Quotulatiousness

June 15, 2012

The Never Seconds flap reveals highly selective anti-authoritarian reactions

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Food, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

Brendan O’Neill is happy that the petty authoritarians at the Argyll and Bute council have rescinded their ban on young Martha Payne’s school lunch blog, but points out that the Twitstorm that helped publicize her plight is remarkably selective in which kinds of official bullying they will oppose:

But what a shame that these decent folks’ opposition to council heavy-handedness in relation to school lunches is so spectacularly partial. What a shame, for example, that they haven’t offered solidarity to those millions of children who have been banned from bringing sweets and crisps into schools, which, as I once reported for the BBC, has given rise to a black market in junk food in school playgrounds. What a shame they didn’t speak out when councils, behaving like a Tuckshop Taliban, stormed into schools and shut down tuckshops and vending machines that sold chocolate or Coke. What a shame they didn’t have anything to say when mothers in Yorkshire who passed chips through the schoolgates to their children were slated in the media and depicted as Viz-style “Fat Slags” in The Sun. What a shame they didn’t complain when it was revealed that some schools are taking it upon themselves to raid children’s lunchboxes — made for them by their parents! — in order to confiscate anything “unhealthy”.

What a shame, in other words, that only one kind of authoritarianism in relation to school dinners is criticised — namely that which censors people from revealing how crap such dinners are — while other forms of authoritarianism, which control both what children can eat and even what their parents can provide them with, are tolerated. Like stern headmasters, it seems concerned hacks will only give their nod of approval to nice, polite, healthy schoolchildren, while withholding it from the rabble, from kids who eat chips and cake with the blessing of their stupid parents. Those kids, it seems, can be censored and censured and controlled as much as is necessary.

June 6, 2012

Scattering that “social” pixie dust on mobile apps

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

In the Guardian Technology section, Frédéric Filloux attempts to disabuse mobile developers about one of the “rules” for mobile apps:

Today’s hype leaves no other option but making an application as “social” as possible. This being the certitude du jour, allow me to think differently.

True, some apps are inherently social: when it comes to rating a product or a service, the “crowd factor” is critical. Beyond that, it should be a matter of personal choice — an antinomic notion to today’s the “Social” diktat. When you sign up to Spotify, the default setting is to share your musical taste with your Facebook friends and to suffer theirs. I can’t stand such obligation: I quickly dumped the application and cancelled my account.

The social idea’s biggest mistake is the belief in a universal and monolithic concept everyone is supposed to be willing to embrace with a similar degree of scope and enthusiasm. That’s a geeky, super-cartesian, Zuckerberg-esque view of society. Among my friends, some like opera (the singing, not the browser), others prefer heavy metal and I’m more into jazz tunes; some are tech-minded like me, others are more inclined towards literature. When it comes to sharing news, I tend to be naturally selective about the people I send a link to: I don’t want to swamp everyone with stuff they don’t care about. I might be wrong, but this is the way I see the social cyberspace: segmented and respectful of each other.

So, mobile app developers, if you find yourself trying to force-fit social features into a Solitaire app, think again.

May 31, 2012

Old worry: the “digital divide”

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

The good news is that the much-feared “digital divide” between the rich and poor never came to pass. Now the worry is rather different:

Remember the “digital divide”? Back in the 1990s, the problem was that poor people did not have enough access to computers and the Internet. Today the problem is that they have too much access. Evidently the digital divide has given way to the “time-wasting gap.” I shit you not. The New York Times reports that bridging the digital divide “created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government [naturally] now wants to fix”: “As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites.” Silly lower classes! Don’t they realize this wonderful new technology is for self-improvement, not for pleasure? Something must be done

May 23, 2012

Chris Selley on the disproportional sentences handed out by the “court of public opinion”

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

People can be idiots. Some of them are idiots all the time. Others are only idiots every now and again. When the idiotic events happen to co-incide with fluctuating public opinion, the sentence for public idiocy can often vastly exceed the impact of the original idiotic action:

It has been a tough week for notorious, misbehaving young people — well, outside of Quebec anyway. On Monday in a New Jersey courtroom, Dharun Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail for having briefly spied, twice, via webcam, on his Rutgers University roommate’s romantic encounters. He was 18 at the time. And on Tuesday, Swansea University, in South Wales, made it clear that 21-year-old Liam Stacey is forever unwelcome on its campus, where he was nearly done studying biology. Mr. Stacey just served half of a 56-day jail sentence for publishing some flamboyantly racist tweets. “Go suck a ni–er d-ck you f–king aids ridden c–t,” one read.

Both individuals are unredeemed pariahs. Yet on either side of the Atlantic, and across the political spectrum, their cases have sparked an interesting debate over whether criminal justice was the proper means through which to express polite society’s revulsion at their actions. I think it was not, for the simple reason that the charges bore little relationship to the true nature of the outrage.

[. . .]

The context of Mr. Stacey’s crimes is less tragic. On March 17, before a television audience of millions, Premier League soccer player Fabrice Muamba collapsed of a heart attack. (He has since made a remarkable recovery.) In response, an admittedly soused Mr. Stacey Tweeted the following: “LOL. F–k Muamba he’s dead!!! #Haha.” That astoundingly insensitive missive was what elicited society’s outrage; it is still quoted at least 100 times in the media for every mention of the torrent of racist abuse that followed, when fellow tweeters complained.

Twitter is not, generally speaking, a racism-free zone; earlier in this year’s NHL playoffs, it hosted some jaw-dropping invective against Washington Capitals forward Joel Ward. And British white trash can match or exceed anything their North American counterparts are capable of. So here it is even clearer: Mr. Stacey’s problem wasn’t “inciting racial hatred,” the charge of which he was convicted, but doing it at the wrong time and getting noticed.

In the end, while two months was a remarkably harsh sentence for mere words, it’s hard to feel sorry for Mr. Stacey. One can argue for unfettered free speech, and equal application of the law, without defending this particular oik.

April 13, 2012

Blogging tip #2: Don’t be this guy

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Every now and again, someone asks me what it takes to be a successful blogger. If I knew all those secrets, I’d be a much bigger internet presence than I currently am, let me tell you. However, aside from updating frequently (daily or better), the best advice I can give you is to not be this guy:

See the whole thing at The Oatmeal.

April 1, 2012

Nightmare progression from Facebook data to stalker app to genocide tool

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:11

Charles Stross on the very disturbing implications of Facebook and other social media tools:

There is an app, currently on the Apple app store as a free download, called Girls Around Me.

A couple of days ago, computer journalist John Brownlee wrote an essay about it explaining why he found it disturbing. I’d like to propose that it is symptomatic of a really major side-effect of our forced acculturation into Facebook’s broken model of human social interaction — a broken model shared by all the most successful social networks, by design — and that it is going to get much worse, until it kills people. Quite possibly in very large numbers.

I wish this was an April Fool’s joke or a piece of dystopian near-future fiction. Unfortunately it isn’t.

[. . .]

What “Girls Around Me” does is simple: it looks up your GPS location, then queries Facebook and FourSquare for people matching a simple search criterion (are they female?) who have checked in (or been checked in by their friends) in your vicinity. It then makes it really easy to pull up their publicly visible information — stuff such as age, occupation, favourite sports, what school they attended, and so on. All the stuff Facebook encourages you to share.

You can probably see why John and his friends became increasingly uneasy about this app: it’s pitched as innocent, slightly hokey fun, but it stops being amusing the instant you imagine it in the hands of a stalker or serial rapist. Or even just an unscrupulous ass-hat in search of a one night stand who isn’t above researching his target’s taste in music and drinks without their knowledge.

Creepy and stalkerish, right? So where’s the dystopic vision? Right here:

It’s easy to imagine how we could make something worse than “Girls Around Me” — something much worse. Facebook encourages us to disclose a wide range of information about ourselves, including our religion and a photograph. Religion is obvious: “Yids Among Us” would obviously be one of the go-to tools of choice for Neo-Nazis. As for skin colour, ethnicity identification from face images is out there already. Want to go queer bashing? There’s an algorithm out there for guessing sexual orientation based on the network graph of the target’s facebook friends. It’s probably possible to apply this sort of data mining exercise to determine whether a woman has had an abortion or is pro-choice.

In the worst case, it’s possible to envisage geolocation and data aggregation apps being designed to facilitate the identification and elimination of some ethnic or class enemy, not only by making it easy for users to track them down, but by making it easy for users to identify each other and form ad-hoc lynch mobs. (Hence my reference to the Rwandan Genocide earlier. Think it couldn’t happen? Look at Iran and imagine an app written for the Basij to make it easy to identify dissidents and form ad-hoc goon squads to proactively hunt them down. Or any other organization in the post-networked world that has a social role corresponding to the Red Guards.)

But as I said earlier, the app is not the problem. The problem is the deployment by profit-oriented corporations of behavioural psychology techniques to induce people to over-share information which can then be aggregated and disclosed to third parties for targeted marketing purposes.

Update, 2 April: The app has been pulled from the App Store after Foursquare revoked the developer’s API access, but the underlying problem is still there.

March 30, 2012

“Fifty-six days. Two months. In an actual jail. For tweeting”

Brendan O’Neill on Britain joining China and Iran in punishing free speech:

This week, Britain became a fully paid-up member of that clique of illiberal intolerant, tweeter-harassing states.

On Tuesday, at Swansea Magistrates Court in Wales, Liam Stacey, a student, was imprisoned for 56 days for writing offensive tweets.

Fifty-six days. Two months. In an actual jail. For tweeting. It needs to be spelt out like that in order to show how shocking it is that in the 21st century, in a nation that gave us such great warriors for freedom as The Levellers and John Stuart Mill, a young man has now been banged up for expressing his thoughts.

Stacey’s thoughts were far from pleasant ones. In fact they were offensive and repugnant.

What kind of freedom of speech do you have when you can be punished for expressing unpopular and idiotic sentiments? None whatsoever. When you’re only free to mouth the mainstream popular opinions — or what the state tells you is acceptable — you don’t have freedom of speech at all.

When other tweeters complained to Stacey about his off-colour comments, he started to use racist language. He told his detractors to “f**k off”, and hurled pretty much every racial slur under the sun at them.

The Twitterati reported him to the police. And sure enough he got a visit from the cops, was charged with committing a racially aggravated public order offence, and now finds himself in the clink alongside burglars and rapists.

Yes, Stacey’s comments were horrible. But this was speech rather than actions, the use of words rather than the use of fists, and there should never be any state involvement, certainly not arrests and showtrials, in the arena of speech.

In finding himself incarcerated simply because he refused to “Pray for Muamba” and then expressed nasty racist thoughts, Stacey has effectively been punished for committing a thoughtcrime, or perhaps its modern equivalent: a tweetcrime.

March 10, 2012

“[A]theists and theists […] are quacking and waddling in the same way in different ponds”

Filed under: Media, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:19

Kennedy expresses the idea that atheism is a religion and becomes “a minor celebrity and a major troll” to her social media circles:

I didn’t know what fire and brimstone was until I made a throwaway claim recently during an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. It seemed pretty unaudacious at the time, but by dropping the simple sentence “Atheism is a religion,” I opened a biblical floodgate of ridicule, name-calling, and abuse.

My Twitter feed and Facebook page became engorged with angry responses. “Your adherence into adulthood to what is usually an adolescent phase (Libertarianism), speaks volumes about your confirmation bias levels,” wrote Kernan. Touchstone Supertramp added; “Damn girl you got a big forehead.” A guy named Kevin and about 70 other people shared this bumper-sticker nugget: “‎If atheism is a religion, then off is a TV channel.” Liz wrote, “Kennedy, is that if atheism constitutes a religious belief than anorexia is whenever you don’t eat.” Michael wrote: “re·li·gion /riˈlijən/ Noun: 1. Whatever Kennedy says it is.” That was awesome. Beth called me a minor celebrity and a major troll—and it was also awesome to have somebody think I’m a celebrity.

[. . .]

Newberg and his late partner Eugene D’Aquili mapped various parts of the brain showing activation in specific areas when people were undergoing certain religious rituals or experiences, such as a shaman being in a trance or a Buddhist entering a mystical state. Regardless of the religion, the brain function was the same. Something was happening when these people experienced their version of religious phenomena, and the scans lit up like Robert Redford’s suit in The Electric Horseman.

This does not prove God exists, but it does show humans are wired or biologically predisposed to believe in something. When I interviewed him for this article, Newberg said his research demonstrates that “we are wired to have these beliefs about the world, to get at the fundamental stuff the universe is about. For many people, it includes God and for some it doesn’t. Your brain is doing its best to understand the world and construct beliefs to understand it, and from an epistemological perspective there is no fundamental difference.”

[. . .]

When atheists rail against theists (as many did on my Facebook page), they are using the same fervor the religious use when making their claims against a secular society. By calling atheism a religion, I am not trying to craft terms or apply them out of convenience. I just see theists and atheists behaving in the same manner, approaching from opposite ends of the runway. The entire discourse about religion stems from those who think they know more than the other guy. But what we really know is that we don’t know much. And we seem to share the same mechanism in our brains that drives us to make claims of faith and rationalism as a way of making sense of the great unknown.

You can call atheism a belief system, which Newberg guardedly does, or you can make a stronger assertion and say that atheists and theists, who have conveniently developed hate-tinged froth and vitriol for one another, are quacking and waddling in the same way in different ponds. Either way, they are ducks and atheism is a religion. At least it is in the hands of those who are so religious about their disbelief that they place the weight of the argument on the feathery shoulders of their believing brothers and sisters.

February 14, 2012

Envisioning the all-online university

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

Megan McArdle on the recent announcement that MIT will be offering online programs (at lower cost than regular courses) and if this is a sign of the future (as it almost certainly is) what changes will occur in the realm of higher education:

I can see all sorts of factors that might combine to preserve the status quo, from signaling and status and networking, to the desire of college students for a four-year debt-financed semi-vacation. On the other hand, disruption never looks inevitable until it suddenly is — if you’d told someone in 1955 that GM was going to have its lunch eaten by some Japanese upstart, they would have laughed until the tears came. So it’s interesting and maybe even useful to contemplate what the college system would look like if this sort of distance learning becomes the norm.

1. Education will end up being dominated by a few huge incumbents. [. . .]

2. Online education will kill the liberal arts degree. [. . .]

3. Professors (course developers) will be selected for teaching instead of research brilliance. [. . .]

4. 95% of tenure-track professors will lose their jobs. [. . .]

5. The corollary of #4 is the end of universities as research centers. [. . .]

6. Young job-seekers will need new ways to signal diligence. [. . .]

7. The economics of graduate school will change substantially. [. . .]

8. Civil society will have to substitute for the intense friend networks that are built at college. [. . .]

9. The role of schooling in upward mobility will change. [. . .]

10. The young will have a much lower financial burden in their 20s. [. . .]

11. The tutoring industry will boom. [. . .]

12. If the credentials become valuable, cheating will be a problem. [. . .]

January 15, 2012

What’s next, allowing only “registered journalists” to report the news?

Filed under: Government, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

A brief item that should send a frisson down the spine of anyone who collects and disseminates information from the web and social media outlets:

Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that emerged from the Department of Homeland Security in November, Washington has written permission to collect and retain personal information from journalists, news anchors, reporters or anyone who uses “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”

According to DHS, the definition of personal identifiable information can consist of any intellect “that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information which is linked or linkable to that individual.”

H/T to Chris Myrick for the link.

December 30, 2011

Revolution driven by social media? How 16th Century . . .

Filed under: History, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

The Economist shows that there’s nothing new in social media as a catalyst for change:

It is a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed.

That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.

Scholars have long debated the relative importance of printed media, oral transmission and images in rallying popular support for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of printing, a relatively new technology at the time. Opponents of this view emphasise the importance of preaching and other forms of oral transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the role of media as a means of social signalling and co-ordinating public opinion in the Reformation.

Now the internet offers a new perspective on this long-running debate, namely that the important factor was not the printing press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the wider system of media sharing along social networks — what is called “social media” today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message.

December 19, 2011

Chiquita, supporter of narco-terrorist groups, calls for a boycott of Canadian oil

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Economics, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:39

When corporate social media goes wrong:

I used to work for an ad agency, and I often had animated discussions with my colleagues about the danger of confusing cause marketing with product marketing. I have always maintained that they are separate disciplines that don’t mix, while many of my colleagues disagreed.

As a society, we have become distressingly pious and self-righteous — and as a natural consequence advertisers wish to capitalize on this instinct. Like my erstwhile colleagues, they see this as an easy path to identifying their product with a strong public sentiment. This is such a bad idea that it merits a blog entry of its own, but what lead me to write today was a satisfyingly spectacular self-immolation by a large American brand that managed to make the wrong choice in just about every decision their communications and marketing teams have made over the past few days.

[. . .]

Worse, Chiquita Brands seemed to forget completely about their Canadian market. It’s easy to underestimate Canada. It’s a little country with a tenth the population of the United States. On the other hand, it’s a terrific export market, and much too accessible and rich to be ignored.

Canadians are understandably touchy about the Oil Sands. The majority of Canadians are very proud of the fact that they’ve transformed the country into an energy superpower by successfully accessing a resource that was considered nearly worthless only a decade ago – and they have done this with unprecedented care, investing billions of dollars in developing new technologies to protect the environment. Canadians are also very proud of the fact that they are the only net exporter of oil that is a liberal democracy and respects human rights. They’ve even coined the phrase “ethical oil” to describe their unique approach to oil production.

What Chiquita Brands succeeded in doing with their announcement was to make millions of Canadian consumers very unhappy. People who couldn’t have told you on Monday morning what brand of bananas they bought were determined by Thursday afternoon that it wouldn’t be Chiquita. Worse yet, hundreds of consumers decided to make their feelings known by commenting on the Chiquita Bananas Facebook page. And this is where Chiquita’s marketing and communications team took one bad decision and turned it into a disaster

H/T to Five Feet of Fury for the links.

December 1, 2011

A defence of Jeremy Clarkson’s “strikers should be shot” comment

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

From, of all places, the Guardian:

How are your outrage levels today? Seen a sweary racist on a tram? Heard a TV personality make a bad joke about shooting public sector workers? Retweeted it and carefully added the correct hashtag?

Were you really, genuinely outraged?

Think about how you would have reacted to the story of an obnoxious woman on a tram seven years ago (pre-YouTube — PYT if you like). Would you have told everyone you know? Would you have asked them to tell everyone they know? Or would you have shrugged, mumbled something about the world going to hell in a handcart, and gone back to watching Top Gear, only to be confronted by Jeremy Clarkson making a hilarious joke about Spanish woman gypsy drivers (shrug again, change channel).

YouTube and Twitter are wonderful, wonderful things that have changed how we interact with the world, to the extent that I’m not sure I can remember life PYT. But they have created a mechanism by which we can we can monitor and record behaviour, whether of private citizens or public figures, play them over and over again, and share them with an alarming rapidity. Perhaps this heightened speed also leads us to feel forced into heightened reactions. Without the time to digest context and meaning we can only choose from a range of default reactions, largely based on our own prejudices.

[. . .]

Likewise with angry racist tram lady. My initial reaction to the video was “God, that’s horrible”, but as the storm grew, to the point where even Mia Farrow felt the need to tell us that she thought racism in south London was, y’know, just awful, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the woman who had become a vessel for everyone else’s outrage. The sheer volume of righteousness becomes off-putting.

And now Clarkson, who has made a dull golf club bar joke about striking public sector workers needing to be shot. God knows the man doesn’t need my pity, but I feel driven towards feeling sorry for anyone who has several thousand people calling for their head simply because they’ve noticed that he’s done the same kind of thing he’s always done. I don’t think there’s a single reasonable person there who actually believes that Clarkson wants people to be shot for going on strike, so why do people feel the need to react the way we do? Lord knows we’re not talking about the most subtle of jokes here, but must we be so literal and unsubtle in our reaction?

Update: Just saw an update from BBCBreaking that Clarkson has apologized for the “should be shot” comment.

November 20, 2011

If you’re not paying for the service, you are the product

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

John Naughton points out that TANSTAAFL still applies, even to “free” services on the internet like Facebook and Twitter:

Physics has Newton’s first law (“Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed”). The equivalent for internet services is simpler, though just as general in its applicability: it says that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

The strange thing is that most users of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other “free” services seem to be only dimly aware of this law. Facebook, for example, handles the pages of 750 million users, enables more than half of that number to visit and update their pages every day and hosts more than 70 billion photographs. The cost of the computing and communications resources — in terms of server farms, energy, bandwidth and technical expertise — required to make this happen doesn’t bear thinking about. And my guess is that most Facebookers don’t think about it.

But it costs money — millions of dollars a month, every month. The monthly amount is called the “burn rate”. It comes from investors who make their cash available for burning in the hope that it will eventually pay off in terms of a stock market flotation or the evolution of a profitable business whose shares will be worth holding. In the internet era, the favoured strategy has been to “get big fast” (the title of a famous book about Amazon — that is, add users/subscribers at an exponential rate, and then find a way of monetising the resulting hordes.

November 17, 2011

Updating 1984 to 2011: tweetcrime replaces thoughtcrime

Patrick Hayes in the Independent:

Who’s afraid of the English Defence League (EDL) clicktivists? Well the police for a start, who decided to undertake a mass pre-emptive arrest of 179 EDL supporters, while they were drinking in a Westminster pub on Armistice Day, for supposedly planning an ‘attack’ on Occupy London protesters at St Paul’s. The police were tipped off by bloggers who had scoured the EDL’s Facebook posts for threatening remarks, and were apparently also assisted in the arrests by some Occupy London supporters, with the administrator of an Occupy London Facebook page boasting he played a role.

These arrests have rightly chilled civil liberties activists. As human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell tweeted at the time: ‘Democracies don’t arrest people who have committed no crime. EDL today, who next? Civil liberties are for all, even odious EDL.’ Brendan O’Neill has argued on spiked, ‘it seems pretty clear that [EDL] supporters were arrested for committing a tweetcrime, the modern-day equivalent of Orwell’s thoughtcrime, where you’re nicked for what lurks inside your head rather than for anything you’ve done in the real world.’

Strikingly, this illiberal, anti-democratic crackdown on EDL protesters came less than a fortnight after the publication of the most extensive research into the EDL yet: one that reveals the EDL to largely be all tweets and no action.

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