won both; In the community category, Flickr won both; In Education, We Choose the Moon by AOL; In Events, it was Ted.com; In Health, Webmd.com; In Humor, TheOnion.com; In Music, Pandora; In Social Networking, Twitter; and in Television, ColbertNation.com. Again, that’s not to say there weren’t some cool sites.  For example, the Japan Science and Technology site, MindLab.  But, for example, the weird category was not that weird – Failblog.com and CuteOverload – although I still don’t quite get Selleck Waterfall Sandwich.  Anyway, still worth a couple hours of your time.  And, in any case, maybe it just means the mainstream operations just ‘get it’ now.  Who knows.       

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