An article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz carried the story of how ultra-orthodox rabbis “in a desparate bid keep flock away from Web,” are denouncing even ultra-orthodox Jewish web sites. The page carried a scary banner ad for a video seeking to expose radical Islam: “Obsession: radical Islam’s war against the west”.
2009
Thoughts about privacy and social networks
Could we be moving into a stage of civilization where not to share our thoughts and experiences with the entire world will be seen as antisocial behavior? For those who invest time in social networks, this is already somewhat true. Those who only re-tweet or share what others have said, without adding anything of their own are exposed to criticism, and I’ve read of twitter software that helps to spot those who only retweet or post links.
Although it would require research in order to prove it, I have noticed that friends in social networks tend to reward expression of emotion and particularly the revelation of what has traditionally been regarded as personal information or private feelings.
Facebook – as the network that initially encouraged interchange with real life friends – has been instrumental in getting people to speak about themselves openly – mainly because members felt somewhat protected within the network’s walled garden. Now Facebook is making incremental shifts towards encouraging its members to share information more publicly. It is encouraging greater openness among its members, by leading them to share more about themselves to more people.
We may already be reaching a time when all of this publicly available information will permanently determine an individual’s chances in life of receiving a good education or career. And while it may still be possible to opt out of social networks, this may not be the case fairly soon, as much of our interaction with people and colleagues is transferred online. There will simply be no place to hide.
Everyone has heard horror stories of Facebook members who have lost jobs, lost out on renting apartments, been expelled from school, ruined their marriage, or even lost their lives as a result of being too open about themselves on Facebook. Lately there was the case of a woman whose insurance claim for depression was challenged because she appeared to look happy in photos she had posted.
However, such cases blur what is actually happening, by presenting examples of behavior that can be easily avoided. In fact, the analysis of data from social networks is becoming much more sophisticated.
There is no way to be a member of a social network without impacting personal privacy. From the moment we join, we begin to construct our social graph: Who are our friends and how many of these do we have? or, in the context of twitter, who do we follow and who follows us? How do we interact with these friends and followers? Do our friends hold us in esteem? How many times are we retweeted or listed on twitter? Do people tend to comment on our posts, and do we comment back? Are we charitable in our comments? Do we show good judgment or intelligence? What groups have we joined? What applications or games have we added, and how long do we spend with these? What websites do we visit? Do we click on ads? Do we spend money online? There is a mine of information here, stretching back years. Combined with the matrix of other information outside, such as medical records, credit card records, and the rest, everything that could be of interest to an employer, a bank, or a government becomes knowable.
What kind of influence will all this have on us and on our society? Will the knowledge that personal information is publicly available influence us to cultivate a fabricated public personality in order to help us in our careers or relationships? I think there will be some of this happening. But I also see this as just another stage in society’s move towards greater personal openness.
Whereas in the past it was much more necessary to hide behind a façade, keeping sexual predilections, religious beliefs and many other matters private, there is a greater acceptance of diversity than before. As interaction with social networks become gradually more prevalent, and everything that is worth knowing about us is literally out in the open, we will learn to live with this fact more easily.
On emusic
Over-all, I have had a good experience with emusic.com since I joined this music download service in early 2006. At that time it cost $10 per month for 40 downloads. It was the only for-payment legal music service available in Israel, except for some Russian sites, whose legality was murky enough to make me wonder if illegal downloads weren’ t a better option. There may be other possibilities today, though it could be the same: the music industry still attempts to close out competition from overseas. And now a neighbor who tried to follow my recommendation to subscribe to emusic was told by the emusic site that the service isn’t available here.
Songs have gotten more expensive on emusic since 2006, though the service itself has improved quite a bit. I came near to canceling my subscription recently when, without asking, they attempted to move me to a much more expensive plan (which nevertheless gave me fewer downloads than the previous one). After a bit of email prodding, they came clean and even gave a hundred free downloads as compensation. So I was chuffed – though they still got me to pay more for less.
I’m happy with emusic because it specializes in the offbeat material I love – and the service works just as well on Linux as on Windows. All tracks are DRM free, and owned permanently. Still mainstream music fans in North America or Europe have better options.
One thing I learned to avoid was the service’s Conduit.com tool bar. Although not usually classed as malware, it certainly acts like it. Ordinary Google searches start to be routed through Conduit (which is then paid by Google). I did not understand, when installing the tool bar, that it was third-party, and it took me a while to find out what was hijacking my browser. Conduit is an Israeli company, I discovered recently.
Telephones in the modern era
My first experience with a cellphone was while staying in a Bedouin tent in the Judean desert. It was at a time when Maaleh Adomim, a large Jewish settlement, was encroaching on Bedouin who had lived in the area since they were ethnically cleansed 40 years ago from the Negev desert. In order to protect them from sudden evacuation, activists maintained a nightly presence. If the security forces or bulldozers happened to show up, we were supposed to call a list of numbers, and for that purpose we were given a cell phone – a heavy Motorola device that was about as heavy as a brick, but larger.
When the security forces and bulldozers eventually did come to demolish their makeshift encampment, it was on someone else’s watch. Sometime in the mid 1990s, cellphones began to be affordable and we purchased another Motorola – much smaller, though still massive by today’s standards. It was possible to receive calls but only to call our home number. From that time on, cellphones have been passing through our household with ever increasing frequency and the drawers of bedside tables are filled with a tangled mass of old chargers, cords, face panels and holsters.
Young people, in particular, seem to replace their phones at a high rate – not because they hanker after the latest models, but simply because the devices break so easily. Every two or three weeks, someone in the family is back at the service labs of the cell phone company, getting a phone replaced after its screen went blank, its ring tone stopped functioning or battery died permanently. The smarter and more sophisticated the phone, the more easily it is broken.
That probably explains why I have so few problems. My phones tend to be old fashioned and featureless. I’ve had the current one about three years, and nothing has ever gone wrong with it. On the other hand, I don’t use it that often. Sometimes I even forget it somewhere in the house until its battery discharges and I can no longer find it by calling myself.
So today I was reading Dave Winer’s piece about how the new Motorola Droid sucks, and I have to agree with him. I’ve never seen a Droid – it will probably be months or years before it ever makes it to Israel – but he’s surely right. For, as he says, “Today’s phones are marvels of technology. I love them. But they all suck.”
Not only did the Droid not make it to Israel, but the Iphone isn’t really here yet, either. All three cellular providers are expected to introduce it soon, at who knows what exorbitant fees. I didn’t wait for the Iphone. I have an Ipod Touch, which didn’t come with any service agreement and costs nothing to use. I like my Ipod very much. Since I’m usually close to wifi, it has everything I want. I’ve wrapped it up in a double silicone case with screen cover, because intuition tells me that these wonders are fragile and ephemeral.
A better facebook interface
One of the problems for Facebook’s interface is that people post at an unequal rate. Those who post a hundred messages a day drown out those who post just occasionally, and this happens despite attempts to balance things. A solution to this would be to introduce an alternative “friends” view which would present just the latest update from each friend and, when clicked, would expand all that person’s other posts. The arrangement could be according to the last person who posted appearing first. However, our “top 20” or “top 40” friends (whoever many fit comfortably on the first page) would always show first, regardless of the number of messages they post. That would prevent the frequent posters from crowding out best friends who post infrequently.
The above suggestion would make it possible for those who like to post as frequently as they do on Twitter from feeling restrained by Facebook etiquette and it would make it unnecessary for Facebook users to block frequent posters. It could be an alternative view to News Feed and Live Feed – but I think it would be popular. And it should be “sticky” – i.e. persistent between Facebook sessions, once chosen. If I recall correctly, Flock browser’s facebook view already presents a friends list with latest status message from each friend.
Red Corner
Red Corner is a movie about an American who comes afoul of the Chinese legal system. It stars Richard Gere and a lovely Chinese actress named – I think – Ban Lee. I’m writing from an Ipod and it isn’t so easy to look up references. Quite a terrible movie. I wasn’t so worried about what critics called the hackneyed plot – since I don’t watch so many movies that never bothers me. And the silly plot developments didn’t worry me too much either. But I felt angry that the American director felt he could give himself so much license in his portrayal of China. I feel few sentiments towards that country, but this kind of xenophobic rubbish, which has a senior Chinese official pull out a gun and dispense summary justice in the courtroom, and other absurdities just add to the cross-cultural bad vibes. It’s a pity that Richard Gere, the Buddhist devotee of the Dalai Lama, involved himself in a hateful movie like this. The media always reports with indignation the way in which Israelis or westerners are depicted badly in Arab or Iranian films.
Memories and experience
Walking in the woods today I turned my thoughts to my early childhood. The fields and woods were growing dark under a gibbous moon and there was plenty of time to let memories surface. I thought of the houses in which I lived, of moments with parents, of childhood friends. It was actually surprising how few memories came, especially before the age of five. I think if I were to write headlines for each of these memories, they would not fill very much space.
Then I let my thoughts flow to memories of adolescence and adulthood. There too the record is murky – a convoluted worm’s-path in sand. I felt sad not on account of memories, but for the fact that so much of life passes unconsciously, unprocessed, without due reflection, as if on automatic pilot. And the consequence is that memory is dim. Even the broad outlines, such as the rationale for directions taken, lose their clarity.
Just as my feet knew to complete the long circle of my evening walk in the semi-darkness, while my mind was reeling back through other times and places, my life experience has brought me safely along to the present juncture. It isn’t a question of following a path and reaching a destination – it’s a question of the manner in which we travel the path.
Tagging would fix Twitter and make it more useful
Nova Spivack likes to differentiate interest networks, like Twine, from social networks like Facebook. The problem is that people also use social networks to follow their interests, especially as in the case of Twitter. The result is that if we want to follow, say, Dave Winer’s thoughts on RSS, we also have to follow his interest in baseball. Microbloggers like Robert Scoble have begun to create separate Twitter accounts for their aggregation of Links and comments. Others use hash tags. But most simply continue to send all their tweets to the same into the unified stream. If Twitter had a tagging option, we could fine-tune the service to follow only Steve’s RSS related tweets, and Robert wouldn’t need to make all those different Twitter accounts. Twitter would suddenly become much less noisy and more useful. The same formula should be adopted by other social networks.
Streaming vs. Blogging
I just finished reading Louis Gray’s blog post about streaming versus conventional blogging, With the example of Steve Rubel’s Posterous. Then had another look at Rubel’s writings. Rubel conceives a situation where content producers might abandon traditional websites – the “hubs” of today’s web – in favor of placing their content on services like Facebook (the “spokes”, from which content emanates outward from blogs and websites).
Whether or not this proves to be true, I think that it requires no less writing acumen to produce an interesting stream than to author a traditional blog. Parts of Rubel’s Posterous are quite boring, Successful streaming and microblogging require stylistic adjustments in order to create interesting content.
I’d love to see greater stability in Google Docs
I have found it possible to create documents in Google Docs that it is impossible to convert to MS Word docs, or download or email. In such cases you can only copy and paste. Some Google docs can’t even be opened by Google Docs. If these are things that I’ve come across, as a fairly light user, it means that there’s a nest of other bugs waiting. Google needs to spend time stabilizing its Docs platform more than it needs to add new features.
But if Google is thinking of new features, user-customized templates should be introduced to standard edition Google Apps or regular Gmail users, and it would be nice to see shared folders. For both of these features I found workarounds*, but these shouldn’t be necessary.
* The workarounds:
– for templates, create a “Templates” folder, create a new template. Open the template as a document, and just remember to change the name to something else. If you make a mistake and change and save the template, you can always revert to a previous “version”.
– as a workaround for the absence of shared folders, I create folders in a shared Google Site, then place links to the documents there. Update: Google has just introduced a shared folder feature (see The Next Web article from October 12) This shares a folder with all of its files. But does it allow another user to place files there? If so, it isn’t clear from Google’s explanation.
