Memes: Not really an in-joke anymore

One of my favorite parts about teaching Media Literacy is hearing/reading about what media my students use, what content they enjoy, and how that compares to the experiences of me and my peers. As someone who is roughly twice their age, I don't really expect that we will engage in many of the same types of media experiences. Just as my teachers would make stilted references to M.C. Hammer in order to garner a laugh, I made a reference to Kendrick Lamar's Swimming Pools (... ... drank!) and got a hearty chuckle from the kids. We're in different age cohorts, different life cycles, and we're living in an increasingly fragmented media environment. What could we possibly have in common?

This makes it all the more surprising when I discover that many of them are encountering the same memes as I am. In some cases, we're on the same website, but in others, we're on different sites (or highly personalized versions of the same site, like Twitter and Facebook) that are increasingly comprised of viral jokes that often re-purpose amateur or professional media content in order to comment  on current events or a relatable situation (i.e., memes). Do we watch the same TV shows? No. In fact, I'm willing to bet more students in my classes have the media experience of seeing a Sweet Brown meme in common than will watch the Super Bowl, the Grammys, or the Oscars. Supposedly, these water-cooler TV events would remain a common cultural touchstone, and they likely will be the one thing (along with some big movies) that cut across age groups. But there is something going on with memes that is interesting. They're often originating from relatively tiny communities or obscure sources well outside of the mainstream, but they become the references that my students and I both have in common. If I include a reference to Mad Men in my slides, I'll get blank stares, but a picture of Grumpy Cat gets them laughing every time.

The first thing that occurs to me about this is that at least for certain populations (young people?), media users may not need TV and celebrities as a subject of common experience and conversation, at least to the extent that previous generations did. I think the use of memes is partially substituting for the use of TV and celebrities as a way to joke about norms, blow off steam, bond, etc. Based on my casual observations, I'd say that music and musicians as personalities are just as central to these young people as they were to me and my parents when they were that age. But TV and celebrities? I'm not so sure.

This isn't to say that TV and celebs are going away, but that they may not be as essential to leisure media use as they once were. Perhaps TV has already started to adapt to this, although the meteoric rise of memes to this stage in which they are something that my students and I have in common seems to have happened so suddenly that I doubt anybody has had time to adjust. Like the TV content that serves/served as our common cultural reference point, these memes, ultimately, only serve as a vehicle for advertisers and websites to build audiences to sell stuff to. But the professional content producers have been cut out of the equation. Just how much time is spent creating, consuming, and distributing memes? And if more time is spent re-purposing and creating amateur content, regardless of how solipsistic and retrograde its humor may be, isn't this something worth celebrating?

What Future Does Professional Media Content Production Have?

In the Media Literacy class I’m teaching this semester, my students are engaging in a role-playing exercise in which they assume the roles of four groups that, traditionally, play a role in the development of a new medium: governments, advertisers, technology developers, and content producers. First, the students research the role that these groups played in the creation and popularization of print, radio, TV, film, internet, etc. Then, they form new groups comprised of representatives from each of these groups and discuss how to develop a heretofore un-developed medium. The first example I thought of for the un-developed medium is: virtual reality.

Most of us have an idea of what virtual reality could be. And this imagined reality of VR could have government regulation (determining how the content will be distributed, if the roll-out of VR will be subsidized like a utility, how to regulate violent/sexual content, etc.), advertising (product placement in virtual reality? Pretty much an advertiser’s dream!), and technology developers (Apple VR might have a cleaner look than Microsoft’s somewhat cluttered-looking VR), and content producers (custom-made luxury environments for you to relax in). Sounds like a good fit!

I’m going to do this exercise again later in the semester, and I’m having no trouble coming up with several other “media technologies of tomorrow”: augmented reality glasses, superior surveillance technology, a portable instant-fMRI machine, affordable 3D printing. Some of these technologies are already gaining a foothold in the market. It’s easy to see how governments, advertisers, and technology developers would be involved in the creation and development of these technologies. But where would the content producers fit in?

The more I thought about the exciting media technologies of the future, the more trouble I have thinking about how professional content producers (e.g., screenwriters or the equivalent) will fit into the picture. I’m quite confident that there will always be an appetite for well-told stories. People skilled at telling these stories, through words or pictures or sounds, will have a place in our media environment. But I suspect that people will devote less time to consuming those stories than in years past. During the golden age of radio and television, people spent hours every day consuming content created by professionals. Increasingly, we spend more and more time using Facebook, Twitter, and other activities that don’t involve much in the way of content production (yes I know, lots of conversations on FB & Twitter are about content produced by professionals, but still, most of the aggregate value of these sites, I would contend, is generated by the users and the creators of the venue, i.e., the technology developers). In thinking about the media technologies of the future, it’s hard to think of a place for the writers, the producers, the directors. I’m sure there will be a handful of greats who produce content we all talk about, but perhaps a shrinking middle ground, and a shrinking window of attention and time we all spend consuming professionally produced content. 

Aside from making my group role-playing project a bit more difficult to design, its hard to think of a downside to this future. Definitely something I'll come back to in class. 

A media dieting manifesto

A majority of American adult Facebook users have taken a voluntary break from using Facebook, according to a recent Pew Research poll. Though only 8% of these people reported doing so because they felt they were spending too much time on the site, 38% of people 18-29 expressed a desire to spend less time using the site next year. So the desire to use less of some media to which we have access is there and, I think, it is likely to grow. But what are we doing about it, other than taking short breaks? Not much. Not yet.

I know its a bit daft to speculate about media use in the future, but since this is a blog and not a job talk, here is my prediction: in the next 5 years, more than 50% of internet users in the United States over the age of 22 will use some form of self-restriction from media to which they would normally have access. Either they will use software restricting their use of the internet or phone or use a self-imposed schedule in which they do not allow themselves to use the internet, certain applications or website, or their phone.

This is the start of an era in which we (adult Americans, perhaps others as well) look at our intake of information and social contact similarly to the way that we look at our intake of food. Food dieting is a billion dollar industry, one that is notorious for generating quick fixes that do not work out in the long run. This failure to generate lasting solutions to a public health problem is unsurprising to anyone who has reviewed the literature on habit and self-control. Habits are extremely robust; recidivism is the norm. Everything from cues in our environment to the chemistry of our brains cause habits to persist in the face of repeated attempts by the individual and others to change them. And yet sometimes, behaviors (particularly long-standing habits) change, permanently.

Though there are similarities between our developing view of media use as a kind of guilty pleasure or alluring, potentially addictive activity and our relationship with unhealthy foods, there are important differences. These differences, I believe, make it easier to alter media use behavior than to change our eating habits, provided we use the tools at our disposal.

First, our media use behavior is easier to passively track, far easier than counting calories. Chances are that right now, you could access information about how much and what type of media you are using just by looking at your browser history, on your laptop, tablet, or phone. More sophisticated tracking software is certainly available. That data may just make us feel guilty when we look at it, but if we know what to do with it, it can help us understand more precisely why we fail at media self-regulation and how we can change our use for the long term.

Second, the same technologies that brings so many tempting, immediately gratifying options in close temporal and physical proximity to us can also deliver us from this problem. They provide a sufficiently motivated media user the opportunity to alter the timing and amount of access they have to many different kinds of media. As in the world of food consumption, the individual and the self-regulation industry is in a never-ending battle with those making and promoting tempting options. The more we try to regulate our environment, the more insidious their pitches become. But the fundamental malleability of new media, the bottom-up nature of Code, makes it difficult for the purveyors of temptation to maintain a direct line to our Ids for very long, at least more difficult than it is for advertisers in the still top-down universe of food production, promotion, and consumption in the US.

So far, those of us who have bothered to use or enhance these tools haven't yet used them in the most effective way. The first stabs at internet self-regulation technologies (SelfControl, Freedom, Leechblock, StayFocusd) are all, in some sense, overcompensating for our newly empowered Ids. By totally restricting us from all media for a time period, these programs (or the strategy of "unplugging" that seems to be popular among certain crowds these days) leads to reactance, ultimately leading to workarounds (finding a computer that doesn't have the restricting program installed, justifying a little cheating here and there, etc.).

The way forward, I believe, is "nudging" (a la Sunstein and Thaler): designing our information environments so that they do not deprive us of access to all tempting options at any point, but instead creating menus comprised of both tempting options and less-tempting options that benefit us in the long-term. Information and social contact is available in various combinations on a regular schedule so that we are not so utterly deprived of "fun" things that we break our diets. Each combination will be specifically calibrated to each individual (customizability being another virtue of new media) to maximize not only productivity but happiness, social responsibility, or whatever the individual's long-term goals entail.

I make this seem simpler than it is. But that's typically what manifestos do, right? There is much research to be done.

Lyrics: Not as violent/profane/"offensive" as they used to be?

There's an assumption that the number and intensity of references to sex and violence and otherwise "offensive" content has a certain upward trajectory across the years: each generation of parents complains about how media content is somehow worse than it was when they were young: more anti-social, dumber, or more harmful in some way. If you look at ALL media experiences, this trend seems to be holding. Yesterday, parents worried about rock and roll music and comic books, today they worry about video games and Facebook. Mind you, I don't think that this cycle of worry has anything to do with the actual effects of these media experiences: most of the people on either side of these moral panics aren't very interested in empirically testing their claims. Nevertheless, content analyses of media experiences would, I think, show a kind of evolution over time, with some taboo activity (typically related to sex or violence) getting more numerous, intense, and realistic as time goes on.

But if you look WITHIN a certain medium, like popular music, I'm not sure the trend holds. Have the lyrics of songs gotten "worse" - more references to sex, drugs, violence, other taboo subjects - over the past 20 years? Two things make me think they have not obeyed this upward trajectory.

1: personal experience. I admit, I'm an old fogey. I'm 36, I mostly listen to music that was written last century (and occasionally before that), but I listen to pop radio on a semi-regular basis and absorb aspects of most cultural trends in the way that any user of meme-based entertainment websites does. I can still detect the shifts in popular genres of music (the ascendance of EDM for example). Of course, there are small sub-genres I'm completely unaware of, but that was always the case: there were always musical niches listened to by the minority of listeners, and often those were the places where future popular music would arise from. But I'm willing to bet that even if you sampled music from every genre you could find, even the small ones, the lyrics would not be any "worse" than they were in the 1990's. So I guess I'm making two claims: the "worst of the worst" in lyrics today is no worse than it was in the 90's, AND the average popular song is no "worse" in lyrics today than it was at that point. The extent to which lyrics of popular music were anti-social and taboo-violating peaked in the 90's (but maybe I'm just saying this because it was the time when I came of age, when I was rebelling, seeking out the "worst" lyrics I could find).

2. Crime rates in the United States. I recall that many people - pundits, scholars, and everybody else - looked at the trend in violent crimes in the US during the 20th century and assumed that the upward trend would just continue. But it didn't. Murder rates, burglary, you-name-it have all fallen since the 90's. There are many reasons for this, I'm sure, but it made me think about lyrics and certain assumptions about lyrics simply because it was another case of people being mistaken about a trend continuing unabated. I'm not saying these two trends (assuming the lyrical trend is real), which would be more-or-less simultaneous, are causally related (though if I had to speculate, I would say that the lyrics reflect social reality and not the other way around, or its a reciprocal relationship). It just got me thinking that trends are often part of cycles, not inexorable laws with one trajectory.

Of course this is just a hunch. I'm looking for a quick way to do a little content analysis to test this hunch. There are a lot of useful databases out there now, so I assume it could be done.

To return to my point about lyrics and their place in the media environment: I get the sense that teen rebellion (or just rebellion in general) is no longer the domain of popular music. Lyrics went about as far as they could go in terms of violating taboos. The internet clearly allows for more rebellion, more anti-social behavior (not only in word, but in deed), which, I suppose, underscores the importance of taking a holistic view of media use, whether you're a parent, a scholar, or both.

What is Wikipedia now?

I was searching for information on a current event for class discussion: the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Before, I was assigning a reading to another class: the wikipedia entry on Bandura's Bobo Doll study (I didn't feel as though students were ready to read an academic article from the early 60's, and I thought that the wikipedia article did a good job of distilling the essence of the article and doing so in a manner that most undergrads could understand and remember it). I felt a bit guilty about using Wikipedia in these ways. I wasn't holding up Wikipedia as an object of study (how is it created? Who creates it? How trustworthy is it relative to other sources?), but instead using it as if it were a legitimate source of information.

Upon reflecting on these feelings of guilt, I thought about how Wikipedia has probably changed over the past few years, since gaining prominence. Initially, the question was "is Wikipedia as reliable as published sources?" The assumption was that, because it is open to be edited by anyone, it could never be as reliable as published, vetted sources. As far as I know, it is still as open to change as it was back then (though perhaps the structure of correcting errors and detecting bias has been improved), but I think its wrong to assume that openness determines the extent to which any document is trustworthy. The factor that people should be paying attention to is motivation to introduce bias.

Think about other sources of information on the web. Is there some motivation to introduce bias to the information? In most case, there is some motivation. Maybe it is to please corporate shareholders, or to retain a certain audience so that they can get more views within that niche and generate profit that keeps them afloat. With Wikipedia, there are some particular topics that are edited frequently by interested parties, but as I understand it, the system has a way of detecting those and flagging those. But for my purposes, for using it in class as a way of getting the facts straight about Sandy Hook, or learning about Social Learning Theory, doesn't it present a much more even-handed, complete summation of these entities than any other available source on current events?

Maybe it wasn't always this way. There might have been a contingent of people adamant on shaping public perception of some event or entity that systematically altered the Wikipedia entries on those things. That was when there was some public conversation about the trustworthiness of Wikipedia entries. But now that that conversation has dropped out of the news cycle, out of the public consciousness, are those interested parties still as numerous, and as interested? These things have implications for the true trustworthiness of the content on Wikipedia. I am skeptical that people intent on fooling people retained their passion for altering Wikipedia entries, or, in that passion, eclipsed the Herculian efforts of volunteers working for Wikipedia to keep it free of disinformation and bias. But who knows?

The Werther Effect 2.0: Psychogenesis in the Internet Age

One of my favorite films from the last few years starts and concludes with an idea that, aptly, took root in my brain and has been something I think about long after I saw the film for the first time. It is articulated by the main character Dom Cobb: "An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you." Soon after seeing this film, I learned about the Werther effect. 

The idea of the Werther Effect is simple and unnerving. When people are informed through news reports or fictional stories of the fact that other people have committed suicide, they are more likely to commit suicide themselves. The message (e.g., a news report of suicide or suicide statistics or a story about someone committing suicide) likely makes the message receiver believe that the act in question is something that people, perhaps people similar to him or her, do. That isn’t to say that it makes the act socially acceptable or condones the act. By conveying that it has happened and that someone else did it, the message makes the act salient to the receiver, introduces it as a possible course of action, and may imply that it is common. Some theorists say that it may just be a simple suggestion-imitation model of behavior. In either case, it is more likely that the message receiver will commit suicide than if they had not heard the message at all (see Etzersdorfer, Voracek,& Sonneck, 2004; Gould, 2001; Hittner, 2005; Phillips 1978, 1979; 1982; Wasserman, 1984 for details, Thorson & Oberg 2003 for a contrary view).

In the top-down world of mass media production, news editors have been encouraged to downplay suicides, making them less likely to inspire readers to commit suicide. But if we assume that the same relation holds between exposure to the message and suicide in the age when exposure is "viral" (i.e., spread through online social networks) and/or search-based (i.e., determined by in-the-moment interests), then how do you curb imitative suicide? The story of someone’s suicide might spread through a group of people who are already preoccupied with the idea or seek out this kind of information. It may spread through people who are trying to offer support. 

This might be part of a more general problem in the age of the internet (where messages reach people through social networks or based on their consistency with people’s pre-existing pre-occupations/preferences). There might be other kinds of behaviors (anorexia, cutting one’s self, abusing drugs) and even other ways of thinking (depressive thought patterns) that are similar to suicide in that they are capable of being directly influenced by messages (i.e., not entirely physiological in origin), they are generally considered to be undesirable (i.e., painful for the individual and community), and are stigmatized (that is, not talked about). This particular kind of stigmatization makes these behaviors and thought patterns different from acts of aggression toward others, which, as a culture, we seem to have no problem discussing. This stigmatization leads, in certain communities, to an attempt to overcome the stigma through communication, through sharing experiences with the behavior or thought pattern and through support, to let people know that they are not alone. This reaction to the silence of the stigma is unquestionably well intentioned and it may have positive effects, but the evidence of suicide contagion makes me wonder if there are unanticipated effects. It may make message receivers who do not yet exhibit the undesirable behavior or thought pattern (or who do exhibit it but to a lesser extent than the extreme examples they hear about) more aware of the negative behavior or thought pattern, believe that it is more common or that what they are experiencing is more serious or more intense than they would have otherwise thought, and believe that it is something that people like them do or, worse yet, something that people are (as in: a permanent, defining characteristic, e.g., a depressed person, an alcoholic, etc.). 

Possible stimuli that may lead to a negative behavior or thought pattern becoming more common include advertisements for drugs or programs treating depression, anxiety, and other psychological conditions; online support groups; social media messages (Facebook and Twitter posts) related to the topic; news stories encountered via major news sites (e.g., NYTimes) or circulated virally via social media (e.g., Twitter). Make no mistake: there is plenty of evidence to suggest that these tools are useful in combating the spread and intensity of suffering and so they should not be discarded unless there is evidence that they do more harm than good. Its unrealistic to think that they ALL do more harm than good, but the evidence of suicide contagion via mass media suggests that it is worth examining whether some of thee messages, under certain circumstances for certain people, may, in fact, backfire. Establishing whether or not any messages designed to curb suffering that is not physiological or physical in origin backfire is the first step. Then, it is essential to understand why this happens, when this happens, and be able to modify the messages so that it doesn't happen anymore: all possible given the wealth of data on Internet use. 

The Greener Pastures of the Internet

Recently, I visited an old friend who is currently living in Japan. On the train ride from Tokyo to the Sea of Trees, we caught up, talking about our lives, relationships, careers, plans for the future, speculating on happiness and ambition and satisfaction, the paths we took, where to go from here. As the skyscrapers of the city outside the train’s window gave way to jagged hills and manicured hamlets, we kept coming back to the truth of the old adage/cliché: the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Realizing this, and living by this, had helped us, so we thought, to feel happier and more fulfilled (or at least less miserable). All the talk of relationships and careers and places to live seemed couched in this. And yet, strangely, that whole day, as I walked around in the crisp autumn air with Mt Fuji in the distance, relishing the company of an old friend and several new friends, I kept thinking “this is the place to live! I’d be happier here” even though I knew that my happiness had more to do with my attitude (or perhaps other qualities like self-control, grit, etc.) than where I was. The grass was still greener on the other side. Like an optical illusion, I couldn’t not see it even though I knew it wasn’t real.

This got me thinking about some aspect of living in the world of many media options.

Basically, my hunch is that the Facebook/jealousy effect (Facebook use can inspire jealousy) encompasses a larger swath of our experience each day. When you interact with warts-and-all people, you get frustrated at times, you have to work through problems, and you hone your abilities to cope with and deal with problems. When you deal with people on Facebook, you deal with co-constructed entities, products of those other people’s attempts to hide their “warts” and your desire to avoid seeing some of their warts (maybe not that simple. Maybe we’re trying to see imperfections at times and maybe we’re blind to them at other times, depending on mood, individual characteristics, etc.). I suppose those given to the language of communication theory would call these relationships “pseudo-relationship” and call the larger phenomenon I’m talking about the creation of “pseudo-environments”.

If these are pseudo-environments we live in, filled with pseudo-relationships, they are different than the pseudo-environment informed by the mass media and constructed by the Powers that Be. The priorities in their creation are different. They are similar in that they lack some important characteristics of unmediated relationships and reality. But the distortions are different. They are animated not by The Powerful’s desire to control the powerless, but by some aspect of our brains that wants a fantasy, an aspect that, in real life, runs into obstacles, gets sad, adapts, and overcomes obstacles, but now, in some sense, runs amok. We’re losing out abilities to revise our conceptions of what is possible in response to adversity because we’re often seeking new realities instead of trying to fix the problems of the old realities. We still live in a world of real, material relationships and must always, eventually, return to them and confront them, but our abilities to adapt in that environment have atrophied, and so we’re left in a world that seems depressingly unfair. But it’s not because the world is depressingly unfair so much as it is because we’re less and less capable of re-making any of it or ourselves in order to bring the two in sync. We grasp for explanations for this seemingly insurmountable disconnect: our own inherent inferiority; malevolent, powerful authorities. Maybe we’re partially right. Maybe unchangeable flaws in ourselves and changeable flaws in The System (i.e., corrupt authorities) are part of the problem. But maybe that sense is exaggerated by feelings of powerlessness that comes with our atrophied ability to adapt to adversity.

The features of the options we browse through, be it Facebook profiles or places to lives, are shaped by those presenting them in a mediated form. The options, as they appear to us, are optimized for online searches, edited to attract more people and/or the “right” people. We eventually encounter their hidden flaws in a patterned way. At first, we can’t see them because we’re hopeful about the New. Eventually, as we get to know the option better and its ability to hide flaws decreases, we become disappointed. Not to worry: there are always other untried options, other greener grasses.

Once you’ve tried many, many options and are still running into seemingly insurmountable obstacles, you feel all the more hopeless. The infinite possibilities that initially seemed so liberating are now just more ideas that didn’t work. The notion that nothing will “work” (in the sense that it will provide enough meaning and happiness to keep you fulfilled, or at least extant) seems more likely as the number of failed options grows. Perhaps it’s right to think, as a hopeless person might, that all those options you haven’t tried – the people you haven’t met or dated, the places you haven’t visited or lived, the books you haven’t read, the religions you haven’t experienced – aren’t that different than the options you have tried. Perhaps they never were “different” in any objective, meaningful way. But it might have been the ability to adapt to the disconnections between fantasy and reality, hardened by the rough edges of reality with its dearth of options, that provided us with enough meaning and happiness.

But this is idle speculation. How could we test this hunch? It would be interesting to see to what degree belief in this statement (and other adages, like “no man is an island” or “wherever you go, there you are”. I’m a big fan of adages these days) predicts happiness in a world of more options.

Related questions:

What exactly does the green grass statement convey? Is it the opposite of jealousy? It is, but it’s also something that runs counter to hope, or “hope” as most people think of it. It’s being happy with what you have, which may be the opposite of striving as well as hope.

What do you do with the world of expanded options? That is, what is the practical response to our media environment for someone who acknowledges the truth of the green grass statement? You can think of ways to make the options not seem quite so infinite. And you can identify the characteristics of those who flourish and languish in these environments.

Who survives best in the world of infinite options? What is the relationship between striving, hopefulness, jealousy, number of options, qualities of those options (how mediated they are, how curated they are) and life satisfaction? What about other individual characteristics like self-control and grit?

This might lead us to the Green Grass Theory: In a world of many options, those who are high in striving and hopefulness yet low in jealousy (i.e., those who agree with the aphorism that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence) flourish. Those who are not languish.

Our actions and moods are in part determined by our notions of what is possible or probable in the future. Media are tools for considering possibilities and probabilities. The extent to which they distort depends on our orientation to them. 

On "Liking"

Facebook's decision to create a "like" button seems like one of the most effective tweaks to a social media application, or any piece of new media for that matter. I feel great sympathy for the up-keepers of popular new media applications. To remain the same is to stagnate in an environment where novelty is among the highest virtues. And yet most changes you make, no matter how subtle, tick off the user-base. I imagine that its hard to quantify such things (only the folks at Facebook will know for sure), but adding the "like" button has to be one of the most effective tweaks in terms of its ability to increase interaction on the site, thereby increasing time spent and "personal investment" in the site, thereby increasing ad revenue. The "like" button achieved what all technological innovations aspire to: it became so ingrained in users' behavior, so instinctual, that its virtually invisible. The only push-back was the half-hearted attempt by some users to get a "dislike" button which, smartly, Facebook never delivered.

What is it about "Liking" that works so well? In a sense, it lowers the barrier for interaction. You're not required to have something to say in order to interact with others. Although Facebook has experimented with ways to give users control of their audiences when they post content, the process of creating discrete groups, thinking about which groups you want to see whatever you're posting, and then selecting that group is unwieldy and requires consideration and reflection. Using Facebook, like most real world social interaction, requires spontaneity and impulse. If that flow is interrupted, users might as well click to another site. So users are still stuck with the problem: when I say what I want to say, will some of my friends judge me harshly or misinterpret what I've said? Or there might be a more fundamental problem: what do I really have to say besides: I agree!

Real world interpersonal communication is filled with subtle cues: head-nodding, furrowed brows, smiles, "uh huh"s. These non-verbals and "barely verbals" have no "content" per se but are integral to the process of communication. The speaker knows that they're not putting information into a vacuum and the listener is not called upon to risk judgement or do the work of generating a substantive response. On an interpersonal level, "Liking" something on Facebook essentially replicates this in the online social environment.

Of course, Facebook isn't one-to-one communication. There is a broader (though not too broad) audience for your "like"s. "Liking" forms a visible social net that reflects people's attention and affection. Avatars, names on our friends lists, or photos are adjuncts to the real substance of virtual presence: signs of attention and affection. Those are what prompt much-needed feelings of belonging to a group.

Additionally, "Liking" is a bit like voting for something at a town hall meeting: a semi-public (or "locally public") endorsement that, by virtue of showing that many like-minded people endorse something, is likely to influence an observer, even if that observer is completely passive. In this sense, the "like" button replicates an essential element of offline civic discourse.

So, what else can Facebook do to build on the success of "like"? Perhaps there's some way to address this issue of audience, but in a way that doesn't interrupt the flow of impulse. Somehow, Facebook needs to be able to just sense who we want to see our mundane, half-funny observation or reply to someone else's mundane, half-funny observation. Until then, we'll just have to keep liking.

Whom do we owe for that song?

After engaging in a stimulating discussion about the value of music on a friend's Facebook page, I thought I'd expand my thoughts to an essay. The discussion was prompted by this blog entry by musician David Lowery, which was prompted by Emily White's article for NPR. White, who is 20, explains that most of her huge music catalog consists of songs ripped from friends' CD, from promotional CDs she had access to while working at a radio station, and some songs that were illegally downloaded. She also explains that what she and her age cohort desire as much as the music itself is convenient access to the music. Lowery, along with my friend on Facebook, claims that White and her ilk fail to grasp how their unwillingness to purchase albums hurt artists. Its not quite clear from White's short piece whether she'd be willing to pay for all her music through Google Play or ITunes or some service that gave some of its revenue to the artist. But Lowery makes it clear that there are many people White's age who go out of their way to justify illegally downloading music (or downloading music from companies that don't give the artists a big enough cut of the profits). Ultimately, so the argument goes, they are exploiting artists.

My counter-argument rests on the notion of replace-ability. An artist may spend hundreds of hours working on an album which is then downloaded by millions of consumers and, in some cases, the artist may not see a dime, or may see a tiny fraction of the profits that ITunes, GooglePlay, or whomever is putting ads on Kazaa reap. I'll admit, this sounds hideously unfair to the artist. After all, the artist created the content and the artist is wildly popular. The consumers, seemingly, demand the artist's music. However, things aren't that simple.

As White points out, part of every young consumer's desire for music (and make no mistake, they desire music as much if not more than generations before them) is a desire for convenient music. Their decision to download the music of a particular artist seems to indicate that they love that artist and value their music. They may also tell you how much they love the music of that particular artist. But ultimately, we don't know the degree to which their decision to download the music of that artist was desire for that artist's music and to what degree it reflected their desire for convenient music of any kind.

The fact of the matter is that creating music that others will want to listen to is so inexpensive now that if one artist wants more money, either from the consumers or from distributors or aggregators of content like Google Play or ITunes, consumers or aggregators do not have to pay more. They can simply find music by someone who wants less money. Increased competition prompts us to re-consider the value of listening to particular artists or particular kinds of music. My feeling is that the ability to create music that people will want to listen to is not as rare as the ability to distribute it, make it searchable, and make recommendations that anticipate consumer demand, or the ability to help "brand" the music in such a way that consumers understand that listening to that particular music is a mark of social distinction.

In fact, I'm not convinced that it was ever particularly rare. Who's to say that every town didn't have its talented musician, none more capable of generating listenable music than the other? Corporations like Apple, Amazon, and Google know that most people want cheap, easy access to music and that there will likely always be another artist who will give away their music for free for the chance to become famous if this particular artist, or a hundred or a thousand artists, does/do not want to. Once musicians become popular, they become rare, and become worth compensating. But, it could be argued, they did not become popular because they possess some rare talent. Its possible that the rare and valuable commodity of the popular artist was created by handsomely-compensated talent scouts, content aggregators that used patented algorithms to put their songs in front of taste-maker bloggers, and some element of chance. In such a case, the artist at the center of it all could've been any artist.

I've discussed this view with friends, and some of them are skeptical that anyone could create music good enough to become popular. I suppose I'm not claiming that anyone could do it, but I'm questioning the reasoning of Lowery and others that the number of downloads or searches for a particular artist are at all indicative of a collective desire for the music of that particular artist rather than a collective desire for something to dance to, to empathize with, to sing along to with friends. Preliminary evidence from Netflix subscriptions suggest that people are willing to pay a premium for high quality video content, and there are only so many people who can make high-quality video content, so the content creators can and should expect a bigger cut of the profits. But does this apply to the average career musician? We need to think more about how to assess the replaceability of a musical artist's work before determining its value.

Asynchronicity

Most of the ideas on this blog come about as the result of some combination of talks, articles, books, events, or conversations to which I've recently been exposed. The most recent combination: a great talk by Nicole Ellison at Michigan's School of Information, a TED talk from Sherry Turkle, and the book Nudge.

The first part of Ellison's talk concerned online dating and deception: when, why, and how much are online daters willing to stretch the truth about themselves in their profiles. In her interviews with several online daters, she found that they often excuse online exaggerations about themselves by saying that it either once was true of themselves (e.g., a person who, when they made their profile, did not smoke but then took up smoking and failed to update his/her profile) or, hopefully, will be true in the future (e.g., a person who anticipates losing a few pounds or getting a slightly better job). This is excusable in the arena of online dating because the dater never knows exactly when he/she will be contacted by another person. You could easily "forget" (or say you forgot) to keep your profile up-to-date and you could easily lose those pounds or get that job by the time Mr./Ms. Right contacts you. Asynchrony (i.e., some lag time between when you put some information about yourself into the world and when you get a reply) is a defining characteristic of the online dating world; norms of deception reflect that.

Turkle was a bit more broad and impressionistic in her analysis of the recent increase in technologically mediated communication, at times indulging in the kind of cynical hand-wringing about "Technology" that, I feel, isn't the most fruitful approach to improving our interactions with technology and with one another. The overlap between the two talks related to asynchrony: Turkle pointed out that many of her interviewees preferred texting to talking face-to-face, and that this was likely due to the amount of control it offered them in terms of what they would say and how they would present themselves.

Early versions of various communication technologies are often asynchronous: think of the postal service, email, and texting. As technology became more advanced, people could engage in synchronous communication: telephone and Skype. But maybe people don't always want the loss of control over one's presentation of self that comes with synchronous communication. Even a small lag of 30 seconds allows the person to have an immediate reaction, think about what the other person wants to hear (or about what will make them react in a way that's desirable), and send that message. Both Ellison and Turkle note that this is a kind of tailored self, likely different than the un-tailored self that cannot help but come across in face-to-face interactions. In Goffman's terms, those who use asynchronous media like Facebook and texting instead of talking face-to-face or on the phone are all front stage and no backstage.

At the same time, people have noted the dangers of impulsive texting, suggesting that people don't take time to consider their initial emotional reaction and merely text or post without considering the consequences. I think this worry may have to do more with the permanence of the message (unlike the impermanence of something said in conversation) and the fact that the person might not consider the context in which the message will be consumed because he/she is not in that context (unlike face-to-face conversations in which folks see, immediately, the consequence of what they're saying). Its also possible that there's simply more conversation going on with asynchronous communication technology than there was without it, particular conversation with certain others (people you care about a lot, and not people you happen to physically be around). The more you converse, the more likely you are to say something impulsive.

There are a few reasons why the extent to which communication is synchronous or asynchronous appeals to me as a research topic. First, its an attribute of a media experience and not a medium or an application. Attributes like temporal proximity, assortment size, or synchrony are like mass or volume: they never change; television and Facebook change all the time, making it hard to know for sure if what applied to them 5 years ago still applies today. Secondly, you can easily measure synchrony: just gauge the average amount of time between posts, texts, emails, etc. Lastly, you can tweak it pretty easily. This brings me to Nudge. The book's premise is that there are many attributes of our choice environments that weren't considered when they were designed. By tweaking them in ways so subtle that most users don't notice or mind (e.g., changing the number of mutual funds a person picks from when investing via an IRA; changing the choices on multiple-choice questions about organ donation) you can profoundly affect what people choose. Email, texting, Tweets, and Facebook posting don't really have much in the way of temporal constraints. What if you introduced some: requiring people to reply within 10 seconds or requiring them not to reply for 1 day? Yes, of course, people would notice these constraints and would likely mind them. But technically, it wouldn't be very hard at all to make these changes. Most of these applications already have artificial constraints (think of Twitter and its 140 character limit). You'd just have to sell users on the benefits of such constraints. 

To return to Turkle's point about control, its not just that these technologies allow users the time to have control over their presentations of self. They also allow them to choose how long to wait: whatever amount best suits your needs. Meanwhile, the person of the other end can feel quite powerless, causing a strain on the relationship. Maybe its not particularly important that sending letters via mail required folks to wait days or weeks before getting replies or that face-to-face requires instant replies (though with mail, one could choose to write back later rather than sooner). Maybe its more important that imposed constraints put the interlocutors on common ground.

How much of the media we consume is really user generated?

Like most media users today, I enjoy two kinds of leisure media: user-generated content (UGC) and professionally generated content. The former costs WAY less to produce than the latter. On one of my favorite user-generated content websites, Reddit, there was a pretty good description of why cable costs so much, and a good part of it has to do with the cost of professional production of content. But if we're using our internet connection to access UGC, well then, we shouldn't have to be paying so much for the professionally generated content that we're not using. This got me to thinking: how much of the content I use is user-generated?

I don't think I'll ever abandon professionally generated content: I still love sports and a handful of television shows like Mad Men and Charlie Rose. I also loved relaxing at the end of a hard day by flipping on the TV and channel surfing. But I don't really do that anymore. I think that what has replaced that for me are two things: Facebook and Reddit, both of which are primarily UGC. Facebook occasionally contains references to content that was professionally created: a link to an article on NYTimes.com, a link to a video clip from a TV show posted on YouTube. But MOST of the information I encounter on there is generated by my friends: status updates, photos.

The same is true of Reddit. Let's take the most up-voted stories on reddit today as a sample. Of the 25 items on this front page, 16 of them are pictures or statements or links to content ostensibly generated by a non-professional (someone who did not create the content with the understanding that it would generate revenue for them personally). So again, its not clear cut. Facebook and Reddit and YouTube derive SOME of their value from professionally generated content, but it seems disingenuous to say that they're similar, in terms of what it costs to maintain the quality of the experience, to the former great American past-time: channel surfing.

I accept the fact that Facebook, Reddit, and sites like them provide a useful service by providing a venue for all this interaction between users. I accept that this takes a lot of hours of coding, and I accept that I must pay for that service in some way: with my attention to ads or having those companies mine my data or sell it to advertisers. But clearly, the overhead of running such sites is much less than running a television network: you don't have to pay writers, actors, set designers, animators, etc. So yes, I should pay for my time on Facebook and Reddit, but not as much as I should for my time watching a television network.

It wouldn't be that hard or time-consuming to code a random sample of Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit content as UGC or professionally generated content, and then to do a rough calculation of the true cost of producing and distributing this content. Another project for the back burner!

Gender, social networks, the rise of Pinterest

I've been hearing more and more about Pinterest: via my Facebook feed, via a field observation study of media use of undergraduate students. Curious, I checked it out and, to the extent that I could understand the function of the site without actually becoming a member, noted some similarities between Pinterest and social media like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and, to some extent, news and entertainment aggregation sites like Reddit. As I understand it, users post images and other users comment or "like" things or re-post them, thereby boosting their overall visibility.

What struck me immediately about Pinterest was the fact that all the users seemed to be female (female user names). I went over to alexa.com and confirmed that, by Alexa's estimates, most of Pinterest's users are female, far more than any of the aforementioned social network or aggregation sites. Also, Pinterest is growing at an astonishingly quick pace, already the 16th most visit website in the US, trebling its traffic in 2 or 3 months.

So, why is Pinterest so popular among only females and what are the implications of this? It wasn't seeded with a particular kind of content. Is there something about the site's design that appeals more to females than to males? If there some kind of network effect where the first users were female, posted things that interested them, told other people about it, and only other females were interested in it because the kinds of content posted only appealed to women?

Is the discourse on the site any different than the discourse on other sites because of this gender difference? At first glance, it seems to conform to the stereotypical norms of female interaction: more supportive comments, less one-upsmanship via crude humor, less hostility (which makes you wonder if the rest of social web is dominated by discourse embodying hetero-male norms if not by actual 14-year-old boys). Of course, maybe we're only looking at a particular kind of female (Alexa indicates that the users are mostly 25-34).

I'm betting that most Pinterest users look at the site as a supplement to their use of other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. But its interesting to consider the possibility that use of this site, which is essentially a self-selected portion of the overall public, might be eating into time spent on sites that have no gender/race/interest skew like Facebook and Twitter. There are advantages to using "big tent" social networking sites like FB and Twitter, but perhaps as time goes on, they will become places that you feel you have to go to keep up on the goings on of those you know well, those you barely know, and those you don't know. They'll chiefly be tools for social surveillance, places to see and be seen. But they'll stop being the places (or at least the only places) you go to indulge your interests or have conversations and share things with others. Those activities will increasingly become the domain of sites like Pinterest that cater (though not purposefully) to a certain segment of the population that has something in common.

The return to segregated online social spaces isn't simply a recapitulation of the interest-driven message boards of the early internet. These sites will draw people not through people actively deciding, declaring, and seeking out particular sites dedicated to topics, but through much subtler avenues, spreading through social networks that have their roots in the real world. Their content will reflect the collective preferences of their users, which, as strange as it may seem in a technological world in which we were supposed to slough off our corporeal identities, appear to be dictated to a large degree by our physical selves.

I'll get back to you

I haven't checked my email lately. And by "lately", I mean roughly 12 hours. I feel a dual pull: the desire to put off other important work by checking my email, i.e. the desire for immediately gratifying distracting novelty stimuli, and the worry that I may be missing something important, i.e. the desire to be responsible. To neglect one's email is to deprive both one's short-term and long-term desires. That's how I feel, but how do the people on the other end of those emails waiting in my inbox feel? How long do you have to wait to be considered neglectful?

Email, like texting, is an asynchronous form of communication. With any asynchronous form of communication, there is no obvious answer to the question above. These two ways of communicating have vastly different norms as to how long one can wait to reply without seeming rude. In fact, I would argue that email does not really have a norm, and that lack of a norm may cause some animosity toward the person with whom the email user is communicating as well as animosity toward the medium of email.

Thinking about how long is an acceptable gap between message-received and message-reply prompts me to think about the power dynamic between the sender and the receiver. One may always hide behind the fig leaf of busyness ("sorry I didn't return your email sooner. I've been totally swamped!"), and certainly some emails take longer to reply to than others. Some require that you look up other information or do some work in order to craft an acceptable reply, and this may take time. In some cases (as in mine right now), the receivers may not be aware that he/she received any message, and thus can plead ignorance (for about 12 hours or so, right?). But in many cases, the receiver prioritizes. All other things be equal, the receiver puts the sender somewhere in a hierarchy. They can afford to put off answering a co-worker but not the boss, a brother but not a wife, etc. To be upset about not being replied to sooner is, sometimes, to be upset at one's place in another's social hierarchy. Because email is asynchronous and it lacks the norms about time-to-reply than texting has, it is ideal for exposing these hierarchies.

One interesting solution to this problem might be to develop a thorough email policy: you're guaranteed a reply within one week, barring vacation or illness. You get a reply in 48 hours (excluding vacations and illnesses) if the reply requires less than 5 minutes of work. Within work hours, you can expect a reply in 4 hours if the reply requires less than 5 minutes of work. If the reply requires more work, the amount of estimated time of work in minutes = the required reply time in hours (20 minutes of work = 20 hours to reply). No exceptions, regardless of whether you're my boss's boss's boss or my intern.

I'm sure people would think you're pretty weird for setting these rules, but norms have to start somewhere.

Is the internet speech or behavior?

In the debate about SOPA and PIPA, there are several assumptions worth examining. The first is that the content of the internet (by "content" I mean every bit of information conveyed via the internet) is "speech" in the same that "speech" was defined at the time that the Constitution was written, and therefore must not be subject to censorship. 

You can do more and more things with the internet each year. Hence, you can do more and more bad things with the internet. Eventually, people will be able to do so many bad things with the internet that in order to maintain any sense of economic or social stability, it will be impossible for governments to maintain a hands-off attitude toward regulating content. The scale of the havoc a malevolent person or group could create online will increase until, at some point, it will be greater than the amount of havoc that a person or group could create offline. We may not be there yet, but the more aspects of life move online, the closer we get to such a scenario.

If we consider the internet to be like speech, well then, we shouldn't restrict it in any way for fears of a new McCarthyist era, or worse. While the analogy of internet to speech is intuitive and made sense when the internet was little other than a replication of offline conversations and news, I think it makes less and less sense the more and more you can do on the internet. When you can engage in almost any activity online that you can engage in offline - commerce, relationships, etc. - then the internet becomes less like speech and more like an alternate social and commercial reality. If we consider the internet to be more like an alternate version of the offline world (or a microcosm of the offline world, complete with commerce, substantive relationships, etc.), then asking the law to stay out of online matters altogether in the name of free speech seems increasingly unworkable and inappropriate.

There's a larger philosophical point we will have to confront at some point: is the internet and all online interaction speech or behavior? Deciding what kinds of speech are okay is very neat and tidy: its pretty much all okay; speech is free. But behavior is not. Deciding what kinds of behavior lead to negative consequences - that is, what kinds of behavior are bad behavior - is very messy. Its an eternally unfinished project. But no one would ever claim that everyone is free to behave as they wish.

If a governing body is given the power to deem some online speech/behavior illegal and worthy of punishment, of course there will be the possibility that those in power could abuse their power and shut down sites not because the sites are doing something that most people would agree is wrong, but because it goes against the interests of those in power. But the same is true of law in the offline world: an authoritarian regime could seize power and enforce rules that are not in the best interest of the people. And yet we live within the law. We have a system of checks and balances in the offline world that, by and large, keep overwhelming corruption from happening.

So it seems increasingly unrealistic to have anything associated with internet content to be utterly and completely free from the rule of law, but clearly, there need to be checks and balances, and it seems as though this part of the plan of legislating online activity, at this stage, hasn't been thought out. Now would be a good time to start figuring out what such law would look like.

Over-sharing, time dilution, and the weaponization of words

If there are classes on "how to use social media" that will be taught in secondary school, its likely that one of the topics will be the hazards of over-sharing. There's a common sentiment, typically expressed by digital immigrants like the New York Times' Timothy Egan, that young people share too much via social media. Many people seem baffled as to what the reward might be for telling people so much about your inner thoughts and feelings. Egan suggests, like many others, that this compulsion to share is driven by (and drives) the sharer's narcissism, though some research I'm working on right now with a colleague indicates that no such connection between narcissism and social media use exists. In fact, if there is any connection between tweeting and narcissism, its actually in the opposite direction than is suggested by Egan and Co.

What really concerns many digital immigrants are the consequences of over-sharing. Drunk status posts live forever in the digital archive of the internet, preserved word for word, undistorted by individual memory. Most conversations about this topic concern employment or election: one's past indiscretions come back to haunt those seeking work or public office. Its interesting how the conversations about reputation that only used to apply to celebrities and politicians and reality TV stars apply to all of us now. We can all be publicly disgraced and publicly redeemed.

The argument against sharing assumes that collective, disembodied digital cultural memory operates like the collective, disembodied pre-digital cultural memory and pre-digital individual memories. But I wonder if there might be some differences that aren't being accounted for. There might be a kind of dilution of the past going on. Perhaps each bit of information about the past matters less because there's simply so much of it. We judge gaffes the same way we judge everything else: on the extent to which they are rare. People also speculate that more information shrinks our attention span and with it the duration of the news cycle, so that people move from topic to topic quicker. We might move through the cycles of admonishment and forgiveness more quickly as well.

But maybe the critics of over-sharing are right. Maybe each person who has tweeted something stupid or left a stupid status update is instantly and permanently discredited by some for doing so. In a market where there are so many people out there who are equally accessible online, employers, voters, consumers of entertainment content, and even online daters can discard people for single infractions because there's always a comparable replacement who hasn't said anything stupid (yet). Dismiss anyone for tweeting something stupid and you'll be dismissing a lot of people, but maybe that's not such a problem when you've got so many people to choose from.

There's another way in which over-sharing might be changing the nature of conflict. If you tweet something potentially embarrassing and it lives forever, does that mean that everyone's words can be used as weapons by their enemies against them in the future, the way it happens with politicians now? This might just be the next frontier of human hostility: searching people's pasts and using what they've said as a point in an argument against them, context be damned. Maybe we could only forgive because we could forget, because our memory of ugly, hostile behavior softened with time. Now that we can't forget, now that every ugly, hostile remark is retained, we'll stay mad at people and never give them another chance. We've started to get cynical about politicians because they were the first to have every one of their moves recorded and re-broadcast out of context. Soon, when this happens to many of us, we'll become cynical about human nature.

Here, I must make a point similar to one I've made about privacy: digital social media gives people ammunition to hurt others, but it doesn't create the will to use it, nor does it assume that we can't make rules, laws, or norms that prohibit using past or private information against people.  The preservation of information doesn't necessarily mean that anyone will dig it up and broadcast it in the future. Someone has to care enough about finding the information to search for it and have some reason to defame another person. So maybe you can go on sharing as much as you'd like on twitter and facebook. Just don't get on anybody's bad side so that they will go to the trouble of digging up something stupid you'd said years ago and use it against you. And if they do, know how to fight back in the ways pioneered by the frontiersman of character assassination, the political operative: dig up something on your opponent or dismiss their efforts as "mud-slinging".

The outlandishly stupid tweets used by those making the over-sharing argument are rare and, so long as these "be careful what you post" stories are out there, liable to become rarer still. I just don't see people cutting back on sharing, despite the fact that the preservation of day-to-day sharing can make any heartfelt sentiment seem stupid when taken out of context. If people are pre-disposed to disliking a person, they'll take a questionable post from the past as evidence to support their dislike. It they are pre-disposed to liking the person, they'll shrug and say "so what if a person tweeted something embarrassing 5 years ago? Who cares?".

Many assume the words and pictures that preserve and transport our past acts have a certain power, but our view of just how powerful they can be is distorted by our experience with how they were used in the previous age. Before print, television, and film, these things were ethereal and hard to use against anyone or for advancing any agenda. During the broadcast era, they could be used to convince a great many people of a great many things. I imagine that many were initially inclined to the "sticks and stones" way of thinking about preserved, portable information. After some rough lessons, they came to see that the pen could be mightier than the sword. Underlying all of these shifts in the way words and images convey our pasts are conflicts and allegiances that revolve around scarce resources. The power of words to advance any individual or group's agenda depends on its permanence. The print era, with its centralized authority, taught us the power of words and images to shape our view of the past and of individuals and their reputations, but we shouldn't assume that words and images will be just as powerful when the power to create and distribute them was in the hands of the few.

Using Anonymous

I saw E. Gabriella Coleman give a terrific talk Friday at the New Media/Social Change Symposium on Anonymous, the loose online collective bent on wreaking havoc and occasionally bringing about positive social change. Like Alan Smithee or Luther Blissett, Anonymous is an "open reputation" or an "improper name", an identity to be used by anyone. Coleman's talk prompted me to ask several questions about Anonymous, aside from the obvious question of who uses the title: why do people use it and under what circumstances do they use it?

There's something exhilarating, liberating, and perhaps frightening about an identity that gives anyone the freedom to do or say anything without fear of reprisal. You could think of the title "Anonymous" as less of an identity and more of a tool that could be used by the powerless to subvert the creeping surveillance state. But that's not quite what this is. In actuality, there are authorities trying to identify and prosecute members of Anonymous or, more intriguingly, trying to infiltrate it and discredit it by engaging in activities in its name that are antithetical to its stated modus operandi. In order to outwit their "competition", members of Anonymous require free time and technical know-how: two things many young, unemployed or under-employed men happen to have in spades. It certainly helps explain the original aesthetic and ideological tendencies that marked Anonymous's original endeavors, and also helps explain its limits: why it can't be picked up by any group to do anything. Instead of a selfless Robin-Hood-type collective, we're left with a small, relatively homogeneous group that is the only group capable of using the tool well. They all have the same axes to grind, the same sense of humor, and very similar experiences: all markers of a relatively uncomplicated identity. Anonymous didn't have to be an identity, but there just aren't that many people who have the time and the skill to use it as a tool.  

While one anonymous collective is good at disrupting and tearing things down, another relatively anonymous collective is good at building things up: wikipedia. As an anonymite, you can create or you can destroy, but (to return to the topic of the symposium) can you really change anything, any existing power structure in the offline world? Offline world changes - changes in policy, changes in the flow of capital - usually require actors to maintain traceable identities. But maybe the disruptions caused by Anonymous are enough to spark offline changes by people who have traceable identities - voters, investors, consumers, and workers.

Finally, to get a sense of the possibilities of anonymous social action, its worth considering two competing popular narratives that revolve around revolutionaries, justice, and open reputations. Anonymous borrowed the iconography of a graphic novel and film from the 1980's/mid-2000's: V for Vendetta, which featured the open reputation of V, a freedom fighter (or anarchist) intent on bringing down a fascist regime. The story leaves it open as to whether V was sane or not, but his actions - toppling a regime that is obviously fascist - are treated by author and audience as having a positive outcome. Conversely, in Fight Club, we see a collective like so many military or para-military revolutionists, bent on washing away any trace of individuality in order to form a stronger coalition, only to re-discover the value of individual identity when one of them is martyred. But the real identity problem in this story is with the main character, who is either a downtrodden worker drone or the lead revolutionary. Instead of sloughing off his old, ineffectual identity for his gleaming new one, he's caught between the two, a stranger to himself. It remains to be seen as to whether the lead hackers behind Anonymous are less like Bruce Wayne/Batman and more like Ed Norton's character/Tyler Durden, and whether their minions are more like the group-thinking benign terrorists of Project Mayhem and less like the triumphant masses of the Arab Spring.

Guilty Pleasures and Shameful Pleasures

Do many people really like facebook?

My sense is that it has a very high use-to-liking ratio. People spend more time on facebook than the other 5 most popular sites combined. many people spend more time on it than other things they profess to love. People often say that they're "addicted" to it. Of course, this is an exaggeration, but the tendency of people to say that they're addicted to something, or the tendency to spend a lot of time on something that they don't claim to like all that much, is interesting. What might be even more interesting is if Facebook use, or similar high-use/low-liking leisure activities are displacing activities that people say they really like. Imagine that you are a fan of a TV show. You've got a lot of unwatched episodes on DVR, but instead of watching them, you spend more time of facebook.

There might be many reasons for this. One is the quantity of content. Facebook, much like the internet itself, provides a seemingly unending stream of novel content, something tv shows can never keep up with. Second, you can always watch the shows later, but the news on facebook loses its freshness and its value quickly. Also, you just donkt want to be out of the loop. This brings up another argument about habitual facebook use. No one says that they're fans of talking, or fans of phones, or parties. Its just something that people do. This is why its important to think of facebook use, or any other high-use/low-liking activity on the rise, in terms of displacement. Is it substituting for other kinds of talk, like face-to-face communication, or is it substituting for things that people say that they like, that they say they want to do more of but can't find the time. This is the difference between an enjoyable pasttime and a compulsive time-suck. It also might be the difference between a guilty pleasure (something that you feel bad about because you don't want to be doing it) and a shameful pleasure (something that is frowned upon in your culture but that you really like doing).

In conducting my research on why and when people choose guilty media pleasures, I think this is a crucial distinction to make. You can be a fan of Real Housewives of New Jersey and people might refer to it as a guilty pleasure, but as long as you truly and honestly are a fan, then we're talking about something that violates societies' values, not your own values. It would be interesting if the guilty pleasure were displacing the shameful pleasure.

A Perfectly Social World

There's an interesting window of time between when you've heard that something new and supposedly "game-changing" is about to happen and when know what it is, the moment before the unveiling. Once you find out, it usually disappoints, but before you hear about the reality, knowing that something big might be on the horizon gets you thinking about what's possible. I remember that happening in the months leading up to the release of the Segway scooter. We knew that an inventor with an incredible track record and lots of resources had secured some very interesting looking patents, but we didn't know if this thing would fly, how it would be powered, or how fast it would go.

It feels like a similar situation now with a supposed re-design of Facebook on the horizon. This article speculates that Facebook will put an emphasis on passive sharing: rather than signifying that you like something by clicking the "like" button or posting a link on your profile or on someone else's, you will just go about your web browsing and other people will see it (or, more likely, just the parts of it that you want seen). Let's just assume, for a moment, that Facebook does something like this.

The first gut reaction is that its too much of an invasion of privacy, and I'm sure people will write tons about this angle if this ends up happening. But its more interesting to think about why passive sharing might be appealing and what it might feel like to live in a world where more moments of every day are shared and social. So, start out by imagining there's a magical switch that is thrown each time you browse on something that you don't want certain people to know about. It filters out exactly the people you want to keep from knowing what you're doing and it does so without you needing to actually do anything. If this existed, what would be the appeal and effect of increased passive sharing?

As I read articles for my research, design experiments, read the NYTimes, watch ESPN, go to reddit, I have an inner monologue, sometimes an inner dialog, a kind of hypothetical conversation about what I'm reading or writing. Heavy posters on Facebook or twitter (or even heavy texters) have taken to transcribing this inner mono/dialog so that it can start a conversation, and they can do this at any place or time. But passive sharing doesn't necessarily initiate social interaction of any kind. It might act as a pretense for conversation ("I saw that you were reading that article I read yesterday. What did you think of it?") or we might just use it as a more finely tuned means of social comparison than just seeing what people actively post about themselves. You run out of new actively posted items to look at on Facebook pretty quickly, but I doubt you'd ever run out of passively shared activity of others to look at. Plus it seems like more of an "honest" look at how they really are, not just the happy, shiny selves they present in their pics.

Since I'm in dissertation mode right now, thinking about one theory and how everything fits (or doesn't fit) it, I'm thinking about this in terms of choice, value, and delaying gratification. You could always use Facebook and other social media (even a phone) to have a social experience, but for people to connect with you or even to see what you're doing, you had to take some initiative. The people taking initiative - the frequent posters, the tweeters, etc. - may not have been all that relevant to you, in terms of your mood or your pre-existing social connection to them. But what if you always had the option of having an interesting conversation with someone you wanted to converse with about something you wanted to converse about? If that option is sitting there in that little rectangle of light you're staring at right now, you would probably choose it over most other activities.

Its been said that we're social animals, that all humans need social interaction and that society grows from this. But all social interaction has been embedded in the rules and systems of culture and physical space. You were surrounded by people, but they were people whose personal lives you didn't care about all that much. Its interesting to think about a world in which you could always look over and see what your friend is doing and strike up a conversation about it.

The Two Facebooks

Facebook has changed the way that it presents updates of information about a user's friends, starting the familiar cycle of backlash and revision. Setting aside the inevitable grumpiness of many users who are averse to change, why did Facebook make these changes? How and why is it hoping to reshape the user experience?

As I posted before, Facebook's appeal depends to some extent on the "freshness" of the information presented in the feed. There's probably thousands of hours worth of "content" available on most people's Facebook pages. If I considered all the updates from all of my friends as the total information available on Facebook, I (like most people, I would assume) have seen very little of it. The value of each little bit of information about my friends depends on a few things: its recency (wouldn't I rather know what happened to my friends within the past few weeks than know what they were doing last year?) and its relevance to me. Facebook's privileging of the "top stories" over the "most recent" may be an attempt to get users to more relevant information.

They haven't taken away the "most recent" option. Instead, they've turned it into a ticker and put it on the side of the page. Really, they're just preventing users from opting out of seeing the information it deemed to be "top stories" by simply clicking on "most recent". Its interesting to consider the differences between the "most recent" and "top stories" experiences of Facebook. Its likely that people are more apt to merely read "most recent" news and not to actually post anything about it. Facebook has an interest in getting people to post and interact more and be less passive about the experience. That gets them more involved and attached to the application, more "embedded" in some sense. More interaction also gives Facebook more data on users. They can't track what you're looking at when you're scanning "most recent", but they can track posting patterns and use that data to make the "top stories" even more relevant, more satisfying, and better at keeping people on the site.

"Most recent" is really a way of using Facebook for social surveillance, not as a venue for interacting with close ones remotely (which is significantly more valuable a service). Some people may have become accustomed to using Facebook to see the news of people that they really wouldn't classify as close friends, even if Facebook gave them the chance to parse their friends into groups more easily. Maybe they were using it for downward social comparison or "stalking" people, and asking them to create a group of people they like to gawk at and not interact with breaks some sort of spell, makes people more aware of their inner voyeur. In this way, this particular user backlash might be about preserving the "mis-uses" of Facebook, not as a tool for better communication but as a way to look at people without being looked at.

"It depends what you mean by sex": Google and Language

While researching the effects of stress on learning, I decided to look at differences between the ways male students reacted to stress and the ways female students reacted to stress. I went to Google Scholar and typed in "gender learning college stress" or similar variants of that. While doing this, I recalled that there was a difference between gender and sex, or rather, the contested nature of the definitions of the words. Ultimately, I think I'm interested in a social role rather than the levels of estrogen and testosterone one possesses.

What if I was more concerned with the biological trait and violence, and I assumed (probably wrongly) that academic writers made a distinction between gender roles and biological sex? Then I'd have to google "sex violence", which, even in the relatively porn-free ecosystem of Google scholar, would yield plenty of irrelevant results related to the act of sex, not the characteristic of sex. Really, its just a homonym problem, but its interesting to consider the role this problem plays in debates like the one over the definition of "sex" and "gender".

Perhaps in the future, searching won't be entirely contingent on individual words free of any context. Maybe search will get smarter about what we want. But in the meantime, we're in a world in which words (or names, for that matter) are at a distinct disadvantage if they refer to too many different concepts or people. Of course, the people who started the debate over the meaning of the word "sex" or the word "womyn" or many other words weren't thinking about the impact of google on the efficacy of their intervention. Again, its hard to say how long we'll be living in the word of context-less word searches, but if you're banking on it being around for awhile, it pays to use unique terms.

This leads to another problem, one that has frustrated me for years: the tendency of scholars to come up with yet another term for a concept that is subtley different from another concept we have a term for just so they can have an "original" concept to base their career and reputation on. The reverse happens, too: theorists hijack each other's terms and re-brand them, much to the confusion of students everywhere. There's a point at which this behavior leads to a breakdown in communication: are you talking about "priming" or "priming"? (or perhaps "priming"!).

The evolution of language has always been messy, and while google does bring a kind of order to our information environment, it may not be doing wonders for our languages