Is Facebook Asking the Right Questions?

I just finished reading a BBC News post entitled “Facebook reveals most-seen posts are inane questions, not politics.” The story itself begins as follows:

After being accused of spreading right-wing content, Facebook has revealed that its most-viewed posts include asking if sugar goes with spaghetti.

Its first-ever report on the contents of people's news feeds in the United States focuses on how many people see a post rather than any other measurement.

The good news is that, at the very least, this counts as an attempt to clear Facebook of any accusations that is has become an instrument for “politics by other means” (or, perhaps, the more activist proposition, “revolution by other means”). The bad news is that they may have engaged inadequate analytic techniques to arrive at questionable conclusions. The fact is that people were bombarded with “things to see” long before Facebook added to the bombardment.

We might do well to think of the mechanisms behind Facebook posts the same way we think about advertising. We are all used to the high volume of advertising that we encounter through television. (There are other sources, such as billboards and newspapers; but my guess is that television advertising draws more attention, simply because it can deploy more attention-grabbing techniques.) Furthermore, the advertising business is not just about drawing eyeballs. It is a matter of drawing the right eyeballs in the interest of getting “the mind behind the eyeballs” to take some desired action (usually buying something, whether you need it or not).

In that context the concept of “most-viewed posts” is a relatively meaningless metric; and rank-ordering the posts themselves according to that metric is even more meaningless. Indeed, even the question of passing a post to others may not be that significant. The more difficult question to deal with is whether acts of reading and sharing lead to actions being taken that have nothing to do directly with reading and sharing.

In other words Facebook needs to be addressed on the same turf as the question of whether the storming of the Capitol building was the result of deliberate incitement. This is a complex question that cannot be answered by simple bean-counting. It is not so much about “spreading the word” as it is about how persuasive those words are and if they are persuasive enough to lead to action.

My guess is that there are no analytical tools for identifying such persuasion, not among Facebook resources or anywhere else. Those in the business of advertising may have a richer qualitative understanding of human nature, but they probably know better than to reduce that understanding to quantitative metrics. The best we can do in the face of a possible crisis is ask, “How did we get into this mess?” Where the National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex is concerned, the House of Representatives tried to address this question. Whether or not any useful results will arise is still up for grabs.

Meanwhile, we should be as careful with Facebook’s accounts of its own analyses as we are in taking any television commercial to be verifiable truth.

Getting the News in the South Pacific

Following the reports about Facebook blocking access to news in Australia has been a disquieting experience. For the record, I have never used Facebook as a news site. Indeed, the only reason I have a Facebook account at all is because Blogger no longer notifies my readers whenever I create a new article. As a result I have created a “shadow” page, also called The Rehearsal Studio, which readers can follow to receive hyperlinks to new articles as they are published.

Furthermore, that limited use of Facebook was reinforced by Mark Zuckerberg himself, when he told a Congressional committee that the business of his company was advertising. Any “distribution of information” was assessed more on what advertisers would pay to share space with that information than on whether the information itself was accurate or willfully deceptive. Why would anyone want to get news from such a source, particularly in a setting that allows users to compare reports from different sources, either through a search engine or by maintaining multiple RSS feeds?

For the record, I have three such feeds for international news: Al Jazeera, BBC News, and The Guardian. I am writing this just after having read a Guardian article by Sheldon Chanel about the accessibility of news across the South Pacific. For the record, this article was written with financial support from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas. The operative content of this article comes down to the citation of an observation made by Amanda Watson, a research fellow at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs based at the Australian National University:

Facebook is the primary platform, because a number of telco providers offer cheaper Facebook data, or bonus Facebook data. Many Pacific Islanders might know how to do some basic Facebooking, but it’s questionable if they would be able to open an internet search engine and search for news, or go to a particular web address.

One reason for this limited approach to access appears to be that most of these individuals connect to the Internet through a cell phone, rather than a computer. (I should also observe that my own experience has taught me that the efficiency of search increases with the size of the screen displaying the results.)

My guess is that Tim Berners-Lee would have puppies if he encountered Watson’s analysis of Internet use in the South Pacific. He would probably accuse the Islanders of trying to ride bicycles on his eight-lane superhighway! I was reminded of the sobering experience I had when I once attended an advertisers’ conference. One talk began with a sobering observation:

We spend much of our time flying over the people we influence.

In other words the primary target of advertisements lies in those population centers that are not on the coast of either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans.

Internet usage is sort of the “flip side” of that proposition. Internet content is driven heavily by a handful of technology companies, and most of the drivers think that the whole world sees the Internet the same way that they do. This is, to say the least, a fatuous fantasy. As a result, we now have an extensive demographic that is likely to be deprived of timely news simply because Facebook is more interested in more revenue, rather than in seeing to the needs of one category of its user base. (It goes without saying that one of those needs is the distribution of content vetted for validity!)

Zuckerberg might want to give that proposition some thought, were it not for the fact that his only view of the South Pacific would probably be restricted to a luxury resort on one of the islands.

Entropic Facebook

Where signal does not stand a chance of rising above the noise:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/04/facebook-groups-misinformation

Max Weber in Bedford Falls

Yesterday afternoon I returned to the War Memorial Opera House to take in the second of the two Thanksgiving weekend performances of Jake Heggie’s It’s a Wonderful Life presented by the San Francisco Opera. This time I could enjoy my subscription vantage point, which allows me to divide my time between the activity on stage and the activity in the orchestra pit. Nevertheless, this turned out to be an occasion when the narrative held the focus of my attention, whether it was being reinforced by Leonard Foglia’s staging or by Heggie’s setting of Gene Scheer’s libretto.

That focus was directed primarily on how the narrative served a socioeconomic precept I had cited at the end of my previous account of the opening-night performance. I considered the possibility that the narrative may be viewed almost like a “lesson play” (in the spirit of Bertolt Brecht) on the opposing views of the banker Mr. Potter (sung by baritone Rod Gilfry) and the protagonist George Bailey (sung by tenor William Burden). As I put it, the lesson goes back to “Max Weber’s contention that any society in which the only value is monetary value is a seriously flawed social institution.” Over the course of his writing, Weber took this principle in two directions, one involved with loss of freedom and the other with loss of meaning. (Jürgen Habermas would subsequently explore these two losses at greater length in his Theory of Communicative Action.)

As the narrative of It’s a Wonderful Life unfolds, there are any number of indicators of how freedom may be in jeopardy. Potter is revealed to be not only a banker but also a slumlord. The Bailey Building and Loan, founded by George’s father and then taken over by George after his father’s death, becomes a symbol of freedom those those less well-off. It manages as an organization in which the community provides money to help the community, using the underlying capital to build affordable houses. When “Angel Second Class” Clara (soprano Golda Schultz) gives George a vision of a world in which he had not yet been born, freedom has fallen victim to that jeopardy. Potter not only owns the town but also its citizens, whom he holds in a “virtual slavery.”

Loss of meaning, on the other hand, has less to do with the narrative itself and how different generations end up reading it. My own thoughts were triggered this morning when I saw a sign in my condominium complex that referred to “our neighbors.” It triggered a sinking feeling that the very meaning of the noun “neighbor” no longer had much currency when confronted with a mentality that is cripplingly limited to Facebook friends.

Those thoughts then turned to the two critical plot-turns in the opera narrative. The first takes place during the crash of 1929, when Bailey and his new wife Mary (soprano Andriana Chuchman) take the money intended for their honeymoon and distribute it among the depositors of the Building and Loan. That act is then reflected with those same townspeople give their money to Bailey upon learning that the Building and Loan had suffered an unexplained loss of $8000.

The Bailey family, Mary (Andriana Chuchman), George (William Burden), and Uncle Billy (Keith Jameson) with the money given my the neighbors to make up for the lost $8000 (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

This triggered reflection on those currently prevailing mentalities. I realized that there was now a generation that would react to these episodes by asking “Why didn’t they just set up a GoFundMe page?” That struck me as the essence of a mentality of individuals whose focus on Facebook friends had essentially sapped the meaning out of the noun “neighbor.” In our present day loss of meaning is no longer a threat considered by Weber and Habermas; it is a stark reality.

Heggie’s opera, of course, is not a lecture in socioeconomic theory. It is not even a PBS “Socioeconomics for Dummies” television series! Nevertheless, it is a source of reflection on who we are and what we have become; and, through the imaginative uses of abstraction in Foglia’s staging, it is probably an even greater source of reflection than Frank Capra’s film of the same name had been. Sadly, while those of my generation still seem to appreciate and value such opportunities for reflection, there is a younger brave new world out there for which the concept of “reflection” has joined that of “neighbor” in having lost the essence of its meaning.

Opera cannot change the world, but my second viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life left me wishing that it could.

Did Tim Berners-Lee Trip Over his Own Feet?

Tim Berners-Lee is back in the news again. As in the past, it would appear that the combination of his reputation as “inventor of the Internet” (whatever that means) and his knighthood have led him to believe that he can pontificate about anything. Apparently it has only recently come to his attention that, if you create a medium through which anyone can say anything to anyone else, then everyone will. In other words it would appear that Berners-Lee has not yet grasped that phenomena such as fake news and hate speech are the inevitable products of what the Internet is and, for that matter, what Berners-Lee claims he wants it to be.

Back in November of 2013, this site took Berners-Lee to task on the basis of an article summary on the BBC News Web site that quoted him as saying that the “democratic nature” of the Internet was being threatened by a “growing tide of surveillance and censorship.” Apparently, it took him over two years to realize that, where information is concerned, an unregulated democracy has, by its very nature, tended to produce excess noise to the detriment of the signal in was intended to produce. If one wants to filter out the noise, then one must look for it (surveillance) and then design a filter for it (censorship). Before trying to unpack Berners-Lee’s failure to grasp this fundamental reality, it is worth recalling his own origins, as well as those of the Internet.

The important thing to remember is that Berners-Lee is a computer scientist whose skills led to his working as an independent contractor for CERN, a European research agency specializing in the challenging domain of particle physics. It subsequently became the home of the Large Hadron Collider, the primary instrument involved in the discovery of the so-called “God particle,” known more accurately as the “Higgs boson.” CERN is a perfect example of people with a wide diversity of cultural backgrounds coming together to work on shared problems. In that context it is easy to imagine Berners-Lee recognizing that communicating through a computer network could enable an even larger population to share their work and their results. He went about designing and implementing an infrastructure to enable that kind of world-wide sharing; and the result was the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee then became an evangelist for making the Web available to as many people as possible. The result tends to reflect the joke about the Statue of Liberty in the Beyond the Fringe “Home Thoughts from Abroad” routine:

After they put up the Statue, some idealistic Johnny decided to put the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” on the base. Well … people did!

Berners-Lee’s mindset never seemed to recognize that his evangelism would attract more than scientists or that the Web would be used for anything other than doing more science. Even the pre-Internet Usenet had more common sense, thanks to which those responsible for regulating discussion groups came down like a ton of bricks on the very first effort to advertise through spamming.

According to a BBC News story that appeared over this past weekend, Berners-Lee finally seems to have recognized that an unregulated Web is not good for much of anything, particularly his dearly beloved science. For example, he would like to see regulation of “unethical” (those quote marks come from the BBC, not me) political advertising. Unfortunately, he thinks this can be done by putting “a fair level of data control back in the hands of the people,” failing to recognize that “the people” are the ones putting the data he abhors into the system in the first place.

Fortunately, there is at least one government out there with a more realistic model of regulation, and it will be interesting to see if they can put it into practice. In an article that showed up in today’s The New York Times, Melissa Eddy and Mark Scott reported that Heiko Maas, Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection in Germany, is proposing that the technology companies responsible for maintaining social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, be fined for the presence of content that would constitute hate speech or fake news. In other words the only way you are going to get people to fix a problem is to penalize them for failure to do so, and whopping fines can make for a very effective penalty.

I applaud Maas’ effort, and I wish him well. However, whether we like it or not, this kind of regulation is likely to turn into a losing game of Whac-A-Mole. Shutting down one source can easily lead to another popping up, and probably more than one of them. The fact is that just trying to figure out how hate speech can propagate may be a major research problem. It is one thing for an extremist to find a sympathetic blog and then tell all of his friends about it, but what about the process of discovery itself?

Someone I know rather well tripped over this problem the other day. She was trying to track down information about Jews in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust. She typed a search query into Google and discovered a relevant Wikipedia page as the highest-ranked result. On the other hand the second-highest ranked result turned out to be an anti-Semitic blog being maintained on a Wordpress platform. In other words the Google search result was not only unreliable for her needs, it was also disturbingly offensive. Thus, regulating the content itself is definitely a step in the right direction; but, if we are really interested in regulating sources of hate speech or fake news, we have to think about not only those sources but also the ways in which they show up in search results.

Now we are in territory that, as some of Berners-Lee’s professors may have said on more than one occasion, is “beyond the scope of this course!”

Patrons of the Arts

This afternoon my wife and I attended the 2017 Medallion Society Luncheon of the San Francisco Opera (SFO). This is one of the ways in which SFO thanks its more generous donors. Our donation level is not up there with the heavy hitters, but it is enough to get us admission. This makes for a relatively pleasant afternoon of good food and people-watching.

My wife always likes to go through the enumeration of donors at the back of the booklet that awaited us at our places at the table. She encountered an ample number of familiar names. However, what surprised me was that my own traversal of the list turned up names that she did not know, members of the computer science community that I knew either as colleagues or individuals I had encountered at conferences. I was more than pleasantly surprised at how many of them there were, many of whom were more generous than we were. This led me to make a second scan in search of my more recent colleagues and familiar names associated with the younger members of the "technology generation" in the Bay Area. This time I came up with no hits at all.

This is the endemic problem of the performing arts these days, the "greying" of its audience base. I realize that the older generation writing about the young pups is a familiar cliché. Nevertheless, just about every sector of the performing arts to which I have some commitment has tried to attract a younger generation to the audience community; and the sad truth is that they have failed dismally. A generation that understands the world only through "social software" available on a smartphone is a generation that lacks either the motivation or the patience to become audience for the performing arts. Furthermore, it is very unlikely that anyone of any generation will be able to serve as a change agent to lure this sector into the "audience fold."

When I was a student, there were strident modernists who delighted in accusing concert halls of being little more than museums that served only past relics. However, in the city of San Francisco, there is an abundance of opportunities for "emerging" composers and performers interested in the more recent repertoire to lay out the fruits of their labors to those willing to serve as audience. Further more, those who show up tend, more often than not, to be appreciative. The question is whether those on the way up will have to rely on those "nearing the end of our journey" to serve as audience. If so, they face a future of dwindling audiences with little hope of having the resources to do anything about it.

It would appear that, regardless of how Hans Christian Andersen chose to tell the story, the Emperor's mechanical nightingale may have triumphed after all!

Are Trump Supporters Having Second Thoughts?

The headline for Alfred Ng's Tech Culture article on CNET felt like a faint glimmer of good news: "Most Americans wish Trump would stop tweeting so much." Admittedly, 69% is a bit narrow for the adjective "most;" and, more to the point, it is unclear to what extent 1000 constitutes a representative sample, particularly in the absence of any information as to just how those polled were selected. Nevertheless, a faint glimmer is probably better than total darkness, which may be what we shall get should Trump decide that the best way to respond to this article is with a Tweet.

More disconcerting is the Trump quote from his 60 Minutes interview justifying his heavy use of Twitter:

When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story...I have a method of fighting back.

To be fair, anyone who thinks that politics is not adversarial has to be living in some idealistic alternative universe. Nevertheless, having an argument need not be treated as a matter of going into combat. Indeed, Carl von Clausewitz' famous aphorism about war being diplomacy by other means seems to suggest that combat is what one resorts to when the cooler reasoning of argumentation no longer yields mutually beneficial results.

It goes without saying that Twitter was not conceived to be a medium for argumentation, and trying to use it that way is bound to be frustrating. To the contrary, the whole raison d'être behind Twitter is that it would provide a medium for spontaneous impressions. It would not surprise me to learn that those who first conceived of it saw it as a way to use words when a simple emoticon would not do. The "better angels" of the Internet may even still see it that way; but the Internet is an entropic environment that devours better angels. Donald Trump's use of Twitter has become an object lesson that demonstrates where such entropy will lead.

Will the World Economic Forum Have a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Moment?

The television channel for BBC World Service News has begun to run self-promoting advertisements about its coverage of this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. This year’s gathering will begin on January 17 and will last for four days, meaning that it will probably conclude around the time that Donald Trump will be taking the Oath of Office for President of the United States on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Those who have followed this site for several years known that it has pulled no punches in writing about this event in the past. In 2014 it went as far as to compare Davos with Prince Prospero’s fortified castle from Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Masque of the Red Death;” but Davos seems to be far more insulated from harsh (if not deadly) realities than Prospero’s castle. Even when the Forum invites the likes of Joe Stiglitz, it has been clear that the gulf between inviting a participant and paying attention to him/her continues to entail an unscalable width.

Still, one has to wonder how the rich and mighty have been so successful at maintaining their oblivion. Will their gambits continue to work in an age when Great Britain voted to secede from the European Union and the United States voted Trump to succeed Barack Obama as President of the United States? Think of the mileage the Brexit leader Michael Gove got out of his declaration that his followers “have had enough of experts.”

Davos has traditionally been the venue in which the rich and mighty get to drink from the deep pool of expertise and then go forth with their policies refreshed. The reality, however, it that, being all-too-human, they only listen to observations that reinforce opinions and strategies that they already have, which is why someone like Stiglitz can only survive by realizing that he is fighting a losing battle.

So the question to ask is whether or not those “wise men of Davos” can sustain a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment and recognize why so many people around the world chose to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the motto, “Good riddance, 2016?” Do they view Gove and Trump as nothing more than “outlier” points on whatever multidimensional landscape currently feeds their econometric models? Alternatively, has the “echo chamber” effect of social media combined with fallacious attempts to extract knowledge from Google snippets so numbed their capacity for decision-making that they do not even realize that the “wise men” epithet can only be read sarcastically? My guess is that Davos will continue to provide the cloud of ignorance that has nurtured its denizens for many years. The raison d’être behind the venue’s isolation may well be that it supports deep thinking by insulating attendees from the hassles of day-to-day life; but history has taught us that it is just another echo chamber where world leaders in both business and politics can reassure each other that they are all making wise decisions without worrying about how well those decisions mesh with down-to-earth reality.

Zuckerberg Goes Head-to-Head with Aristotle

One of my favorite topics, outside of the domain of music, on this site has been Max Weber’s proposition that too much attention to market values and consumerism can lead to loss of meaning. My own effort to keep loss of meaning at bay has involved a concerted effort to read texts that require sustained cogitation, rather than simple “consumption” based on a “bottom line.” This is the sort of reading that sticks with you long after you put the book or article down; and experience has taught me that it often involves interaction with the physical medium (not only annotation but also leafing back and forth through the pages to recall what one thinks one has previously read). Thus, it is not reading that fares very well on a computer screen, whether we are talking about a monitor or a desk or the surface of a tablet.

Not too long ago I posted a “progress report” on my efforts to work my way through the “Nicomachean Ethics” of Aristotle. I am still at it, but I have just embarked on a domain that has already started my reflecting on the fact that I have begun to spend more time on Facebook since the demise of Examiner.com. It turns out that Aristotle devotes two entire books (the eighth and ninth) of the “Nicomachean Ethics” to friendship; and in the revised Oxford translation edited by Jonathan Barnes and published by Princeton University Press (in the Bollingen Series), this comes to about 27 pages. In other words there is a lot more to friendship than creating a social network by clicking a Friend button!

To some extent I might be accused of trivializing Facebook by writing that last sentence. However, I prefer to look through the other end of the telescope: By its very nature, friendship is a highly complicated dimension of human interaction that, by its very approach to interface, has been trivialized by Facebook to a degree that the noun has been almost entirely stripped of meaning. This may seem like an extreme position to make over a rather innocuous piece of software. However, it is basically yet another instance of a precept expressed by H. L. Mencken that I cannot cite too often:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

It is through clarity and simplicity that Facebook has managed to build up such a large user community, but size signifies only in matters of marketing rather than the complexities of social interaction that occupied so much of Aristotle’s thought. One might almost argue that a Presidential election came down to choosing between a candidate that was not afraid to confront complexity and one that had a clear and simple answer for everything without caring very much whether or not that answer would be effective if put into practice.

Nevertheless the nature of meaning has not yet been entirely lost. The good news is that there is still a body of individuals out there, however small their numbers may be, that are not afraid of big books and complex arguments that do not always result in easy resolutions. We may have to keep a low profile for the next four years; but, as long as we continue to express ourselves through media that exceed the prevailing attention span, we have a fighting chance of keeping at our business. We just have to view that low profile as a safety measure, rather than a sign of weakness.

"… our pathetic native self"

I just finished reading Janet Malcom's harsh review of Jonathan Bate's recent biography of Ted Hughes, now available online prior to my receiving it in the next issue of The New York Review of Books. I was particularly pleased with her concluding paragraph, in which she dismissed the idea that a biography should be about what the subject was "really" like. Her punch line about that topic was:

If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self.

This left me wondering if this was her way of venting about the current mass addiction to social media, suggesting that whose who indulge most heavily are actually the most pathetic. In an earlier age (about which these addicts are totally oblivious), the prevailing motto would have been "Get a life!" In the absence of an authoritative voice to utter that maxim, such addicts can think of nothing to do other what broadcast every detail of "native self" to the entire Internet, neither knowing nor caring about how pathetic that act of broadcasting is.

Keeping the Faith No Longer

The BBC News Web site just posted an article based on a rather interesting finding:

Pew Research Center found that 71% of Americans identified as Christian in 2014 - down from 78% in 2007.

Statistically, that amounts to a pretty significant drop; and it will be interesting to see what sorts of hypotheses are launched to explain the shift. We have a long history of viewing our country as a secular one dedicated to the separation of church and state. However, in this new century fundamentalist Christianity seems to be playing a greater role in politics. Thus, it may be that those who previously embraced Christianity are put off by extremist fringes, possibly even seeing little difference between them and Jewish or Muslim extremists. In other words, where the fellowship of Christianity once provided a "quiet place" where an individual could take stock of his/her values within a sympathetic community, that "place" has now become unduly "noisy," meaning that, as a "social world" it is not that different from Facebook or Twitter. I have been living comfortably with my own atheism for over 40 years, so I am probably not the best source of hypotheses. Still, I have to wonder if this is yet another case of "voting against," rather than "voting for," in which case it may be a sign of an increasing loss of any value system, secular or sacred.

Mata Hari Wants to Friend You

The following showed up this morning on Al Jazeera English through their wire service sources:

Iranian hackers set up fake Facebook accounts and tried to befriend US and Western officials in an effort to spy on them, an internet security firm has said.

The hackers created fake personas and populated their profiles with fictitious personal content, and then tried to befriend targets, the Reuters news agency reported.

Targets are believed to include a US navy admiral, politicians, ambassadors, lobbyists and officials from several other countries including the UK and Saudi Arabia, according to the internet firm, iSight Partners.

Is anyone surprised that social software should turn out to provide a new layer of efficiency for some of the oldest spycraft techniques?

Be Careful What You Wish For

Charles Simic's latest NYRBlog post provided a slightly disquieting example of a poet who could see the future:

That gravestone reminded me of something crazy the poet Mark Strand thought up many years ago, when he was broke and thinking up ways to make money. He told me excitedly one day that he had invented a new kind of gravestone that he hoped would interest cemeteries and carvers of gravestone inscriptions. It would include, in addition to the usual name, date, and epitaph, a slot where a coin could be inserted, that would activate a tape machine built into it, and play the deceased’s favorite songs, jokes, passages from scriptures, quotes by great men and speeches addressed to their fellow citizens, and whatever else they find worthy of preserving for posterity. Visitors to the cemetery would insert as many coins as required to play the recording (credit cards not yet being widely used) and the accumulated earnings would be divided equally between the keepers of the cemetery and the family of the deceased. This being the United States of America, small billboards advertising the exciting programs awaiting visitors to various cemeteries would be allowed along the highway, saying things like: “Give Your Misery A Little Class, Listen to a Poet” or “Die Laughing Listening to Stories of a Famous Brain Surgeon.”

One of the benefits of this invention, as he saw it, is that it would transform these notoriously gloomy and desolate places by attracting big crowds—not just of the relatives and acquaintances of the diseased, but also complete strangers seeking entertainment and the pearls of wisdom and musical selections of hundreds and hundreds of unknown men and women. Not only that, but all of us who are their descendants would spend the later years of our lives devouring books and listening to records, while compiling our own little anthologies of favorites.

I wonder if either Simic or Strand realizes how close this is to a viable reality. There has been a fair amount of debate over that happens to your Facebook site after you die. It seems as if Strand inadvertently (and anachronistically) provided a perfectly reasonable solution: Your Facebook site becomes your gravestone. Furthermore, since Facebook is always on the ball keeping that site populated with the latest advertising, visitors will not have to worry about dropping coins into a slot (even bitcoins). For that matter, if Strand had a bit of a lawyer's imagination to go along with his poetic inventiveness, he might even be able to claim prior art for the whole Facebook concept!

All of these visions, however, evade the question of whether or not any of this stuff is worth leaving for posterity in the first place.

Recognizing the Need to Blow the Whistle

Listening to the headline summary at the beginning of Democracy Now! this morning, I was particularly struck by the final item. It concerned an editorial published under the title "Edward Snowden, Whistle-blower." In reporting his particular item, Amy Goodman quoted the following text from the editorial:

Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service.

For those who have not encountered the details behind this story, the newspaper that ran this editorial was The New York Times.

I wanted to cite this example because yesterday afternoon KGO-TV attributed exactly the same motives behind the hacking of Snapchat. In this case, however, the source they cited was anonymous (lower-case). When the Snapchat story first broke, KGO was there interviewing members of the Silicon Valley technology community, basically making the case that Snapchat management had been informed of security flaws and had been negligent in addressing them.

Anyone who has had to live with the "Patch Tuesday" culture of Microsoft knows that both the reliability and security of software are moving targets. These are not "goals" that one reaches through some sort of hill-climbing technique. They are problems that arise in software not only because of the code but also because of the environment in which the code is embedded, an environment that involves factors that programmers may not know about or cannot control even when they are aware of them. One cannot attribute these flaws to malice; but, if they are not recognized and repaired, they can be used maliciously. The Snowden case provided us with a situation where, because of the "cult of secrecy," recognition itself was problematic, thus leading to exploitation rather than repair. In the case of Snapchat, the consequences have not been as embarrassing as they were for projects like Prism; but those who were embarrassed would probably feel otherwise.

Many of last month's retrospective articles talked about 2013 as "the year when trust died" (or words to that effect). I found those article naïve, to say the least. Swindles are always perpetrated in the name of trust (or, if you prefer, confidence). They were probably with us before history began to be documented, and they were probably remain with us. They succeed under the assumption that suspicion requires too much time and effort, meaning that you might miss out of all the fun. Nevertheless, there will always be individuals determined to prevent the hapless from being victimized; and sometimes that act of prevention requires blowing a very loud whistle.

Who Will Tolerate How Much Annoyance?

I have been following with some interest the ongoing story of Facebook's plans to introduce video advertising as part of the News Feeds offering. This past Thursday the USA TODAY College Web site ran a story by Akane Otani entitled "Users balk at 'intrusive' Facebook video ads," which I feel provided a useful account of at least one prevalent reaction to the plan. For those unfamiliar with the site, it appears to be a platform upon which college students can prepare to be "e-journalists of the future." I have no idea whether or not they are compensated for their efforts. However, my guess is that they are not under any salaried contract, which may be part of how they are prepared for what real-world work will be like after they graduate. The contributor for this particular article is a senior at Cornell University.

My one problem with the article is that I am not sure whether or not Otani either grasped or communicated the justification for that adjective "intrusive." My doubts come from a quote that presumably came from an interview with another student:

I think that introducing the concept with movie trailers is interesting. I'd probably click to watch them on my computer if they were different films each ad.

What this student (and, perhaps Otani) may not have realized is that the sorts of videos that Facebook has in mind are self-starting. Unlike the video that shows up on, for example, the BBC News Web site, you do not click on it to start it. It starts up all by itself. Because of the many items (including other ads) that are getting loaded on the same page, that start-up is usually not immediate; and, if you do not know that it is coming, it can be a surprise (and, if you do not control your volume setting appropriately, that surprise can be a loud one).

Thanks to my own reading habits, I have had a fair number of encounters with these videos. I really do not like them one bit, but I have resigned myself to being stuck with them. I now know enough about where they lurk that I can usually turn them off preemptively. This is particularly important since, as I discovered with my OS X Activity Monitor, they can eat up a lot of Flash time, basically taking the CPU away from other things that you would rather it be doing! I shall therefore continue to be curious about Facebook's move. I may not be one of their users, but I know how infectious Facebook usage can be. Whether or not user enthusiasm will be attenuated by "force-feeding" remains to be seen.

"Person of the Year"

The Associated Press story about the selection of Pope Francis and the Time Person of the Year was less interesting for the result than it was for the account of the contenders. Apparently it came down to a choice between the Pope and Edward Snowden. No manner how strongly anyone feels about Snowden, positively or negatively, there is no denying his impact on our lives, not just in the United States but around the world. Before his massive leak of data from the National Security Administration, talk about the dangers of a surveillance society were limited to a handful of individuals who could not always substantiate their suspicions. Now the topic is on everyone's lips, and reform is easier to achieve when everyone is talking about the situation from their respective points of view. With that in mind, my own vote would have gone to Snowden; but I have been pretty dismissive of the whole Person of the Year thing for some time. Remember, Mark Zuckerberg was Person of the Year for 2010; and his respect for privacy (sic) has been a public matter for some time.

The Associate Press article also included a few sentences about other contenders:

Besides Snowden, Time had narrowed its finalists down to gay rights activist Edith Windsor, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Time editors made the selection. The magazine polled readers for their choice, and the winner was Egyptian General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who didn't even make the top 10 of Time's final list.

For my money (which does not go into a subscription to Time) this "state of the playing field" simply affirms for me just how much of a waste of time this whole project is.

The BBC Tries to Diagnose the US Government Shutdown

From time to time, the BBC News Web site runs articles under the rubric called Viewpoints. The basic idea is to take a critical issue a source out a wide variety of perspectives on the state of play. I am not sure that the BBC always does a good job of providing a representative sample of opinions, but there is still value to the exercise.

Yesterday afternoon's Viewpoints article was based on the question "Is American politics broken?" For the most part the contributions were reasoned, reflecting a variety of points of view. If definitely was more informative than listing to Washington Journal this morning on C-SPAN, which simply alternated between Republican and Democratic congressman accusing each other of bad behavior. Therefore, what I enjoyed the most from the BBC article was a break from the partisan ping-pong provided by Iwan Morgan, who runs the programs at the Institute of the Americas, which is based at University College in London.

Morgan argued that "American politics is working exactly how the founding fathers intended." In other words the current situation was simply a demonstration of separation of powers in action. He then observed that the Founding Fathers had not anticipated the extreme polarization of views that characterizes the current situation.

This is a good point. The prevailing culture of the Founding Fathers believed that "reasonable men may differ." Differences were resolved by compromise. The process was frequently painfully arduous. However, it resulted in a Declaration of Independence that was approved unanimously and a Constitution that was ratified by all thirteen of the existing colonial territories (which then became "states of the union").

This culture no longer prevails. Facilitated by the Internet, every individual is entitled to voice an opinion as loud as possible. Whether or not that opinion may be reconciled with others through reason depends less than how many followers one can muster through Facebook or Twitter. As a result, the American political system has become a deformed dog with lots of little tails all trying to wag it. If I may continue that metaphor, the energy that goes into wagging all of those tails requires so much metabolic energy that, because the dog never gets a break to eat, it will probably starve to death.

The culture of the Founding Fathers emerged from a (relatively new at the time) practice known as the "Republic of Letters." Writing letters had become a medium through which "reasonable men" could share their opinions across great distances. I remember Internet evangelists preaching that the Internet would launch a "new generation" of the Republic of Letters. It didn't happen.

It didn't happen because the Republic of Letters was not simply a matter of "content exchange." It involved a community of participants who but both mental and physical effort into the acts of both writing and reading. Rather than cultivating a new generation of such a community (as Usenet did in the pre-Internet days), the technology of "social software" not only destroyed and remnants of the community but made it virtually impossible for a new such community to arise. As a result, we are now in a terra incognita that the Founding Fathers could not possibly have imagined, meaning that not only are political practices broken but so, too, are the mechanisms for repairing them.

Is the Social Network Sociopathic?

Chris Matyszczyk had a field day today with his Technically Incorrect blog for CNET news. The title of his post was "Does Facebook prolong heartbreak?;" and, as might be expected, the post was all about an affirmative answer to that question. The basic argument is that Facebook has a tendency to remind you of things you would prefer to neglect, one reason being that it has no way of marking certain links in a social network as leading to an emotional minefield for someone at one end of that link. To be fair, there is probably a good chance that any function capable of making such marks is not Turing-computable; but I think that just makes the point stronger. Those of us who continue to caution against unintended consequences continue to be in the minority, even when those consequences may be sociopathic.

However, while Matyszcyk's post may add fuel to one of my favorite fires, I have to be skeptical about its conclusions. The problem is that Matyszczyk's source for this post happens to be an article on Mail Online, the online service provided by the London Daily Mail. While the Daily Mail may have better claims to legitimacy that, say, the National Enquirer, I am not convinced it is that all much better. This particular story was filed by "DAILY MAIL REPORTER," which strikes me as a red flag that protects any particular individual from taking the rap for bad (or, worse yet, libelous) information.

The primary source then turns out to be Sir Nigel Shadbolt, who has never had any problems in accepting the burden of authority by publishing under his own name. The fact that he spends much of his time drinking Semantic Web Kool-Aid is his own affair. The point is that, because I know about his professional reputation, I am in a better position to assess my skepticism of his assertions than I am when confronted with an anonymous source.

I would, however, observe that Shadbolt is one of the co-founders of the Web Science Research Initiative. His co-founders are Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Dame Wendy Hall, and Daniel Weitzner. Having voice criticism about the IBM "service science" initiative in the past, my reaction to "Web science" is basically "more of the same." Just as "service science" tried to factor the social dimension out of acts of providing service, I fear that "Web science" may have a similar objective. This is likely to have no effect on any general awareness of unintended consequences and may even reinforce those determined to believe that such consequences do not signify.

Fortunately, since my own presence on Facebook is kept to a bare minimum (and that only because it is required for some Examiner.com communications), I do not think I need worry about any new threats to my own sense of psychological well-being.

Another Nail in the Coffin for the Long Attention Span

As a heavy user of Google Reader, I am one of the many who reacted negatively to Google's decision to shut down the service at the beginning of July. I have not actively been part of the petitioning process to persuade Google to reconsider. I recognize that Google does what it does on the basis of revenue stream. Google Reader was never designed to be a cash cow. It was probably just a matter of time until Google decided that they no longer wanted to feel charitable about it any more.

However, while I cannot direct my wrath at Google, I can still complain about what amounts to a good-riddance column written by Ben Parr for CNET. Fortunately, I can credit Parr with giving a clear statement of his position at the very beginning of his column:

Like some of you, I was once a power user of Google Reader. I needed it to do my job. But as Twitter started to gain steam, I started checking it less and less. It was less a pleasure and more a chore. 

And then suddenly, I just stopped. I created a Twitter account to track tech news, and I never looked back.

I must confess that this argument gave me a violent reality check. Never, in my wildest dreams, would I have thought of Twitter as an substitute for Google Reader; but then I have never thought of Twitter as having any utility for the writing that I do. The reason is simple enough, the writing that I do for Examiner.com depends on my having to read material of a fair amount of substance, rather than 140-character tweets. Through Google Reader I track both blogs and periodicals that provide articles of varying length concerned with the performance of music. On the whole I found that I could use the Google Reader display as a convenient way to decide which of those articles demanded more serious attention. To even suggest that Twitter can provide similar utility is nothing short of ludicrous.

Nevertheless, it is a symptom of a disease whose progress (I must admit) I have been afraid to track. That is the deterioration of attention span. As its name implies, Google Reader was designed for readers; but, thanks to Twitter (and other tools that care more about social networking than about content), reading has become a dying art. The very idea that someone might have something to say that deserves more than a few glances at a computer screen has become so "old school" that it no longer carries any currency.

Thus, for better or worse, I attention will now be devoted to finding a viable alternative for managing my RSS streams. If the petitions work, I shall be happy. However, it will be clear that Google Reader will be on life-support. Thus, it would probably be best for me to find a good alternative now, rather than trying to cling to it until its very last gasp.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s “Reality Problem”

I was glad to see New York Review Books release a collection of essays by Daniel Mendelsohn entitled Waiting for the Barbarians. As readers of this site know, I have followed Mendelsohn’s New York Review articles eagerly and enthusiastically. While many of them capture some immediate spirit of the moment, such as his review of Avatar, Mendelsohn always seems to extrapolate his accounts beyond that immediacy to more general hypotheses, if not truths.

The review of this collection by Edward Mendelson (note the spelling difference) calls particular attention to what Mendelsohn calls the “reality problem.” Since this has been a favorite topic of my own, I feel it worth quoting how Mendelsohn formulates it:

… how the extraordinary blurring between reality and artifice that has been made possible by new technologies makes itself felt not only in our entertainments…but in the way we think about, and conduct, our lives.

Expressed this way, the reality problem may be viewed as a corollary of Max Weber’s “loss of meaning” problem, since the very meaning of “reality” is at stake. Since Weber posed this problem as a hazard of too much emphasis on market-based thinking, I think this connection is particularly appropriate. Whether it involves the convincing levels of artifice available through, for example, CGI or the extent to which Facebook embeds us in an “artificial” version of the social world, rather than the “real” one, the intense marketing of new technologies seems to have confronted us with the unintended consequence of Mendelsohn’s reality problem.

Of course, once “reality” loses its meaning, so does everything else, whether it involves how we choose those who govern us or how we shall be able to eat a decade from now.