Question Technology

All a-Twitter

I don't know much about Twitter -- maybe it's truly useful, but I find this column by Ivor Tossell amusing:

You have to keep an eye on the computer nerds. One day they're abuzz about some new Internet widget — something with a funny name and indistinct purpose — and the next thing you know, everybody bar nobody (except you) is using it. They're kind of like college kids that way.

So here's an early warning: Something new is brewing amongst the nerds. The next new thing is called Twitter, and for once in this Web 2.0 world, its name is both correctly spelled and apt: It exists to fill the ether with an endless chirping.

Twitter lets you post public updates about your status; it presents a simple page with a text box, that asks "What are you doing?" The catch is that you're only allowed an answer that's 140 characters long — but you can post as many updates about your day as you like.

Judging from the postings from around the world that are continually updated on the Twitter website, that's more or less what they get — and by the thousands. Here are three updates that popped up from random Twitter users (Twitterers?) in the last few minutes: "Done with grading! Time for a break!"

"Very, VERY pleased with how Apple and UPS handled this."

"Twitter won't let me post Pi to the first 140 characters. What's up with that?"

[...]

Its brand of micro-blogging hits a sweet spot: it has the shout-it-to-the-world appeal of blogging, but without the strenuous effort of ideas and paragraphs. It has the immediacy of instant messaging, but carries no obligation of getting embroiled in an actual conversation.

It's the ultimate in relaxed communication: little farts of consciousness, unpackaged and unaddressed, sent out into the void without the pretension of being of any interest to anyone. It has its appeal, and soon, everybody and their dog (except, possibly, you and your dog) will be on it. Brace yourself.

Link: globeandmail.com: Reading online column now.

NY Times says: Stop Clicking!

I've mentioned before (Give Me Back My Mouse) that I have some sort of obsessive clicking/mousing disorder when I read text on the web, and how it irritates me when newfangled ajax-y sites pop up stuff unexpectedly when you idly mouse around.  This week the New York Times has taken a big leap forward in irritating its web readers.  Now if you double-click on any word in an article it (slowly) brings up a big honking window with a definition (and some ads -- probably the real reason for this "feature").

The good news (for me) is that it appears I'm far from the only person with this problem.  The Grammar Police blog is heading up the campaign, with a spiffy graphic and an excellent rant:

Okay, nytimes.com, we need to have a talk. The "contextual dictionary," if that's what you're calling it, isn't cute or clever. It's not helpful. It's just a pain. The New York Times may be the paper of record, but I'm not putting up with a pop-up record for every word I double click.

Oh, I double-click words—and how. I'm a habitual screensifter. When I'm reading something on the screen, I click, double-click, drag, and highlight words. Any and all words, whole blocs of text, I don't care. Idly but mercilessly, and according to rules of symmetry and aesthetics so sure and precise I won't detail them now, I highlight and grab and drag sentences, even whole paragraphs, anywhere I damn well please. If I want to just nervously click on words, that's what I do.

But the NYT wants to ruin my games—and worse still, prevent me from reading at all. I'll be the first to admit that screensifting is an obsessive–compulsive disorder (and probably a genetically inherited trait for which I'm not to blame), but nevertheless, there it is, absolutely unavoidable and necessary to the process of reading the digital fishwrap.

Read the rest here: Grammar.police.

(via Get Satisfaction)

Shutdown Day

In the tradition of PC Turnoff Week (in June) and TV Turnoff Week (in April) comes Shutdown Day (March 24), a challenge to turn off your computer for the day.  Boy, the calendar is really filling up.  The site is a bit lacking in details on who's behind this, but they do have a blog, a forum, and YouTube promo videos.

Teen Blogs and Future Embarrassment

Paul Saffo writes about the downside of having your adolescent writings archived for all time online:

[...] I pity teens today, for in a few decades their sophomoric musings will deliver a vast embarrassment utterly unknown to earlier generations. It is not that their words are any sillier than earlier generations; rather teens today have had the misfortune of being the first generation to record their thoughts in cyberspace where those thoughts will remain perfectly preserved until some wag drags them out at a school reunion or the author’s children discover the IM affections that passed between mom and dad.

[...] the biggest favor you can do for a teen today is to remind them of what is ahead and gently suggest that perhaps they should record their thoughts the old-fashioned way -- on paper. Buy them a Moleskine, or a ream of high sulfur paper that will decompose quickly.
Link: Saffo: journal.

Of course, not everyone agrees.  In the (much blogged about) article "Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll," Emily Nussbaum explores this topic at length, and it's worth reading the whole thing.  An excerpt:

[...] we are in the sticky center of a vast psychological experiment, one that’s only just begun to show results. More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, “Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.” 

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

Link: Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy (New York Magazine)

The Most Popular Video in the Blogosphere!

You've probably already seen that spiffy little video about hypertext, XML, and Web 2.0 and how it's changing the world.  It's by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch and is called "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us," though the title doesn't appear in the video.  By "using us" he means that the machine (i.e. the web) "learns" when we tell it stuff -- probably the hokiest and least true point he makes in the video.

It's a clever little piece and it makes a few good bullet points about the changing nature of how we experience text, but I'm amazed at the overblown reaction to this thing.  There isn't much substance to it -- basically a bit of information science 101 combined with some trite Web 2.0/user-generated media hype.  But it's got style, which counts for a lot with today's techno/web enthusiasts (Lawrence Lessig's books may be a bore, but boy has he got the hippest posters for his talks of any academic!).

It's not surprising, I guess, that a video cheering on user-generated content is embraced by those same users.  Yay us! (or yay you!)

This article at Inside Higher Ed tells the story of the video and its reception: A lesson in viral video.  I originally spotted the video at Chris Anderson's blog: The Long Tail: This is what I'm talking about, though it's been everywhere else too (BoingBoing, Lessig, even the Transhumanists love it!).

Technoromanticism

I have a Google alert set up for the word "Luddite" so I get email every day with links to new occurrences of that word in news or blogs.  Today it found this blog of student postings for a course on "Technoromanticism".  It's pretty interesting reading.  There's currently a discussion of Frankenstein, with reference to Steven Jones's Against Technology, which is apparently one of the texts for the course.

Link: Technoromanticism.

Professor Says Bloggers Are Losers

He won't make many MySpace friends with talk like this!

Bloggers are living in a world where emotions may be real but everything else is make-believe, says a University of Calgary professor in a new book.

[...] Michael Keren, who has written "Blogosphere: The New Political Arena," suggests individuals who bare their souls in blogs are isolated and lonely, living in a virtual reality instead of forming real relationships or helping to change the world.

"Bloggers think of themselves as rebels against mainstream society, but that rebellion is mostly confined to cyberspace, which makes blogging as melancholic and illusionary as Don Quixote tilting at windmills," the author says. [...]

"In this world of blogging, which the whole world can read, you have a personal expectation about a readership that's just not there for the millions of bloggers who are writing their personal feelings." [...]

"Many of us end up like Father McKenzie in the 'Eleanor Rigby' Beatles song, who is writing a sermon that no one is going to hear," he suggests. "Some of us are going to be embraced by the mainstream media, but the majority of us remain in the dark, remain in the loneliness."

Link: globeandmail.com: Author laments lonely life of bloggers.

As a critic of technology and self-loathing blogger, I'm inclined to agree.  But it sounds like he's painting with too broad a stroke, judging by this article anyway.  I absolutely love the creepy book cover, though.

Web Dragons a.k.a. Search Engines

I've been reading the new book Web Dragons: Inside the Myths of Search Engine Technology by Ian Witten, Marco Gori, and Teresa Numerico.  It appears to touch on most every issue that concerns search engines including technical workings, history, philosophy, and ethics.  It's a bit quirky (in its illustrations and the perhaps-too-broad audience it tries to address), but I like it so far.  It seems fairly academically rigorous, but written and designed for a popular audience as well.

From the book description:

Search engines—“web dragons”—are the portals through which we access society’s treasure trove of information. How do they stack up against librarians, the gatekeepers over centuries past? What role will libraries play in a world whose information is ruled by the web? How is the web organized? Who controls its contents, and how do they do it? How do search engines work? How can web visibility be exploited by those who want to sell us their wares? What’s coming tomorrow, and can we influence it? We are witnessing the dawn of a new era, starting right now—and this book shows you what it will look like and how it will change your world.

Link: Web Dragons - WebSite.

Against Technology by Steven E. Jones

I mentioned this book back in December and read it shortly afterwards: Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism by Steven E. Jones.  I've been meaning to write up a proper review but haven't had time.  Here are some rough thoughts while it's still reasonably fresh in my head.

An Overview of the Book:

The book comes at the Luddites from the perspective of cultural/literary criticism -- Jones is an English professor.  He shows how the idea of The Luddites quickly grew to represent more than just a small, localized labor conflict.  In fact the Luddites' own writings (Jones draws many examples from Kevin Binfield's 2004 book: Writings of the Luddites) were richly allegorical, and they drew parallels with the Robin Hood movement/mythology that came out of the same geographical area of Sherwood Forest only shortly before.

Jones's main thesis seems to be that the meaning of the Luddites has been perverted repeatedly, not only to be anti-technology or anti-science, but by the politically liberal to also mean "back to nature," new-age, or anti-capitalist movements.

The Romanticizing (literally) of the Luddites began with writing from that period by Blake, Byron, the Brontes, and Keats, which contained explicit mention of the Luddites and similar labor struggles.  Jones makes the point that these mostly elite, high-brow writers were far removed from the reality of the poor lifestyles of the Luddites.

Jones devotes the next chapter to Frankenstein, mostly in order to chastise you for thinking it has anything to do with the Luddites.  He begins "Name a Luddite novel: Odds are you're thinking of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein."  Frankenstein of course has no struggling workers, no employers to rebel against, no physical machinery, etc., and Jones makes sure we know that.  Frankenstein has evolved into an anti-science/technology myth (along with other Golem tales), and Luddism has evolved into an anti-science/technology myth too, but I think Jones is off-base in thinking anyone believes Frankenstein has anything to do with Luddism if you take out the anti-science/technology link.  Or maybe I just missed Jones's point.

Several more, mostly little-known novels pop up in the next chapters, and Jones traces anti-technology themes through them.

In the final chapters, Jones gets to the two latest neo-Luddite periods, where Luddism has been most perverted from its original form.  The 1960s counter-culture has been described as a rebellion against technocracy by Theodore Roszak.  This period also saw the rise of "Appropriate Technology" movements, led by E.F. Schumacher and others.  The counterculture then split -- one side going the way of environmentalism, new-age, and back-to-nature, the other towards cyberculture, hacking, and Wired.  The Luddite idea continued in the first branch, in forms such as Edward Abbey's eco-Luddism and radical environmental movements.  The second branch of the counterculture, now the cyberculture, obviously dropped any anti-technology heritage it might have had.

In the 1990s, a new Neo-Luddite movement emerged in writings by Kirkpatrick Sale, Chellis Glendinning, Sven Birkerts and others.  Jones seems most critical of these writers for calling themselves Luddites, and taking a spiritual/philosophical approach to the question, which surely the original Luddites would have no time for.  He's right of course  that Luddism by now has quite a different meaning in popular culture, but I think he's a bit unfair to these authors -- they clearly weren't the first to stretch the term, as Jones himself has shown.

Jones describes the anti-technology leanings behind other far-left radicals and others, including terrorists: Primitivists, John Zerzan, anti-globalization protestors, and Ted Kaczynski.

Summary, Criticisms:

To my limited knowledge this is the best study to date on the cultural evolution of the idea of the Luddites and anti-technology themes in culture and literature.

There are two ideas that seem to be missing from the discussion, though.  First, the term "Luddite" is used not only by those who call themselves Luddites, but by those who oppose them, or in fact oppose anyone showing skepticism about science and technology.  "Luddite" is an insult as much as it is a badge of honor, so the construction of the term's current meaning co-evolved on both sides.  Embracing the term "Luddite" is partly a response to those who use the term negatively (and too broadly).  By leaving out the Luddite-insulters, I think Jones misses part of the story.

Second, Jones associates neo-Luddism only with those on the political left.  This is probably technically correct, but events happening in the current decade in the U.S. are messing up the pattern.  The fabled Republican War on Science would have us believe that conservatives are the new Luddites.  This is wrong -- conservatives are certainly pro-science/technology when it's in their interests -- but "Luddite" is a handy insult, so more and more it gets associated with religious or conservative opposition to science.  If you take a skeptical attitude towards technology these days or call yourself a Luddite you're likely to be pigeon-holed as a political conservative.  This is something you wouldn't expect from Jones's analysis (and it's something I didn't quite expect when I started this blog two years ago).

Apologies again for the sloppiness.  In short: good book.  If you're seriously into lit-crit and luddites, buy it.  Just into luddites/technology?  Borrow it from the library.

The Deception Behind "Sense about Science"

The UK nonprofit group Sense About Science has made the press recently with a new initiative to fact-check celebrities who make controversial claims about science.  They've distributed a leaflet that purports to correct statements about topics including organic food, alternative medicine, and animal welfare made by the likes of Madonna, Jamie Oliver, and Heather McCartney.

It makes for a good story (aren't those celebrities dumb!  let's stamp out bad science!) and the media has dutifully eaten it up.  But here's the thing: Sense About Science is arguably a public relations front group for industry.  Fact checking for celebrities?  How about fact checking for journalists.  Aren't they supposed to be the professionals?

My primary source for telling you SAS is biased is the non-profit Source Watch's article on the group.  (I've written about Source Watch previously here.)  For more background on SAS, here's an article by George Monbiot from the Guardian: Invasion of the entryists.

I first read about the Sense About Science Celebrity campaign in the January 6 edition of New Scientist magazine (the article is also online here: Celebrities Should Watch What they Say).  It also got written up elsewhere:

• The Times: Celebrities told to embrace the facts, not bad science,
• BBC: Stars must 'check science facts', When celebrities speak on science,
• The Guardian: Neutralise radiation and stay off milk: The truth about celebrity health claims,
• Blogs: Instapundit, Slashdot, and lots more.

None of these articles mentions the industry connections of Sense About Science.  Whether celebrities speak the truth or not is beside the point and is hardly newsworthy.  It's plain as day that SAS is pushing certain pro-industry viewpoints in some of this material.

Of course this isn't a unique occurrence.  Companies and PR firms go to enormous lengths to spin science reporting and public opinion in their favor.  With a little knowledge it's really not that hard to spot.  One good book on this subject is Trust Us, We're Experts by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber.  I recommend educating yourself as the best defense -- especially if you're a journalist.

Web Search for Geezers

It's the latest inane attempt by a dot-com to cash in on the supposed "baby boomer" market: a search engine called Cranky.com.  This is from the same company that launched Eons.com several months ago.  Eons is billed as "MySpace for boomers" and features death alerts.

From CNN:

A media firm catering to people over the age of 50 has launched a new search engine on Tuesday geared to Baby Boomers and seniors. And the name says it all: Cranky.com.

Eons, the media company behind Cranky.com, said that the new search engine will yield fewer search results and rank them based on their relevancy to older Web users.

Link: New search engine Cranky.com takes aim at Google and Yahoo - Jan. 9, 2007.

The top searches, which look just a bit too perfect for me to believe they're not tweaked for marketing purposes, include Brain Builders, Stephen King, and Jobs After Retirement.

I'm not in their target demographic yet (except mentally, perhaps), but I think I would find this site insulting.  I can see the value in an online place for seniors to connect, but I don't think they need coddling like this when it comes to using the web.

TiggerGate, YouTube, and Network News

Apparently the news shows just love the YouTube.  At least it's a step up from the "Cool Links" news segments from a decade ago.  From an article by Liz Cox Barrett at CJR:

Hey, TV news producers and reporters: Absurd amateur video footage does not a news story make.

All three networks (plus cable) recently aired a "story" -- we'll call it, for now, TiggerGate -- that has left us wondering: where's the news judgment? It's almost as if the only question television news producers ask nowadays before approving a "story" is, "Is there video we can run (ideally video that has appeared on YouTube, so we can say the word 'YouTube' in the story)?"

Now for some background on TiggerGate.

As you probably know by now, some guy is claiming that during a family visit to Disney World last week, a man dressed as Tigger (Winnie the Pooh's tiger friend) punched his 14-year-old son in the face as they posed for photos. And -- oh, happy day! -- this guy captured the "assault" on home video (or, as CNN's Betty Nguyen gleefully exclaimed while reporting this story on Sunday, "Ooh, it's on tape!").

Time was when footage like this might, best case, end up on America's Funniest Home Videos with Bob Saget. We no longer live in that time. Today, the once-wholesome Bob Saget is raunching it up. And television news judgment has gone to hell.

Link: CJR Daily: Have Video, Will Air It.

Modern Techno-Maladies

The latest issue of New Scientist has a little tongue-in-cheek piece about bad habits people develop online.  The full article is available free online, along with a few "confessions."  Here's a glossary from one of the sidebars:

Modern maladies

Blog streaking Revealing secrets or personal information online, which for everybody's sake would be best kept private

Crackberry The curse of the modern executive, not being able to stop checking your BlackBerry even at you grandmother's funeral

Cyberchondria A headache and a particular rash at the same time? Extensive online research tells you it must be cancer

Egosurfing When "just checking" gets out of control

Infornography You're beyond being a healthy "infovore": acquiring and sharing information has become an addiction for you

You Tube narcissism Not even your closest family want to see hours of your holiday videos

Google-stalking Snooping online on old friends, colleagues or first dates

MySpace impersonation Many of us pretend to be someone we're not when we are online, but some will pretend to be a well-known figure

Powerpointlessness One too many flashy slides

Photolurking Flicking through a photo album of someone you've never met

Wikipediholism Excessive devotion to a certain online collaborative encyclopedia. You can test whether you're an addict at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Are_You_a_Wikipediholic_Test

Link: Just can't get e-nough - tech - 20 December 2006 - New Scientist Tech.

More About "You"

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks Time's selection of "You" as person of the year is ridiculous.  Andrew Keen, author of the forthcoming book The Cult of the Amateur, writes:

It's the logical conclusion of our consumer centric culture -- what Huxley, Adorno, Lasch, Postman, Habermas, Zizek and, most recently, Thomas Frank, have been warning us against. [...]

Anyway, I'm keeping my physical issue of Time for Dec 25th 2006/January 1, 2007 -- the one that awarded its person of the year to YOU. With its mirrored, iMac style computer screen, it has anachronism, stupidity and farce written all over it.

One day, in the not too distant future, people will look back at this self-congratulatory issue (in the midst of the single most disastrous foreign war in the country's history -- welcome, indeed,to your world) and think...

what the hell were those idiots thinking?

Link: The Great Seduction: Welcome to your world.

Christian Vachon at CJR Daily, speaking of those also-rans Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hugo Chavez, writes:

Like it or not, this year the "greatest impact on the news" came from this hydra that threatens American power, prestige, and economic stability. Still, the editors of Time would have us believe that this is less consequential than the novelty of Internet users who "mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals," and "turn on a computer and make a movie starring a pet iguana."

Instead of living up to the high mandate of its own editorial policy, Time responded with a non-choice, awarding the Person of the Year to an abstraction. By giving the award to "You," it effectively gave the award to no one. In dong so, it has insulted its readers with the assumption that they are too vain and gullible to know the difference.

Meanwhile, in an effort to outdo Time's stupidity, some of the would-be leaders of this Web 2.0/user-generated content revolution are unhappy that Time didn't bow down low enough.  Apparently "you" is condescending; it should have been "us", and us the people don't need the MSM Gatekeepers to tell us we're the most important people in the world.  Dan Gillmor wrote:

But there’s a tiny bit of reality in the fact that the cover didn’t say “Us” instead of “You” — in part because it was a vestige of the magazine’s traditional, royal thinking wherein they told us everything they thought we needed to know (and what to think about it). Our role: We bought it or didn’t.

If the people of the year are all of you out there somewhere, that leaves “we the deciders of what is news” still inside the gates.

Link: Center for Citizen Media: Us, not You.

Jeff Jarvis (in a blog post accompanied, apparently without ironic intent, by a picture of himself on the Time cover) wrote:

So the Time person of the year is you. Otherwise know as us.

Well, I suppose I should give Time some credit for recognizing the power of the people. Only thing is, there’s no news here. This is nothing new. We have always been in charge. It’s just that the people who thought they had the power now have no choice to but hear us and recognize that we are, and always have been, the boss.

Link: BuzzMachine: It has always been us.

Privacy Online: Is Anything Fair Game?

The AP reports today on the increasing concern over the lack of privacy online, particularly on social networking sites.  This isn't a new issue, but it's getting more attention, as it should.  The gist of their recommendations is that if you get into trouble it's your own fault, but I think that's only half of the story.  Some excerpts:

“Everyone at this point — even if it hasn't happened to them — has heard about someone who's gotten in trouble at school, with a parent, a coach, because of something that's been posted online,” says Susannah Stern, an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of San Diego who studies young people's online habits.

“They're now more conscious that information they post online can be used in ways they didn't intend it to be,” she says. “And I think this awareness is healthy — for adults or kids.”

Today, the rule of thumb is: If it's in the public domain, it's fair game.

Jeff Krakauer, human resources director for the legal services company Juriscape in Pasadena, Calif., says he recently began looking at social-networking profiles — especially for candidates for whom he's “on the fence.”

So far, what he's seen hasn't swayed him one way or another.

“But if something was really wild and way out there, it would cause me some concern,” he says.

Hearing more stories like those prompted career counsellors at the University of Dayton to survey employers in their database about their use of Facebook. They found that 42 per cent of the 326 who responded said they would consider factoring a Facebook profile into their hiring decisions. Some of those employers also said they'd already rescinded offers because of things they'd discovered online.

“I do think it's an invasion of privacy,” says Melissa Bush, a business major at the University of Dayton. “But when you think about it, anything you post online is open season.”

When she interviewed for an internship last summer, her interviewer told her upfront that they'd be checking her Facebook profile. She didn't worry because she's careful about what she posts — but lately, she's been deleting messages from friends that she deems inappropriate.

“If you don't want people to read it, don't post it,” Bush says. “If you don't want people to see a video, don't post it.”

Link: globeandmail.com: A little too public?.

I'm surprised that employers are so quick to admit that they search for personal information about applicants online.  In the US, anti-discrimination laws are very strict -- there are many things you can't ask about an applicant, such as marital/family status, age, national or ethnic origin, religion, and disabilities (source: Yahoo HotJobs).

What are these employers looking for?  When they search on Facebook, MySpace, or even Google, they're more likely than not to find personal information.  So unless the job is related to online services or media, for example, then what relevant information are they hoping to find?  And aren't they setting themselves up for claims of discrimination by conducting undisciplined searches like this?  I would expect employers to start being more careful about this by limiting the searches they allow, or by allowing only third parties to do background checks so that irrelevant information doesn't factor into hiring decisions.

It's certainly unwise to put embarrassing information about yourself online, and we all bear responsibility for this, but not everything online should be fair game to employers.  We need to develop guidelines to respect privacy and discourage discrimination online in hiring practices.