Happy 2004

Warren Ellis posted 2004 wishes and greetings and thoughts from many people. Really cool and very entertaining.

John Barlow on the Economy of Mind

This article made a big impression on me when I read it for the first time a while back. Now I see Joi Ito referencing is and it brings back a host of thoughtful memories. Our lives are changing as technology is clawing its way into acceptance for normality. Does it bring us together or push us apart? Time will tell and I don't think anyone can really predict. Technology is a tool and the users of the tool will eventually determine the overall impact of its presence.

ZDNet UK - News - Online growth plateaus

ZDNet UK - News - Online growth plateaus. It looks like the Internet growth has slowed down from its gargantuan proportions. The new Pew Internet and American Life study reports that the growth has plateaued at around 2/3 of the population. The study also focused on how people use the Internet. This is both interesting and important. Pew Internet were among the first to consider that the how of Internet use is important to understanding the impact of said use. The latest report shows that the patterns of use have not changed, but the variety of services used have steadily increased in popularity. I am curious how this landscape is going to change in the next 3-5 years, when the current "net generation" of college kids starts graduating college and joining the workforce.

The Pew organization does an amazing job of tracking Internet use. I only wonder if it would be possible to convince them to do another set of longitudinal data collections as they did with one of their studies in 2000 & 2001. Longitudinal studies done by Pew would give provide unique detailed data on changes in Internet use and other behavior over time, allowing scientists to test causal hypotheses of the impact of Internet use on outcomes of interest. So how would one convince Pew to put down the buck into such an enterprise? Longitudinal studies take a lot of time, effort and expense...

I Spy with my little eye...

Lost? Hiding? Your Cellphone Is Keeping Tabs triumphantly announces NYT in its quite interesting if a little eery article. While parents watching their children is a function of this technology that is a little obsessive (and probably somewhat damaging for the said children's sense of independence) it is inconsequential. The potential for abuse of this information is absolutely fantastic.

The most impressive thing about this, is that it is impossible to turn it off on your phone. Mine, for example, allows me to choose between a "location On" option and a "911 Only" option. I realize the concept of "help and safety" being employed here, but what if I simply don't want to be saved in return for my ability to retain the relative anonymity of my location. This world is already too small for comfort. So under the guise of worry and care comes the discomfort of surveillance by private individuals of private individuals. The law is unclear on the topic, but business is not - surveillance is money. Of course, advocates of the technology will always point to safety benefits, which, most certainly, comes at a price of freedom and privacy in this case. Is it worth it?

Yes, Howard Rheingold (via scott) has some insightful musings about this concept, yet he seems woefully behind the times. For one, he is speaking in future tense about this! "Are we going to be walking around?". Howard, we already ARE walking around with location aware devices.

At the advent of the Internet, the academia was enamoured with the possibilities - oh the anonymity, oh the ability to play out different selves, oh the freedom, oh the convenience... wait a minute... convenience? Most academics are only now catching on - the Internet never gave freedom. If anything, it took it away. The Internet killed the concept of privacy and the users and the academics caught on only now... and now is a little too late. Have you ever been to an academic privacy panel? It nearly immediately degenerates into a spam gripe session. The issue though, isn't spam, spam is just a minor manifestation of the bigger problem - what you do on the Internet can be connected to you and the traces are retained forever... Are you ready for this kind of persistence of memory?

And all this really comes down to is choice. In this case we are not even given a choice whether to receive location specific advertising, to allow someone else (911 included!) to track our location, to consent to email to be sent to us. Most would probably say yes to those questions anyway, but having the choice is the important part. We might not exercise it but we must be given the choice in order to honestly say that we still live in some bastardized version of a "still free" society. Privacy practitioners are split on the definition of privacy - people say one thing, do another, what do they mean by privacy? That definition is simple, I think.

Privacy is the ability to control information about self, its dissemination and its use. That ability should not come at a price of convenience, at a price that forces one to give up the urban contemporary lifestyle. At the moment, if I don't want to give up my privacy, I very well could get out of an urban environment and go live in a cabin in Montana, without telephone, electricity, etc. I would probably have to buy a spool of aluminium and surround my home with it in order to prevent them pesky satellites locating me anyway (sounds a little bit paranoid doesn't it?) Nevertheless, acheiving this kind of privacy is still possible... at the price of giving up my life. That price requires me to have enough resources to finance my dip into oblivion.

This points to another interesting outcome. We are fast approaching the age where privacy is a luxury available to those rich with resources. Since the industrial revolution, a working man could not afford principles. Those were the lot of the well to do, the noble born, the bored intelligencia. Privacy is fast becoming such a principle. It is a frightening concept.

Drop the dead-weight of that landline, Jack!

"Research Shows More Americans to Switch to Wireless
A recent nationwide consumer survey on wireless number portability (WNP) revealed that more and more Americans are planning to drop their home phone for wireless. InsightExpress conducted the research that was commissioned by Standard & Poor's Equity Research Services reports. S&P says almost 10 percent of current fixed line customers would take their business and their number to a wireless carrier based on the new rules. This figure alone is more than double the amounts of customers that have thus far cut the cord. The survey also found that when switching to wireless, customers are primarily looking for attractive pricing and quality of service. (Source: Cellular-News.com)"

Hmm... watch the baby-bells shiver at the thought of loosing 10% of their customers. I am looking forward to finding out how many of the new movers from the national mover-study I am currently running have decided to drop their landline service and kept their cell phone (without switching to a new number at least immediately) after the move. Since wireless companies do not provide forwarding services like landline companies did (or at least most do not), many movers keep their old cell phone numbers for a while, until they find it too cumbersome (or maybe until they have built a social network in their new location and ties with their old social network don't seem as desperately important anymore - people who matter will switch the number for you in their cell phone. Long-distance is mostly free these days anyway). Hmmm... another three months until reasonable data comes in.... impatient :)

A sure way to kill SMS in the US - SMS spam is on its way...

Ok, here are two little blurbs via CTIA daily news wire that make me REALLY WORRIED!

mBlox Unveils New Cross-Carrier SMS Product
SMS infrastructure services provider mBlox, Inc. unveiled its Premium SMS product set for the U.S. wireless market. The new service allows customers, such as mobile marketers, advertisers, retail service providers and affinity networks to seamlessly access all premium-rate, SMS-capable U.S. wireless carriers, providing a complete package of SMS delivery, revenue settlement, and SMS micro-billing. The service is enabled by mBlox's integration with carrier SMS transport and wireless billing systems. (Source: PR NewWire)


Short Codes Could Spark Surge in Mobile Marketing
The recent launch of Common Short Codes in the wireless marketplace could open a surge in opportunities for the mobile marketing industry. As content providers, advertisers and marketers adopt the new SMS-based service, it will open the door to broader use of text messaging in sweepstakes, contests, coupons and other promotional devices. Jim Manis, vice president of M-Qube and global chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association says, "The real value of Common Short Codes is the personal nature of the mobile phone. It's being able to target and personally communicate with people." Manis predicts a rise in common short code use early next year, when many marketers initiate new budgets. (Source: DM News, NY)

While there IS an FCC ruling that says marketers can not use cell phone numbers unless customers explicitly requested to get promotions on their cell phones, I wonder what will happen with SMS. Most carriers in the US also charge for incoming text messages regardless of its sender. The new short codes and software for locating all SMS capable phone numbers seems to provide a frightening amount of power to marketers though. I HOPE this does not happen. I love using SMS and find it one of the most useful features of my phone. However, SMS is just starting to gain users in the US. If marketers start spamming before users become comfortable with SMS, it is likely that many will prefer not to use the feature. In fact, I am positive that I will be calling Verizon and asking them to completely disable SMS as soon as my phone starts getting flooded with messages.

I wonder how long it will take for a consumer class action suit against both carriers and marketers for the charges incurred from unwanted and unrequested messages too... hmmm...

Breed your cell phone with an Ipod

"AT&T Wireless to Offer New mMode Service
AT&T Wireless is getting ready to offer a new mobile music service that will allow its mMode subscribers to purchase music downloads on their wireless phones. The offering will be available sometime in 2004 and AT&T is among one of the first U.S.-based wireless service providers to offer a service of this kind. The service will allow these customers to browse songs and preview selections before purchasing. The added charge for the service would appear on each users' monthly cell phone bill. (Source: Seattle Times, WA)" Yes, this is not particularily new, and has been a sources of news in Europe for ages. But it IS interesting in the context of the United States, the DMCA laws, the struggle of the record industry to retain the tenuous hold on its monopoly.

It also points to something else:
Phones fundamentally are social tools. This is on of those technologies that is used to help us maintain our social ties (keep in touch that is). Yet cell phone manufacturers for some reason have decided that talking (and maybe SMS) were everything the user needed to use the phone for "social" things. They have, instead, focused on adding a myriad of features that have LITTLE TO DO with the social aspect of the phone. In fact, some might even argue these features make the phone ANTI-Social. Users, of course, find ways to use these features for social reasons, or ignore their presence past the buying-feature-bloat-craze. For example, when was the last time you used the calendar or task list on your phone? (mine is a motorola and the calendar is the most awkward thing I've seen, after the operating system as a whole, but that's a different issue). What puzzles me most, is the strange insistence of the phone-maker companies to NOT investigate new ideas in the social-network space. A space, where their product is, essentially, the most important. (Some of HomeNet's research repeatedly shows that phones are more important than even face-to-face meetings for keep up social ties and feelings of closeness)

I wonder what new uses phone-users will invent for the music-touting, juke-box-like new At&T phone...

Canadian Ruling on Web Music

New York Times reported about a Canadian Ruling on Web Music in Canada last week. It goes something like this:

"Downloading copyrighted music from peer-to-peer networks is legal in Canada, although uploading files is not, Canadian copyright regulators said yesterday.

In the same decision, the Copyright Board of Canada imposed a government fee of as much as $25 on iPod-like MP3 players, putting the devices in the same category as audio tapes and blank compact discs. The money collected from levies goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenue lost from personal copying. Manufacturers are responsible for paying the fees and often pass the cost on to consumers.

The peer-to-peer component of the decision was prompted by questions from consumer and entertainment groups about ambiguous elements of Canadian law. Previously, most analysts had said uploading was illegal but that downloading for personal use might be allowed. "

Note the last line - does that sound like the marihuana law in Canada? Well, smoking for personal use and thus buying for personal use is legal... but selling is illegal... ahem... This, however, misses some important parts of the peer-to-peer protocol. On most things, whatever you happen to download, becomes instantly available as a download to other users. So... ummm... if downloading is legal and uploading is illegal, but that action is, essentially, one and the same, how will uhhhhh the legal system deal with this quandary? Just another example of the profound detachment of legislature from reality... ouchie

disc_sophist: WE ARE NOT AMUSED!!!!

In that afternoon of December 12th, LiveJournal members found out about the LJ Mood Project and they were NOT AMUSED!!!!. In fact, they were quixotic for a while. The effort was impressive. On LJ, there appeared the "Journal of La Mancha" project meme... and Mark Handel and I got amazing data on information dissemination, social network in action. Thank you disc_sophist LJ user for creating an incredible set of data for us in no time, for no reason, just because. heheehehe

current mood: giddy

Time Gap, The

Time Gap heheheh this article form NYT made me smile (thank you scott). So what time is it? now? 10 minutes ago? 30 seconds ahead?

ungrok.org: virtual citizen unkaned

via scott - virtual citizen unkaned is an article about a umich prof who seems to be flabbergasted by obvious censorship on the part of a corporation whose game environment he was researching. They decided to pull the plug on him, he is upset. I am being fascetious, but I think it might be time for researchers to pull away from the "holy grail" of research and peak out into the "real world" they actually sometimes affect with their antics (i sure hope i do too, damnit).

funny how people forget... forget that the days of the mud-community experiments are gone... forget how the mud-democracy experiments did not work and what always survived was an authoritative regime... forget that this is no longer a bunch of people with nothing better to do but maintaining a server and putting everything they got into a community that makes them feel like they belong too... this is harsh, I know, but there is a grain of truth in it. I used to be one of those geeks running a mud...

MMORPGs are the biggest money-making machines around, games with budgets larger than Hollywood movies... Do we really think they are worried about free speach? Corporations are notorious for all kinds of censorship - some silly researcher said something they did not like, they decided it disrupts the community as a whole and makes it more difficult to make money, they shut him down. Surprise? I think not.

Much of the MMORPG research even in universities is sponsored by gaming companies in one way or the other. Their purpose? Find out how to make these communities more compelling, to more people in order to enlarge a repeat customer base. They dip into social network research, online community research, others. Any time words comes around about addiction, they quickly move to shut that avenue of research down and focus on something different. Sort of similar to tobacco companies in an eery sort of way (with almost as much money at stake, if not now, then in the near future).

Amusing how these tycoons are not the only ones. Social science researchers are fascinated by online communities and recommender systems that live on participant contribution. Somehow they are unwilling to accept that a lurker used to be commonly known as simply a reader, they perceive this behavior as negative (not surprising, reading IS dangerous after all, they prevented women and poor from doing it for centuries...) Online community research seeks to understand what makes an online community both from behavioral and design points of view. The functional purpose of the research - increasing contributions to one site or another through design changes (sometimes completely cosmetic) that would convey belonging, suggest importance and uniqueness, elicitate response and contribution... playing a man like a fiddle... utterly fascinating... and then it gets bought by coroporate research... ooh boy, them social scientists might have to join computer professionals for social responsibility and start taking some responsibility for their work.... hheheh yeah right...

Online search for fun without a look for love

This article in NYT had a curious theme to it. I'd been thinking about a position paper for a CHI workshop on online-dating lately. I really think that a large part of online dating sites comes from people who have moved to new, urban locations, where they are having a hard time meeting people. Online websites provide at least some information about a person and a bit of a distance from which it is possible to find something out about a person before meeting them. Yes the Internet has its drawbacks (you never really know what people look like until you meet them). Meeting people, though, is a somewhat dangerous thing anyway - whether you base your first impressions on online conversation or looks. Stakes are there, just different.

The article in the Times had an interesting quote though - "Web sites like Craig's List and Friendster," she said, "have taken the dating stigma away from using activity partner services." A nod to social networking sites that have managed to make meeting people online interesting, without the stigma of a direct purpose of dating. Interesting people are hard to come by, harder even when outside of a crazy academic environment (of course this depends on your definition of interesting, but to each their own). The funny thing is, that I don't think the initial purpose of the social network websites had anything to do with making the step towards re-casting the Internet simply as just another social space for a larger audience, outside of chat rooms and MMORPGs. The Internet has long been more of a social space than anything else, yet the image of a nerdy pasty-white boy stuck somewhere in a dirty apartment, pretending to be a beautiful blond in a chat-room has been a potent deterrent for much of the Internet user-population.

Two things have happened though:
1. Teen-agers have grown up into adults, grown up using the Internet outside of the stigmatized images and self-consciousness of technologically inept. As more of these kids grow into adulthood, more of the Internet social aspects will become both viable and interesting.
2. The user-friendly level of current interface design has spurred on increasing saturation of users, hitting critical mass and creating a large enough population that coudl sustain the concept of a social network website.

The future holds promise... it is also interesting to watch the new space grappling with glaring privacy problems, demanding ever more vigilance and attention to nuances of personal behavior and that of others. The world only gets more interesting... Brain candy... here we go!

Those memory problems...

A quick note from danah about Elizabeth Loftus's false memory research made me think about survey research and its reliance on self report vs. qualitative research and its relaince on ... well more detailed self-report. In this strange space of social science, of trying to figure out the why's of human behavior as it is related to the what's of our world, we often rely on human memory to provide proof or basis for our theories and models of the world and the human function within it... Yet memory is a slippery thing, unreliable, plastic, unpredictable even to the owners let alone us, the "askers"...

Addiction to Email

The Register has a fascinating article on a hard-to-track-down study of a zillion IT managers that announced that they find loosing access to email for a week more more traumatic than getting into a car accident or getting a divorce... hehe... ok, seriously though, the article points out how people get irritated if they can not get to their email for more than 30 minutes and minor down-times contribute to daily hassles and irritations.

This is interesting... One of my proposed current arguments is that IT makes us more stressed out precisely because it makes us expect immediate response, immediate feedback, quick turnaround on things. This adds to the daily stress in more than one way. First, of course, is increasing impatience - the irritation that comes with minor delays even if we are in no hurry. The second is a little more complicated and comes from expectation - the expectation that email must be answered quickly, documents must be sent immediately, and information procured in record time.

These increases in stress have been documented (although not analyzed and evaluated) in some quantitative "effects-of-the-internet" studies. Effects of Internet on depression and socializing have not been stable, yet stress remained an effect, although an elusive one. We haven't been able to find common causes of it. Simply Internet use does not work... I believe that stress is not so easy and changes for high-IT users more than for low IT users. In fact, a high-IT environment in itself can become a powerful stimuli , prompting impatience AND pricing time higher.

hmmm... more later

Political Wire: Liberty's Kids

Taegan Goddard's political wire is touting Liberty's Kids - its an amazon game. Having just looked at a link from danah regarding the results of a blogging survey something about Taegan's post caught my eye and made me apprehensive.

Taegan's post looks like an advertisement, complete with an amazon link to the product. On one hand, I understand the fascination with the product itself (just the name is exciting for a cynic), on the other, however, seeing this as an advertisement makes me uncomfortable. So how do I know Taegan didn't just get paid or asked to blog this on his wire by Amazon? His readership is quite large, and this is about as close to word-o-mouth advertising (the strongest form of marketing there ever was) as you can get. My paranoia again I suppose...

We know what you eat...

MPs challenge supermarkets on obesity - Hmm so UK is considering using the supermarket data from lyalty cards to monitor customer's eating habits and then suggest healthier products based on that.

Its curious that my roommate immediately said that monitoring eating habits through the card was ok, but suggesting, that's the process that immediately felt weird. This brings me back to my conversation with Bob Kraut and John Tang at dinner last night. The collection of data is ok... its the infringment on personal choice that is not... even if the idea is to benefit the users as a whole...

John C. Tang's home page

John C. Tang gave a job talk (or something that could possible turn into a job talk) at CMU today. He was talking about Awarenix, a software they used to figure out a way of telling distributed group members other's availability.

I find that I have intense problems with this type of research (the idea that you can capture sensor information and infer other's patterns through that, which would let you figure out when it is best to contact people). Great idea, and frightening as hell! Essentially it ignores the social construction of relationships and social negotiations of introductions and initations of conversation.

The idea that this is designed to use in distributed group work is a moot point. It CAN be used anywhere, which makes privacy concepts a very large liability. Researchers involved in this type of research though, markedly refuse to complicate their world with such considerations. I feel this attitude is really insensitivei to possibilities of abuse and basic human nature and can lead to disasters!

IMing at Work

Z posted this on her blog about a month ago and I meant to keep the link but I keep loosing it so here it is, lest I loose it again. IMing at Work - was a "newstrack" from CACM produced by none other than Blue-Coat systems. Their report made allegations that IMing at work was highly detrimental to productivity. One look at their site though and its now wonder their report produces the results they expound upon - the company's main product is a "business solutions" platform that offers IM control as its main feature! Duh... and if you take a closer look at the actual report there is NO information about where this sample came from, how it was collected, and what were its metrics of productivity and personal communication. No wonder the workplace is terrified of IM!

The little black book online?

Esther Dyson's article (via danah) is a brilliant little piece. She speaks to many ideas, but one that grabs me most is her concern about the emergence of a new kind of surveillance - the peer-to-peer surveillance through social network manifestations. With so much social software emerging, it is becoming easier to look at sides of people you might never be able to see otherwise, to note their comings and goings (by last login dates on Friendster or posts on LJ), to monitor expansion and changes in their social networks, to even seek out their alternate selves (Google them if you like).

We have become more sensitive to our manifestations on the web as a consequence of realizing such surveillance is possible. Yet much of that realization can come too late for many. The original idea of the Internet being a free-for-all medium of free expression, devoid of necessity to identify yourself, to monitor yourself, to watch what you say, has left a mark on many a profile. Some Internet users are terrified of their Google-profile and there is little they can do due to this strange persistence of information. Digital memory is almost perfect. It rarely forgets and offers the past for observation indiscriminantly.

Gone is the time when Sherry Turkle hailed the Internet's ability to foster anonymity and, thus, freer self-expression. Surprise, turns out the Internet never really was very anonymous unless you worked really hard to make it such. Digital traces, like footprints, stay forever and can be tracked so many years later with frightening results. Is this really too paranoid? Maybe not. Or maybe the Internet stole our privacy instead of giving us more freedom. Curious thought.

CATaC'04

CATaC'04 This conference looks really neat! Submission deadline is January 12th for full papers, January 26th for short papers... hmm... must consider! If onl CHI wasn't on the same date, blah!