Response 7: What has surprised me (Or: In Which I am Slightly Less Paranoid Than That Guy Who Tried To Convince You That 9/11 Was an Inside Job)
I came to this class with at least a basic working knowledge of a lot of the topics we’ve covered. I had a geocities page back in the day (a tripod one too, as I recall–sidenote here: how is it that Geocities is gone but Tripod continues to exist? I am baffled.) Years later I briefly maintained a personal blog using blogspot, and I have close friends who devote a serious amount of time to their WoW guild. So, while the reading and in-class discussions added more depth to my understanding, none of these things really surprised me. The one thing I can nail down that has changed? My attitude toward Google.
I’ve always had a touch of paranoia (enough to suspect that all corporations are run by evil overlords, not enough to think we didn’t land on the moon), but learning more about how Google is run, how closely information and changes to the algorithm are guarded, and how much it knows about me was enough to change my usage patterns. Sure, it’s a pain to maintain an Outlook calendar separate from my personal email—but now I’ve decided to abandon Google’s calendar. I just don’t like the search engine that knows I was looking for running shoes knowing that I have a run scheduled on Thursday. And I *really* don’t like the idea of that search engine recording, say, a diagnosis from my doctor I decided to research, while the calendar records that I was at a specialist three days ago. Call me crazy, but I just don’t want it to be that easy to get so much personal information about me.
Becoming aware of the fact that Google would like to get involved in EMRs was, in fact, the straw that broke this particular camel. I find it fundamentally unacceptable for a company to handle both my personal medical information and targeted advertising sales. Further, the idea that Google-run EMRs could prevent medical mixups is suspect, keeping this, this, and this in mind. I’m not buying it, and as a result of this class, I now trust Google a shade less than this guy.
Response 6: My Honest Response to Second Life
Like so many others of my generation, my first experience with gaming came via the original Nintendo. Back then, though, it wasn’t me that the gaming bug bit—it was my father. In 2009, the notion of 32-year-old man spending an hour a day gaming isn’t that revolutionary; this was not so in 1991. The guy mapped ‘Nam on graph paper lifted from his office in order to beat the NES version of Platoon. I learned young that successful gaming takes serious time and effort. My later childhood and adolescence was filled first with learning Punch Out combos, then gathering in friends’ rooms to play Tekken Tag. In 2005 I downloaded a copy of The Sims (late to the party, I know) and promptly devoted several hours a day to my sim. Her name was Lindsay, she had my personality (as plugged into the game’s rudimentary personality scale), and she refused to converse with other sims without slapping them. While not exactly an MMOG, my Sims experience was an introduction to a simulated world that I had to learn to navigate.
So I thought I could handle Second Life. And yet: I do not understand this crap, and I feel like an old person. I figured out walking, touching things, and flying rather quickly—and I promptly edited my avatar’s appearance to look like “me” (she really looks like a more evolved version of the old Lindsay Sim). But then I got stuck on “Avatar Island,” which is apparently a location, and I couldn’t escape, and I wandered my own personal hellscape for half an hour before tiring of all the barely-dressed avatars (I guess people come here for this?) and logging out. What surprises me about Second Life? The fact that, despite a generation-y gaming history, I am unable to figure out how to have a meaningful or productive gaming experience. I’m supposed to love this stuff! Instead, my second life is a cracked-out electronic version of an imitation Beckett play. And I’m not interested.
Note: My friend Mike wanted me to note that I read My Tiny Life back in the day, as though this is somehow proof that I don’t hate MMOGs. Then again, he also wanted me to just write this blog post about his upcoming Tekken 6 party, so take his input for what it’s worth.
Would Universal Broadband Change Anything?
Last week, there was a link on the Delicious site to an article about Finland’s decision to make broadband access a legal right. The news was, of course, released to an internet’s worth of applause (see examples here and here.) Back in June, France’s high court asserted that internet access was a basic right (leaving aside the specific speed of the connection) that could not be denied, even to repeat illegal downloaders. Now, two countries do not a revolution make, but it’s worth asking: Is this as big a deal as the internet world is making it seem? What does it really mean for Americans?
The decision is obviously a landmark, and a reframing of the internet from a sort of luxury tool (like TV) to something much more fundamental (like electricity.) But a mandate without a plan for extensive funding is, in my mind, useless. (A timely parallel can be found in certain US Healthcare reform proposals.) If broadband is available via a private company (like, god forbid, Comcast) at a cost, what ends up happening? People who didn’t have broadband only because it wasn’t available in their area will probably use it. But what about those people who can’t afford the monthly fee? Or who just aren’t interested? According to Pew research, only 14% of dial-up users and 13% of non-internet users cite lack of availability as the problem. In comparison, 35% of dial-up users and 7% of non-internet users cite price as the issue. For more proof, consider this: “Only 35 percent of homes with less than $50,000 in annual income have broadband, while 76 percent of homes earning more than $50,000 per year are connected” (via InternetForEveryone). These facts drive home the “Concerns About Inequality” that an NPR poll cites as one of Americans’ main concerns about the internet. A mandate without funding won’t help the poor—all it will do is make service better and more reliable for people who can already afford it. Obama’s got a plan, and an expensive one at that. I just hope that some of that money goes somewhere other than to the companies laying the cable.
Response 5: Google Owns You
Whenever I need information on a topic, my mother instructs me not to “google it,” but to “ask Google” (an amusing miscegenation of Google and AskJeeves). This always makes me laugh, as it implies a sort of all-knowing information overlord hiding behind that friendly, primary-colored logo. When I stop to think about it, though, my mother might be onto something.
Should we be afraid of Google? In short: hell yes.
Google is responsible for 70% of search engine queries. They control what information we see in the results of those searches, via their secret algorithm(s). The best we can do is guess at what’s involved in the rankings, which still doesn’t leave us in any more control of the information (links) our search turns up. As Battelle says in The Search, “no one goes to the fiftieth page of results” (165). A minor tweaking of Google’s algorithms can throw businesses into despair, not to mention cause serious problems for individuals.
And Google is far from just a search engine. Gmail users are increasingly common both in the US and worldwide. Google Books is revolutionizing the way we consume books and the accessibility of out-of-print materials, but not without giving Google itself some pretty hefty benefits (and serious power). And, as I discovered only this week, for every user (and to use Gmail, for example, or Google Reader, you have to create a user profile), Google maintains a total web usage history. Google knows that on September 17th, 2009, I searched for “kinds of slugs,” then visited a website called Different Kinds of Slugs. I don’t remember why I did this—I’m fairly sure it was innocuous—but I’m vaguely uncomfortable with Google maintaining a record of it. What if poison slugs are involved in some crazy terrorist attack, and the government demands to know who’s researched them lately? It sounds stupid (well, that particular premise is stupid), but the overriding principle isn’t. The amount that Google knows about me—who I email, what I say, where I live, what websites I visit, what books I’ve looked through, projects I’m working on in GoogleDocs, where I might be going based on GoogleMaps searches, the list goes on and on—is deeply unsettling. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Google’s working on breaking into the medical record business.
In sum: Google controls access to unimaginable amounts of data, about both the world and individuals in it. They are also a for-profit company with a history of doing what they want and avoiding regulation. If that doesn’t scare you, it should.
Everybody Hates a Tourist
Tourism troubles me. I once had a boyfriend who liked to wander the Earth in search of some authentic experience that could only be found in countries that didn’t speak English. Upon his return from one distant locale, he told me that he’d asked a random woman if he could go in and take photos of her hut (“It had a dirt floor and everything!”). For her trouble, he gave her five dollars. (“That’s a lot of money to those people!”)
Now, I am planning my honeymoon with a different man, and the subject of where to go and what to do came up early in the wedding-planning process. We considered the mighty all-inclusive, with its swim-up pool bars and free watersports—and in fact, I’ve had pleasant family vacations at all-inclusives in the past. The thought of a week surrounded by a bunch of other couples and families all sequestered on one of those massive hotel-estates, forced to eat tepid buffet food and overhear other customers get frustrated with the waitstaff for their lack of perfect English? Just didn’t seem like honeymoon material.
Not to mention the ethical concerns I hinted at above. I don’t know that there’s such a thing as truly ethical tourism. It’s a complicated situation—do you support an industry that takes advantage of the natural beauty of someone else’s homeland by plopping a resort on top of it, far removed from the neighborhoods in which locals actually live and eat and sleep, and employs those locals for your pleasure (for much less than an American would make)? Do you rationalize it by thinking about the amount of money that tourism brings the global economy, the number of jobs it provides? Can you actively work to send your money in a more socially-responsible direction? What happens to local economies when, for whatever reason (ECONOMIC MELTDOWN, say?) the tourists stop coming?
Can you (or I) take personal moral responsibility as tourists? Or will we just hate ourselves a little more with each margarita that Carlos the pool-bartender slaps in front of us? Like I said, it’s complicated. My fiance and I are, for the record, driving across the U.S. on our honeymoon. Eco-tourists we’re not, but nor will we be invading anyone’s dirt hut.
Think of the Children!
Following the news that the Obama assassination poll was created by a minor and the introduction of the proposed Cyberbullying Prevention Act, it seems clear that kids are having a tough time navigating the intricacies of the online social world. For all the press extolling the younger generation’s ability to navigate new technologies with ease, there seems not to be much discussion of whether their developing brains are equipped to handle the realities of a massively-connected social world.
When I was 13, I had about 4 close friends, 10 friendly acquaintances, and a circle of roughly 50 other people I knew well enough to say something vague about (“That’s Laura. She takes ballet, and her older brother is cute.”) That’s 64 people, total, most of whom were 12-15, and most of whom knew very little about me (“That’s Lindsay. She fell asleep in geometry last week.”) A quick look at a younger relative’s Facebook page reveals 107 friends, a disproportionate amount of whom also have more than 100 friends. For every ill-advised status update or butt-centric photo this child posts to her page, at least 100 people have access. And so it’s not the technology that concerns me, but adolescents’ inability to successfully navigate a very sophisticated social world.
Now we’ve got proposed legislation to punish online bullying (I wonder how many people now in their 30’s wish they could go back and apologize for the “real-world” bullying they dished out. Would time in juvie have helped them not call someone fat or stupid? Somehow I doubt it.) and the Secret Service (rightfully) investigating a poll posted by a child. We’re working on punishing these kids—but what are we working on teaching them?
A Google search for the terms “kids social media class” turns up nothing relevant. A search for “teach kids how use social media” yields very little of interest, save for one article about social media being taught in UK primary schools. If we’re going to enforce rules, we need to teach kids what those rules are, first. And that means not just teaching them the tools (which they probably know how to use anyway), but introducing a substantive class on social media, personal image, self-esteem, and respect in the online world. It’s worth wondering if there’s anything that will make a 13 year-old really “get it”–many of them are, by nature, short-sighted, impulsive, and reactionary. But since they’ve shown us they can’t figure it out on their own, we ought to feel an ethical obligation to at least try to lend a hand.
Response 4: The Long Goldfish Tail
Like countless other idiots, I won my goldfish at a fair. Ulysses came home in a plastic bag, his partner Agnes in the bag beside him. Long story short, Agnes croaked, so my fiance and I bought him a new friend (Pilar) who naturally came to us with parasites and proceeded to hide in a corner for four days, then die. At that point, Ulysses wasn’t looking too good–the combination of his traumatic beginnings, parasites, and the untimely deaths of two companions wasn’t doing much for him. I needed help if my fish was going to make it, and goldfish books weren’t doing the job.
I tell this story because it was at this point, my little fish throwing himself at the gravel in a bizarre fit, that I first discovered the online goldfish community. Happy Goldfish is more an information page than a community site, but I mention it because it a) saved Ulysses’ life, and b) gave me the terminology I needed to do a more productive google search than “goldfish throwing at gravel disease.” Once I was able to search for “goldfish flukes,” several message-boards and forums turned up in the hits. Of these, the most active is probably Koko’s Goldfish Forum, followed by Site for Goldfish Keepers . The forum is the most common tool of the online goldfish community. Not surprisingly, there isn’t much real-life crossover interaction (goldfish-keeping is, after all, a rather solitary and deeply nerdy hobby.) There are no goldfish meetup.com groups within 100 miles of my zip code, and the Potomac Area Goldfish Enthusiasts club seems to be defunct as of about 2003.
What surprises me most about the forums is not that they exist (everything seems to exist somewhere on the internet), but the fact that posts go far beyond information-sharing: people post “funny” fish stories, pictures of their fish for others to comment upon, and memorials to deceased fish (which really makes me feel like I moved on from Agnes and Pilar much too easily.) The other things the forms really excel at are product reviews and recommendations. With Amazon at our disposal, goldfish enthusiasts are able to purchase any book, food, or castle mentioned in a post. This is where the long tail is most evident (because, honestly, there aren’t that many sites devoted to goldfish-keeping): Goldfish: A Complete Pet Owner’s Manual is ranked #549,495 in Amazon books—but it’s still there; Amazon carries it even though it hasn’t cracked the top half-million in sales. And 13 people have reviewed the book, which confirms Anderson’s hypothesis that there will generally be at least a few people who find and purchase goods from the long, low end of the tail.
I, by the way, am one of them. On recommendations from various forums, Ulysses’ diet now consists of two different types of fish flakes, sinking goldfish pellets, dried bloodworms, and thawed frozen peas. And a 20-gallon tank. To himself.
Response 3: Three Reasons the Social Web Bill of Rights is Important (and three reasons it’s futile)
Before this week, I didn’t know anything about the “Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.” Call it naiveté; it never occurred to me that social websites would prevent personal ownership of or access to information. On reading up, it became clear to me that businesses, when left to their own ethical devices, are generally jerks, and that a social web bill of rights is important, even to the casual user. Below are my top three reasons why—and three corresponding reasons why I can’t imagine how much of a difference it will really make.
1. If I don’t own my information, it can be sold. This is pretty self-explanatory. I’m not interested in buying whatever it is that Facebook or its friends would like to sell me. I’m also not interested in my information being used in covert market research, or in the myriad other ways I haven’t yet imagined. I’ve noticed, though, that since I changed my relationship status on Facebook to “engaged,” my page is inundated with ads begging me not to be a fat bride. I imagine once I am “married,” I will learn all about fertility drugs, or mortgages or something. Facebook tells me I own my information—but what is this ownership worth to me, if targeted ads still find their way to my screen?
2. I want to retain the power to delete my profile—really, forever, for-realsies delete it. It may be the case that nothing will ever be totally gone from the web once it’s been posted—but I’d like to retain the right to get my information as close to gone as possible, if I so choose. The bill of rights provides for this choice, and attempts to protect my ability to remove any and all content from social websites—profiles from dating sites, photos from flickr, and any stupid thing I said in my Facebook status. Of course, if another user has cached my page or downloaded my images? I’m still boned.
3. When it is clear that users demand these rights, sites will be more inclined to dialogue. When Facebook tried to change its TOS to grant itself “perpetual license to all photos, videos and copyrighted material posted by its members,” users responded (unfavorably.) This reaction helped spawn the “Facebook Principles,” which clearly echo the principles in the social web bill of rights. The more people are familiar with and committed to these principles, the more ubiquitous they should become. Unfortunately, there is no regulatory enforcer to compel sites to comply. Todd at Geek News Central articulated this much better than me (“But who will get them in trouble?” I thought to myself).
Response 2: Google Reader and I Are Getting Married
I had not used Google Reader prior to last week’s class, and have to admit I was spellbound by the possibilities. As of last Wednesday afternoon, I was already checking my favorite blogs about once an hour, as well as popping onto Google News and CNN once or twice a day. Before tools like Google Reader, I guess there were just, well, tools like me who couldn’t go an hour without more (useless) information.
But after class? I proceeded to promptly add 10 blogs to my reader, expanding my daily consumption from just the A-team to include the B-list. DCist? Sure, why not. Sartorialist? Absolutely. I found using the reader to be simple and intuitive, and I quickly organized my content into folders: favorites, news, class-related, etc. Wonderful!
Of course now, instead of having a desktop screen, I have Google Reader open. I’ve found myself sitting at my desk, attempting to complete some menial task when—ooh!—one of my favorites just posted something. I live for the moment when the blog title in my list goes from gray to bold and black. I live, as I have always lived, for more (useless) information.
And there is always more to be had. Having Google Reader open has given me just a taste of how remarkably CONSTANT new posts are. Sure, some of my favorites only update a few times a week—but some of the B-list sites update several times an hour. Seeing all of these posts collected in one space makes me imagine what the internet would look like if it could be visually represented in terms of new content. I’m picturing an enormous lite-brite, a new glowing peg popping up every second.
It’s in the middle of picturing this that I realize it’s 3:30, and I still haven’t finished completing that menial task, and while I was zoned out, 4 new posts have appeared. (Amazing!) And I click the bold black titles, and I absorb the content, and I will have only myself and Google Reader to blame when the fire department eventually finds me fused to my desk.
Google Reader: www.reader.google.com
In Which I Become the Kind of Person who Reads Internet Forums About Television Shows
I am not the kind of person who talks about television. Despite the depth and passion of my occasional TV obsessions (I was deeply invested in season 1 of VH1’s Tool Academy, among other, less embarrassing programs), I have never been the type to hover around the water cooler, discussing last night’s episode or forwarding my half-baked theories about events to come. Television, after all, is both not real and strictly dictated by what writers and producers have already planned. Engaging in these types of conversations would be akin to interrupting someone’s recollection of a vivid dream to tell them I think they probably ought to attack the giant tomato monster with a laser beam and, further, that the giant tomato monster is clearly foreshadowing that, sooner or later, they are going to become a farmer.
My point: Personal reflections on television shows are ludicrous.
And yet. I’ve been watching AMC’s drama Mad Men with rapt attention since the middle of season two (season three is currently underway) due in no small part to the episode recaps posted on Jezebel.com. They caught my attention last year and, before long, I purchased the first two seasons from Itunes. Nothing amiss there. Recently, however, my quick viewing of the recaps has turned into something very, very different.
I’ve started to read the comments.
And not just read the comments, really, but devour them with a boundless appetite. I read them shortly after the recap has posted, and then I read them a couple of hours later to see how the conversations have developed. While Jezebel remains my favorite resource, I’ve also taken to popping onto the forums at Televisionwithoutpity.com to see what people think over there. There is a whole internets worth of people who watch Mad Men, and they have facts and theories and Freudian deconstructions of each and every episode—and all without the discomfort of standing around a water cooler, waiting for someone who likes my particular show to get thirsty. Fairygirl109 thinks Don was being sexist in his response to Peggy? SO DO I. MamaGloria doesn’t think so, but MamaGloria is wrong.
I would tell her so myself, if I was the kind of person who talked about television.
