Christopher Herot's Weblog

Facebook and Faux Friendship

While Mark Zuckerberg waits for the latest Facebook privacy controversy to pass, it may be worth considering the larger issues of why so many of us find social networking services to be useful.

Recently, a friend passed on an article by former Yale Professor William Deresiewicz on Faux Friendship which decried the way he saw people replacing real interactions with real friends with simulacra of his friends - "little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets." While I loved his metaphor of the "loneliness of our electronic caves" where we rearrange the "tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls" I found myself thinking he should just go out and visit some of his friends instead of brooding about it.

My colleague and friend (in real life as well as Facebook) Steve Patterson had a good retort:

Most of the time I use social media to keep track of social media. I have been updated daily for at least 6 months by Bob Metcalf's internet connected bathroom scale that he has not lost weight and is no nearer to his goal of 180Lb than he was when he started. I tweeted him once suggesting that he would have fired a CEO of a portfolio company if he had performed that way.  Then I use it to learn about what Chris Brogan and others have to say about how they use social media.

Recently I was speaking with a friend who is an editor for MSNBC who was surveying his friends on their use of Twitter. In response to his inquiring why I used twitter, I told him that I used Twitter to stay in touch with really smart people, i.e. Zoltrain, Dyson, O'Reilly etc. He responded that he used it to stay in touch with Kim Kardashian and was willing to wager $100 that his recall of her last 3 tweets was better than my recall of the last 3 posts of the really smart people's tweets. I did not take the bet.

But there is one bright spot. I was concerned about friends in Chiang Mai Thailand due to the fighting in Bangkok. Though Chiang Mai is 400 miles from the fighting in Bangkok it is the birth home of opposition leader Tahksin and where many of the Red Shirt rebels come from.

After news sources produced few uncensored results, I searched Twitter. There I found a dutch woman Journalist Step Vaessen, Aljazeera's Indonesia correspondent on her way to Chiang Mai. who reports for the English language Aljazeera media outlet. Yes, the Aljazeera that we learned to love to hate due to our fear of the middle east after 9/11. Long story, I would never have learned that Aljazeera objectively reported on east Asian politics and economics had it not been for Twitter.

So what did should I take away from this? We are starting from the end of Jorge Luis Borges story the "Aleph" about the library that has become so large and old that there is no index. So much information in so many unexpected places un-indexed but for  social media.  I learned this by looking out for the safety of some true friends. 

So, please, enjoy Facebook but by all means get out into the world.

South Park Meets Social Media

You may or may not be a fan of South Park, but if you participate in social media you will want to watch last nights' episode, You Have 0 Friends, which manages to send up Facebook, FarmVille, Twitter, and Chatroulette, including the issue of parents "friending" their children in Facebook and the kind of people you meet in Chatroulette.  It skewers the whole currency of friends in Mad Friends, a take off of CNBC's Mad Money with Cartman in the Jim Cramer role.

 The last half is an homage to Tron, in which Stan's attempt to delete his Facebook profile gets him digitized onto the Facebook Game Grid.  Still in doubt, check out the number of fans of Kip Drordy.

Enough of the Facebook Fan Pages

Farewell Facebook?

Arriving as predictably as fire season in LA, articles predicting the demise of the latest Internet phenomenon show up as soon as the product or service in question approaches mass adoption. The latest in this series was an article by  Virginia Heffernan in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine entitled Facebook Exodus. Somewhat reminiscent of Yogi Berra's remark that "No one goes there any more; it's too crowded," Heffernan notes that people she knows are leaving Facebook, even as its overall numbers increase.

Is this just normal churn, or is Facebook doomed? While, as John maynard Keynes said "In the long run we are all dead," social networking services such as Facebook go through a predictable cycle. At the beginning, the early adopters sign up and get their friends to do so (the infamous "viral" spread), and the fun is seeing how many of your friends have joined and linked to you. By the time the wave has reached the general population, the earliest users have already "friended" everyone they know and are getting bored.  Who remembers Friendster or Orkut? The better sites give people something to do once they've signed up their friends, and Facebook has proven useful to many people as a way to share photos and events in their lives. Facebook may not be new and cool, but new and cool drives the early adopters - practical utility is what keeps them.

However, according to a recent report from Forrester, we are all early adopters now: 63% of Americans have broadband Internet and 75% have cellphones and PCs. Whether Facebook survives or not, there is no going back to an era when we wrote letters with quill pens and had them delivered by hand.

The Law of Amiable Inclusiveness

In his column yesterday in the New York Times, When Everyone’s a Friend, Is Anything Private?, Randall Stross explored what he calls the Law of Amiable Inclusiveness and its growing practice on Facebook.  He observed that the average number of "friends" on Facebook has grown from 100 to 120 in the past few months as more people routinely accept friend requests, even from people they don't know.

I've found I am moving in that direction as well.  When I first joined Facebook I only accepted friend invitations from people I had met, and occasionally sent replies to those I didn't recognize asking if we knew each other.  After a few of those people reminded me of a conversation, typically at a computer industry event, I adopted a more permissive attitude, usually looking at whether we have any friends in common.  This heuristic is obviously vulnerable to serial frienders, but then it's only Facebook so who really cares?

Stross goes on to describe the debate between people who think Facebook's default privacy settings are too loose and those who point out that if users really cared they could change the settings.  Since most don't bother, he concludes that with the concept of "friend" being so all-inclusive, it seems pointless to distinguish between private and public.

I draw a somewhat different conclusion.  Most of the information people post on Facebook is innocuous if not downright uninteresting to anyone but one's real friends.  This is especially true now that Facebook's membership has been open to the post-college crowd who presumably have settled down to less colorful private lives.  Still, it seems creepy to some people that a total stranger would be interested in such things, and puzzling that more Facebook posters aren't concerned.  (Obviously they haven't been watching much "reality" television.)  One way people that people can be made to feel more comfortable with the potential exposure is to limit it somehow, even if that limitation is arbitrary. The requirement that people had to be in one's "network" to see one's profile is one such safeguard, as if one was safer if the person looking at the profile was from the same town.  (Personally, I would be more concerned about being stalked by someone in my own town than someone a continent away.) The requirement that someone be a "friend" may serve a similar purpose.  Even though these friends may not be people one has actually met, there is at least some semblance of control, which is good enough for most people.

Good Cases Make Bad Law - United States v. Drew

When Lori Drew and her teenage daughter Sarah created a MySpace account in the name of a fictitious "Josh Evans" they apparently neglected to read the MySpace Terms of Use Agreement which, among other things, requires that "all registration information you submit is truthful and accurate."  Anyone who had read it probably would have concluded that the worst that would happen would be that MySpace would terminate their account, which MySpace reserves the right to do "at any time, for any or no reason, with or without prior notice or explanation, and without liability."  Of course that was before they used the account to torment Sarah's (former) friend Megan Meier, who committed suicide shortly after receiving a message from "Josh" suggesting the world would be better off without her.

Officials in Missouri were dismayed to find out that there was nothing in the state's laws that could be used to prosecute the Drews, but that didn't stop Thomas O'Brien, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, who claimed jurisdiction because even though the both Lori Drew and Megan Meier lived in Missouri, MySpace had its headquarters and server in his district.  He got an indictment charging that Lori Drew had violated the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 USC 1030) by providing false information to MySpace when she signed up for the account and had used the account for the "intentional infliction of emotional distress."  The former would be a misdemeanor but the latter a felony if deemed to be "committed in furtherance of any criminal or tortuous act in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States or of any State."  He further charged Drew with conspiracy for involving other, unnamed persons in the venture.

The jury deadlocked on the conspiracy count and acquitted on the felony charges, but did find Drew guilty of three counts of violating paragraph (a)(2)(C) of the Act, which states:

Whoever--...
(2) intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains—
...
(C) information from any protected computer if the conduct involved an interstate or foreign communication;

is guilty of a misdemeanor, in this case because on three occasions, she, "In violation of MySpace TOS, accessed MySpace servers to obtain information regarding [Meiers].

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out in an amicus brief this interpretation of the law essentially gives rules made by a private company the force of criminal law.  In this particular case, the defendent's actions were particularly egregious and the results tragic, but none of that was material to this case.  All that was legally required to win a conviction was to prove that the defendent made some material misrepresentation which induced MySpace to grant access to its system.  One suspects that the prosecutor and the jury were looking for something to throw at someone whose actions were truly appalling, but there is nothing about this interpretation of the statute that would prevent it from being used in the future against any unpopular defendant.

United States v. Drew CR-08-00582-GW

www.cacd.uscourts.gov

Ambient Intimacy

First it was Continuous Partial Attention.  Now it's Ambient Intimacy.  Both terms refer to the effect of a continuous flow of information via networked computers and wireless devices.  The former term, coined by Linda Stone, captured the human desire not to miss anything.  Modern technology and affluence have allowed us to more than satisfy the craving for information just as they have met our our craving for fattening foods, with results that are also deleterious, even if they don't shorten our lives.  More recently, Leisa Reichelt coined the latter term to describe how services such as Twitter allow us to keep in touch with other people, a larger scale and with more frequency than could be done before.

In a thoughtful and well researched article in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Clive Thompson describes how Facebook, Twitter and similar products have allowed people to exceed the Dunbar Number - a limitation of the brain on how many people we can stay connected with at once - mostly with beneficial results.  He uses Boston's own Laura Fitton as an example of someone who used Twitter's ability to make use of "weak ties" to do everything from finding an accountant to building a consulting business. (She's @pistachio.)

Unlike some journalists who tried Twitter for a few days and, not having figured it out, dismissed it as a fad, Thompson signed up (@pomeranian99), used it for more than a year and interviewed some of them.  They described a number of positive effects Twitter had on their lives, such as keeping up a social life while working, traveling and raising a family.

The article is well worth reading, as are the questions and answers posted on the Times Web site.

True Enough

When the World Wide Web burst into the pubic consciousness,  many pundits believed it would usher in a new era in which better-informed citizens would finally transcend the partisan bickering and warfare of the previous millennium and allow the creation of a more civil society.  Few were more fervent evangelists for this point of view than Louis Rossetto who in founding Wired Magazine wrote that "The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon."  Recently, Rossetto admitted that while Wired accurately predicted the degree to which the Internet would transform the economy, it underestimated the degree to which Old Media, Old Government, and Old Politics would live on.

Now Farhad Manjoo, a staff writer at Salon.com, has written a book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, that explains how the new, more fragmented media enabled by recent technology, such as Cable TV and the Internet, may actually have exacerbated the situation.  Citing a broad range of research in psychology, Manjoo catalogs the way humans appear to be hard wired to indulge in information that reinforces existing beliefs, interpret raw data according to those beliefs, listen to experts (real or phony) who make us comfortable, and attribute information which makes us uncomfortable to bias on the part of the source.  He offers examples from both ends of the political spectrum, showing how the Swift Boat Veterans created a media campaign that may have influenced the 2004 presidential election and how the National Election Data Archive argued that the election had been stolen.  In both cases, the data was ambiguous at best, but the groups involved skillfully exploited a fragmented media market to build their case among people who can increasingly select new that reinforces their existing prejudices.

Manjoo dissects a number of media events from the past few decades, including the conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination and September 11th, the Lou Dobbs phenomenon, and some less well-remembered stories including the disputed 1951 Princeton-Dartmouth football game and the SALT II treaty.  The last chapter, Truthiness Everywhere, delves into some modern propaganda techniques, such as astroturfing, push polls, and search engine marketing.  In an Epilogue, Manjoo concludes that a successful society requires trust, which not only lowers what economists call transaction costs but can result in lower death rates and greater civic participation.  He cites studies that show Americans who say they trust each other have declined  from 60% in 1960 to 32% in 2006.  While he admits there is considerable debate as to the causes of that decline, the increased efficiency of distorting the truth hasn't helped and the fragmentation of media may have shrunken the size of the circle of people we do trust.

Whether you believe the world is getting better or worse, Manjoo makes a compelling case that human nature being what is, we are susceptible to our decisions of who we listen to and who we ignore.  Being aware of those decisions, and how others may attempt to influence them, is something we ignore at our peril.

Some Practical Applications of Facebook and Social Networking

Recently I've been spending more time on Twitter than on Facebook, so I was pleasantly surprised by some of the ways Facebook can be useful, even for the casual user.

I took some photos at the PodCamp Boston conference a few weeks ago and posted them in all the usual places: my blog, the herot.com photo gallery, Flickr, and Facebook.   The blog and gallery got a modest number of hits, and I assume people enjoyed the Flickr stream, but the Facebook album generated a flury of activity.  I had tagged the people I knew, but as often happens at events like these there are people I had talked to but didn't have the opportunity to exchange contact information (which at PodCamp can be as simple as exchanging Twitter ids).  No problem.  In a serendipitous exercise in crowdsourcing, within the first day my other Facebook friends had tagged all of the unidentified people.

The following two weekends I found myself in, respectively, Stowe, Vermont and in the water outside Marion, Massachusetts.  Although I don't check the Facebook news feed as often as I once did, I decided on the spur of the moment to use my mobile phone to update my Facebook status.  In Stowe I immediately heard from an old friend and Lotus colleague who now lives there, inviting me to visit.  In Marion, I similarly heard from another friend and colleague who invited me to visit and offered a mooring in Marion harbor.  Both cases illustrate Mark Granovetter's theory of weak ties and how social networking software can be useful in maintaining them.

PodCamp Boston - It's About People and Stories

At PodCamp Boston last weekend, one theme ran through all the presentations and discussions, which was that the best way to get and hold people's attention was to tell them compelling stories about other people.  As Jack Valenti said many times about the movie industry, you can spend all you want on famous stars or special effects, but what draws an audience is "a good story, well told."

This point was made many times with regard to web-based businesses, but artist Keith Burtis described how it worked for promoting his art.  Burtis writes about the process of making his woodturned art on his blog, and does live videos on BlogTV.  He said people were much more interested in purchasing a piece of art when they saw or heard the story of how it was made, even to the point on insisting on purchasing the object in the video instead of a nearly identical work made in private.

Burtis offered some additional examples, such as Natasha Wescoat's art tutorial videos and art news blog which have made her a top seller on the Web and led to a lucretive licensing deal with Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Shelley Greenberg made this point and more in her summary of PodCamp's Five Lessons:

1. Social networks are a means, not an end.
2. Content is king.
3. Participate, participate, participate. And then? Participate.
4. Everyone, no matter how much gravitas they command, is human.
5. Help yourself by helping others.