Whimsley

Alone Together II: The Unburdening

[After my first Alone Together post (link), about how much I like Sherry Turkle's use of closely-observed stories, the prolific Rob Horning, now of The New Inquiry among other things, wrote a companion piece (link) on Authenticity, which this post follows. Other things you may want to read about this book include Tom Stafford's Why Sherry Turkle is So Wrong and Mr. Teacup's review.]

Slippery words: caring and conversation

When I started reading Alone Together, I didn't expect to end up wondering what a conversation is, but that's what happened, so that's what you get here. Spoiler: my wondering wandered in a circle, first agreeing with Turkle, then disagreeing a little, then a lot, until I ended up largely agreeing with her again.

What do you think about a seventy-two-year-old woman, Miriam, finding comfort in telling stories toParo, a furry machine designed to care for the elderly and infirm? 

"Care for?" Turkle writes, "Paro took care of Miriam's desire to tell her story – it made a space for that story to be told – but it did not care about her or her story" {106}. It's not just the word cares that Turkle objects to, but also the word conversation. "To say that Miriam was having a conversation with Paro, as these people [Paro's designers] do, is to forget what it is to have a conversation" {107}.

Turkle worries about these inauthentic conversations partly because we are so easily seduced by the appearance of caring. We read caring into the actions of robots at the first opportunity, even when we know better. When a robot called Domo simply touches its designer, Aaron Edsinger, he says that "there is a part of me that is trying to say, well, Domo cares." Turkle concludes: "We can interact with robots in full knowledge of their limitations, comforted nonetheless by what must be an unrequited love." {133}

Rob Horning writes that Turkle has always been concerned with the way that "Users begin to transfer programming metaphors to their interactions with people and psychological metaphors to the behavior of machines." She believes that authenticity is important (real caring, real conversations with real people) and that technology is replacing the authentic with the fake. As she tells the stories—the robot ones anyway, the network ones less so—I can't help but agree with Turkle. Caring robots may be seductive, but in the end their companionship is a deception and should be avoided.

Authenticity: if you can fake that etc

There's a catch in Turkle's argument, which many others have noticed: many "real" conversations are not authentic either. Horning takes this point to the extreme: "Nobody can ever show you their 'real' self." Turkle's "concern with authenticity is an expression of nostalgia", and authenticity is "a pressing personal issue now for many not because it has been suddenly lost" but because it is being lost in new and different ways thanks to digital networks. Authenticity itself is not what it used to be.

I kind of agree with Horning. Even without taking it to that extreme, we clearly spend much of our day in inauthentic interactions, robots or no robots. When the cashier says "Have a nice day", is it the voice of the cashier or the company whose policy they are following? Small-talk and passing greetings are more the enacting of social scripts than authentic exchanges of emotions or views. The scripted responses of call-centre employees just waiting to be replaced by a cheaper technology are obviously inauthentic. The coffee machine at work even tells me to "enjoy your beverage" and I don't really mind that. Where does inauthenticity become a problem?

Even Turkle's own profession by training (psychoanalyst) has always seemed to me to have a big dose of inauthenticity to it. As a man of a certain age from the north of England the whole "talking about feelings" thing is foreign to me, and as a leftist the idea that markets alienate people from their work is easy to identify with. So I remember being shocked when I first came across people going to therapists in the 1980's. If you do need to talk to someone about your problems, I thought, you should at least do it with friends or family. Going to a counsellor is a bit like going to a prostitute, I thought: paying for something you should get out of affection. You may talk with them, but it's not a real conversation. It's not authentic.

To be fair, Turkle has heard all this before and acknowledges that "We assign caring roles to people who may not care at all." When a nurse at a hospital takes our hand during an operation, does it matter if the gesture is rote? {133} The market has moved us closer to what she calls "the robotic moment", when certain kinds of interaction are ready to be automated. We know it's not a real person at the other end, so why not just replace them with a machine anyway.

So if a nurse's hand is OK, but a robot's is problematic, what about when people receive comfort over networks? Is this inauthenticity any worse than that of the market? The market brings new forms of inauthentic interaction into our lives all the time: people who use the language of caring but who are just doing a job. Personal trainers, massage therapists, and all the way to automated voice systems. Or how about conversations while drunk (are we really ourselves?) or how about talking to someone using antidepressants to get through the day (is that really them speaking?) Inauthenticity is everywhere.

What's a conversation?

So I started to disagree with Turkle about authenticity and its importance. Next up, the idea of a "real" conversation. A later chapter of Alone Together, about the online confessional site PostSecret (link), made me reconsider my initial agreement with Turkle on this. Maybe Miriam, telling her story to Paro, is not looking for what we think of as a conversation anyway, so much as an opportunity for "unburdening", and unburdening has its own dynamics.

An example. Sixteen months after physicist Richard Feynman's first wife Arline died of cancer, Feynman – a convinced atheist and one of the most consistent denouncers of fuzzy thinking on record -- nevertheless wrote a moving love letter addressed to her (link). "I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and what I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you." .

The letter served an important purpose for Feynman. His daughter Michelle notes that it was well worn: Feynman had re-read it often. There were things he needed to say, and even though Arline was not there to hear them he needed to address these things to her. Feynman's letter is a way to speak out loud (yet in private) to an audience that is important (yet not present). It's sort of a conversation, but also not, and that's the way that unburdening often works.

Some forms of unburdening have become formalized and surrounded by ritual. Take the Catholic confession: it takes place in a private space, behind a curtain; there is a barrier between the penitent and the priest that serves to emphasize the distance between the two; the solemn ritual surrounding confession serves to emphasize a commitment to privacy, so that the penitent can speak out loud to an audience that is barely there, knowing that what he or she says will go no further.

Psychoanalysis has taken on many of the same characteristics as confession. The quiet office formalizes the encounter. The guarantees of privacy are emphasized. The patient lies on a couch and the therapist sits out of sight so that the patient is as close to alone as possible. Again, in order to speak things that really matter, we seek an audience of almost zero.

Even in less formal settings, unburdening is most commonly carried out by expressing intimate thoughts out loud (on paper, on a screen, or by voice) but to an audience that does not know us intimately. How many people have told secrets to strangers they will never meet again? People talk to their pets. Sometimes unburdening has no audience at all; for centuries, private diaries have been receptacles for sorrows and a place to work out problems and dreams. These are the most private of public gestures: secrets we whisper aloud and then lock up, needing to speak them but not wanting them to be heard.

The posting of confessions to PostSecret is another form of unburdening, of speaking without full conversation. In this case anonymity hides the identity of the penitent, and the role of the priest is taken by the readers and commenters on the site. The site has its own rituals; you don't e-mail your secrets, you must mail a physical postcard with your secret (as it passes through the mail system, it is visible - another anonymous disclosure).

Turkle sees many acts of unburdening as somehow less than satisfactory. "On the face of it, there are crucial differences between talking to human readers on a confessional site and to a machine that can have no idea of what a confession is. That the two contexts provoke similar reactions points to their similarities. Confessing to a website and talking to a robot deemed 'therapeutic' both emphasize getting something 'out'. Each act makes the same claim: bad feelings become less toxic when released. Each takes as its promise the notion that you can deal with feelings without dealing directly with a person. In each, something that is less than conversation begins to seem like conversation. Venting feelings comes to feel like sharing them" {231}

It seems to me that she is understating the benefits that unburdening can provide, and missing the long history of practices that surround the act, for good reason. There is more to unburdening than "bad feelings become less toxic when released", and more to it than a simple venting; it's just that what we seek is not always conversation. We should pay attention to gestures like Feynman's.

• Aside: Unburdening and anonymity
  

  There is much talk about speech, anonymity and privacy on the Internet, but sometimes our ideas of speech and what it is for are too narrow and this steers the debate off the rails. Perhaps it's the information-centric view of dialogue as information exchange that blinds some people to the other purposes of speech, but acts such as unburdening need to be thought of differently. There is an idea (see Eric Schmidt's famous "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place", or Douglas Rushkoff in his recent "Program or be Programmed") that so long as we are honest with what we say, then privacy is not that big a worry. But it's not only stupid mistakes or criminal/offensive acts that we don't want out there in public, associated with our names. Unburdening is just one kind of speech that needs to be private for completely legitimate reasons, and that we need to be able to enter into knowing that its consequences are limited.

What is conversation for?

Perhaps, I wondered, unburdening is one form of conversation that doesn't need a full participant on the other end. The point is sometimes to hear ourselves speak. A friend of mine at work had a teaching assistant in a science lab class who said "you can ask me any question you want, but first you have to ask the bear". The bear was a teddy bear sitting on a filing cabinet. It was surprising, my friend says, how many students asked the bear their question, and then realised they didn't need to ask the teaching assistant.

So then, why does it matter if it's a robot, a dog, a diary or a teddy bear on a filing cabinet if what we want is to just use speech to work out some problem or explore some emotion? Turkle writes "How can I talk about sibling rivalry to something that never had a mother?" {19} But a diary doesn't have a mother, and a dog doesn't understand what you are talking about, and people have used diaries and dogs to sort out sibling rivalry problems for centuries.

Back to where I started

So there I was, disagreeing with Turkle about authenticity and about conversation. Yet the more I think about it, the more I am coming round to agreeing with her (on the robots anyway), for a mixture of reasons.

One is what I think of as the "postmodern mistake". Postmodernism takes things we think of as certain and shakes them up, showing us that foundations we thought were solid are in fact wobbly. But sometimes it leaps from "everything is uncertain" to "everything is equally uncertain" and that just ain't so. Is there a well-defined border between India and Pakistan? No, but we can still talk unambiguously about "India" and "Pakistan" despite that. A little fuzziness doesn't mean we have to abandon everything.

So conversations with checkout workers are inauthentic, and conversations with robots are inauthentic, but that doesn't make them equally inauthentic. The limits of a robot are orders of magnitude more constrained than even the most robotic of phone-call workers. In "Everything is Obvious", Duncan Watts explains how Artificial Intelligence has been more challenging than its proponents believed because, in attempting to design intelligent machines, they failed to realize what was relevant. The fact that we are so ready to add meaning to robot actions will lead interactions rapidly into unexpected and problematic areas.

Why am I so pessimistic that the interactions will be "problematic"? Because the robots we may see soon will be commercial products, and that means they will have an agenda. Rob Horning has the same worry about networks; in his final paragraph he writes "The problem is that we believe that we construct this social-media identity autonomously and that it is therefore our responsibility, our fault if it’s limited. The social-media companies have largely succeeded in persuading users of their platforms’ neutrality. What we fail to see is that these new identities are no less contingent and dictated to us then the ones circumscribed by tradition; only now the constraints are imposed by for-profit companies in explicit service of gain." In the same way that the algorithms of social networking sites have a straightforward agenda (keep us on the site, to maximize advertising exposure), so robots will have a straightforward agenda (cost effectiveness, keeping old people occupied, and so on) that will not be obvious to us as we interact with them.

The other problem I see, which applies to networks and to robots, is their uniformity. People have their faults, but different people have different faults, and so humanity as a whole is not dragged down any single rabbit hole. The introduction of global communications media that have very specific (and limited) formats (the text message, the tweet) cannot but have a homogenizing effect on our interactions.

But these conclusions are not so important, and I could be talked out of them. What's more important about the book is the unexpected avenues it leads you down. I'd rather have a book that prompts a week or two of thought than one that gives me the answers I'm looking for. I'd rather a book with the foibles of a human conversation than the reassuring, stress-free interactions of a robot, and Alone Together was such a book for me.

I've screwed up the comments trying to move to Disqus so I don't have to deal with the 10/1 spam to real-comment ratio that Typepad lets through. Hope to have it sorted soon, when usual crappy service will be resumed.

Alone Together 1: Stories

[The first of a few reflections prompted by Sherry Turkle's Alone Together.]

The sublime Leonard Cohen in today's Guardian:

I don't really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans. They tend to be on the right side of things: ecology or vegetarianism or antiwar. All these are wonderful ideas but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart. I never set out to write a didactic song. It's just my experience. All I've got to put in a song is my own experience.

The same is true of fiction. Songs and stories are powerful ways of communicating, but literature with an agenda is almost always bad literature, stories with a message are almost always shallow morality tales, and the fables that now pepper popular non-fiction books are often particularly egregious examples. Thomas Friedman's taxi drivers and Malcolm Gladwell's hush puppies are the 21st-century template for books on management, business, economics, politics, and technology only because even badly-told stories seduce us.

Whenever I encounter a story in a non-fiction book my guard goes up, whether it's fictional or a retelling of an actual event. I know that I am being presented with a Trojan horse; there's a message hidden inside and the only reason for telling me the story is to sneak that message past my defenses of scepticism and logic. It's a trick, and critical readers must reject it. At some point the tables will turn and the telling of non-fiction tales will be recognized as the dishonest, slippery tactic that it is, but for now we must simply resist them and the invading armies that they are smuggling. Which makes it all the more surprising that I loved Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, because it is full of stories.

More precisely, I loved the first half of the book, devoted to observing how humans react to robots that react to humans. In Part Two she observes humans reacting to other humans through the medium of digital networks and is less successful. Her use of stories is one reason why Part One works and Part Two fails, so lets stay with the robots and Part One for now.

First, if you are going to use stories you might as well tell them well and Turkle does so. She has an eye for a telling phrase that sets her apart from most non-fiction writers. From a robot that "develops its own origami of lovemaking positions" to the titles and subtitles of the book, she coins phrases that evoke the contradictions and tensions that are her subjects. "Alone together", "The robotic moment: in solitude, new intimacies", "Networked: in intimacy, new solitudes".

Second, the stories are not archetypes conjured up simply to illustrate a point, but emerge from the extensive observational work Turkle has done: more than 700 interviews over 30 years, decades of bringing robots to schools and nursing homes, sending them home with children for weeks at a time, watching participants interact with robots and watching herself also. "I think of the product as an intimate ethnography" she writes {xiii} and the credibility of the book comes from this longstanding and far-reaching work.

More importantly, in Part One she uses stories to provoke questions, rather than to provide answers. Consider two examples.

Early on, Turkle writes of visiting the American Museum of Natural History with her then-teenaged daughter Rebecca. They approach an exhibit of two giant tortoises from the Galapagos Islands. Rebecca looks at the one visible, motionless, creature and declares "They could have used a robot".

Turkle was taken aback, and started a discussion with other parents and children in the line-up. Several of the children shared Rebecca's concern for the animal and her unimpressed reaction to its authenticity: it would be better for the tortoise itself not to have been brought all this way; a robot would not make the water dirty; "for what they do, you didn't have to have the live ones." The parents disagree: "The point is that they are real. That's the whole point."

What I like is that the story does not deliver a message, but instead prompts questions in the mind of the reader. In this way, despite its factual origin, the story is more fictional/literary than many. Does authenticity matter? If so, under what circumstances, and why? It's the open-ended nature of the event that makes reading Alone Together an active, questioning experience, and one I found very rich.

That's not to say Turkle doesn't have a message to deliver. She does, and she is clear enough about what it is: "I am a psychoanalytically trained psychologist. By both temperament and profession, I place high value on relationships of intimacy and authenticity." {6} The book is about Turkle's increasing concern, after years of enthusiasm, that social technologies are serving to erode these qualities.

The second story is one that has stayed with me because it gets right to the heart of the issues the book raises around authenticity {74}. Visiting Japan in the early 1990s, Turkle heard tales of adult children who, too distant and too busy to visit their aging and infirm parents, hired actors to visit in their stead, playing the part of the adult child. What's more, the parents appreciated and enjoyed the gesture. It's slightly shocking to western sensibilities, but once we hear a little more context it becomes more understandable.

First, the actors are not (in all cases, at least) a deception: the parents recognize them for what they are. Yet the parents "enjoyed the company and played the game". In Japan, being elderly is a role, being a child is a role, and parental visits have a strong dose of ritual to them: the recital of scripts by each party. While the child may not be able to act out their role, at least this way the parent gets to enact theirs, and so to reinforce their identity as an elderly, respected person.

The story, again, provokes questions in the mind of the reader rather than leading us to a staged conclusion: questions about authenticity, when it matters, and why. Turkle's reaction was "if you are willing to send an actor, why not send a robot?" If it does not matter that the visitor is really a child does it matter if the visitor is really a visitor? Does it matter if the visitor is not really visiting (a phone call)? Or why, as my wife asked, should we see this as less than a visit when we could see it instead as more than a bunch of flowers?

To me, the story and the questions it prompts undermine my confidence in my own judgements: to make me realise that they are more tied up with cultural conventions, more arbitrary and more shallow, than I thought. And if prompting reflection is the point, then that's OK because the story is, again, open ended: it is not hiding a pre-planned answer.

Part Two of Alone Together fails because Turkle's interviews and observations focus on bringing out our discontents (new solitudes) with networking technologies. She has a message, and it's one we can either agree with or argue with, but by approaching this part in terms of discontents she fails to escape being didactic. The slogans have not dissolved, in Cohen's words.

Part One succeeds because it explores the "new intimacies": what is surprisingly seductive about interacting with even the most crude and obviously artificial robots. It's this seduction that is so unsettling: the notion that things are "alive enough" for a given kind of relationship; that the most powerful thing a robot can do is to have needs which we can meet.

There is something of a taboo against robots in Western societies. In the last few years we have grown to accept human-sounding artificial voices (the iPhone's Siri being the latest) but we shy away from artifical human appearance. We permit robots as toys and vacuum cleaners, but their use as companions for the aged or as visible service employees is still outside the realm of the every day (at least for now). Interacting with a visible robot is still a novel experience for those of us outside childhood, and so Part One of Alone Together has a sense of a report from a slightly alien future. What she shows us is how vulnerable we are to the seductions of even the most crude simulations, and for unexpected reasons, and the disquiet this provokes is something worth reflecting on. Taboos are vulnerable to suddenly being washed away, and the technological imperative may yet carry us forward into a world where robots are more commonly present. I share Turkle's concern about what impact that will have. More on that next time.

Short Notes: Cute Cats (or not) in Central Asia

Doing some reading after up my recent post on Ethan Zuckerman's "Cute Cats" talk I came across this post by Sarah Kendzior at registan.net. I know roughly nothing about the places and events she discusses, but it is a fascinating post by an obviously knowledgeable person, and the comments thread following it is one of the most absorbing I've ever read. Lots of people have great things to add, and they do so in a constructive and generous way.

Upcoming: Alone Together

I just read Sherry Turkle's excellent and provocative Alone Together and I plan to put up four wordy posts about it here, more "inspired by" than "review of", which will probably take me a month or so. Does anyone want to join in, either at your own blog or here, to make it a conversation instead of a monologue? If so, either leave a comment or by email  (here).

Ethan Zuckerman's "Cute Cats and the Arab Spring"

Table of Contents

• 1 Dry Tunisian Tinder
• 2 Cute Cats and Malaysian Opposition
• 3 Polish lunch rooms
• 4 Tunisia's Second Act
• 5 Media Ecology or Network Ecology?

Cory Doctorow (*) and Jillian York (*) were both full of praise for Ethan Zuckerman's Vancouver Human Rights Lecture on Cute Cats and the Arab Spring (*), so I listened to the podcast from CBC's Ideas (*). You can also watch the lecture on YouTube (*).

Ethan Zuckerman (EZ) has a long and admirable history of involvement in digital activism and a wide knowledge of both technology and social change; the lecture is worth an hour of your time. But (you knew there was a but) in the end I have to disagree with his main thesis.

1 Dry Tunisian Tinder

EZ tells us how, after years of sporadic and failed protests in Tunisia, one particular spark in the city of Sidi Bouzid blossomed into the forest fire of revolution. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest at official interference with his vegetable stall it was a dramatic and desperate act, but not unique: he wasn't the first person to do so even that year. What was different this time?

EZ's argument is that digital social media was different. The early protest was captured on video using a cheap phone and posted to a social networking site where… it did NOT "go viral". Instead the video was picked up by Tunisians outside the country (including EZ's friend Sami ben Gharbia¹), who were scanning Tunisian web content for political news and curating it on a site called nawaat.org (*).

Al Jazeera got the video from nawaat.org and broadcast it back into Tunisia; Tunisians found out in turn what was going on from Al Jazeera. What's important here, says EZ, is that the new low-cost participatory media is an essential part of a larger media ecosystem that helped to stir up feelings within Tunisia.

2 Cute Cats and Malaysian Opposition

In the 1990s EZ ran a web site called Tripod for college/university students. Surprisingly, many people used it not for the Worthy Purposes he and his colleagues had planned, but to share simple and casual things, like pictures of cute cats. Also surprisingly, some of the heaviest use came from Malaysia. Wondering what was going on, Zuckerman got the Malay content translated, only to find that his site was hosting the Malaysian opposition Reformasi movement (*). Tripod was a space that was difficult for the Malaysian government to censor while being easy to hold discussions.²

And so we reach the "cute cat theory": the ideal places for those who suddenly have important, politically sensitive material they want to share are sites designed for sharing videos and pictures of "cute cats" (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr). These sites are easy to use, have a wide reach, and are difficult to censor – if the government shuts them down it annoys a lot of people and alerts them that something interesting is going on. "Cute cats" sites are natural tinder boxes for revolutionary sparks.

The events EZ recounts are compelling, but a lot of compelling things happen in this strange world, so my first thoughts whenever I hear a story of the Internet producing some unique chain of events is: can I think of a non-Internet example that matches? So here is the lunch-room theory of political dissent (details from here).

3 Polish lunch rooms

On July 8, 1980, in the lunch room at a transport equipment plant in the eastern Polish town of Swidnik, the price of a pork cutlet jumped from 10.20 zloty to 18.10. For Miroslaw Kaczan, this jump was the final straw, and after lunch he switched off the machines he was working on. Others in Department 320 joined him, and other departments in the factory were quick to join. Soon there was a factory-wide stoppage, and it wasn't just about pork cutlets: the demands of the protesters revealed a wealth of pent-up frustration.

News about the strike in Swidnik spread so quickly that within two weeks 50,000 people in the region were on strike. This wave of strikes was resolved on July 25, but the disruption was far from over: three weeks later the strikes at the Gdansk ship yards in northern Poland started, and within a year Solidarnosc had over 9 million members.

In the early days of the strikes, Poles had a hunger for news of the protests, of course, and despite the heavy censorship of official media they found them, through short-wave radio broadcasts from other countries.

So the lunch-room theory is not that different from the cute-cat theory, except that there's no Internet. People gather wherever they gather for their everyday conversations and interactions, and it is in these everyday places that a spark of frustration can catch fire. And once it does catch fire, a combination of broadcast media and a networked public spreads the news quickly.

Perhaps, the Polish example shows, the Internet is not essential for the spark to turn into a fire. Perhaps a digitally networked public is not the only networked public.

4 Tunisia's Second Act

Even in Tunisia, politically sensitive material for which there is a high demand has found its way through dangerous pathways to reach a public desperate for news.

In a long piece called Streetbook (*) John Pollock interviews two members of an underground Tunisian group called Takriz [update: see Ethan Zuckerman and Jillian York's comments below for reservations about Streetbook]. One of these "Taks" describes how the video that "made the second half of the [Tunisian] revolution" was taken when the regime had shut down the Internet, so "Takriz smuggled a CD of the video over the Algerian border" before forwarding it to Al Jazeera. YouTube may make it it easier and safer to make videos available (at least so long as Google lets it be done anonymously), but when an important video was available, the Internet was not essential to the process of distribution.

5 Media Ecology or Network Ecology?

If we are really going to talk about a "media ecology" in the sense EZ means, we need to include all those gathering places–online and offline–which are difficult to shut down precisely because of their everyday, general purpose role. In addition to Facebook and YouTube we need to include factory lunchrooms, mosques and churches, football stadia (*), universities, popular music (*), balconies (*), and more.

All these share a number of properties with Cute Cats sites. They are difficult to shut down without annoying large numbers of previously quiescent people, they are difficult to monitor in detail because of the dispersed and varied nature of the interactions that go on, and they are already familiar places for the gathering and sharing of information. EZ says that "we don't take these 'cute cat tools' seriously enough. These tools that anyone can use, that are used 99% of the time for completely banal purposes" but he doesn't take offline everyday institutions for banal sharing seriously enough.

EZ's mistake is the achilles heel of social media advocates. Talk of a "networked society" is justified by comparing today's digitally connected populations to a population of couch potatoes watching prime time TV, but such a comparison overlooks all those other institutions of public networking. Instead of talking of a "media ecology" we should be talking of a "network ecology": the intricate tapestry of multiple networking institutions and practices that makes up a society.

Do digital social media supplement other networking instutions or displace them? There has been a lot of work on this at the individual level, but it's much more difficult to evaluate on a societal level. It is possible that digital social media increase the richness of social networks in a society, but it's also possible (likely?) that digital social media are the kudzu of networks, thriving while they strangle the other components of a rich and diverse network ecology; the best network left standing in an impoverished environment.

Footnotes

¹ Among other things, Sami ben Gharbia is author of a fantastic essay on The Internet Freedom Fallacy and Arab Digital Activism (*)

² In fact it may not have been so much that the site was difficult to censor, as that Malaysian government had decided to exclude the Internet as a whole from its otherwise-strict censorship rules (*).

Date: 2012-01-05 22:50:21 EST

Org version 7.6 with Emacs version 23

2012 Predictions: Turning Points for the Web

Table of Contents

• Avoiding Cynicism (As If)
• Facebook: Privacy Hits the Mainstream
• Amazon: Abusing Community
• Apple: Stepping in Front of Google

Avoiding Cynicism (As If)

Peering into the New Year, my better half Lynne reflected yesterday that it is a duty of each of us, as we grow older, to be vigilant against encroaching cynicism. She's right (of course!), and I do feel that strong and steady current tugging me sluggishly downstream towards the lazy, easy waters of geezerhood, to a place where everything new shows itself only by its flaws and in which every new glass is basically empty.

Luckily, 2012 looks like being a banner year for those of us who take a critical view of the hype and commercialization around digital technology, so I'm actually feeling quite cheery. The number of digital hecklers is growing¹, and will continue to do so as the relations between the mainstream Internet and its audience/members sours. A growing wave of disenchantment is gathering enough steam [sic] to become a creative force in its own right, and I think that's going to be fascinating to watch, as well as potentially a period of renewal for alternative culture.

So Happy New Year, and here are a few predictions for 2012. I don't think the full impact of any will be over and done during the calendar year, but I do think we'll look back at 2012 as a turning point in attitudes to digital technologies.

Facebook: Privacy Hits the Mainstream

Prediction

High-profile privacy cases in 2012 will dramatically accelerate the level of public distrust in Facebook, which will spill over to other Internet aggregators.

Privacy has always been the other side of the openness coin. Everyone loves openness, of course, but the last year or two has made it clear that behind Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook profile (*) claim that "I'm trying to make the world a more open place" there is a hard, cold, commercial reality. Are we sharing among each other, or are we feeding Facebook? And where is the boundary between the two?

Here's a dilemma my son faces, which also confronts many other young people. After university one potential employer is the Canadian government. If he clicks his support on Facebook for political protests, will government background checks have access to this information and will it count against him? There's no point asking Facebook even if you did trust it, because today's terms and conditions may change, and the laws governing it may change too. From being an open space where it is easy to express our political views, Facebook is becoming a panopticon where we censor ourselves, not knowing who is watching.

It's not clear that the advertising driven model of web technology is sustainable given its dependence on data that we are increasingly reluctant to give up. As ex-Facebook engineer Jeff Hammerbacher says, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks." We've lived with this downside until now but as the choices become more stark this may change, and when things change on the Internet, they can change very quickly. danah boyd's view that "Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated" (*) will become mainstream. We'll see demands² for changes to Facebook's practices (see the Europe vs Facebook group (*), and the Irish data protection commissioner's report here) gaining momentum.

Amazon: Abusing Community

Prediction

Change in the open source world as Google takes on Amazon.

Amazon is rapidly making a name for itself as the company to give the Internet a bad name. From brutal working conditions (*) to treating physical bookstores as showrooms (*) to union-bashing (*) to McCarthyist policies around Wikileaks (*) to tax opposition (*) to screwing libraries (*), this company has done everything it can to demolish the image of the Internet as a source of cooperation, collaboration, and open friendship. It has perfected the act of free-riding on open source efforts, building its (remarkable, it must be said) profitable EC2 infrastructure on Xen Hypervisor, using Linux extensively, and not contributing back (*), in the same way it happily takes all those volunteer hours put into Wikipedia and uses them to sell its own devices, messing with authors' rights as it does so (*).

The Kindle Fire is the icing on the cake: Amazon has taken the Android operating system and its Linux kernel and used it to power the Amazon tablet. In doing so, it has taken Google's language of openness around Android (always suspect) and thrown it right back in Google's face, removing the Google applications and most evidence that the device is running Android, and making it an Amazon device from end to end.

With the Kindle Fire looking likely to become the top selling Android tablet, you have to wonder how long Google will welcome this state of affairs. There's a lot of talk about the rivalry between Google and Apple, but the tension between Google and Amazon is the conflict that may change the open source world. The licensing terms for open source software have been increasingly friendly to commercial exploitation of community projects, moving steadily away from the more restrictive GPL (*), and Amazon's nose-thumbing may be the step that forces a re-evaluation of this enterprise-friendly stance.

Apple: Stepping in Front of Google

Prediction

As the open web fragments, Google will look to its bottom line.

Speaking of Google, Apple's voice control system Siri may be the biggest threat the friendly ad-broker has yet faced, and you could argure that Siri is the major threat to the openness of the web.

It's increasingly obvious that the web has several natural bottlenecks, and that these bottlenecks are simultaneously the places where money can be made and chokepoints where political pressure can be applied. Ever since broadband and mobile access replaced ye olde dialup and Internet access became dominated by telcos and cable companies, ISPs have been one set of bottlenecks. Mobile device makers are another. The DNS system itself is yet another, which SOPA is looking to squeeze. Finally, there is aggregation, Silicon Valley's preferred source of influence.

Aggregation creates a single point of entry into a part of the web, whether it's aggregating consumer items (Amazon), digital products (Apple), people (Facebook), or the web itself (Google), and aggregation is driven by increasing returns to scale. The point of aggregators is to stand between us and what we want to reach, guiding us to those parts of it that seem best.

The thing about Siri is that it stands in front of Google, potentially displacing the search box as iPhone users' point of entry to the web. Just as removal from Google's search engine makes you vanish from the web, so Siri has the potential to make Google vanish. Well, not vanish in the short term, but fade at least. Apple negotiates deals with providers like Yelp and Wolfram Alpha, doing an end run around the PageRank algorithm.

If Siri and other voice-recognition "assistants" move towards the mainstream, we can expect to experience an increasingly curated/censored version of the web (*). The relationship between Apple and the anti-establishment has always been love-hate, and Siri may drive it into hate-hate.

Google's friendly image can last only so long as its growth rate and profit margins stay healthy. It's already lost the aura of being the place to be for programmers, soon we'll soon see enough competition to force Google into a more orthodox stance, and that will shock a lot of observers.

Footnotes:

¹ A few years ago Andrew Keen's silly "Cult of the Amateur" was the most prominent digital criticism book. Now we have Zittrain ("The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It"), Carr ("The Shallows"), Turkle ("Alone Together"), Wu ("The Master Switch"), Lanier ("You Are Not a Gadget") and many more.

² "Demands" is not the best word, as Chris Dillow points out (*)

Comment problems and one other update

I've had a couple of people tell me they were unable to post comments. After taking this up with Typepad, I have shifted from their "Typepad connect" system back to the vanilla commenting system. If you have problems posting a comment, then I would appreciate an email at last name dot firstname (gmail). And you can rest assured it isn't personal unless you are a spambot, in which case it is, or would be if you were a person.

Also, in a recent post I suggested that there was a conflict of interest in a paper I read. The authors have now published an explanation at the end of the paper and I retract the suggestion (I still don't understand why lead author Gilad Lotan lists his affiliation as he does, but that's his personal decision). I've put a note in the post to clarify.

Morozov on Jarvis: Is There a Point?

Jeff Jarvis's 2009 book What Would Google Do? is a breathless paean to the benefits of sharing, linking, and being open, but it has not a single reference or footnote, and no bibliography. Jarvis extols the virtues of listening and speaks of mutuality but in the end, of course, the benefits flow one way. Jeff Jarvis has become wealthy from this new ethic of sharing -- he is fond of "starting conversations" which he can then take ownership of -- but when it comes to giving credit to those who come before, for example by referencing previous writers on the topics he addresses, well it just seems like it's too much work for him. The book is one long argument by assertion, unsupported by facts and liberally sprinkled with utterances like "small is the new big" or "We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance" or "Google has built its empire on trusting us".

It looks like his new book, Public Parts, is more of the same. The New Republic just published a long review of the book by Evgeny Morozov here or here. It's forthright, opinionated, angry, entertaining and also makes some damning arguments against the book. 

Jeff Jarvis responds to the review here in bizarre fashion. He first raises the prospect of personal prejudice ("Morozov reliably dislikes me, just as he dislikes people I quote") and then dismisses the review as "he writes only a personal attack". Morozov spends 800 words critiquing Jarvis's misunderstanding of ideas about the public sphere and his oversimplification of Habermas, which Jarvis distorts and reduces to a complaint "about the names Habermas and Oprah appearing in the same book". Morozov spends 600 words on Public Parts' culturally narrow ideas about Germany, Finland, and the strange attitudes of non-Americans to privacy, which Jarvis encapsulates as "[Morozov] finds Streetview to be a case of Germans 'tyrannized by an American company'". In short, Jarvis exaggerates and distorts the arguments before dismissing them.

*                                *                                 *

To anyone who reads carefully, the argument is over and Morozov wins, but unfortunately that's not the end of the story. Much of Morozov's frustration comes from Jarvis's refusal to engage with the world of facts. He stays safely in the world of pronouncement ("Publicness is a sign of our empowerment", "the crowd owns the wisdom of the crowd" and so on). Jarvis is skilled at the marketing of ideas: if you Google [publicness], four of the first page listings are about or by Jarvis, and this canny use of branding will keep his profile high, well beyond the reach of factual criticism. Jarvis knows his audience and what they want to hear, and what they want is a self-help message for businesses: the world is changing, everything you thought you knew is irrelevant, and I have the key to the future.

So what, then, is the point of the hours Morozov spent writing a 7,000 word review if he won't reach Jarvis's core constituency? There are two other audiences that such pieces can reach. One is to shore up those who broadly agree with Morozov's perspective (yes, like me) that there is an ulterior motive, a very familiar and old-fashioned one, behind this talk of sharing and publicness. We cannot read every new book, watch every new TED talk, attend every conference and yet we do need to stay current and stay informed. I am not going to read Public Parts because there are so many other things to read, but I cannot afford to be completely ignorant of it. Morozov's review does the job for me.

The second is more important. Many people are attracted by the romantic rhetoric of openness, sharing, and the end of existing institutions, but not all have yet sorted out the political consequences of a commitment to these virtues. There are still people on the fence - and it's important for these people to know that, no matter what progressive-sounding language is used, some of the most idealistic arguments for sharing are made by those who will mine the data you provide in order to build fortunes from advertising. To shape that debate and to keep a political space open for an Internet that does not simply follow the venture-capitalist idea of progress, we need fact based arguments, so kudos to Morozov for doing the necessary work in this case.

Broken Promises: Following Your Dreams, and the 99 percent

This speech by Steve Jobs has been posted in many places over the last 24 hours:

 

It is a strange speech: quite moving, personal, modest, and thoughtful. But in the end it’s a “follow your dreams” speech, and as such is quite a contrast to another Internet event of the moment, the very moving stories being posted at We are the 99 percent.

“Follow your dreams” invokes a cosmic bargain (fortune favours the brave) and it also invokes a social bargain: that if you work hard, and have a little luck, society will ensure that your efforts are rewarded. Meanwhile, the "we are the 99%" posters “sense that the fundamental bargain of our economy – work hard, play by the rules, get ahead – has been broken, and they want to see it restored” (Felix Salmon, quoted here).

So nothing against the guy, but over the next few days I’ll think more about what the 99%-ers say than what Steve Jobs said at Stanford. One of the stories he tells is of dropping out of college and, instead, monitoring courses independently. It's an inspiring story, but the contrast to this post, made today, is glaring.