"Dear Internet" - The Internet as a Distinct Community

The nascent ‘online community’ that has been given the opportunity to exist from the emergence of the internet is the topic of this week’s column. Although many may define a community as being a cohesive gathering of distinct parts, often unified around one particular theme, goal or characteristic, the ‘internet’ has itself become a discreet entity that can be interacted with, in effect it is more than just the sum of its parts.
    Before the internet, it was much more difficult to directly address a community without directly addressing specific people that make up that community. However, online social communication totally changed that idea.
    As the image shows, there is a lot of communication that takes place from one person to ‘the

internet.’ That is a snapshot of the trending topics on Twitter recently, where the most used keywords and phrases being tweeted are compiled into a list and displayed, with sometimes hundreds of updates containing that specific keyword happening every minute. This same type of communication can be seen on YouTube where users address videos directly to the ‘YouTube Community.’ These people often share extremely intimate details of their lives, and do so in a way such that they have a) no idea who might watch them b) when people might watch them and c) in what context people are watching them.
        Compare the type of things that people communicate on TV, or even radio versus the internet. TV communication is censored, is strictly controlled, the messages and images (even on reality shows) are incredibly carefully pieced together, only a very few people have control over who gets to transmit that information and it is only one-way. The internet is the total opposite. As long as we have net neutrality, there are no controls or filters on what people say. Online communication can be anonymous, cannot be controlled by anyone and there is an unprecendently low barrier to access for people who want to broadcast their ideas.
    This revolution in communication creates an environment where people push in two seemingly opposite directions. One direction is some of the most unintelligent, sometimes outright hateful and barbaric content one might imagine. There are entire websites like lamebook.com that are dedicated to displaying the incredibly bizarre and sometimes outright insane or mean things people say on Facebook, in addition to the many websites which are based solely on propagating hateful content, often towards specific people or groups of people.
    At the same time, there is a wealth of truly amazing community outreach, support and inspiration for people in various challenging life situations, charitable fundraising, government accountability and intelligent issues discussions that is literally mind-boggling as to their quantity and authenticity.
    A great representation of this dichotomy is something I saw on Facebook the other day. This was an update where someone had become a fan at the same time of both a page titled “Slapping the Sh*t Out Of Stupid People” and a page titled “Victims of the Earth Quake Disaster In Haiti.”

Neither of those comments are at the total extreme, as some comedic value is is most definitely part of the first one, but the juxtaposition was too good not to mention and does represent two distinct ways people use social media.
    I see the job of people in new media development such as myself, and anyone who might be reading this, to be brainstorming and promoting platforms that encourage the latter type of new communication - the kind that is supportive, caring, informative, personal and entirely authentic. People may be inherently dichotomous, and although there is no excuse to ever censor the ability for one to freely create content online, there is so much promise in pushing to develop ways to people to use their energy and ideas to contribute positively in civic life and to the lives of other people, and not just in their online community, but in that real-world community we all do still live in.

The Emerging Privacy Implications of Social Media

This is the full un-edited text of my News-Record Column:

Earlier we looked at the strange, and fairly recent, shift in human communication where information could be reproduced, repeated and widely broadcasted. This week, we’re going to look at online privacy.
    30% of employers admit to using Facebook alone to vet potential employees. If that weren’t reason enough to think about online privacy, the majority of young people find it socially acceptable to look through someone’s Facebook profile and photos to learn about them before going on a first date and many parents now use online social networking tools as well. I use Facebook as a prime example because it has 350 million active users, half of whom log in at least once per day.
    On a website like Facebook, where 2.5 billion photos (and climbing) are uploaded to the site every single month -  30 billion photos every year - how much privacy is left?
    Not much, at least according to President Obama. When speaking to a group of high school students last year, he said in response to a question from one student about how to become president one day: “I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life,” Obama said. “That’s number one.”
    There is something epic happening in our culture when the President of the United States tells young people that the number one thing to remember if you are interested in becoming president is to be careful about content posted online.
    Even the way in which people converse on Facebook has seemed to change over the years. Conversations that used to happen either over phone calls, emails, text messages or private messages on Facebook now seem to happen right out in the open for, at the minimum, hundreds of people to see and save for eternity if they so desire.
    The way sites like Facebook or Myspace are designed encourage this, as the default means of communication is posting content to the semi-public wall of another user’s page. At what point did personal communication become a public spectacle?
    Most Facebook users do not have strict privacy settings and most Twitter users, for example, do not have protected (or private) updates. The mere action of communicating with one another has become a public event for people to comment on, reproduce, or save.
    On one hand, this new way of communicating is extremely interactive, to the extent that one can see on who is communicating with whom, can comment on any individual communication or even send it to another friend. This virtual community has an amazing upside - we have literally created new communities where there were non before. You can see what your friend thought of photos uploaded by another friend on the other side of the world.
    And not only do people publicly converse about normal things that used to be private by default, but people also tend to share more personal information about themselves online. Again, a double-edged sword - as this creates incredibly engaged, emotional and personal communities online, but also leads many people to put on display things they perhaps ought not, and in the future may wish they hadn’t.
    That is one of the downsides, related to what Obama said about online content being saved for eternity. And there is enormous social pressure put on people when their lives are literally on display for anyone to see. Relationships between people often start or end based on what happens on Facebook. Media ecologist Marshall McLuhan may have said it best, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
    Our ability to recognize this problem, however, is important and I think we can temper the negative side effects and gain more of the positive. As per usual, I don’t think I can fully answer any of these questions or issues here, but it is very important to bring them up and ensure that the implications of some of these new and emerging technologies are taken seriously and discussed.
    In the meantime, check out my blog for the 5 Facebook privacy settings you need to ensure you have control over your privacy online.

Quick Guide To Facebook Privacy

Facebook has 350 million users, half of whom log in at least once per day. Do you know want all those people to see all of your personal information? Here is a quick guide to understanding privacy on Facebook and the five privacy settings you should know about:

1) Friend Lists

These can be a little time consuming to set up a first time around, but they do help you have some control over who views certain content on your profile and make things easier potentially in the long run. Navigate to your friends page and you'll see an option to create friend lists. Maybe setting up Family, Friends and Co-Workers is a way to go, but whatever you do, friend lists are a very helpful tool that Facebook offers its users.

2) Tagged Photos and Videos

Go to your privacy settings page (Settings and then Privacy Settings) and you can enter a custom privacy settings for photos and videos that you have been tagged in, for example allowing only you to be able to see them.

3) Your Photo Albums

You can set privacy settings on each individual photo album that you upload to Facebook. With about 30 billion photos being uploaded to Facebook each year, odds are there are some photos that may be a bit more personal than others, and Facebook allows you to set the level for each album if you so choose.

4) Your status updates and wall posts

Recently, Facebook changed the way that you can control privacy when updating your status or posting to your wall. Now, each time you post an update you can select who (down to literally selecting friend by friend if you want to) will see your updates. The privacy button for the updates is right next to the "update" button when you publish a status update.

5) Your profile information

This is a basic one, but important. Go back to the privacy settings page and you can check off which information on your profile you would like to be visible to whom. If you are using Facebook for networking, you may want to keep work information viewable, while things like relationship status private.

None of these settings are any fool-proof way to ensure that you don't get embarrassed online or have personal information, private photos or videos or inappropriate status updates seen by the world. The best tip that anyone can give: If you don't want stupid photos of you showing up on Facebook, don't act stupid. If you must, then at least don't take pictures of it.

Studies routinely show that people are willing to share far more information online than they would be in a direct physical setting, so keep in mind how you would have felt about the information you are about to post to Facebook being on public display before this thing called Facebook came along - a time when communication between people was generally private by default.

Online Sarcasm

Have you ever been a situation where you made a sarcastic statement online, only to be rebuffed by an angry or confused colleague or friend?

Well, one company thinks they have the solution: SarcMark. A new character (to the right of the "SarcMark") to be used in online communication, the SarcMark is supposed to be able to designate that the sentence to which the punctuation is attached was sarcasm.

This is a brilliant idea, as no doubt many people have trouble communicating sarcasm online, an for the visually impaired, having a standard punctuation mark to denote sarcasm will really help with reading online.

Unfortunately, SarcMark costs $1.99 to download and use. Do they expect that the hundreds of millions of people using computers will each pay $2 to download this nifty punctuation mark? And thusly make hundreds of millions from this one product. Not likely. So much so, that the likely winner in creating a new punctuation mark for sarcasm will be a company who releases the character into the public domain so that it may be used widely. Hint: any graphic designers out there.

But then again, I'm just fine with writing sarcastically ambiguous statements online that confuse people. [SarcMark]


http://mashable.com/2010/01/15/sarcmark/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6995354/Sarcasm-punctuation-mark-aims-to-put-an-end-to-email-confusion.html

The Costs of Waiting

When thinking about investing money in infrastructure (whether physical, political, educational, etc) like healthcare it's important to frame the context in which this debate is being held. Let's be honest: our current system will change, probably quite often until some sort of equilibrium is reached, and then it will just change again. The idea of changing something we have now should never, ever be controversial.

Unfortunately, a counterproductive practice people tend to exhibit, that has been more recently explored in the field of behavioral economics, is peoples' misperception that waiting costs nothing.

I find the phrase 'status quo' interesting, because, in reality, it doesn't exist. Nothing is ever not changing in some way. The changes may be small or may seem unrelated, but they are not. And in terms of healthcare, the costs are enormous as emergency rooms become more overcrowded and more American families are faced with the horror of not having the ability to ensure the safety and health of their loved ones.

I am not even advocating a particular solution, and in fact, none of the solutions we have are perfect, and they never will be, but as science moves forward exploring and learning, so must we in public policy. And part of that is realizing that waiting has costs just as much as bad policy does, maybe even more. Not everyone will get exactly what they want out of this debate, but let's think about how we can best move this policy forward and help cover more of those 47 million uninsured Americans.

An Open Letter to Research in Motion

Many people rely on their BlackBerry device to provide data and email services on the go. However, if email services fail, critical information or emails may not get through to the user. And unfortunately for the user, it is not always possible to tell when data services have gone down.

RIM should create an automatic process by which an SMS is sent to all subscribed data users (because when data/email fails SMS almost always still works) letting the user know that the email/data service is down, and to check the website, etc for updates.

This way if a user is expecting an important email, for example, they can make arrangements to get information from another source, rather than be in the dark as to why an email hasn't arrived. If you are on business somewhere and rely on your BlackBerry for email but email service is down, simply having that information can help avoid missing any critical information.

Sign the petition via Twitter here: http://act.ly/1k0

Good News for Cell Phone Users

A 30-year, nearly 16 million person study concluded on Thursday that there was no link between cell phone usage and the potential development of brain tumors.

As reported in the The Age "We did not detect any clear change in the long-term time trends in the incidence of brain tumours from 1998 to 2003 in any subgroup," Isabelle Deltour of the Danish Cancer Society and colleagues wrote."

Read the full story here.