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

Rechargeable Value

In trying to think through how I will have media users rate the immediate gratification value of their media selections in scheduled and un-scheduled choice environments, I've run across some artifacts that make it difficult to re-schedule certain media experiences in people's lives and still have them be enjoyable or valuable to them. For instance, if you insist that people only send text messages between 3 and 5 PM each day, they may not get much value out of text messaging at those times because the motivation to send those messages was time sensitive. They needed to re-schedule an appointment or make arrangements for dinner that evening. I think we tend to over-estimate the time sensitivity of the value of such communiques (including online chatting). Would you really feel deprived if you had to wait a few hours before learning that someone cared for you or want to make plans for the next day, or learning a bit about how someone's day went? Probably not, but we've gotten so used to having the ability to message whenever we'd like and we don't see a reason to change.

So, there's at least the perception that the value (in terms of enjoyment and utility) of messaging is affect by time in this way. Other mediated experience can be time shifted without losing enjoyment or utility. People are fine with planning to Skype at certain times and would be fine with switching the time if needed. People are fine with shifting a TV show to fit their schedules. They'd probably like to watch it as soon as possible because they're anxious to find out what happens next and they'd like a dose of the pleasure brought on by the show as soon as possible. If I had a choice between the next Batman film coming out tomorrow and having to wait a year to see it, I would choose to see it tomorrow. I might even pay a bit more to do so. But if I had to wait an extra few hours or even a few days to see it, it wouldn't change the value of the experience. I'm sure I would still enjoy it.

There are some interesting exceptions to this rule, some non-interactive media experiences whose value are somehow contingent on the timing of the experience. News and sports seem to decline in value over time after their live broadcast in a way that other types of content do not. For some reason, live-ness (or, to use a grocery metaphor, freshness) matters. Of course, a classic game might still be fun to watch on ESPN classic years later and old news might be fascinating to some, but for the most part, "yesterday's news" isn't very enjoyable or useful.

I had an interesting experience when I deprived myself of a few kinds of media experiences that I partake in a lot: NPR, Facebook, and Reddit. I was away on vacation for a few days and just didn't have time to check any of these (that is what one does with these sources: they check on them). I then experienced more pleasure than usual when I checked these at the end of the vacation. It was as if their value had been recharged since the last time I checked on them. Many interesting bits of news about my friends and about the world had accrued since I had last checked in. When I'm in my normal media habit, I check on these things regularly, getting some utility and enjoyment, but then quickly exhaust their value, having used up the best parts, having to wait until people in my Facebook feed post interesting things, until Talk of the Nation has another media-related offering, or until enough interesting/funny things are posted on Reddit. When I check on them often, their values are quickly exhausted, but when I don't check on them for a bit, their value accrues and lasts longer.

This isn't quite how the value of traditional current events news works, I think. I wasn't adamant about going back and finding exactly what had happened in Washington or Libya while I was off the grid. An even more obvious example would be weather reports: I'm not going to go back and read weather reports for Ann Arbor for the days I was out of town. If there's some sort of commentary about the events, like I'd find in Slate, NYTimes, the New Yorker, or Grantland, then the pieces hold their value. The less commentary, the shorter the "expiration date" for the experience.

People check Facebook many times throughout the day because they can, because its there. Each time you check it, you can only go so long before you've read all the good stuff and you're making due with the dregs. The same goes for any continuously updating site: blogs, Twitter, online newspapers, etc. If it weren't, if you had to check it between 3 and 5 each day, you might be able to read longer and enjoy it more, not having to make due with the dregs. You're dealing with a fully charged-up experience. You might even say that this is true for email accounts: if they're accounts you typically get pleasurable emails in, then you'll have more of a chance of getting that pleasure of an inbox full of pleasurable messages if you wait longer to check your email. If you only get messages that you consider to be unpleasant, then the longer you wait, the more unpleasant the moment of checking will be. The trouble is that its too hard to resist the not-fully-recharged version because its always accessible.

"The Thug Finding the Gutenberg Press"

What is the role of digital media in cases of social disorder, be it a riot or a revolution?

The answer on the tips of every social media guru's tongue is that social media - text messaging, group messaging, social networking sites - make organizing protests and mass looting easier and faster. Without this tool, the argument implies, the young men (and it is mostly young men, for what that's worth) would not overthrow the government or burn down the business. Another argument states that it is the way the rulers are behaving (austerity measures, police brutality, and a gap between rich fat cats and the proletariat) that inevitably leads to this kind of behavior.

Both of these arguments seem unsatisfying to me. Riots and revolutions happened without social media and there have been plenty of nations throughout history that had huge disparities between ruling classes and non-ruling classes that didn't erupt into violence for long periods of time. Perhaps both of these things contribute to the likelihood of these events, but perhaps there are other ways in which the new media landscape contributes to this likelihood.

Media content, be it what we see on television, what we read on our favorite site for news, or what we see in our Facebook feed, influences our ideas of what is normal in society or the sub-segment of society to which we believe we belong, which in turn affects our actions. By framing a certain behavior as more or less normal, a message sender can affect behavior of the message receivers. Its possible that various kinds (both positive and negative) of coverage of social unrest frame it as something that angry young men at a certain place in time do, enforcing a kind of norm to engage in civil disobedience, violence, or destruction of property. Instead of relying on the depictions of protesters, freedom fighters, and rioters that the mainstream news give us, we can get a first-hand look at them on social media sites. Even if only 5% of the population goes to these sources instead of MSM for coverage of the unrest, if its the right 5% (i.e. the 5% inclined toward real-world action), it matters. Perhaps this gives readers the impression that these aren't just objects on the screen to be watched, but people who are similar to the readers, who could interact with the readers. Maybe that makes identifying with them easier.

The panoply of opinions and ideologies on the internet makes finding justification (and a group that makes your thoughts about behaving in a certain way more normal) easier to find as well. I think this gets lost in the discussion of how easy social media facilitates the logistics of social unrest. You may start out with anger, but if that anger can't find justification, its unlikely to manifest itself in action. Sure, a mind sufficiently detached from reality can find a justification pretty much anywhere, but even those with a firm grip on reality can find reasons to act in ways that they couldn't when the messages were manufactured by people with too much to lose to advocate civil disobedience, violence, or property destruction.

Perhaps the default sentiment toward authority in complex societies is anger, an instinct that we feel from perceiving that we do not have much control over our fate. But that anger gets channeled into avenues other than civil disobedience, violence, and property destruction when we can't find justification or a group performing these actions to make them seem more normal.

(quote from Mike Butcher, TechCrunch Europe)

Puppies & Iraq

I just saw Page One, a documentary about the New York Times, which raised some interesting (if oft repeated) questions about journalism that come along with the financial instability of the industry: is there something about a traditional media outlet like the NYTimes that is superior to the various information disseminating alternatives (news aggregation sites, twitter, Facebook, Huffpo, Daily Kos, Gawker, etc.) and, if so, what is it? What is it about the New York Times (or the medium of newspapers in general) that would be missed if it was gone?

Bernard Berelson asked a similar question in a study of newspaper readers who were deprived of their daily newspaper due to a workers' strike in 1945. The reasons people liked (or perhaps even needed) the paper back then - social prestige, as an escape or diversion, as a welcome routine or ritual, to gather information about public affairs - are all met by various other websites and applications, some of which seem to be "better" - that is, more satisfying to the user - at one or all of these things than any newspaper is.

I want to pick apart this idea of that which is "more satisfying" to the user, or what it means to say that they "want" something. The mantra of producers in the free market, no matter what they're selling, is that they must give the people what they want. Nick Denton of Gawker has a cameo in Page One in which he talks about his "big board", the one that provides Gawker writers with instant feedback about how many hits (and thus, how many dollars) their stories are generating. Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune media company, voiced a similar opinion: those in the information dissemination business should give people what they want. Ideally, you make enough money to do "puppies and Iraq" - something that people want and something that people should want. To do anything else is, to use Zell's phrase, "journalistic arrogance".

Certainly, a large number of people are "satisfied" with the information they get from people like Denton and Zell. But Denton and Zell, like any businessmen, can only measure satisfaction in certain ways: money, or eyeballs on ads. There are other, often long-term social, costs paid when people get what they supposedly want. When news is market driven, the public interest suffers. So goes the argument of many cultural theorists. But who are they to say what the public interest is? Why do we need ivory tower theorists to save the masses from themselves?

Maybe that elitist - the one who would rather read a story about Iraq than look at puppies - is not in an ivory tower but inside of all of us, along with an inner hedonist (that's the one that would rather look at puppies all day). There are many ways to measure what people like, want, need, or prefer. I'm not talking about measuring happiness as opposed to money spent/earned. I'm considering what happens when we're asked to pay for certain things (bundled vs. individually sold goods) at certain times (in advance of the moment of consumption vs. immediately before the moment of consumption). There is plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that those two variables, along with many others situational variables external to the individual, alter selection patterns of individuals. Want, or need, or preference does not merely emanate from individuals. When we take this into account, we recognize that a shift in the times at which individuals access options and the way those options are bundled together end up altering what we choose. We click on links to videos of adorable puppies instead of links to stories about Iraq because they're links (right in front of us, immediate) and because they've already been paid for (every internet site is bundled together, and usually bundled together with telephone and 200 channels of television). If it wasn't like that, if we had to make a decision at the beginning of the year about whether we "wanted" to spend all year watching puppy videos or reading about Iraq...well, I guess not that many people would want to spend all year reading about Iraq. But I reckon that many people would want, would choose some combination of puppies and Iraq if they had to choose ahead of time. The internet is a combination of what we want and what we should want, and so is the NYTimes, but they represent a different balance between those two things. The Times is 100 parts puppies, 400 parts Iraq. The internet is 10000000000 parts puppies, 100000000 Iraq (or something to that effect. When you change how things are sold, you may not change what people want, as many theorists claim, but you do change how we measure what people want.

Maybe we never have to defer to a theorist to tell us what we should be reading or watching in order to be a better citizen. Maybe we just need to tweak our media choice environment so that it gives the inner elitist a fighting chance against the inner hedonist.

Restricted Access

As I passed by a University of Michigan librarian unlucky enough to have her computer screen visible to passers-by and saw that she was on Facebook, I thought about the rights of employers to restrict the internet use of their employees. I believe there have been mixed results from studies of whether or not allowing employees unfettered access to the internet hurts or helps productivity. I can't recall the source, but somewhere I recall reading that workers who take short breaks every hour to do some leisure web browsing are more productive than those who do not take those breaks.

In any case, let's assume that businesses want to restrict their employees use of the internet for leisure purposes in order to boost productivity. I'm sure many employers block ESPN, YouTube, Facebook, maybe anything that's classified as having adult content using some sort of Net Nanny. But what if the employer wanted to really restrict their employees internet use? What if they thought that it would be better for their employees to, say, read the complete works of William Shakespeare or learn about particle physics than to be on Farmville for an hour or two a day? Somewhat less benignly, what if they wanted their employees to only read or watch materials that showed their company and product in a positive light, or endorsed a particular kind of lifestyle? Could they restrict their employees access to, say, one or two sites like this? Are they within their rights to restrict their employees in this manner?

I have little sympathy for employees demanding the right to surf the net at work. When you are at work, you're supposed to be working. Yes, there are the studies that say that these little breaks can boost productivity, but I don't think there's any research on whether certain kinds of restricted internet surfing is just as good at this. So the employee defense of "a bit of cyberslacking makes me more productive" wouldn't necessarily contradict an employer's right to limit their internet use how they see fit.

Its like having the ultimate captive audience. Sure, you could choose not to watch any of the content we make available to you, but then you'd have to do work (ugh!). Options that might have been unappealing at home suddenly seem interesting. Regarding the scenarios listed above, I'd have some faith that employees would forego any ham-handed attempts to brainwash them into loving the company they work for (opting to actually work instead of watching or reading poorly made, pro-corporate content) but (assuming a certain kind of intellectual curiosity) might actually respond to reading Shakespeare or learning particle physics. It wouldn't have to be Shakespeare, of course. Whatever the employer thought it would be enriching to know could be substituted.

Research on persuasion suggests that convincing someone to do or buy something they didn't already have some inclination to do or buy is extremely difficult if not impossible. If you restricted my access at work to Fox News, I wouldn't suddenly become a right-wing ideologue. I'd get back to work, or daydream, or talk to a coworker. But if its something you've been meaning to do, perhaps the work setting is the proper restrictive environment, providing that unappealing alternative, that would finally get you to read that classic you've been meaning to read.

The Ethical Issues of Analyzing Time, Desire, and Self-Control

My tentative dissertation project (becoming less tentative as my defense date draws closer) has to do with time, desire, and self-control. One basic premise of the project is that each of us has short-term desires and long-term desires, and that these desires are often in conflict with one another. We might say that "part of us" wants to eat that chocolate cake or spend time on our favorite leisure website, and another "part of us" wants to eat less fat and carbs and spend more time working on projects, exercising, or volunteering. This, in and of itself, doesn't seem that controversial.

Through parents/caregivers and the education system, most people learn at an early age the consequences of too-frequently indulging their short-term desires. The more immediate, painful, and affective the negative consequence, the easier it is to convince yourself to refrain from future indulgence. Even before our parents/caregivers, evolution gave us in-born, visceral reactions to things that are good for us in the long run (eating nutritious berries = yummy!) and things that are bad for us in the long run (eating poisonous berries = vomit). But evolution doesn't provide the fine tuning, and in a fast-changing, complex environment, our consequence estimations need outside assistance. A different kind of convincing-of-the-short-term-self needs to happen when the feedback isn't visceral and immediate.

People have been smoking tobacco for roughly 5000-7000 years, but it wasn't until the last hundred years that large numbers of people knew that it hastened their death. Of course, most ancient smokers died from other ailments when the lifespan wasn't long enough for them to die of lung cancer. Once it became long enough, and once scientists had found a connection between smoking and cancer, a large number of people who would've enjoyed smoking in the short-term stopped or cut down (or at least felt guilty) because they had been informed by some trusted "other" that doing so would bring about long-term benefits. This isn't just self-control. Its informed self-control.

In some ways, this is the role of culture in general: to produce informed self-control (Freud's super-ego). We've all got the easy behavioral imperatives figured out: don't eat stuff that makes you puke; avoid situations that evoke terror. Rules exist because some of us (or all of us under some circumstances) may be inclined to behave in ways that are prohibited by those rules. Rules are not so much "made to be broken" as made to correct what was "broken" about our perceptions of consequences. For better or worse, this has become the domain of doctors: first physicians and perhaps now psychologists and psychiatrists. They make rules based on observations of seemingly disconnected actions and consequences. They are experts in consequences. Did psychologists, educators, or scientists aspire to the role of rule-maker? Probably not, but they're a necessary bi-product of a complex world in which our finite senses can't keep track of the many connections between actions and consequences. To believe otherwise is to succumb to nostalgia for a by-gone world.

Things get messy when we get personal about our analysis of time, desire, and self-control: media use (my area of research) and, even more personal, marriage and sex. There have been some terrific articles and commentary about marriage and fidelity in the wake of Anthony Weiner's virtual infidelity and NY's passing of a gay marriage law. A defining characteristic of marriage is the pledge of individuals to stick together. Its an attempt of the long-term-thinking self to override the future short-term-thinking selves so that the long-term self can benefit. But who is informing that long-term-thinking self? What is their evidence? What is their agenda?

This leaves us with an uncomfortable reality: those who can demonstrate the negative long-term consequences of things you know are pleasurable in the short-term and you think are not harmful in the long-term are telling you what to do, and people tend to not like being told what to do. For good reasons, too. Those in positions of power abuse it for their own gain. If I own stock in a cookie company, I'll fund research and coverage of research suggesting that another indulgence is particularly harmful, leading people away from that indulgence and toward cookies. Similarly, certain relationship experts might promote a certain view of monogamy because they benefit from its success in the marketplace of ideas, not because its any more accurate at predicting negative consequences than any other theory. The same might be said of a media effects researcher. Those who reject the findings of so-called experts analyzing this complex causal world can simply blame another aspect of that complex world that isn't under their control, freeing their short-term selves from blame. If people who aren't in long-term, monogamous relationships aren't happy, its not because they couldn't exert the self-control recommended by experts; its because they're being judged by an unfair, retrograde society intent on maintaining a certain kind of social order. If people who play lots of violent video games are more aggressive, then its because you measured "aggression" wrong or its due to some variable the researchers didn't control for. Basically, this leaves everybody believing what they want to believe, deferring to no one, and assessing consequences based on personal experience and the limited experience of those around them.

Since I don't want this entry (or anything else I write) to be an empty exercise in hand-wringing, I'll suggest some priorities for research and reporting on research.

We'll have to move from a proscription paradigm to an explanation paradigm, one that is supported by replicable empirical evidence. It is best to demonstrate how to find the links between short-term behavior and long-term consequences, to let people "see for themselves" as much as you can. Our society has become more complex, making it difficult to see the connections. Much of the study of the world, in science and the humanities, has become equally complex: full of impenetrable jargon and statistics. We've got to make explanations clearer, better educate ourselves so that we have some basic fluency in these languages, and support an education system that helps students understand how to find connections for themselves. Yes, we live in an extremely complex world, but the good news is that we've just scratched the surface of how technology can be used to explain concepts, patterns, and connections to large numbers of people in a customizable, individualized way, for free. Behavioral scientists and theorists might be at the forefront of finding patterns in behavior across time, but they can't maintain the trust of the public unless the public can see for themselves.

Not only can the public see for themselves, but maybe they can do the restricting themselves, too. We've all got a conscience. We just don't have the societal restrictions to assist it, and physically/temporally proximate temptation makes it harder to listen to that voice. We're not all tempted by the same thing, so the restrictions really shouldn't be one size fits all. If people can design their own restrictions, you avoid the possibilities of reactance and the totalitarian manipulation of taste that inspires it.

So, I'd like to run an outside-the-lab experiment to provide evidence that supports my dissertation hypothesis, but I'd also like people to be able to try the experiment on themselves, to plug in their own individual variables.

The other privacy setting on your Facebook account

After attending another stimulating International Communication Conference, I've been thinking a bit more about the issue of privacy and everyday use of social media such as Facebook. Its one of those issues that seems to interest nearly everyone, not just theorists, but teachers, parents, even teenagers.

I have problems with the popular narrative that Privacy is a human right and that it is eroding or otherwise disappearing in the age of networked selves ( I fully articulate most of these in this earlier entry). To echo Ron Rice's argument in 'Artifacts and Paradoxes in New Media', I think we just assumed that the level of privacy we knew was somehow the natural state of things, and that we only tended to think about privacy when it was obviously breached, but not about how it was constructed with the help of older technologies in a certain way, to hide certain information from certain people. One example of many: having a private conversation required certain kinds of architecture: small rooms in big structures with sound-proof walls. I supposed these technologies kept some of the privacy we'd grown accustomed to when we weren't living in tightly packed urban centers. Still, it seems likely that, as individuals and as groups, we would have a strategic advantage to achieving our own ends and outwitting our competitors if we were able to trade information with allies while our enemies weren't able to overhear, and that this (along with the simultaneous drive to survey our environment for threats or resources) drives innovation in privacy enhancing and destroying technologies. While I'd agree that anyone totally robbed of privacy would be at a distinct disadvantage compared to those doing the robbing, and that this imbalance between those with and those without must privacy is to be avoided, talking about it like its a fundamental human right implies that it is somehow absolute or that, once upon a time, we actually had the ability to communicate with many others and keep those communications hidden from others, or that such a world could or should exist, which I don't buy.

The most compelling way to talk and write about technology and privacy would be to reveal the ways in which technologies unintentionally and subtly enhance or erode personal privacy. This got me thinking about Facebook. Most of the public debate over Facebook and privacy has been about its settings: how customizable they are, how easy they are to use. The mere existence of buttons that you click to change your level of privacy stops many users from thinking about other ways you can use the technology to alter your level of privacy. In particular, I'm thinking of the number of friends one chooses to have. As that number creeps up, the photos and the status updates you post gradually become more public and less private. The more gradually this happens, the harder it is to notice. It would be interesting to know the rate at which people acquire (or get rid of) friends on Facebook and if this rate is associated with how aware they are of their level of privacy and if that affects their behavior in any way.

More generally, this is about technologies of self-performance that allow us to set our privacy or "reach" at one point, letting us grow accustomed to one imagined audience. After we set the settings, we think "okay, I know who I'm performing to and I'll tailor my performance to that group", even though social media audiences are always changing in unpredictable ways. Even this blog and others like it are written with one imagined audience, but then that audience changes in ways that would be very difficult for the author to predict: encompassing people from various spheres of the performers' life.

As always, changing the technology can help us out of this bind. Maybe there could be a little graphic representation on every social media that let the author know what kinds of people were in the audience and how that was changing over time. It would take into account the current occupation and place on a professional network of each audience member (a color-coded "status" marker) and the social distance from you based on frequency of interactions between that person and other people you know. You could probably find that information if you really dug around for it (google insights and the like offer good data on web audiences), but what you need is something that is up in the face of the performer, just as it would be in the real world when you enter a room and start speaking. Technology will always change our levels of privacy. Instead of stopping it or trying to reverse it, the best we can do is to make it explicit.

Television is not a toaster with pictures, and Facebook circa 2005 is not Facebook circa 2015

Most people have likely formed an opinion about media effects: the degree or type of effects certain types of media use has on us. They likely talk about this in terms of media technologies (TV, radio, internet) or types of media texts (violent video games, Fox News). I think that we're using an outdated way of talking and thinking about the question of media effects.

We know that we spend more time using media - at home, at work, on the move - than ever before. And we know that there is a greater quantity of media options (in terms of content options and affordances of the technologies or applications) than ever before. I think that these two facts, by themselves, should prompt everyone (even skeptics) to reconsider the degree and type of media effects, and the ways in which we go about assessing these effects.

First, things have changed on the level of media technology. The question of media effects arose at a time at which the types of media (identifiable by their affordances) were limited. Producing and distributing a widely used communication technology that was functionally different than another communication technology took a lot of capital. Once the vast broadband and mobile online networks were established, it became significantly easier to create and distribute applications that, functionally, differ from other communication technologies. Much the same way the establishment of the electrical network permitted growth in the variety of machines in our lives and the establishment of the highway and railway systems permitted the growth of transportation, this network growth has increased diversity. Before the establishment of the electrical grid, you could make plenty of generalizations about machines and their effects on humanity because the number of widely used machines was quite limited. Afterward, those generalizations didn't make as much sense given the variety of machines that people used. Was the effect of a television the same as a toaster? Using pre-electrical network logic, the answer was yes.

Lumping all the uses of the internet or all the uses of Facebook together creates a similar problem. We still want to use the frames that were established by scholars and researchers during the 20th century for understanding media now. We talk about (and study) the effects of Facebook, of the internet, of texting, in the same way we talked about the effects of television 30 years ago: as if these things were discrete entities. But this approach doesn't make sense in a world in which the media forms to which we give names quickly change in fundamental, functional ways. The internet of 2011 is likely no more similar to the internet of 2000, in terms of its uses and effects on users, as radio (or a toaster, for that matter) is to the internet of either era. Yes, some useful things can be said about the effects of all online experiences just as some useful things can be said about the effects of the use of all machines (studies of modernity), but most of these general ways of thinking are just reflections of a time when "machine" or "online experiences" were easier to generalize about, before the network made new technologies and texts easier to create and distribute.

There is a similar problem with the way we think about the effects of types of content. If we talk about the possible effects of a particular film or television show, we do so because we believe that the principles at work are generalizable beyond that one text and that one audience. A film scholar writes about their experience viewing a certain film, but implicit in their writing is the assumption that other people will experience the film in a certain way and/or that other people will experience other similar films in a certain way. When the number of texts explodes, as it has done for the past several years, the question of what one particular person (or type of person) does with one particular text reveals less about the overall experience of media consumption. This just wasn't a problem when the number of texts was lower, when readers could be expected to have seen "classic" texts.

This isn't to say that there won't likely be some media texts that will be experienced by large numbers of people over long periods of time. Our thirst for common experiences will ensure the persistence of canons, but these canons will consist of a smaller and smaller sliver of our overall media use. Figuring out the effect of the two hours I spend watching Citizen Kane is worthwhile, but what about the effects of the thousands of hours I spend online? How do we go about assessing that? Do we break the texts into genres, like we did before? Do we pretend that Facebook or social networking sites are media technologies in the way that radio or television are media technologies? What happens when Facebook's online movie-watching feature takes off? Is its effect on users the same as it was 5 years ago? This seems ludicrous, and yet studies that purport to be about the effects of "Facebook" do not take it into account.

How do we adapt? We identify characteristics of media experiences that cannot be made obsolete by developments in technology and we base our theories on the presence or absence of those characteristics. How many people does a media application connect a user to? How often is it used? Is its use planned or spontaneous? What emotions is its use typically associated with? What parts of the brain light up when we're using it? What are the gratifications sought by the users? If you look at technology this way, you can make sense of the effects of television and toasters without having to conflate the two, and without having to re-invent your theories when the next contraption is invented. These approaches to media effects seem suited to an era in which there will be too many different texts and media technologies for any human to keep track of.