Quotulatiousness

February 14, 2014

Facebook‘s multiplicity of gender choices

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:30

I have known enough people for whom the arbitrary division of people into “male” or “female” was insufficient that it didn’t surprise me at all that Facebook has extended their available self-designators. What does surprise is the vast selection of choices they currently support. Slate‘s Will Oremus attempted to identify all the options:

Facebook told me it has no plans to publish a comprehensive list of the choices it offers. So we took it upon ourselves to reconstruct it by typing each letter of the alphabet into the text field, one at a time, and transcribing the options that appeared. We found 56 custom options, bringing the total number of options to 58 including male and female. Please note that it’s possible that the list below is not complete. If you find one that we missed, please feel free to point it out in the comments and we’ll update accordingly.

The list goes from “Agender” to “Two-Spirit”. Who knew there could be so many discrete gender states?

January 16, 2014

Facebook‘s business model and why your status isn’t gathering “Likes” anymore

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:36

Derek Muller has an interesting analysis of the different business models of Facebook, YouTube, and other social media sites:

Published on 14 Jan 2014

Share this on Facebook 😉

Facebook is a complex ecosystem of individuals, creators, brands and advertisers, but I don’t think it serves any of these groups particularly well because its top priority is to make money. Now, I don’t think making money is a bad thing, in fact I hope to make some myself. The problem is the only way Facebook has found to make money is by treating all entities on the site as advertisers and charging them to share their content.

This business plan backfires because 1) not all entities ARE advertisers and 2) it was the content from these people, specifically friends, family, and creators that made the site worth visiting in the first place. Now the incentives are misaligned:
– individuals want to see great content, but they are now seeing more paid content and organically shared content which appeals to the lowest common denominator (babies, weddings, and banal memes)
– creators want to reach fans but their posts are being throttled to force them to pay to be seen
– brands and advertisers have to pay once to advertise their page on Facebook, and then pay again to reach the people who have already liked their page. Plus Facebook is not a place where people generally go to buy things.

Facebook stands in contrast to other social media like Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram where all content is shared with all followers.

I don’t spend much time on Facebook, even though I have my blog posts automatically posted to my timeline. When the video ads start to arrive, it will provide me with even more of an incentive to avoid spending time there.

H/T to Cate Matthews for the link.

Update: Apparently the folks who “Like” their own posts are not egomaniacs (well, not all of them) … they’re rationally responding to how Facebook‘s algorithms rank posts for deciding what will appear to your friends. A post with a “Like” is much more likely to be shared than one that hasn’t been “Liked”.

January 11, 2014

Do you tweet a lot? You might just be a narcissist

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:11

I’m not sure this even rises to the level of “bleeding obvious”, but Tom Jacobs connects the dots to make the point that narcissists on Twitter send frequent tweets:

Spotting a narcissist can be tricky, but newly published research suggests a tell-tale marker: Note how often he or she tweets.

“Narcissism does appear to be a primary driver for the desire for (Twitter) followers, which in turn drives tweets,” writes a research team led by Shaun Davenport of High Point University.

It reports in the journal Computers in Human Behavior that study participants with narcissistic tendencies tended to tweet more often than others, as well as to post more Facebook status updates.

Comparing the two social media platforms, the researchers found a generational divide, noting that “narcissistic college students prefer to post content on Twitter, while narcissistic adults prefer to post content on Facebook.”

This appears to reflect a difference in Facebook usage between millennials and members of earlier generations, with millennials’ posting of status updates being more routine and less likely to reflect narcissistic motives.

H/T to David Warren, who makes the obvious point:

December 31, 2013

Social networking – your weak contacts may be the most valuable ones

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

Tim Harford explains why your friends and family are not the most valuable members of your extended social network … at least when it comes to looking for jobs:

This dispiriting stuff reminded me of Mark Granovetter’s work on “the strength of weak ties”, published in 1973. Granovetter, a sociologist, brought together two disparate strands of work: a survey of how people with professional or managerial jobs had found those jobs; and a theoretical analysis of the structure of social networks.

Start with the theoretical observation first: the most irreplaceable social connections, paradoxically, are often rather weak or distant ones. A family group or clique of close friends all tend to know each other and know similar things at similar times. Their social ties are strong but also redundant, in the sense that there are many different paths through which information could pass from one member of that group to another.

By contrast, “weak ties” between one social cluster and another are valuable precisely because the social contact is unusual. Information passed along a weak tie will often be totally new — and if it doesn’t arrive through the weak tie, it is unlikely to arrive at all.

Granovetter then supplemented this theoretical idea with his survey, showing that it was very common for people to find jobs — especially managerial jobs and jobs with which they were satisfied — through personal contacts. The old saw is true: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Or as Granovetter put it in his book Finding a Job, what matters most is “one’s position in a social network”.

But this is not because of crude nepotism: the key contacts who helped jobseekers find jobs were typically distant rather than close friends — old college contacts, perhaps, or former colleagues. Granovetter’s analysis made this finding make sense: it’s the more peripheral contacts who tell you things you don’t already know.

This observation has certainly been true for many of my jobs: colleagues from a decade or more in the past suddenly pop up with an interesting position or business opportunity (such contacts are all the more interesting because they’re completely unexpected).

December 28, 2013

Facebook ages out

Filed under: Europe, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:12

In the Guardian, Jemima Kiss explains why European teens are finding other social networking tools to be more attractive than Facebook:

Facebook is ‘dead and buried’ to older teenagers, an extensive European study has found, as the key age group moves on to Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat.

Researching the Facebook use of 16-18 year olds in eight EU countries, the Global Social Media Impact Study found that as parents and older users saturate Facebook, its younger users are shifting to alternative platforms.

“Facebook is not just on the slide — it is basically dead and buried,” wrote Daniel Miller, lead anthropologist on the research team, who is professor of material culture of University College London.

“Mostly they feel embarrassed to even be associated with it. Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives.”

Teens do not care that alternative services are less functional and sophisticated, and they also unconcerned about how information about them is being used commercially or as part of surveillance practice by the security services, the research found.

“What appears to be the most seminal moment in a young person’s decision to leave Facebook was surely that dreaded day your mum sends you a friend request,” wrote Miller.

December 19, 2013

Patrick West on “the mourning wars”

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

In sp!ked, Patrick West notes the difference in tone for two recently deceased world leaders:

Remember when Margaret Thatcher died in April? ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead!’ they rejoiced on the streets and on social media, the recalcitrant losers of the old left uniting with today’s self-styled radicals, for whom Thatcher was a semi-mythical creature from the past who had wronged their ancestors. The Iron Lady was a mean old bitch, they cried, her creed of individualism being responsible for today’s troubled times.

A few months later, the hero of the left dies. Where was the comparable vitriol from the right, as was expected, about ‘Nelson Mandela the terrorist’? Sure, there was the odd, fringe UKIP fruitcake (isn’t there always?), but for the most part there was warmth and praise. Some, like former UK prime minister John Major, even said that the Conservatives were wrong on South Africa in the 1980s. Even the right-wing press has been quiet on Mandela’s real legacy and South Africa’s future. Curiously, only the Guardian — in articles by Simon Jenkins and Slavoj Ĺ˝iĹžek — has really questioned the saintly status accorded to Madiba (though not nearly as well as spiked has done, of course).

Indeed, the only tangible vitriol to emerge has come from old lefties themselves, complaining on social media when David Cameron paid homage. How dare the Tories try to appropriate a foreign leader to make themselves appear virtuous? We bagsied him first!

Politics isn’t meant to be this way. Right-wing people are meant to be horrid and selfish and left-wingers caring and nice. Yet, episodes such as this seem to suggest, once again, the opposite. It’s one of the paradoxes today that the liberal-left is often far nastier, more vitriolic, censorious and egotistical than the ‘selfish’ Tories they profess to loath.

November 22, 2013

QotD: Free speech can still have unpleasant consequences

Filed under: Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Speech has consequences. It ought to.

In America, we have an elaborate set of laws strictly limiting the government’s ability to inflict those consequences. That is right and fit; the First Amendment prevents the government from punishing us for most speech.

Private consequences are something else. Speech is designed to invoke private and social consequences, whether the speech is “venti mocha no whip, please,” or “I love you,” or “fuck off.”1 The private and social consequences of your speech — whether they come from a barista, or your spouse, or people online, or people at whom you shout on the street — represent the free speech and freedom of association of others.

Yet people often confuse these categories. It’s one of the fundamental errors of free speech analysis that I like to write about the most. I praise people who get it right — like a university administrator who points out that racist speech is not sanctionable, but will have social consequences — and ridicule people who get it wrong — like people who apply the term “bullying” to any criticism of their speech, or assert a right not to be criticized for being an asshole, or generally proclaim that criticism is tyranny.

Yet the idea persists.

[…]

But speech has private social consequences, and it’s ridiculous to expect otherwise. Whether sincere or motivated by poseur edginess, controversial words have social consequences. Those social consequences are inseparable from the free speech and free association rights of the people imposing them. It is flatly irrational to suggest that I should be able to act like a dick without being treated like a dick by my fellow citizens.

Some criticize social consequences as being chilling to free speech. That misappropriates the language of First Amendment scrutiny of government restrictions on speech and seeks to impose it upon private speech. It is true, superficially, that I am chilled from saying bigoted things because people will call me a bigot, or chilled from saying stupid things because people will call me stupid. But how is that definition of chill coherent or principled? How do you apply it? If Pax Dickinson suggests that “feminism in tech” is something to be scorned, to we treat that as something that as first-speaker speech that we ought not chill with criticism, or do we treat it as a second-speaker attempt to chill the speech of the “feminists in tech” with criticism? What rational scheme do you use to determine what speech is “legitimate disagreement,” and what speech is abusive and “chilling”?

Ken White “Speech And Consequences”, Popehat, 2013-09-10

November 20, 2013

An app like this may justify the existence of Google Glass

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

I have a terrible memory for people’s names (and no, it’s not just early senility … I’ve always had trouble remembering names). For example, I’ve been a member of the same badminton club for nearly 15 years and there are still folks there whose names just don’t register: not just new members, but people I’ve played with or against on dozens of occasions. I know them … I just can’t remember their names in a timely fashion. David Friedman suggests that Google Glass might be the solution I need:

I first encountered the solution to my problem in Double Star, a very good novel by Robert Heinlein. It will be made possible, in a higher tech version, by Google glass. The solution is the Farley File, named after FDR’s campaign manager.

A politician such as Roosevelt meets lots of people over the course of his career. For each of them the meeting is an event to be remembered and retold. It is much less memorable to the politician, who cannot possibly remember the details of ten thousand meetings. He can, however, create the illusion of doing so by maintaining a card file with information on everyone he has ever met: The name of the man’s wife, how many children he has, his dog, the joke he told, all the things the politician would have remembered if the meeting had been equally important to him. It is the job of one of the politician’s assistants to make sure that, any time anyone comes to see him, he gets thirty seconds to look over the card.

My version will use more advanced technology, courtesy of Google glass or one of its future competitors. When I subvocalize the key word “Farley,” the software identifies the person I am looking at, shows me his name (that alone would be worth the price) and, next to it, whatever facts about him I have in my personal database. A second trigger, if invoked, runs a quick search of the web for additional information.

Evernote has an application intended to do some of this (Evernote Hello), but it still requires the immersion-breaking act of accessing your smartphone to look up your contact information. Something similar in a Google Glass or equivalent environment might be the perfect solution.

October 16, 2013

If everyone followed these rules, Facebook would be 1/8th the size it is

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:54

Brendan McKenna linked to this Huffington Post piece, providing a gentle reminder to too many Facebook users about their insufferable posting habits:

To be unannoying, a Facebook status typically has to be one of two things:

1) Interesting/Informative

2) Funny/Amusing/Entertaining

You know why these are unannoying? Because things in those two categories do something for me, the reader. They make my day a little better.

Ideally, interesting statuses would be fascinating and original (or a link to something that is), and funny ones would be hilarious. But I’ll happily take mildly amusing — at least we’re still dealing with the good guys.

On the other hand, annoying statuses typically reek of one or more of these five motivations:

1) Image Crafting. The author wants to affect the way people think of her.

2) Narcissism. The author’s thoughts, opinions, and life philosophies matter. The author and the author’s life are interesting in and of themselves.

3) Attention Craving. The author wants attention.

4) Jealousy Inducing. The author wants to make people jealous of him or his life.

5) Loneliness. The author is feeling lonely and wants Facebook to make it better. This is the least heinous of the five — but seeing a lonely person acting lonely on Facebook makes me and everyone else sad. So the person is essentially spreading their sadness, and that’s a shitty thing to do, so it’s on the list.

Facebook is infested with these five motivations — other than a few really saintly people, most people I know, myself certainly included, are guilty of at least some of this nonsense here and there. It’s an epidemic.

October 5, 2013

The future of post-IPO Twitter from the user perspective

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

In Maclean’s, Jesse Brown looks at the ominous signs of change for Twitter’s users in a post-IPO world:

As a private company, Twitter prioritized the user’s experience. I would go so far to say that providing an excellent user experience was the whole point of Twitter’s existence.

I didn’t get Twitter, at first. It seemed like just a stripped-down, feature-limited version of Facebook’s News Feed. Of course, that was the whole idea. By constraining users to 140 characters of text and a few buttons for sharing, “favoriting” or replying, and by eliminating the concept of mutually accepted friendship as a requirement for network growth, Twitter provided a simple, lightweight, super-charged information machine. The initial absence of pictures and video helped it move lightly across the slower phones of the time, and the arbitrary, spartan limitation on tweet length was a stroke of brilliance, forcing brevity upon its users to prevent blabbermouths and spammers from clogging up everybody’s feeds.

[…]

They will soon be under intense pressure to bring that number up, and in preparation, Twitter is moving away from sponsored tweets and sponsored trends, investing heavily in slick, complicated new ad products like Twitter Amplify, which embeds video clips into tweets with unskippable pre-roll ads. I can’t imagine any Twitter user saying “what this service really needs is some TV commercials!”

And whereas once Twitter played nicely with other apps, welcoming other companies (like Canada’s HootSuite) to build new apps that plug into Twitter and build on its network, they’ve since been frustrating developers with increasingly restrictive changes to its API, the interface it provides to outsiders. Last year, for example, Twitter put a cap on the number of users a third-party app could support. Now, if your Twitter-based service gets too popular, you’ll have to ask Twitter for permission to grow.

October 2, 2013

Bruce Schneier’s TEDx talk “The Battle for Power on the Internet”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Published on 25 Sep 2013

Bruce Schneier gives us a glimpse of the future of the internet, and shares some of the context we should keep in mind, and the insights we need to understand, as we prepare for it. Learn more about Bruce Schneier at https://www.schneier.com and TEDxCambridge at http://www.tedxcambridge.com.

About TEDx, x = independently organized event
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

October 1, 2013

PRSM – the not-at-all-a-joke NSA sharing network

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick on the no-we’re-actually-serious “joke” PRSM network:

Soon after the very earliest reporting on Ed Snowden’s leaked documents about PRISM, the folks from Datacoup put together the very amusing GETPRSM website, which looks very much like the announcement of a new social network, but (the joke is) it’s really the NSA scooping up all our data and making the connections. It’s pretty funny. Except, of course, when you find out that it’s real. And, yes, that seems to be the latest revelation out of Ed Snowden’s leaks. The NY Times has an article by James Risen and Laura Poitras (what a combo reporting team there!) detailing how the NSA has basically built its own “shadow” social network in which it tries to create a “social graph” of pretty much everyone that everyone knows, foreign or American, and it all happens (of course) without a warrant. And, note, this is relatively new:

    The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.

    The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.

There were apparently two policy changes that allowed this to happen, and both occurred in the past three years. First, in November of 2010, the NSA was allowed to start looking at phone call and email logs of Americans to try to help figure out associations for “foreign intelligence purposes.” Note that phrase. We’ll come back to it. For years, the NSA had been barred from viewing any content on US persons, and the NSA, President Obama and others have continued to insist to this day that there are minimization procedures that prevent spying on Americans. Except, this latest revelation shows that, yet again, this isn’t actually true.

September 7, 2013

The online life of the professional athlete

Filed under: Business, Humour, Media, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:25

Chris Kluwe has a bit of experience as both a professional athlete and as a social media guru. Here’s some advice from him on how other professionals should handle their Twitter feeds:

When you’re a professional athlete on social media, there are certain unspoken rules (I lied, some of them are spoken in media meetings) you’re expected to abide by. The team (or company, really) wants you to be engaging, because that draws interest and boosts ticket/jersey sales, but it’s best if you’re only engaging on innocuous subjects. Teams really like it when you tweet “Rise and grind” each morning, or “gr8 day wth my tmmates, gettin that work in,” or “TEAM PROMOTIONAL ACTIVITY GOES HERE” — because it’s seen as the pinnacle of wit, you’re interacting with fans, and above all, it’s comfortably inoffensive (except, perhaps, to those with a dislike of the redundant and an appreciation of spelling and grammar, but no one really cares about those people, amirite?). Michael Jordan’s famous quote holds even more true today than it did in the ’90s:

“Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

You see, we’re in the business of selling you entertainment! We’re also in the business of selling you everything that goes along with entertainment, like sneakers, and jerseys, and sweatsuits, and mini-helmets, and commemorative plates, and cars, and alcohol… well, you get the idea. The funny thing about entertainment companies is that without fail, they want to grab the biggest slice of the pie they can, and the pie is biggest when it’s watered down and spread out and so generic that anyone can stomach a bite. It might not taste like much, but it sure is easy to keep choking it down the old gullet.

What teams don’t like is spice. Flavor. Something that makes people angry, gets folks riled up. They hate to see those messages that could possibly alienate a buyer, no matter how odious that buyer’s views may be.

September 3, 2013

Social media and the new alienation problem

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:50

Russell Taylor went to a wedding recently, in a rural area outside the range of cell towers and wifi signals. Some of his fellow guests treated the lack of connectivity as if it were the end of the world. The constant need to be “connected” has other unhealthy aspects:

Where social media differs from telephone, radio or television is in turning its users into broadcasters. This makes it useful as a business tool and as a gazette for news of interest to family and loved ones; but it also enables bores and exhibitionists to publish their every passing thought. This self-absorbed waffling does little to bring people together. On the contrary, it appears to distort their perception of others, until they become mere abstractions: bit-part players in the story of their lives.

This phenomenon was seen in extremis in the reaction of onlookers to the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby earlier this year. Rather than running to his aid, finding a policeman or simply freezing in terror, dozens of bystanders whipped out their phones and started filming the horror show unfolding before them. Possibly they figured that by the time the police had done a risk assessment and checked their diversity training was in order, the killers would be at home with their feet up; in which case, capturing some incriminating video evidence was the responsible thing to do. But I doubt it. It’s far more likely that they saw someone being butchered and simply thought, “Wait until they see this on Facebook”.

When your first reaction to seeing someone murdered is to film it and post it online, you are no longer an active moral being; you’re a detached observer of the world around you. If this is a symptom of the always-connected age, so too is faux concern. Consider those Facebook posts that ask you to ‘like’ a sob story about a complete stranger. They have to be among the most pitiful and inauthentic expressions of human emotion ever devised, making the wearing of a charity wristband look like donating a kidney by comparison. When someone being hacked to death is an exciting ‘I was there’ moment and compassion is demonstrated by means of a mouse-click, something is seriously awry with our moral compass.

The big question is whether social media has contributed to this apparent atomisation of society, or if people’s use of it is merely a symptom. Or could the relationship between the two be dialectical? If so, habitual users of social media can expect to see their usage increase as their resemblance to well-adjusted human beings diminishes. Time will tell how much further they have to fall, but once you start treating murder as status update gold, you must already be somewhere near the bottom.

August 12, 2013

Online privacy and habitual oversharing

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

Cory Doctorow explains why so many of us have gotten into the habit of oversharing personal details in our social media activities:

Whenever government surveillance is debated, someone inevitably points out that it is no cause for alarm, since people already overshare sensitive personal information on Facebook. This means there’s hardly anything to be gleaned from state surveillance that isn’t already there for the taking on social media.

It’s true people overshare on social networks, providing information in ways that they later come to regret. The consequences of oversharing range widely, from losing a job to being outed for your sexual orientation. If you live in a dictatorship, intercepted social media sessions can be used by those in charge to compile enemies lists, determining whom to arrest, whom to torture, and – potentially – whom to murder.

The key reason for oversharing is that cause and effect are separated by volumes of time and space, so understanding the consequences can be difficult. Imagine practising penalty kicks by kicking the ball and then turning around before it lands; two years later, someone visits you and tells you where your kicks ended up. This is the kind of feedback loop we contend with when it comes to our privacy disclosures.

In other words, you may make a million small and large disclosures on different services, with different limits on your sharing preferences, and many years later, you lose your job. Or your marriage. Or maybe your life, if you’re unlucky enough to have your Facebook scraped by a despot who has you in his dominion.

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