Evgeny Morozov finds Jeff Jarvis' latest paean to the wonders of the internet deeply flawed, and rather unserious:

Why are we so obsessed with privacy? Jarvis blames rapacious privacy advocates – "there is money to be made in privacy" – who are paid to mislead the "netizens," that amorphous elite of cosmopolitan Internet users whom Jarvis regularly volunteers to represent in Davos. On Jarvis's scale of evil, privacy advocates fall between Qaddafi's African mercenaries and greedy investment bankers. All they do is "howl, cry foul, sharpen arrows, get angry, get rankled, are incredulous, are concerned, watch, and fret." Reading Jarvis, you would think that Privacy International (full-time staff: three) is a terrifying behemoth next to Google (lobbying expenses in 2010: $5.2 million).

"Privacy should not be our only concern," Jarvis declares. "Privacy has its advocates. So must publicness." He compiles a long and somewhat tedious list of the many benefits of "publicness": "builds relationships," "disarms strangers," "enables collaboration," "unleashes the wisdom (and generosity) of the crowd," "defuses the myth of perfection," "neutralizes stigmas," "grants immortality … or at least credit," "organizes us," and even "protects us." Much of this is self-evident. Do we really need to peek inside the world of Internet commerce to grasp that anyone entering into the simplest of human relationships surrenders a modicum of privacy? But Jarvis has mastered the art of transforming the most trivial observations into empty business maxims.

Contrary to Jarvis' protestations, Morozov's review doesn't read to me as a personal attack – more a clinical, brutal dismantling of a collection of shallow cliches in support of the argument that we shouldn't worry about the way pretty much every commercial entity we deal with online seeks to hoover up as much personal information about our use of the internet as it can because the (somewhat nebulous) benefits outweigh the potential problems. So long as you respect your cultural norms, you'll be fine.

[Via The Awl]

Best. @Reply. Ever?.

[Via @davepell]

Jason Scott found a Facebook exchange that neatly encapsulates the pros and cons of the latest round of changes to the way Facebook operates.

My Facebook Purity Test score: 98.

If you're in the UK, please consider signing the Open Rights Group's Save our social media! petition:

The Government is focusing on entirely the wrong problem in trying to increase their powers to ban, block or monitor people's communications. Social networks like Twitter are used for a huge array of positive purposes such as warnings of danger and organising clean up projects. Blanket surveillance measures of private communications or increased powers to mine users data would undermine people's freedom to communicate in very damaging ways, and would in no way address the problems at hand. Making laws in haste, with limited analysis and information, to deal with an exceptional problem is likely to create unbalanced laws and abuses of our rights.

Noted for future use:

[Context: a comment thread inspired by David Cameron's argument in favour of controlling the type of discussions taking place via social media.]

CrypticMirror
12 August 2011 4:14PM

@IvyLeague
12 August 2011 2:51PM

"If you've got nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear"

So glad to hear that, now I'd like your full name, address, date of birth, make and model of car you drive, all telephone numbers mobile and landline, name of employer, email address, annual income (gross and net), and of course I'd also like to know what your daily schedule is and what times you estimate being out of the house this weekend. Come on now, if you've nothing to hide then you've nothing to fear. Please post this information publicly, or are you up to something?

Oh and please post your internet history too, I'd like to check what sites you browse, just to make sure you aren't fapping to something nasty. By your own statement if you are reluctant to do so then you must be up to something criminal. Or you could admit your over simplistic statement was absurd.

[Via Memex 1.1]

See something or say something plots maps of major cities, showing locations from which people tweeted and locations where they posted photographs to Flickr.

Unfortunately I don't know any of the cities well enough to positively identify the locations revealed by the pictures, but a quick look at Google Maps seems to confirm that¹ many of the concentrations of red dots in London mark the locations of the various royal or public parks.

I wonder what such a map would look like for Newcastle. I can guess where most of the photos would be taken (i.e. on and around the Quayside), but where would all the tweeters be hanging out?

[Via Flowing Data]

1. As you'd expect. ↩

I didn't know you could disable Google Reader's social features with a single line of JavaScript:

1. Go to Google Reader
2. Type this JavaScript code in the address bar: javascript:antisocial('true')
3. Google Reader will reload and you'll see a simplified interface that removes the section "People you follow" and no longer shows shared items from your friends.

[Via Tom Morris]

James Shelley on social media overload:

Are we still communicating? Or are we just sending faxes?

(Rest assured that, read in context, that's a perfectly sound metaphor.)

Asked to comment on the prospect of one day archiving Facebook, Jason "Archive Team" Scott got his rant on:

Facebook is a living computer nightmare. Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship. While I can't really imply that it was going to be any other way, I can not sit by and act like this whole turn of events hasn't resulted in an epidemic of ruin that will have consequences far-reaching from anything related to archiving.

Follow the link – trust me, the full rant is well worth a read.

The Best Obnoxious Responses To Misspellings On Facebook. My favourite: the entry about the bombing of Libya.

[Via Word Magazine Blog]

Kevin Charles Redmon wonders whether the rise of the e-book means the end of marginalia:

[Sam Anderson...], master practitioner of literary journalism, used the Times Sunday Magazine's new Riff column to observe that marking up a book's pages gave him "a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane." [...]

At present, annotating an e-book with a stylus is about as handy as marking up a Norton anthology with a Crayola. The amount of clicking required to two-finger type a note using the Kindle's mini keyboard is even worse. But as technology (and perhaps our patience) improves, Anderson envisions a kind of free global bazaar of e-marginalia, so that you can read Hemingway, while also reading–in the margins – Gary Shteyngart's thoughts on reading Hemingway. Or your sister's. Or Michiko Kakutani's. [...]

"I want, in short, marginalia, everywhere, all the time," Anderson concludes. Welcome to the twenty-first century, kids, where even reading is social, networked activity.

Anderson is among the literary vanguard's optimists, though. [...]

The argument against Anderson's position suggests that marginalia are inherently part of an individual reader's dialogue with the text and are distinctly unsuited to the sort of 'sharing' that Kindle readers are treated to when their e-reader underlines passages in a text that have been highlighted by other Kindle users.

I think it's important to remember that it's still very early days for the mass-market e-book. Over time, if the trend of sharing your preferences across your social network and beyond continues, we'll almost certainly see greater granularity built into the software used in e-readers to share marginalia, allowing you to decide whose comments you want to subscribe to and/or limiting the extent to which your own margin notes are shared with others.

I'd say the bigger problem is that with so many different e-reader platforms and DRM schemes it'll be harder than it needs to be to standardise a cross-platform means of sharing this sort of data, unless Amazon or Apple or whoever manages to dominate the market to the point that they can impose their standard on everyone else. Amazon probably have the best chance of establishing a critical mass of e-book readers, but look again in a couple of years, when the iPad has some real competition and the tablet computer market segment has filled out a bit, and the picture could look very different.

[Via The Browser]

In the wake of their decision to 'sunset' Delicious, Jason Scott is not inclined to give Yahoo's management the benefit of the doubt as regards their future intentions towards their remaining acquisitions:

I am, frankly, a mixture of disappointed and sad that after Yahoo! shut down Geocities, Briefcase, Content Match, Mash, RSS Advertising, Yahoo! Live, Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Pets, Yahoo Publisher, Yahoo! Podcasts, Yahoo! Music Store, Yahoo Photos, Yahoo! Design, Yahoo Auctions, Farechase, Yahoo Kickstart, MyWeb, WebJay, Yahoo! Directory France, Yahoo! Directory Spain, Yahoo! Directory Germany, Yahoo! Directory Italy, the enterprise business division, Inktomi, SpotM, Maven Networks, Direct Media Exchange, The All Seeing Eye, Yahoo! Tech, Paid Inclusion, Brickhouse, PayDirect, SearchMonkey, and Yahoo! Go!… there are still people out there going "Well, Yahoo certainly will never shut down Flickr, because _______________" where ______ is the sound of donkeys.

What, because they take your money? Because they're so big? Because so many people use it and like it? Because it works well? Because it would make Yahoo! look bad? Go ahead, give me some more reasons. Flickr allows you great ability to export all your data. Get used to using it regularly.

Notes on "how to clone delicious in 48 hours".

[Via kottke.org]

I'm mildly surprised just how much of a reaction there's been to the impending death of Delicious. Granted, the posters to this MeFi thread may not be entirely representative of the typical modern-day web user, but the way that alternative online bookmarking services like Pinboard and Zootool are feeling the strain as Delicious users migrate does that perhaps the online bookmarking and tagging market has more life in it than I'd thought.¹

Meanwhile, bittersweet nostalgia from NTK #316 (2003-12-05):

>> TRACKING <<

sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering

The best thing about a minimal "link log" that runs in the corner of a real blog is that, with luck, it kills the main blog stone dead. Linklogs perform all the old school functions that make blogs most useful – providing a permanent store for interesting URLs, hideously distorting Google searches to favour people's real preferences, etc – while dispensing with that DJish slice o' life chit-chat in between. Now Joshua "the other memepool" Schachter has created the blogspot of linklogs. DEL.ICIO.US is a centralised Web service for dumping links, generating feeds and resucking an HTMLised list of your most recent choices back into your own Website. His brand of bitterness-driven perfectionism grants a bit more confidence that the del.icio.us setup will stay up a little longer than other blog servers. And the open API and ongoing experimentation already hints at wider possibilities for a lightly metadata-ed, collectively edited URL-bank. As it is, it's mostly just nice to have someone else write the bookmarklet and keep up with whatever the hell RSS format people are using these days.

http://del.icio.us/

- there goes the neighbourhood

http://www.blogshares.com/

- Falcooooo! (and jennicam.org too)

(For an explanation of the post title, see here.)

[Via this is sippey.com]

1. Yahoo's frantic backpedaling is neither here nor there. Sacking the entire team that was running Delicious is not the best plan if you're hoping to sell the service as a viable business. ↩

Yahoo! is shutting down Delicious.

http://delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export is your friend.

Zadie Smith was teaching at Harvard seven short years ago, right when Mark Zuckerberg was inventing Facebook:

At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly opt out (by choice, by default) of the things they have embraced. We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.

I wish she hadn't twice used the phrase "open internet" to describe Zuckerberg's vision of a world wide web where every web site that matters is linked via Facebook Connect¹ but her essay reviewing both David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network and Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto is still well worth a read.

Coincidentally, I read another account of technology exposing a generation gap today over at Crooked Timber. The post was prompted by a study suggesting that the average US teenager between the ages of 13 and 17 sends or receives a total of 3,339 text messages per month. As was pointed out in comments, this figure isn't quite as shocking as it first appears, once you consider that it's effectively counting every single sentence in a conversation as a distinct text message (and possibly counting each message sent to multiple recipients multiple times). The really interesting generational difference was pointed out by cj in comment #36, who linked to an anecdote at Alas, a blog about how students reacted to the notion that it had once been commonplace for couples to communicate by writing one another letters:

"But so much will have happened between the time the letter was sent and the time it was read. How did you remember what you wrote about?"

1. The concept of an "open internet" is a) much more all-encompassing than the world wide web, b) very much not what Facebook is all about, and c) is already a contested term and is only going to become more so in the next few years. ↩

James Bridle has been thinking about what's missing from the current generation of ebooks:

[While...] traditional books are physical objects, that's not the core of our relationship with them. The truth is that books are essentially not physical objects, but temporal ones.

[...]

[The...] real problem with the ebook as it stands is that it denies us many of these temporal aspects, which produces a kind of cognitive dissonance. And there's a social layer that forms around this, another timeline of reading reviews and discussing with friends, that the ebook could actually exploit better than the physical book, if we work on it some more. We really need to look at how we address this temporal mode with ebooks.

[...]

Well, the thing I've been thinking about a lot, the thing I keep coming back to, is Bookmarks. Bookmarks in all their forms: as underlining, dogears, annotations, notes and references. User-generated tags and footnotes. A horrible phrase, but. There is something there. [...]

All of which, as well as being interesting in its own right, acts as a launchpad for Bridle's Open Bookmarks project:

Open Bookmarks is a project to discuss, develop and design an open framework for saving, storing and sharing bookmarks, annotations and reading data in ebooks. When established, Open Bookmarks will champion the new standard and support widespread adoption.

We want to work with publishers, software developers, hardware manufacturers, merchants, and anyone with an interest in the future of the book.

Here's hoping the publishing houses have learned something from the experience of their friends in the music and film industries. Something other than "wrap your content in as much platform-specific DRM code as you can find and hope for the best", I mean.

[Via Phil Gyford]

How the Facebook News Feed works:

The more digital our daily lives become, the more perplexing the questions seem. Will the growth of social media destroy our notions of privacy? Is democracy helped or harmed by the cacophony of opinions online? And perhaps most confounding: Why does that guy I barely know from the 10th grade keep showing up in my Facebook feed?

[...]

[With...] the mystery of that 10th-grade friend in mind, The Daily Beast set out to crack the code of Facebook's personalized news feed. Why do some friends seem to pop up constantly, while others are seldom seen? How much do the clicks of other friends in your network affect what you're shown? Does Facebook reward some activities with undue exposure? And can you "stalk" your way into a friend's news feed by obsessively viewing their page and photos? [...]

I don't use Facebook¹ but I'd always assumed that the whole point of a personal news feed was that it'd keep you abreast of what your friends are doing, not just whatever subset of their activities Facebook decides to show you.

I can see the argument that if the news feed was just a river of news showing every type of update all your friends shared with their friends – or whichever subset of their friends you fell into – then you could easily be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of messages, but doesn't that just suggest that Facebook needs to make it possible for you to sort or group the content of your news feed in some user-defined way, or to have the News Feed flag certain types of update? Or is this like Facebook's privacy settings: something it is possible to customise to some degree, but which most users will leave at the default settings because it's too complicated/inflexible to be worth the hassle?

[Via kottke.org]

1. I don't mean that as snobbery, some modern-day equivalent of "I don't watch TV", honest! I do have a Facebook account, but I've never thought it worth spending time on. I get that for a lot of people Facebook provides an easy way to keep tabs on the lives of friends who wouldn't dream of setting up a weblog or online journal, and that's just fine if that's what you want. ↩

Mike Elgan of Datamation predicts that Human Resources departments are going to come over all Minority Report any day now:

Okay, let's put this all together. What happens when social networking analysis and predictive analytics are combined for HR goals?

Following the current trend lines, very soon social networking spiders and predictive analytics engines will be working night and day scanning the Internet and using that data to predict what every employee is likely to do in the future. This capability will simply be baked right in to HR software suites.

When the software decides that you're going to quit, steal company secrets, break the law, post something indecent on a social network or lie on your expense report, the supervising manager will be notified and action will be taken — before you make the predicted transgression.

Two thoughts come to mind:

1. False positives. Closely followed by lawsuits.
2. If a company manages to write a program clever enough to predict individual human behaviour with any degree of accuracy, they'll find much more lucrative sources of income than sales to HR departments.

It strikes me as much more likely that HR departments will start routinely demanding that employees reveal their social networking identities as part of the hiring process, so that the organisation can keep an eye on whether their employees are doing anything out of office hours that might embarrass their employer.

For the record, I think this would be an extraordinarily silly and counterproductive policy, even if it didn't involve handing over passwords. Pretty much everyone has something they do outside of work that could be construed as embarrassing or odd or otherwise inconsistent-with-our-corporate-values. Big deal.

[Via Bruce Schneier]