Crooked Timber

Speaking of public intellectuals, Siva Vaidhyanathan gave a talk here a couple days ago on privacy and surveillance, developing the ideas here. (For one thing, he now prefers “Cryptopticon” to “Nonopticon.”)

Siva thinks we should stop our Foucauldian worrying about Bentham’s Panopticon. He says he’s lived in the Panopticon, in New York, where there are lots of visible cameras everywhere (when I lived in one of the home counties, where it is said you can go all day without being out of CCTV range, I knew the feeling). Siva points out a lot of the cameras aren’t maintained, monitored, or even attached to anything; that’s not the point of them. They’re not there to watch you, they’re there to make you think that you’re being watched. Such reminders (your call may be monitored) are supposed to get you to become your own social superego.

On balance, Siva seems to think, this is pretty harmless. The point of the Panopticon is to get you to behave, to hide your real self, to conform. About which we can note two things: one, if you’ve been to London or New York, you see that in the real Panopticon people get their freak on just fine, thank you very much. And two, to the extent that it does work, the Panopticon actually reinforces privacy—getting you to hide your real self draws the boundaries around that real self. What we really need to worry about is unannounced, concealed surveillance: the NonCryptopticon.
Continue reading “I never feel like somebody’s watching me.”

Obviously, I’m not Crooked Timber’s resident expert on the sociology of online communities, so here’s hoping that Kieran or Eszter will be along in a moment to reassure me, but, as a keen Flickr user, I’m perturbed by their decision to start allowing video. Flickr (owned by the troubled Yahoo, of course) probably has two (overlapping) kinds of user: the person who wants a repository for their snaps to show to friends and family and the person who is into photography on at least a hobbyist level who wants to interact with similar others. It also has thriving groups of various kinds based on shared interests or locality: for example my local group has 1000+ nominal members, dozens of active members, and a fairly thriving offline complement of activities (monthly meets where much beer is consumed, photowalks etc.).

All of this is threatened by the addition of video. As the photographic element is diluted and the YouTubers arrive, some photographers will find it less congenial and will choose to go elsewhere; as they go, the pool will become more dilute, leading others to take the same decision. In other words, I predict the kind of cascade effect the Mark Granovetter and others have written about. Of course, I could be wrong, and maybe the Flickr community is more robust and adaptable than I’m allowing for. SmugMug and Pbase don’t (yet) have local groups of photographers who hang out together, critique one another’s pictures and so on. But this seems a rash decision for Yahoo to make. Does it have to do so with the Microsoft bid? Maybe.

I should be prepping for class, but I want to add an alternative perspective to a question raised about Google’s popularity. The Freakonomics blog features an interesting Q&A with Hal Varian today, I recommend heading over to check out how Google’s chief economist answers some questions submitted by readers last week.

The Official Google Blog takes one of the questions and posts an expanded response to it. The question:

How can we explain the fairly entrenched position of Google, even though the differences in search algorithms are now only recognizable at the margins?

Varian addresses three possible explanations: supply-side economies of scale, lock-in, and network effects. He dismisses all of these (see the post for details) and then goes on to say that it’s about Google’s superior quality in search that makes it as popular as it is.

I don’t buy it, especially the dismissal of the lock-in factor. Continue reading “Explaining Google’s popularity”

Or how I can’t resist linking to Lee Siegel complaining on The Daily Show about how the market is making the Internets into teh Stupid.

In a moment of search engine ennui, I typed this into the Google search box: whatever I’m looking for, I won’t find it here.

First up was the nutty Tom Cruise video excerpt where he raves about Scientologists as the only people who can really help at the scene of an accident. Then, bizarrely enough, came a 2002 White House press conference with Bush convivially avoiding answering questions about unilaterally attacking Iraq and making in-jokes to the supine press corps. Then, suitably enough, a piece called ‘why search sucks and you won’t fix it the way you think’.

On page 2 of the results I found Trent Raznor moaning about album sales and proposing a music tax for ISPs, then Larry Birkhead insisting he would not share custody of poor (literally) misbegotten Dannielynn. Then MediaMatters gave a bizarre insight into the American poltiical psyche when a discussion of Clinton supporters sliming Obama for his middle name and Muslim father segued into how men feel castrated by Hillary.

And after that the randomness got a bit samey. Google’s tailoring of results to geographic location meant that any non-bracketed query of commonly used words returns me a cornucopia of US-oriented flim flam. It reminds me of why we used to buy a British Sunday newspaper at home; to know what they really thought of us. When the papers caught on to the Irish market and started finessing their stories and cutting back on the anti-Irishry, I lost interest. Same with Google. If I wanted to know about nothing but celebrity gossip and political tittle tattle then I’d, well.., I’d read the same pointless echo-sheets I already do every day.

I was going to ask Google if I’ll ever find true love. Don’t think I’ll bother now.

Harry’s mention below of finding a comic strip from his youth on the internets made me think about the cultural ephemera that the Internet does and doesn’t preserve. Lots of stuff out there that people have scanned or Youtubed that I was delighted to find again decades after first seeing it. Lots of stuff, however, that isn’t available at all. Two of my favourite things that seem to have slipped down the memory hole (if I’m wrong, of course I would love to be told so, and more to the point, given the URLs).

(1) The famous ‘mothers of prevention’ confrontation between Jello Biafra and Tipper Gore when the latter was on her rampage against naughty rock lyrics and bad thoughts in teenagers. I remember this as having been a gloriously entertaining demolition job by Biafra (but the best part of two decades afterwards, my memory may be faulty or my standards of judgment may have shifted).

(2) Kevin McAleer’s sketches about the old days. These were broadcast on the comedy show ‘Nighthawks,’ which used to be on late at night on RTE, Ireland’s national TV station in the early 1990s. I suspect that you’d have to be Irish to really have gotten the humour – but the soft accent, the gentle, pixillated stare with which he’d not-quite-fix the camera, and the rapid degeneration of anecdotes purveying rural nostalgia into the most demented surrealism were pretty wonderful.

Neither seem to be available (although there are indications that the Biafra-Gore match was once to be found). Further suggestions of pieces of popular culture that ought to be, but aren’t preserved on the nets are welcome in comments, of course.

After reading lots of discussion of Google’s knol initiative, I finally got around to actually looking at the example screenshot, which is about insomnia. Naturally, I was interested to look at the competition provided by the Wikipedia article on the same topic.

The Wikipedia article starts with a cleanup-needed tag (maybe Google’s choice of example topic wasn’t accidental in this respect), but doesn’t look all that bad. What’s startling is that wiki and knol disagree on some fairly basic points.

The knol, written by Rachel Manber states, without citation, that insomnia affects about one in ten US adults, which I would guess to be about 25 million people. Wikipedia says ‘60 million Americans suffer from insomnia each year” and supports this with a link to the NIH which says “About 60 million Americans a year have insomnia frequently or for extended periods of time, which leads to even more serious sleep deficits.” . This WebMD article says “In a 1991 survey, 30-35% of adult Americans reported difficulty sleeping in the past year and 10% reported the insomnia to be chronic, severe, or both” again consistent with Wikipedia. It looks as if the knol introductory sentence should have stated “chronic or severe”.

There’s also disagreement over classifications of transient, acute and chronic insomnia. The knol classification is purely on duration, while the Wikipedia article offers a rather confusing mix of duration and causative indicators. A quick search of the web suggests that there’s lots of different definitions out there.

Continue reading “Knols, wikis and reality”

Henry points us to a new Google initiative and was wondering what I might think about it. I started writing a comment, but thinking that a comment shouldn’t be three times as long as the original post (and because I can), I decided to post my response as a separate entry.

First, I think Kieran is right, knol is way too close to troll, I would’ve picked a different name. (That said, most people out there probably have no idea what a troll is so in that sense it’s just as well although I still don’t like the name.)

I address three issues concerning this new service of trying to create something Wikipedialike within Google’s domain: First, will it gain popularity? Second, what might we expect in terms of quality? Third, what’s in it for Google beyond the potential to showcase more ads? Continue reading “What’s in a knol?”

The Wikimedia folk have been muttering for a while about taking on Internet search companies such as Google, but I suspect that Google is more likely to be able to displace them than vice-versa.

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. … A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content … For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. … People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. … Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge.

I’m waiting to see what Eszter and Siva have to say about this before I can start to think in earnest about this, but given Google’s clout and resources I imagine that this project is much more likely to have legs than, say, Citizendium.

Update: See also Nicholas Carr.

I realize that some of the references in this video require a fairly intimate knowledge of the Silicon Valley scene, but not all so perhaps this will add a bit of amusement to your day regardless of your geek quotient.

My most recent research article looks at predictors of social network site (SNS) usage among a group of first-year college students. First, I look at whether respondents use any social network sites and then examine predictors by specific site usage (focusing on Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster based on popularity). Before asking about usage, I asked about having heard of these sites and all but one person reported knowledge of at least one SNS so lack of familiarity of these services does not explain non-adoption. The analyses are based on a representative sample of 1,060 first-year students at the University of Illinois, Chicago surveyed earlier this year. This is an especially diverse campus concerning ethnic diversity. (See the paper for more details about the data and methods.)

Methodologically speaking, I find that it is worth disaggregating the general concept of social network site usage, because analyses looking at usage on the aggregate mask predictors of specific site use.

Of particular interest seem to be Facebook and MySpace since they are the most popular with this group. About three quarters of students use the former and over half use the latter in the sample.

I find statistically significant differences by race, ethnicity, parental education (a proxy for socioeconomic status) and living situation (whether a student lives with his or her parents or not) concerning the adoption of Facebook and MySpace. Continue reading “Using Facebook vs MySpace”

I’m writing a piece (in the form of a debate with Jason Potts) on the Internet and non-market innovation (open source, blogs, wikis and Web 2.0 more generally) and the editors asked us to say something about digital literacy. I’ve never paid much attention to this metaphor, maybe because of excessive exposure to its predecessor, computer literacy.

It strikes me though, that discussion of digital literacy focuses almost entirely on reading (how to navigate the Web, find reliable information and so on). The things I’m talking about are forms of writing.

Thinking about the rise of text literacy, the distinction tends to be blurred a bit, because most (not all) people who learn to read also learn to write. Still, there’s plenty of discussion of the importance of writing to groups (women, working people) traditionally excluded from written culture.

So, I’m surprised at the neglect of this point in relation to digital literacy, especially because the Internet has done so much to break down the asymmetry between a small group of writers and a large group of readers that characterises most communications media. Having said this, I’m sure this point has been made many times before, and I invite readers to write in with good references.

As an aside, “computer literacy” programs in the late 70s and early 80s had, if anything, the opposite problem. Lots of emphasis on how to code in BASIC and very little appreciation of the potential for computers as tools for general use.