My colleagues and I have been looking into the human computer confluence (HC-squared) research as a potential area of collaboration for EU grant proposals. We participated in a visions workshop and got invited to submit a visionary statement for their online white book. This was not as simple as it sounds - we had to come up with a vision of the future. In order to get inspiration we spent the afternoon reading the statements that have already been published online. As a sort of exercise we tried to imagine what the future might look like had all of these visions come to pass. Perhaps this is a view coming from a somewhat more cynical and cautious about technology point of view, perhaps we are simply failing to see the positives, but the future we ended up imagining looks less than attractive:
In the future technological extensions to our minds will be able to determine our emotional states and deliver information judged appropriate given our estimated processing capacity. In the future we will be able not only to share our lives and our ongoing experiences with people dear to us who are spread out all over the world, but also to experience their lives remotely almost as if we were physically present there. Of course we will be able to consume that information when our mind-expanding technologies will judge us capable of doing so. In the future we will be able to better encode our experiences in our memory by using taste and smell as triggers, potentially making a simple dinner a moment of remembrance or perhaps a memory-lane minefield. After all, what might seem like a wonderful moment to encode as a memory at the time, may turn into a reminder of an awful time in your life later. In the future, our technologies will ensure that we are constantly working on becoming better human beings so that we can be part of an urban socio-technical superorganism busy minimizing energy use, reducing traffic and pollution and maintaining wealth.
Perhaps my vision of the future is how to prevent some of the futures described above from coming to fruition? Or perhaps just ensuring that despite these futures, we can retain our ability to unplug, turn off, spend time alone, make stupid mistakes, feel pain and happiness just because life goes on and for no other reason.
27 June, 2012
18 June, 2012
Computer security and that pesky "human vulnerabilities" factor
The latest issue of CACM published a blog post by Jason Hong entitled "Protecting Against Data Breaches" that caught my eye. Jason attempted to offer some simple guidelines ("a three-pronged approach") to combat ongoing issues in computer security. While I agree with Jason that computer security breaches are a major issue given the increasing amount of personal data about regular people that has proliferated online, I think that the suggestions he provides while useful are perhaps not radical enough. Oh, they are sound enough from a technological point of view and Jason carefully notes the importance of the "human vulnerabilities" implicated in many of the recent big hacks - which is something that has been willfully ignored by the security software developers and researchers. However, I would argue that this "three-pronged approach" simply reinforces the current paradigms and here is why:
Part 1: Get research and industry to develop new best practices, create better tools and have better taining of software developers. It is not clear what Jason means by new best practices, but perhaps addressing the issues of building in separate data architectures and developing new ways of convincing users to "do the right thing" by changing their passwords often, not re-using passwords, getting better at detecting phishing attacks. This is something that is already done quite a bit - who hasn't encountered annoying corporate policies requiring you to change your password every 3 months? Yes we can get better at what is already getting done, but there is little evidence that better will work where the current approaches clearly really do not.
Part 2: Complement these technical approaches with a stronger legal structure that can properly incentivize computer companies to take stronger measures protecting customer data. This one is interesting as it puts the onus on policy and governmental action rather than using technological solutions to the problem. I am reading this as - make personal data loss MORE illegal and put the companies whose data is stolen under the gun. While this might be useful to encourage Sony to do more about security to avoid major losses such as the Playstation debaucle, this also might point to a little problem. Given the ongoing arms-race between the hackers and security sector, at what point is the defence of "industry standard" not going to be enough? And if it is not, how then might this work? Given the rather uneasy relationship between computer scientists and policy makers (i.e. computer scientsts sometimes act like ostriches with heads in the sand when it comes to potentially influencing policy or questioning the ethical implications of their own research) I am not seeing an easy way forward with this one, especially in the rather pro-business and less-regulatory climate in the US. Of course, the consumer block can wield quite a bit of political power in the election season but once again, I am not sure this is enough or even possible.
Part 3: Develop new ways of actually addressing the human vulnerabilities, in the form of simpler and better-designed user interfaces, more research to gain a deeper understanding of human biases and social influences in decision-making, and better ways of motivating and training people so they are effective in the face of these ongoing attacks. This one is where things get really tricky. On the one hand, this isn't all that different from Part 1, except software developers got substituted by people with the addition of - we need to figure out how to change people's behavior more effectively to fit the needs of the security protocols.
This last point is perhaps the most important and the reason why I think the whole discussion mainly reinforces the ongoing and largely flawed paradigm of current computer security practices. Jason laments the common software developer view of users as "stupid" but I would argue that in fact that is a very correct view. Except it doesn't often encompass the software developers themselves and it should. All users are stupid - me, you, them... While we might be smart in some of the things we do likely there are many ways in which we also tend to be very stupid. Password reuse, for example is a rampant practice. I do not know anyone who does not reuse their passwords, including myself, and I am acquainted with quite a lot of computer professionals and all of us should know better. The thing is, either all of us and everyone else in the world are stupid, or the expectations for proper computer security practices are simply impossible to sustain.
I would argue that the current computer security designs make certain assumptions about the type of person that will be using the technology. Oddly enough, their perfect user would be a clinically paranoid individual with infallible memory. You would have to have a perfect memory to never reuse passwords for example. Imagine how many unique passwords you would have to remember given the amount of online services we use? Even with password reuse I can't remember the right combination of letters and numbers half the time. How paranoid do you have to be to methodically change all of your passwords every three months? That's like changing the locks on your front door once a year and that's a very unusual practice. Somehow I don't think there are many such people in the world, but perhaps they are more common in the computer security profession?
What I am hearing Jason say is that in computer security human vulnerabilities are most often the weak link and this is the weak link that is mostly ignored as we develop more and better technical solutions to the problem. This is an important point to make and he points to the need to engage policy and the social aspects of the issue. Yet the solution proposed here is little more than: we must find better ways to change people to fit the needs of security protocols. Changing people to fit the needs of technology (changing policy to fit technology, changing pratice to fit technology) is a common enough approach in the tech sector and it fails early and often. I wonder though, can we take people as a starting point and their failings of memory, the tendency to ignore apparent risks, the plain laziness - and redesign the dominant computer security paradigms to not only take into account but to take advantage of these? Perhaps this might result in systems that are far more successful than attempting to change ourselves to fit the current logic of computer security software and practices - changing outselves into clinically paranoid individuals with perfect memories seems an impossible task.
08 June, 2012
ICWSM - reflections on the conference
ICWSM stands for "The International Conferences on Weblogs and Social Media" and it is run by the AAAI, so I was a bit uncertain as to what to expect from this conference. On the one hand, as one of my colleagues said last year, ICWSM is where "all the cool kids go these days." Just out of curiosity I didn't only submit a paper to the conference but also volunteered to be a reviewer for it. The review process was weird and confusing, obviously going through some growing pains. In many instances reviewers argued whether this or that social-sciency paper was "relevant to the ICWSM community" but it seemed that in each case the person arguing had a very specific vision of what that community represented. I guess it's similar to the "CHI/not-CHI" argument but here the focus was on quantification, computation and algorithms rather than technology design and deployment. It didn't matter whether you built anything, though that was helpful, as long as you had some graphs, numbers, lots of data and maybe some machine learning-based network analysis.
The conference itself though was a pleasant surprise. From day one I oscillated between great amusement at earnest over-simplification of the social by engineers and sheer wonder at some of the really interesting and insightful papers on a surprising range of topics. The opening keynote was by Andrew Tomkins from Google, talking about Google+ and promising to take "an historical perspective on social networking." Oddly enough, or perhaps relatively predictably, the talk eventually gets to the idea that since most interactions between humans and computers are solitary activities, and sociability is a good thing, we should make more online activities social - like for example 'social search' because "historically" we have always had our social networks with us to help us getting through life. Tomkins' main idea is that throughout human history (and his view of history here is in million of years) our relational practices have changed going from shallow but broad broadcasting practices to more involved bonding with particular individuals to a dual practice that can involve both (this is a strange riff on Jensen's media of three degrees but less founded). So basically, why do anything alone, when you can be social doing it all. Somehow this rings hollow in a North American cultural context where independence and personal achievement are hugely valued.
Ok, so making things social is important and also there is that pesky Dunbar number of 150 but we can deal with that by using Google+ and circles. Tomkins goes on to take a fundamentally instrumental view of human relationships - after all, it's all about value and he brings up the difficulty of automatic assessment of how valuable a particular social connection might be to a user based on available data. The notion of 'value' is deeply socially inappropriate when it comes to discussions of friendship, but it is necessary if we are to instrument online services with social components. Tricky issues, but Tomkins does not address them, blithely pointing that for example Google search has productively used user preferences as an increasingly important piece of the puzzle that improved the appropriateness of candidate search content. Social information would simply provide more of that kind of information to hone and specify content (but what if you do NOT share all of your life online?). Suddenly we have an example of the system deciding to show a user a particular article because their friend has viewed it, rather than the one that might have been more relevant to the search. There are potential (minor) social benefits to this, but it seems like a way to break rather than improve search. After all, information seeking is an instrumental rather than a social pursuit in most cases.
There is a kind of false confidence here to the importance of social practice without due attention actually paid to the practice of social and the emotional costs associated with it. By making things more social we might capitalize on things like social curiosity (why did X read THIS article and not THAT one?), social pressure (many of my friends read this thing that is of no interest to me but I feel like I ought to know this too), social exposure (I better not click on this, what if my friends get the wrong idea if they see I read this?). Much of this does not have clear and well defined positive consequences, but it does have consequences.
Finally we are getting to how we might "use" our relationships since that's their value - to be used to our advantage. Here something weird happens - Tomkins goes on to say that help seeking is a purely quid pro quo activity because "if I ask you to help me with finding a job, I get a job out of this and you don't get anything." This is just fundamentally wrong and ignores all of the emotional costs and relational work involved in such transactions and interactions. What you or I might get out of this transaction, what each of us might walk away with, strongly depends on the state of our relationship prior to the interaction and the way we handle the interaction - as each interaction changes the relationship. Think of relationships not as things with value but as ongoing dynamic processes and of interactions as relational work that makes these processes run smoothly or break or deteriorate.
The final slide and the conclusion here is: "social relationships exist so that we can get things done." While this sounds similar to Graham Allan's "social relationships are the way we get through life" - Tomkins's statement lacks the profound emotive content of Allan's. Social relationships? oh, just another GTD tool, on par with your smart calendar and tasking system.... really? My question is perhaps a little mean, but I apologize for being an annoying social scientist in the crowd and ask about one of the two obvious elephants in the room (one is privacy the other is emotion): "what about emotion and emotional costs of social interaction, how does that figure into the system?" There is a non-answer but I suppose this was just a question that needed to be voiced out-loud and I did not expect an answer because it was obvious this wasn't something really relevant to the thought process just presented. A lot of people nod in agreement and say that they wanted to ask the same question. I earn the reputation of someone with tough questions... Still, I think that if we continue to think of relationships in such instrumental ways, we are going to run into deep trouble with the technologies we develop... Or maybe just Google's stock will drop in price?
While this opening keynote set the tone of the conference I was really pleasantly surprised at how many really interesting papers were presented, at how this community is in flux and a kind of freedom from the pressure to be relevant to "designing technology" where here, people are simply interested in "why" although they seem to need numbers to think about it. The fascination with networks and what's going on rather than with what should we build next is really nice. In a completely bizarre and ironic twist, mine seems to be the first and so far only purely qualitative publication here - I have no graphs, no numbers, no survey, no nlp, no code - just people talking. I will never again submit something without a graph, numbers, survey or some code in a paper to ICWSM, but despite this, I actually really liked this conference. It's a small event full of people who don't really seem to fit very well elsewhere (CHI would have demanded they deploy and test something) though a very CHI paper won best paper here (it deserved it). So... if you are dealing with networks and people and numbers and questions that consider what's going on here with this technology, big data, relationships and information flows rather than trying to divine the future - this is a good venue to consider. Also, Google seems to like this venue as an academic outlet for some of their publications - there are quite a few!
The conference itself though was a pleasant surprise. From day one I oscillated between great amusement at earnest over-simplification of the social by engineers and sheer wonder at some of the really interesting and insightful papers on a surprising range of topics. The opening keynote was by Andrew Tomkins from Google, talking about Google+ and promising to take "an historical perspective on social networking." Oddly enough, or perhaps relatively predictably, the talk eventually gets to the idea that since most interactions between humans and computers are solitary activities, and sociability is a good thing, we should make more online activities social - like for example 'social search' because "historically" we have always had our social networks with us to help us getting through life. Tomkins' main idea is that throughout human history (and his view of history here is in million of years) our relational practices have changed going from shallow but broad broadcasting practices to more involved bonding with particular individuals to a dual practice that can involve both (this is a strange riff on Jensen's media of three degrees but less founded). So basically, why do anything alone, when you can be social doing it all. Somehow this rings hollow in a North American cultural context where independence and personal achievement are hugely valued.
Ok, so making things social is important and also there is that pesky Dunbar number of 150 but we can deal with that by using Google+ and circles. Tomkins goes on to take a fundamentally instrumental view of human relationships - after all, it's all about value and he brings up the difficulty of automatic assessment of how valuable a particular social connection might be to a user based on available data. The notion of 'value' is deeply socially inappropriate when it comes to discussions of friendship, but it is necessary if we are to instrument online services with social components. Tricky issues, but Tomkins does not address them, blithely pointing that for example Google search has productively used user preferences as an increasingly important piece of the puzzle that improved the appropriateness of candidate search content. Social information would simply provide more of that kind of information to hone and specify content (but what if you do NOT share all of your life online?). Suddenly we have an example of the system deciding to show a user a particular article because their friend has viewed it, rather than the one that might have been more relevant to the search. There are potential (minor) social benefits to this, but it seems like a way to break rather than improve search. After all, information seeking is an instrumental rather than a social pursuit in most cases.
There is a kind of false confidence here to the importance of social practice without due attention actually paid to the practice of social and the emotional costs associated with it. By making things more social we might capitalize on things like social curiosity (why did X read THIS article and not THAT one?), social pressure (many of my friends read this thing that is of no interest to me but I feel like I ought to know this too), social exposure (I better not click on this, what if my friends get the wrong idea if they see I read this?). Much of this does not have clear and well defined positive consequences, but it does have consequences.
Finally we are getting to how we might "use" our relationships since that's their value - to be used to our advantage. Here something weird happens - Tomkins goes on to say that help seeking is a purely quid pro quo activity because "if I ask you to help me with finding a job, I get a job out of this and you don't get anything." This is just fundamentally wrong and ignores all of the emotional costs and relational work involved in such transactions and interactions. What you or I might get out of this transaction, what each of us might walk away with, strongly depends on the state of our relationship prior to the interaction and the way we handle the interaction - as each interaction changes the relationship. Think of relationships not as things with value but as ongoing dynamic processes and of interactions as relational work that makes these processes run smoothly or break or deteriorate.
The final slide and the conclusion here is: "social relationships exist so that we can get things done." While this sounds similar to Graham Allan's "social relationships are the way we get through life" - Tomkins's statement lacks the profound emotive content of Allan's. Social relationships? oh, just another GTD tool, on par with your smart calendar and tasking system.... really? My question is perhaps a little mean, but I apologize for being an annoying social scientist in the crowd and ask about one of the two obvious elephants in the room (one is privacy the other is emotion): "what about emotion and emotional costs of social interaction, how does that figure into the system?" There is a non-answer but I suppose this was just a question that needed to be voiced out-loud and I did not expect an answer because it was obvious this wasn't something really relevant to the thought process just presented. A lot of people nod in agreement and say that they wanted to ask the same question. I earn the reputation of someone with tough questions... Still, I think that if we continue to think of relationships in such instrumental ways, we are going to run into deep trouble with the technologies we develop... Or maybe just Google's stock will drop in price?
While this opening keynote set the tone of the conference I was really pleasantly surprised at how many really interesting papers were presented, at how this community is in flux and a kind of freedom from the pressure to be relevant to "designing technology" where here, people are simply interested in "why" although they seem to need numbers to think about it. The fascination with networks and what's going on rather than with what should we build next is really nice. In a completely bizarre and ironic twist, mine seems to be the first and so far only purely qualitative publication here - I have no graphs, no numbers, no survey, no nlp, no code - just people talking. I will never again submit something without a graph, numbers, survey or some code in a paper to ICWSM, but despite this, I actually really liked this conference. It's a small event full of people who don't really seem to fit very well elsewhere (CHI would have demanded they deploy and test something) though a very CHI paper won best paper here (it deserved it). So... if you are dealing with networks and people and numbers and questions that consider what's going on here with this technology, big data, relationships and information flows rather than trying to divine the future - this is a good venue to consider. Also, Google seems to like this venue as an academic outlet for some of their publications - there are quite a few!
07 June, 2012
ICWSM: Robin Dunbar - Why Facebook Won't Get You Any More Friends
I've never heard Robin Dunbar speak before but I know his basic arguments pretty well. He doesn't disappoint by repeating them all - monkeys, brain sizes, common functional human grouping size, etc. This talk is about why social network sites aren't going to get you more friends, so Dunbar starts out with a broad statement that "The Internet has promised a greater social connectedness" but apparently that hasn't come to pass. He asks whether technologies really widen our horizons (insert the echo-chamber research) and whether it can really result in more friends. His answer is that it doesn't because of the ... social brain hypothesis...! You knew that was coming, right?
I wonder though - Dunbar seems to take the deterministic argument social technology = more friends as his straw men, but do we really use technologies to try and enlarge our social world or do we use it as part of our habitual social practices which at times can result in an enlargement of our social worlds? I mean, what happened to serendipity and wonder, the chance encounters that can change your life, the discovery of being a part of something that you hadn't realized before. Or is it that once you reach those "about 150" you have to loose one to gain one? Ok, I am over-simplifying and Dunbar as a good scientist is showing lots of studies, graphs and experimental results. He notes that the 150 has high turn-over. It's a clumpy network that pretty much suggests the faceted nature of social life. There is an obvious relationship between frequency of social contact and feelings of intimacy. Inside the 150 is where real relationships live but they can move in and out of that space - becoming more acquaintances at times and maybe sometimes moving back into the circle of close confidants. About half the people you include in your network are family and half are friends (although I suspect this is culturally and individually defined with huge variations across, also what do you define as family - blood ties or perception?) Clearly a huge proportion of our social time is devoted to the "inner circle" and the rest of our attention is spread out unevenly among the ties that are in different states of development (or perhaps deterioration).
Friendship and kinship have different dynamics (though I would argue that some kinds of friendships over time come to resemble certain kinds of kinship). Dunbar points out that the average emotional closeness with kin remains stable after residential mobility (measured over the course of 18 months) while for friendships this plummets. This is my dissertation - crazy! Maybe I ought to publish some stuff from that piece of work finally. Dunbar's data here is exclusively gender-related showing that for women talking and for men doing more activities together results in increases in closeness - very western-normative.
Other interesting bits - laughter influences happiness (this happiness bit is becoming really common in research) - experimental results show that laughter happens more often during F2F encounters and Skype is second-best, while people seem to find everything else - phone, IM, SNS, email - significantly less satisfying. So seeing each other does something to make us laugh more and enjoy the interaction more perhaps regardless of how "useful" or "instrumental" said interaction was (Paul Tomkins, take note - there is a graph proving it!)
The analysis of a cell-phone dataset shows how over time women shift form investing into relational partners to investing into their children. In general, women talk more and invest more into relationships than men (men spike but show shorter spike periods than women). The basic message here is that relationships are costly (Google+ team take note!) they are investments and trade-offs. Romantic relationships means fewer best friends - so falling in love is socially expensive because of the time costs. The more traits we share with someone the closer we feel to them emotionally (homophily) and the more likely we are to act altruistically toward them. Curiously, these traits are NOT personality traits but things like sharing the same language, coming from the same place, sharing the same worldview, politics, religion and shared humor (most important of the six traits). This explains why over time people drift apart.
So what makes relationships work? They relate on emotionally intense grooming and cognitive limits (brain size+cognition).
The cognitive limits are about intentionality and it's relationship to limits of our social circle. By intentionality Dunbar means the ability to keep straight in your mind a hierarchy of intentional action - mary knows that bob knows that jane knows that sharon knows that janet does. Five seems to be the average limit and is correlated with average social clique size.
The emotional part of making the relationship work is grooming, which is all about time investments - grooming is a bonding agent and grooming time is determined by group size. Social grooming in fact triggers endorphin release in the brain which is, presumably, the psyho-pharmacological environment for building trust - mmm... yummy endorphins. Of course, in humans, language allows us to groom more efficiently but we seem to require physical touch to get the endorphin hit from social interaction (ah well, there goes the digital world, we'll have to get our kicks some other way, running?). We bridge the gap between grooming and endorphins through laughter, religion and rituals, dancing or playing music. We can get endorphins simply through physical exertion (see exercise is not just good for you but it's also a drug) but socially shared physical exercise enlarges the effect (tricky, you nature!)
And that's all folks - hug more! Don't expect Facebook to make your social life sparkly and laugh more. I think I like the message here even if I haven't learned anything new - at least for this audience the confounding aspects of emotional investments and costs of relating are important to drive home - repeatedly.
I wonder though - Dunbar seems to take the deterministic argument social technology = more friends as his straw men, but do we really use technologies to try and enlarge our social world or do we use it as part of our habitual social practices which at times can result in an enlargement of our social worlds? I mean, what happened to serendipity and wonder, the chance encounters that can change your life, the discovery of being a part of something that you hadn't realized before. Or is it that once you reach those "about 150" you have to loose one to gain one? Ok, I am over-simplifying and Dunbar as a good scientist is showing lots of studies, graphs and experimental results. He notes that the 150 has high turn-over. It's a clumpy network that pretty much suggests the faceted nature of social life. There is an obvious relationship between frequency of social contact and feelings of intimacy. Inside the 150 is where real relationships live but they can move in and out of that space - becoming more acquaintances at times and maybe sometimes moving back into the circle of close confidants. About half the people you include in your network are family and half are friends (although I suspect this is culturally and individually defined with huge variations across, also what do you define as family - blood ties or perception?) Clearly a huge proportion of our social time is devoted to the "inner circle" and the rest of our attention is spread out unevenly among the ties that are in different states of development (or perhaps deterioration).
Friendship and kinship have different dynamics (though I would argue that some kinds of friendships over time come to resemble certain kinds of kinship). Dunbar points out that the average emotional closeness with kin remains stable after residential mobility (measured over the course of 18 months) while for friendships this plummets. This is my dissertation - crazy! Maybe I ought to publish some stuff from that piece of work finally. Dunbar's data here is exclusively gender-related showing that for women talking and for men doing more activities together results in increases in closeness - very western-normative.
Other interesting bits - laughter influences happiness (this happiness bit is becoming really common in research) - experimental results show that laughter happens more often during F2F encounters and Skype is second-best, while people seem to find everything else - phone, IM, SNS, email - significantly less satisfying. So seeing each other does something to make us laugh more and enjoy the interaction more perhaps regardless of how "useful" or "instrumental" said interaction was (Paul Tomkins, take note - there is a graph proving it!)
The analysis of a cell-phone dataset shows how over time women shift form investing into relational partners to investing into their children. In general, women talk more and invest more into relationships than men (men spike but show shorter spike periods than women). The basic message here is that relationships are costly (Google+ team take note!) they are investments and trade-offs. Romantic relationships means fewer best friends - so falling in love is socially expensive because of the time costs. The more traits we share with someone the closer we feel to them emotionally (homophily) and the more likely we are to act altruistically toward them. Curiously, these traits are NOT personality traits but things like sharing the same language, coming from the same place, sharing the same worldview, politics, religion and shared humor (most important of the six traits). This explains why over time people drift apart.
So what makes relationships work? They relate on emotionally intense grooming and cognitive limits (brain size+cognition).
The cognitive limits are about intentionality and it's relationship to limits of our social circle. By intentionality Dunbar means the ability to keep straight in your mind a hierarchy of intentional action - mary knows that bob knows that jane knows that sharon knows that janet does. Five seems to be the average limit and is correlated with average social clique size.
The emotional part of making the relationship work is grooming, which is all about time investments - grooming is a bonding agent and grooming time is determined by group size. Social grooming in fact triggers endorphin release in the brain which is, presumably, the psyho-pharmacological environment for building trust - mmm... yummy endorphins. Of course, in humans, language allows us to groom more efficiently but we seem to require physical touch to get the endorphin hit from social interaction (ah well, there goes the digital world, we'll have to get our kicks some other way, running?). We bridge the gap between grooming and endorphins through laughter, religion and rituals, dancing or playing music. We can get endorphins simply through physical exertion (see exercise is not just good for you but it's also a drug) but socially shared physical exercise enlarges the effect (tricky, you nature!)
And that's all folks - hug more! Don't expect Facebook to make your social life sparkly and laugh more. I think I like the message here even if I haven't learned anything new - at least for this audience the confounding aspects of emotional investments and costs of relating are important to drive home - repeatedly.
06 June, 2012
Infrastructures, Internet and the future?
A colleague of mine asked me the other day to think about how might users be represented in conversations about what the future Internet infrastructure ought to be like? Tricky question on so many levels! What does it mean to think about the users and their needs and desires when we are talking about Internet infrastructure at the level of packets and protocols? I think that talking to people directly and asking them what they think the internet should be like in the future won't give you anything. This does not mean that this conversation and representing the users and their interests is unimportant or impossible though. In fact it is incredibly important because even though there are many things that can be achieved at the level of applications and policy, modifications at the level of infrastructure will always be the ones hardest to circumnavigate. So if there are particular things that are deemed crucial for the future, the need to be built in at the level of infrastructure.
Here is how I've been thinking about this - if you buy the Bowker and Starr's argument, infrastructure is invisible and that's where it needs to be for people to be able to use it effectively. That is, you want your plumbing to be in the walls and to deliver cold and hot water at the right times, offering a range of pricing options that allow you to get more for less (thnx Laura!). However, the shape of the city plumbing infrastructure and it's basic logic matters. There is a big difference between the plumbing infrastructure that is built around cold water delivered to residences and then heated on the spot vs. hot and cold water delivered via separate pipes coming from a central city boiler station. It implies a different set of costs and concerns down the line directly transferred to the end-user. So this is a question of where the boiler gets put and as a result, who is responsible for its maintenance and how many people get affected by outages if you want to push that metaphor further.
What this kind of toy example brings up are two things:
1. Who is the user - individual home owners? businesses? government organizations?
2. What are the tradeoffs? In the first example there is a lot of flexibility at the end-user level but also a lot of costs shifted directly to the user. There are questions of efficiency here as well as questions of ease of innovation and future development (harder to convince many homeowners to buy new boilers because you want to change the system to a more climate-friendly one for example). The latter system is efficient in different ways but also gives a lot more control to the entities controlling the central boiler. So you can turn the hot water off for everyone if necessary or convenient. The maintenance issues are also different - hot-water pipes require more maintenance.
It's the same thing here. The internet architecture is about how packets (bits of information) are moved from point A to point B. There is nothing else here - just the bits of information and their movement. Even here though, we see how values of designers become manifested in the architecture (consider Sandra Braman's recent work). So ideas of transparency, anonymity and control as aspects of the system are very important.
What happens if we ask the 'user' though (assuming for example that we have decided that our notion of 'the user' are private individuals)? Users most likely won't tell you that anonymity is important to them. In fact, users will probably tell you that for the most part it is not important to them or they haven't thought about it. What is anonymity, how it is operationalized and who is anonymous to whom changes with the group you speak to. If you speak to hackers from the relatively "free" Europe, anonymity and ability to be untraceable is probably one of the most important things to them. However, if you consider similar communities in authoritarian countries, they would emphasize identifiability and transparency to the state as crucial for many of their activities. If you conceive of organizations or governments as your users, untraceability might be most unwelcome. You might want to ensure that governments can not limit content so that a government can not just decide to turn off Facebook because they want to stifle protest. Then again there are many cases where such limits may be arguably necessary (consider closed pedophile networks that often reside on social network sites).
The issue at stake here, as I see it, is that if we leave these things out of the architecture level, if packets will be identifiable and then can be made anonymous at the level of applications or policy, then they can easily be made identifiable again. If on the other hand packets are made anonymous (if the base internet architecture actually does not, can not keep track of identity) then identifiability would have to be created at the level of applications making it harder to retain and easier to slip back to anonymous.
Having said that, I think the question you need to answer first is, what CAN we address at the level of packets traveling through a network from point A to point B?
Given these, how can we identify which of these are important at the user level (having identified what we mean by the user) and why. This last one then is where asking for what people see as broken might be your first clue to what is important. IF you take infrastructure notions at their base, people only really notice infrastructures and their deficiencies when things break, so maybe we need to ask about what doesn't work first? Then, why is that important? Rank things brought up in these lists. Ask about annoyances (evidence that things are awkward or not working as people want, not integrating well into daily practices) and rank these annoyances too. Finally ask about potential outcomes of removing these annoyances - sometimes you can get regular people to follow trains of thought that can bring them to surprising places.
For example, in my work in Russia and Kazakhstan, I asked everyone the following question:
"If you were to wake up tomorrow and find that all social networks sites suddenly disappeared. Just poof and they are gone. How would you react to that?"
This brought up really interesting initial reactions and then explanations and ideas that at times surprised the interviewees themselves.
There are many ways to ask this question and others have asked it differently. I constructed that question with very specific ideas in mind. I wanted to ask about a loss of a service in a way that would imply that everyone lost access rather than the individual in question for two reasons:
I think the mental exercise of imagining what the world and your life might be like and how they might have to be reconfigured without something as profound and basic as plumbing, refrigeration or phone lines is an interesting one. It can highlight what people think is the most important aspect of their reliance on these technologies - what they do with it even as they do not think of it in their daily practice. It can also help shape our thinking of how these basic infrastructures might be productively reconfigured in the future. Of course, I have no idea if that is going to be the case.
Here is how I've been thinking about this - if you buy the Bowker and Starr's argument, infrastructure is invisible and that's where it needs to be for people to be able to use it effectively. That is, you want your plumbing to be in the walls and to deliver cold and hot water at the right times, offering a range of pricing options that allow you to get more for less (thnx Laura!). However, the shape of the city plumbing infrastructure and it's basic logic matters. There is a big difference between the plumbing infrastructure that is built around cold water delivered to residences and then heated on the spot vs. hot and cold water delivered via separate pipes coming from a central city boiler station. It implies a different set of costs and concerns down the line directly transferred to the end-user. So this is a question of where the boiler gets put and as a result, who is responsible for its maintenance and how many people get affected by outages if you want to push that metaphor further.
What this kind of toy example brings up are two things:
1. Who is the user - individual home owners? businesses? government organizations?
2. What are the tradeoffs? In the first example there is a lot of flexibility at the end-user level but also a lot of costs shifted directly to the user. There are questions of efficiency here as well as questions of ease of innovation and future development (harder to convince many homeowners to buy new boilers because you want to change the system to a more climate-friendly one for example). The latter system is efficient in different ways but also gives a lot more control to the entities controlling the central boiler. So you can turn the hot water off for everyone if necessary or convenient. The maintenance issues are also different - hot-water pipes require more maintenance.
It's the same thing here. The internet architecture is about how packets (bits of information) are moved from point A to point B. There is nothing else here - just the bits of information and their movement. Even here though, we see how values of designers become manifested in the architecture (consider Sandra Braman's recent work). So ideas of transparency, anonymity and control as aspects of the system are very important.
What happens if we ask the 'user' though (assuming for example that we have decided that our notion of 'the user' are private individuals)? Users most likely won't tell you that anonymity is important to them. In fact, users will probably tell you that for the most part it is not important to them or they haven't thought about it. What is anonymity, how it is operationalized and who is anonymous to whom changes with the group you speak to. If you speak to hackers from the relatively "free" Europe, anonymity and ability to be untraceable is probably one of the most important things to them. However, if you consider similar communities in authoritarian countries, they would emphasize identifiability and transparency to the state as crucial for many of their activities. If you conceive of organizations or governments as your users, untraceability might be most unwelcome. You might want to ensure that governments can not limit content so that a government can not just decide to turn off Facebook because they want to stifle protest. Then again there are many cases where such limits may be arguably necessary (consider closed pedophile networks that often reside on social network sites).
The issue at stake here, as I see it, is that if we leave these things out of the architecture level, if packets will be identifiable and then can be made anonymous at the level of applications or policy, then they can easily be made identifiable again. If on the other hand packets are made anonymous (if the base internet architecture actually does not, can not keep track of identity) then identifiability would have to be created at the level of applications making it harder to retain and easier to slip back to anonymous.
Having said that, I think the question you need to answer first is, what CAN we address at the level of packets traveling through a network from point A to point B?
- Access? - how much effort should we make at reaching the last mile through network architecture (flexible, ad hoc configurable, etc)
- Anonymity? - how much identifiable information about nodes and paths will be trackable and can we institute things like requisite data loss to ensure certain types of identifiable information are never available at the network level (so only available if the user gives permission at the application level).
- Transparency? - who can see what, at what point and what kinds of protocols are necessary to read the contents of a packet given security implementations for data integrity.
- End user flexibility vs. ease of broad-scale development?
Given these, how can we identify which of these are important at the user level (having identified what we mean by the user) and why. This last one then is where asking for what people see as broken might be your first clue to what is important. IF you take infrastructure notions at their base, people only really notice infrastructures and their deficiencies when things break, so maybe we need to ask about what doesn't work first? Then, why is that important? Rank things brought up in these lists. Ask about annoyances (evidence that things are awkward or not working as people want, not integrating well into daily practices) and rank these annoyances too. Finally ask about potential outcomes of removing these annoyances - sometimes you can get regular people to follow trains of thought that can bring them to surprising places.
For example, in my work in Russia and Kazakhstan, I asked everyone the following question:
"If you were to wake up tomorrow and find that all social networks sites suddenly disappeared. Just poof and they are gone. How would you react to that?"
This brought up really interesting initial reactions and then explanations and ideas that at times surprised the interviewees themselves.
There are many ways to ask this question and others have asked it differently. I constructed that question with very specific ideas in mind. I wanted to ask about a loss of a service in a way that would imply that everyone lost access rather than the individual in question for two reasons:
- if it's just you loosing access and everyone else still has it, this is exclusion and ostracism that has severe psychological and social implications in itself.
- having people imagine such excision of a service without any effect on others allows people to think what other services or things might come in to replace this given the current state of things, what other ways of doing something similar might be available, and also invites them to consider whether this particular activity is really something they want to continue doing. All of this assuming that everyone else would have to reconsider and shift and change too, so it's about creativity or 'going back to the roots' but not about exclusion.
I think the mental exercise of imagining what the world and your life might be like and how they might have to be reconfigured without something as profound and basic as plumbing, refrigeration or phone lines is an interesting one. It can highlight what people think is the most important aspect of their reliance on these technologies - what they do with it even as they do not think of it in their daily practice. It can also help shape our thinking of how these basic infrastructures might be productively reconfigured in the future. Of course, I have no idea if that is going to be the case.
27 February, 2012
If Facebook is the arbiter of speech then what are friends to do?
Tarleton Gillespi wrote a brilliant piece in Salon (reposted on Social Media Collective) on one little document that has been recently accidentially leaked. This is a curious document sent to Gawker media from a disgruntled employer that Facebook apparently uses to deliniate the rules and specific examples of how particular objectionable content ought to be dealt with on Facebook. Remember the "flag this" button? This is the guide to how to deal with the content you might have flagged - it needs humans to ascertain if it is indeed objectionable.
There are interesting and thorny issues here and Tarleton deals with these in turn, concerned with lines in the sand that must be drawn across the expanse of sand that is the content of Facebook. While Tarleton concedes that much of this content is a true form of sewage of human expression - the depravity that we occasionally sink to - some of it awful but harmless and some awful and extremely damaging. Free speech itself is a thorny issue - a political quagmire and a kind of "bright impossible ideal" that people with my background would understand better than anyone else. We know that "bright ideals" are impossible to ever reach, that they are necessary as a way to excite the public when explaining unsavory actions elsewhere, but that can not be made available to said public because said public would not be able to deal with it. Free speech is impossible because for it be free, we as people must be able to hear the kind of speech that can suddenly feel viscerally wrong for one reason or another. Free speech is not pretty and protection thereof is a thorny thing to do. In truth, there is no place in the world where there is such a thing that is "legally protected free speech" because everyplace there are legal restrictions on some kind of speech or other for whatever reason.
So speech and especially public speech is complicated and this is even more so for speech that is conducted in the weird parochial space of Facebook where it does not really feel as "public" and yet you might have forgotten the conservatives or radicals or ultra-liberals or gun-toting animal torturers you friended last year who used to be your high school classmates. When images of tortured animals start floating through the feed in front of your eyes or when your perfect picture of a baby breastfed by its mother upsets someone else - there is a kind of recourse offered by Facebook. No need to engage each other with particular forms of social sanctioning and pressure - the kind that physical communities develop to keep their members in line. No need to face the emotional difficulty of direct interaction of this kind. Just "flag this" quietly and anonymously and Facebook will deal with it directly in a way that is ironically "faceless". Social sanctioning is a difficult process and it requires investment and emotional costs from all parties involved. It can damage or substantially change the relationship. It may result in deliberate un-friending and ranting and ganging up on someone by rounding the friends that DID approve of the content. It is a very costly, difficult, at times prolonged, very rarely pretty process. There is a reason why groups and communities do it though - it is a social process that allows not only control of fringe elements or a kind of forced conformity to communally articulated standards and a resultant seeking of other outlets (a forcing of certain types of behavior underground). It is practically the only way for change of social norms and personal belief systems through argument and true emotional pain. Change is hard and social ostracism is extremely difficult both to adjudicate and to endure, and that is why it might force us to think and thinking is often what lacks in the production of such human sewage. In fact, I wonder whether the very option to "flag it" anonymously even allows the authors of the content to post it at all - the costs of posting socially minimal - so you upset you bleeding-heart academic friends with those pictures, so what? They weren't really "friends" just connected on Facebook, known from that ill-fated stint in grad school so many years ago. You KNOW who "flagged it" and it only confirmed your low opinion of THEM...
I agree with Tarleton's arguments in his article - the practice of Facebook is a manifestation of "ongoing longstanding debates about the content and character of public discourse". I agree that in many ways this document is evidence of Facebook taking on the mantle of a custodian of content - as it attempts to navigate thorny national issues in a kind of space it (and we) elevates as beyond national borders and boundaries. The issues Traleton brings about the questions that are not answered by this document and must continue to be asked about the particular of decision making are important. I find it intriguing and troubling that even content that is not flagged is under scrutiny since there are many groups on Facebook that have attempted to build insular networks where sharing of content that Facebook would clearly consider unpalatable is the community norm and the necessary pre-requisite to the kind of process and practice and work these groups perform for their members. This to me says that these groups will eventually get found and locked out as well and here the question will be with what effects for the groups and how many of these may have lead to the kinds of Arab Spring revolutions and how many supported child-porn rings?
Yet what I find fascinating here is how this particular practice is essential for Facebook users to continue to maintain the ragtag enormities of friendship links - the excision of various kinds of social costs associated with such unwiedly forms of connectedness through the opaqueness of feed algorithms and these types of reporting mechanisms. The only way Facebook can continue to grow is if it encourages an antisceptically positive space where any negativity is slipped under wraps and where potential social processes that could result in changes are routed and limited as these same social processes would result in substantial social costs. Facebook is trying to build a system where social connectedness is far less costly than the reality of daily living would have us believe. With what results?
10 September, 2011
How do technologies and services become indispensable?
Well I am not about to give you a recipe, but lets consider what happens to technologies in order for them to become indispensable. That is, these technologies must be integrated into the process of daily living - the everyday routines of getting things done, getting through the day and making self. The goal of much research in the HCI community is not just on developing innovating concepts or understanding the role of technology in everyday life, we are also aiming at changing everyday behavior or weaving technologies into the part of the everyday. Admit it, who wouldn't want to design the beginnings of the next ipod, invent the next twitter, skype or sms service, design a better facebook that is just as popular worldwide.
Sometimes technologies take over our lives, becoming indispensable to everyday functioning - imagine loosing access to you mobile phone or never again having access to the Internet? The world would radically change for you, wouldn't it?
There are other technologies though that we like to use, and find them certainly entertaining or even at times useful, but if tomorrow we were to wake up and find them missing, it wouldn't be the end of the world. In fact, we wouldn't do much more than shrug and move on. So far when we talk about technology being indispensable - we make the assumption that this is the case for all users. Logically though, it would seem to be obvious that there are differences between people when they say that technology is indispensable and when they don't much care whether it might vanish tomorrow. In my data I have three technological constructs - mobile phones, the internet and social network sites. I have asked people how they would feel if they were to wake up tomorrow and find each of these missing. The answers were as surprising as they were predictable. Would you be shocked to find out that most people could not imagine their world without mobile phones (though some could), about two thirds felt the world would go back to the dark ages if they were to loose access to the Internet (though a third couldn't care less) and that the vast majority felt they wouldn't be loosing all that much if SNSs were to vanish.
Ok, the first two were predictable. The people that didn't care for these never really "took" to them in the first place. The last one though, the SNSs, was a bit of a shocker because even the people who used the services frequently, those that had just talked my ear off about the wonders of reconnecting with former classmates or long lost friends, weren't bothered much. They shrugged and many even said they might then have more time to do other things - like meet people in person instead. There were a few that said their lives would have to be altered because they would loose an important daily tool, but these were few. What was the difference? How can this be if we take all of Facebook research at face value? SNS use is seen as positive and useful and increasing social capital and all that, and yet when asked to consider a sudden loss of the service, most users I've spoken you just shrug it off?????
Caveat of course - my research was conducted in places outside the Western world and my respondents were on average a decade or two older than the college students most research has considered so far (although Burke et al. work looks at random selections of FB users, if the age-range is slanted toward younger users and the sample is constrained by US-based users, the sample would nevertheless have a prevalence of users between 20 and 35).
Yet I think the things I am finding are useful for thinking what it is that seems to accompany integration into daily life and a particular technology becoming "indispensable" and when technologies remain on the periphery of life despite fulfilling useful functions. I can't really answer this definitively, but I can do a good start on that... we shall see, time to go ask the data what IT thinks on the topic.
Sometimes technologies take over our lives, becoming indispensable to everyday functioning - imagine loosing access to you mobile phone or never again having access to the Internet? The world would radically change for you, wouldn't it?
There are other technologies though that we like to use, and find them certainly entertaining or even at times useful, but if tomorrow we were to wake up and find them missing, it wouldn't be the end of the world. In fact, we wouldn't do much more than shrug and move on. So far when we talk about technology being indispensable - we make the assumption that this is the case for all users. Logically though, it would seem to be obvious that there are differences between people when they say that technology is indispensable and when they don't much care whether it might vanish tomorrow. In my data I have three technological constructs - mobile phones, the internet and social network sites. I have asked people how they would feel if they were to wake up tomorrow and find each of these missing. The answers were as surprising as they were predictable. Would you be shocked to find out that most people could not imagine their world without mobile phones (though some could), about two thirds felt the world would go back to the dark ages if they were to loose access to the Internet (though a third couldn't care less) and that the vast majority felt they wouldn't be loosing all that much if SNSs were to vanish.
Ok, the first two were predictable. The people that didn't care for these never really "took" to them in the first place. The last one though, the SNSs, was a bit of a shocker because even the people who used the services frequently, those that had just talked my ear off about the wonders of reconnecting with former classmates or long lost friends, weren't bothered much. They shrugged and many even said they might then have more time to do other things - like meet people in person instead. There were a few that said their lives would have to be altered because they would loose an important daily tool, but these were few. What was the difference? How can this be if we take all of Facebook research at face value? SNS use is seen as positive and useful and increasing social capital and all that, and yet when asked to consider a sudden loss of the service, most users I've spoken you just shrug it off?????
Caveat of course - my research was conducted in places outside the Western world and my respondents were on average a decade or two older than the college students most research has considered so far (although Burke et al. work looks at random selections of FB users, if the age-range is slanted toward younger users and the sample is constrained by US-based users, the sample would nevertheless have a prevalence of users between 20 and 35).
Yet I think the things I am finding are useful for thinking what it is that seems to accompany integration into daily life and a particular technology becoming "indispensable" and when technologies remain on the periphery of life despite fulfilling useful functions. I can't really answer this definitively, but I can do a good start on that... we shall see, time to go ask the data what IT thinks on the topic.
20 October, 2010
Virtual transnationalism?
In this world of digital objects and mediated conversations we can call just about anything "virtual" but when it comes to ideas of relating and concepts that have never been concrete - like transnationalism - adding the term "virtual" creates its own problems.
The notion of transnationalism started out in the early 20th century as a way to contest the idea of immigrant integration and moved into the ground of privilege, defined as an increase in the ability for the people of certain means and aspirations to communicate, interact and conduct business regardless of national boundaries whose significance is seen as receding due to globalization.
Transnationalism as a notion got a similar treatment in academia as anthropologists such as Peggy Levitt and later post-modern media theorists such as Arjun Appadurai theorized the concept into a new existence. Levitt and colleagues saw the idea of transnationalism rooted in migrant practices of establishing and maintaining links between the countries of their origin and settlement, often infused and relying on large amounts of energy, financial considerations and emotional investments. In this conceptualization, transnationalism was about local communities and distant spaces tied to each other by virtue of particular human links, technological means and ways of navigating geopolitical conditions. Scholars saw these as spaces of resistance to state impositions, spaces of, often inadvertent, political oppositions to the established order, hierarchy and attempts at cultural homogeneity. It was the dispossessed creating their own worlds of survival that extended beyond national boundaries and encompassed distant places affecting each other and producing hybrid cultural forms.
Appadurai, Ong and other theorists saw transnationalism also manifesting in that earlier privileged space of globe trotting academics and cosmopolitan refusal of settled belonging in favor of broadly defined non-culturally specific world-identities, where past and culture and nation were occasional reminders of pre-existing conditions once could transcend, while fighting to realize a new kind of transnational identity - where culture was a process not a thing, and where all existing definitions of belonging and self fell short.
In between these two extremes of the world, lies my research, my subjects and the odd notion of virtual transnationalism, where travel is rare and the purview of the privileged, where economic connections are profoundly local and removed from the relationships dubbed transnational, where the concept of emigration had at a point in time implied a permanent physical absence with little promise of future visits and where social network sites suddenly offered a promise of reconnection that brought about deeply emotional experiences of nostalgic remembrance and intimate exchanges of current status, but where the idea of transnationalism does not quite fit despite the ties spanning national boundaries and temporal differences - reconnecting not only with each other but also with a kind of past that is long gone.
So in my view, virtual transnationalism is nostalgic connections with ties who now reside across the world - where these connections are about the past and about the nostalgia of past relationships and yet the current locations situate and contextualize both the reminiscences and the discussions of where life is now. These are connections that are necessarily technologically mediated - they have to be because they are not sustainable when the costs of communication are too high. Yet these are also connections whose attractive accessibility through technology motivates said technology use. These are lapsed ties - where reconnections are not about reviving relationships but about catching up, dusting off, exchanging current news, reminiscing about the past, exchanging a bit of gossip and then laying them back to rest, only slightly less inaccessible now.
The notion of transnationalism started out in the early 20th century as a way to contest the idea of immigrant integration and moved into the ground of privilege, defined as an increase in the ability for the people of certain means and aspirations to communicate, interact and conduct business regardless of national boundaries whose significance is seen as receding due to globalization.
Transnationalism as a notion got a similar treatment in academia as anthropologists such as Peggy Levitt and later post-modern media theorists such as Arjun Appadurai theorized the concept into a new existence. Levitt and colleagues saw the idea of transnationalism rooted in migrant practices of establishing and maintaining links between the countries of their origin and settlement, often infused and relying on large amounts of energy, financial considerations and emotional investments. In this conceptualization, transnationalism was about local communities and distant spaces tied to each other by virtue of particular human links, technological means and ways of navigating geopolitical conditions. Scholars saw these as spaces of resistance to state impositions, spaces of, often inadvertent, political oppositions to the established order, hierarchy and attempts at cultural homogeneity. It was the dispossessed creating their own worlds of survival that extended beyond national boundaries and encompassed distant places affecting each other and producing hybrid cultural forms.
Appadurai, Ong and other theorists saw transnationalism also manifesting in that earlier privileged space of globe trotting academics and cosmopolitan refusal of settled belonging in favor of broadly defined non-culturally specific world-identities, where past and culture and nation were occasional reminders of pre-existing conditions once could transcend, while fighting to realize a new kind of transnational identity - where culture was a process not a thing, and where all existing definitions of belonging and self fell short.
In between these two extremes of the world, lies my research, my subjects and the odd notion of virtual transnationalism, where travel is rare and the purview of the privileged, where economic connections are profoundly local and removed from the relationships dubbed transnational, where the concept of emigration had at a point in time implied a permanent physical absence with little promise of future visits and where social network sites suddenly offered a promise of reconnection that brought about deeply emotional experiences of nostalgic remembrance and intimate exchanges of current status, but where the idea of transnationalism does not quite fit despite the ties spanning national boundaries and temporal differences - reconnecting not only with each other but also with a kind of past that is long gone.
So in my view, virtual transnationalism is nostalgic connections with ties who now reside across the world - where these connections are about the past and about the nostalgia of past relationships and yet the current locations situate and contextualize both the reminiscences and the discussions of where life is now. These are connections that are necessarily technologically mediated - they have to be because they are not sustainable when the costs of communication are too high. Yet these are also connections whose attractive accessibility through technology motivates said technology use. These are lapsed ties - where reconnections are not about reviving relationships but about catching up, dusting off, exchanging current news, reminiscing about the past, exchanging a bit of gossip and then laying them back to rest, only slightly less inaccessible now.
Greateness at what cost?
I have been trying to decide which smartphone to buy in order to join the smartphone crowd somewhat belatedly I suppose. Certainly there is the obvious response - buy an iphone, but I refuse to. I must admit, I am occasionally tempted by the easy user-interface and the ecstatic reports from friends. Yet I have a small problem with Apple and it's products. I think that Apple conducts some of the worst offenses and it's business practices are horrid. The enfant terrible of the tech world produces eye-candy technology of very high quality, but at what price to the people that work for it, the people that revolve in the world directly connected to the design and production of this technology and to the rest of us in this crazy world? So you might say I have principles... not very strong ones (I do use Apple products for a variety of purposes and I do admit their technology is in many ways superior to competitors), but they do exist. I limit my consumption of Apple products out of principle.
Apple is the darling child of the tech community that seems to be able to forgive and forget it's missteps and little crimes in favor of consumption of its brilliance. Some very long time ago, an art history teacher of mine in a class on Russian art told us how one of the brilliant well known artists of the last century was also implicated in occasionally having sex with very young peasant girls (of the pre-pubescent age) and then painting their portraits. He asked us then, whether these crimes had any impact on how we perceived the frankly brilliant paintings now that we knew that the majority of the subjects were also molested by the author. I was horrified, but at the same time, there was a part of me that readily excused the brilliance for having to get inspiration in such a horrific way. As I look on at the enfant terribles of this world - I wonder, why DO we excuse the brilliance for its occasional (or not so occasional) missteps? Why are some vicitimizations and little crimes overlooked when our gains, intellectual or technological, are seen as worthwhile? Is it because the product of that brilliance, no matter its source, is a source of pride and that is important to our little human minds that feel so much smaller in the presence thereof? Is it because the cost-benefit analysis somehow tips in favor of the product no matter its source? I am not sure, but the Apple cultish cabal is sometimes too much conceptually to really buy in to the all-apple product line. Then again, I did just buy an ipad.
Apple is the darling child of the tech community that seems to be able to forgive and forget it's missteps and little crimes in favor of consumption of its brilliance. Some very long time ago, an art history teacher of mine in a class on Russian art told us how one of the brilliant well known artists of the last century was also implicated in occasionally having sex with very young peasant girls (of the pre-pubescent age) and then painting their portraits. He asked us then, whether these crimes had any impact on how we perceived the frankly brilliant paintings now that we knew that the majority of the subjects were also molested by the author. I was horrified, but at the same time, there was a part of me that readily excused the brilliance for having to get inspiration in such a horrific way. As I look on at the enfant terribles of this world - I wonder, why DO we excuse the brilliance for its occasional (or not so occasional) missteps? Why are some vicitimizations and little crimes overlooked when our gains, intellectual or technological, are seen as worthwhile? Is it because the product of that brilliance, no matter its source, is a source of pride and that is important to our little human minds that feel so much smaller in the presence thereof? Is it because the cost-benefit analysis somehow tips in favor of the product no matter its source? I am not sure, but the Apple cultish cabal is sometimes too much conceptually to really buy in to the all-apple product line. Then again, I did just buy an ipad.
14 June, 2010
Russian gaming
Gaming is always present but it is elusive to some extent and different people engage in different kinds of games, often oblivious to other potential forms of entertainment available just a click or two away. In Russia gaming appears in all its forms from game-playing computer clubs that promote within and between club tournaments and serve food alongside use to the complex hybrid reality "night games" to the run of the mill farmville in social network sites. These "toys" as Russians call them, are mostly seen as inconsequential time-waster entertainment, available for relaxation or forms of socializing and mostly by no means a serious past-time. In fact, much of the language around these games uses terms of drug use, addiction and sickness only half in jest.
I first started hearing about Farmville and other Zynga knock-offs that had appeared on Russian social network sites when I was in Kazakhstan. In Moscow the story took on a slightly different turn. Initially, I was intrigued not so much by gaming, but by a somewhat startling increase in the use of Facebook as the favorite social network site for young, technically advanced and relatively financially well off respondents. Where last year Facebook only came up in conversation as a site for use with foreign friends or contacts that explicitly did not speak Russian, this year Facebook came up as one of a number of site where people hung out with their local friends. In fact, Facebook was more common specifically for hanging out with other young moscovites. I was intrigued and my respondents confidently explained that Facebook had become "cool" among a certain "kind of person" in Moscow just in the last six to eight months when suddenly everyone who was in any way interesting was using it incessantly... apparently in order to play Farmville and other assorted Zynga games. After getting into the games, they then got all of their friends to sign up and play as well, devising various methods of getting their friends to join in the madness, often terming this as "getting them hooked" in words specifically used to indicate introduction to intravenous drug use.
Where Farmville, although social because it is often played with friends (sort of), happens to be a slow and individual game, the very technically advanced users of smartphones are playing location-based games like four-square and Gowalla. Here the excitement is in the instant feedback of friends involved in the game and feeling of being perpetually connected and present. "If you are not using social media and if you are not on top of the buzz in Twitter, Gowalla, Facebook and all the rest, then you do not exist!" was the statement I had heard several times from the diehard fans of all things social media. They insisted on existing in their respective favorite social media realms (seemingly as many as possible at the same time) yet they insisted on meeting in person and frequently hanging out as well.
Neither the Farmville players nor the location-based Gowalla-gamers however, were particularly interested in a third kind of game playing that I frequently encountered in the interstices between IT professionals and the less sophisticated users of social network sites. These players of what they themselves termed "night games" were of a different kind - often technologically proficient but not IT professionals, calling the game an "alternative form of entertainment" - the players here were dedicated to the idea of being different and engaging in a kind of activity that might not be understood by the mainstream but that was ultimately an intense bonding experience. Every player that I had spoken to expressed one particular idea about the game that seemed an important reason for their attraction to the whole idea. It was the notion that real life stopped outside the realm of the game and inside the game space, whether on the online discussion boards or during the game itself, the rank, file and social standing of each player played zero difference. Young teenage kids reprimanded men and women in their 40s and got agreement and acquiescence. The game to them was an ultimate expression of democracy and equality where external and commonly culturally accepted markers of status did not count.
The game had spread like wildfire throughout eastern Europe and FSU countries, mostly depending on the extensive russian speaking diaspora. There had been attempts to bring the game to Western Europe and the US as well, but law enforcement in those countries did not look quite so positively on random groups of people running around abandoned urban areas at night with flashlights. There was a lot of location-based technology and mobile internet use in game, but once again purely in service of the game at hand and not for gathering of status or points of any other kind. The game was about extending yourself and going outside safe boundary zones both socially and physically and people involved cherished both kinds of experience. The most intriguing aspect of the conversation about the game with one of the ardent promoters of the game was his story about their attempts to spread the game out to China. They had tried to run similar games there both in Russian and in Chinese, but got few takers and little traction. They hadn't been able to really figure out why but had given up for now.
I've been trying to think where these games are in the scheme of the everyday life and why they are both really important to some people and utterly incomprehensibly silly and unnecessary to most others. Where some games are there to feel minor achievements in the haze of everyday busy life and other games are all-night efforts of pushing yourself beyond your limits and running around basements with a team of others competing for some odd codes written in dusty corners, where members of teams often playing together in the same town may not even know each others' names, only game-handles and never find that particularly limited by a complete lack of knowledge of each others' background. In fact, for many that's exactly the point of the game... and the only way the could play it. Is it escapism? Is it a way to increase social capital without making it all about conscious calculation? Is it just entertainment? Or is this entertainment of a specific, post-soviet flavor? I don't yet know...
I first started hearing about Farmville and other Zynga knock-offs that had appeared on Russian social network sites when I was in Kazakhstan. In Moscow the story took on a slightly different turn. Initially, I was intrigued not so much by gaming, but by a somewhat startling increase in the use of Facebook as the favorite social network site for young, technically advanced and relatively financially well off respondents. Where last year Facebook only came up in conversation as a site for use with foreign friends or contacts that explicitly did not speak Russian, this year Facebook came up as one of a number of site where people hung out with their local friends. In fact, Facebook was more common specifically for hanging out with other young moscovites. I was intrigued and my respondents confidently explained that Facebook had become "cool" among a certain "kind of person" in Moscow just in the last six to eight months when suddenly everyone who was in any way interesting was using it incessantly... apparently in order to play Farmville and other assorted Zynga games. After getting into the games, they then got all of their friends to sign up and play as well, devising various methods of getting their friends to join in the madness, often terming this as "getting them hooked" in words specifically used to indicate introduction to intravenous drug use.
Where Farmville, although social because it is often played with friends (sort of), happens to be a slow and individual game, the very technically advanced users of smartphones are playing location-based games like four-square and Gowalla. Here the excitement is in the instant feedback of friends involved in the game and feeling of being perpetually connected and present. "If you are not using social media and if you are not on top of the buzz in Twitter, Gowalla, Facebook and all the rest, then you do not exist!" was the statement I had heard several times from the diehard fans of all things social media. They insisted on existing in their respective favorite social media realms (seemingly as many as possible at the same time) yet they insisted on meeting in person and frequently hanging out as well.
Neither the Farmville players nor the location-based Gowalla-gamers however, were particularly interested in a third kind of game playing that I frequently encountered in the interstices between IT professionals and the less sophisticated users of social network sites. These players of what they themselves termed "night games" were of a different kind - often technologically proficient but not IT professionals, calling the game an "alternative form of entertainment" - the players here were dedicated to the idea of being different and engaging in a kind of activity that might not be understood by the mainstream but that was ultimately an intense bonding experience. Every player that I had spoken to expressed one particular idea about the game that seemed an important reason for their attraction to the whole idea. It was the notion that real life stopped outside the realm of the game and inside the game space, whether on the online discussion boards or during the game itself, the rank, file and social standing of each player played zero difference. Young teenage kids reprimanded men and women in their 40s and got agreement and acquiescence. The game to them was an ultimate expression of democracy and equality where external and commonly culturally accepted markers of status did not count.
The game had spread like wildfire throughout eastern Europe and FSU countries, mostly depending on the extensive russian speaking diaspora. There had been attempts to bring the game to Western Europe and the US as well, but law enforcement in those countries did not look quite so positively on random groups of people running around abandoned urban areas at night with flashlights. There was a lot of location-based technology and mobile internet use in game, but once again purely in service of the game at hand and not for gathering of status or points of any other kind. The game was about extending yourself and going outside safe boundary zones both socially and physically and people involved cherished both kinds of experience. The most intriguing aspect of the conversation about the game with one of the ardent promoters of the game was his story about their attempts to spread the game out to China. They had tried to run similar games there both in Russian and in Chinese, but got few takers and little traction. They hadn't been able to really figure out why but had given up for now.
I've been trying to think where these games are in the scheme of the everyday life and why they are both really important to some people and utterly incomprehensibly silly and unnecessary to most others. Where some games are there to feel minor achievements in the haze of everyday busy life and other games are all-night efforts of pushing yourself beyond your limits and running around basements with a team of others competing for some odd codes written in dusty corners, where members of teams often playing together in the same town may not even know each others' names, only game-handles and never find that particularly limited by a complete lack of knowledge of each others' background. In fact, for many that's exactly the point of the game... and the only way the could play it. Is it escapism? Is it a way to increase social capital without making it all about conscious calculation? Is it just entertainment? Or is this entertainment of a specific, post-soviet flavor? I don't yet know...
02 June, 2010
The Russian IT Community
The Russian IT community is far more mature than its Kazakh counterpart and they see the Kazakh community as several years if not half a decade behind in expertise, ability and financial solvency to ensure production of data that is necessary for the industry to go forward - real, well collected data about Internet use. There are large and public IT powerhouses such as the search engine Yandex or the mail system Mail.ru as well as smaller but no less agile and financially solvent systems for businesses and IT development companies that are less visible to the public. There are many investors with money, interested and willing to invest substantial amounts into start up IT businesses than there are actual good ideas for said start ups to move things forward. An IT professional I had met over tea mentioned that he had heard not one but two ideas that week that might be worth a million rubles each (30 rubles = 1$) and that might actually know how to spend that money wisely. He excitedly repeated that fact to me several times throughout our conversation.
Both the IT giants and the smaller companies haven't yet quite figured out the value of user experience engineering, but they are learning very quickly. I met someone who for all intents and purposes does the function of a user experience engineer at Yandex although she does not quite perceive herself as such. The IT market here is moving and they actually make real money (unlike Kazakhstan where not a single Internet-based business makes over $500K a year in revenue so far except of course for the providers, but that's a story best told with reflections over pirated content traffic). Most of the money is made in the capital (Moscow) and its northern counterpart of St. Petersburg but the regional centers are important as well.
Curiously, regional internet use patterns differ in fairly specific ways according to data collected by Yandex and several other independent data sources (see infact.ru). Where Yandex with its mail services, news, search, maps and games dominates main population centers, regionally, mail.ru is more popular for nearly everything except for search. For search Google and Yandex compete far more closely in the regions than in large population centers where Yandex rules. For most intents and purposes however, Google (if you don't count Youtube) and Facebook do not present competition to their Russian counterparts. The explanations that people at Yandex gave me for the regional vs. population center differences were fascinating and profoundly culturally based with an emphasis on levels of sophistication and recognition for quality as the main culprits.
Another regional difference that seems to be important at the very least for people who live either in St. Petersburg or Moscow is the prominence of one or another social network site as the main hangout place for its residents. Vkontakte is perceived in Moscow as THE St. Petersburg site. Everyone in St. Pete is on Vkontakte regardless of age or anything else. "It's a St. Pete local thing, 'cause Durov (the founder of vkontakte) is from there" one of my respondents confided. Many people in Moscow have a profile there as well, but this is very much age and social class dependent. Older people still hang out on odnoklassniki despite the fact that the site now requires pay for many types of uses including initial registration. Younger people are mostly on vkontakte, although the upper to upper-middle class 25 to 35 contingent of Moscovites is now suddenly hanging out on Facebook (and I am told this has to do with gaming of Farmville type where descriptions of such forms of gaming are always presented using a very specific vocabulary of drug addiction). The people from infact.ru however tell me that this increase is insignificant still, because Facebook hasn't even surpassed Twitter in Moscow yet (and Twitter use is minor though on the rise). Facebook of course has to compete with vkontakte here that happens to have what they themselves call 'an unfair advantage'. Vkontakte is the largest database of pirated music and video in Russia at the moment, all contributed by its users. So far, it has been able to do so with impunity, however, just the other day it has received its' first legal challenge from a local content-distribution entrepreneur.
The IT community in Russia and generally the technical elite is heavily using Twitter, FriendFeed, LiveJournal, FaceBook and other networking, self-presentation social software all at the same time. It is also a fairly small and interconnected community. Small enough that apparently my short visit had generated enough generally positive noise on Twitter to even get back to me as weird sort of third-party feedback that hopefully will pave the way to more productive meetings in St. Petersburg.
Both the IT giants and the smaller companies haven't yet quite figured out the value of user experience engineering, but they are learning very quickly. I met someone who for all intents and purposes does the function of a user experience engineer at Yandex although she does not quite perceive herself as such. The IT market here is moving and they actually make real money (unlike Kazakhstan where not a single Internet-based business makes over $500K a year in revenue so far except of course for the providers, but that's a story best told with reflections over pirated content traffic). Most of the money is made in the capital (Moscow) and its northern counterpart of St. Petersburg but the regional centers are important as well.
Curiously, regional internet use patterns differ in fairly specific ways according to data collected by Yandex and several other independent data sources (see infact.ru). Where Yandex with its mail services, news, search, maps and games dominates main population centers, regionally, mail.ru is more popular for nearly everything except for search. For search Google and Yandex compete far more closely in the regions than in large population centers where Yandex rules. For most intents and purposes however, Google (if you don't count Youtube) and Facebook do not present competition to their Russian counterparts. The explanations that people at Yandex gave me for the regional vs. population center differences were fascinating and profoundly culturally based with an emphasis on levels of sophistication and recognition for quality as the main culprits.
Another regional difference that seems to be important at the very least for people who live either in St. Petersburg or Moscow is the prominence of one or another social network site as the main hangout place for its residents. Vkontakte is perceived in Moscow as THE St. Petersburg site. Everyone in St. Pete is on Vkontakte regardless of age or anything else. "It's a St. Pete local thing, 'cause Durov (the founder of vkontakte) is from there" one of my respondents confided. Many people in Moscow have a profile there as well, but this is very much age and social class dependent. Older people still hang out on odnoklassniki despite the fact that the site now requires pay for many types of uses including initial registration. Younger people are mostly on vkontakte, although the upper to upper-middle class 25 to 35 contingent of Moscovites is now suddenly hanging out on Facebook (and I am told this has to do with gaming of Farmville type where descriptions of such forms of gaming are always presented using a very specific vocabulary of drug addiction). The people from infact.ru however tell me that this increase is insignificant still, because Facebook hasn't even surpassed Twitter in Moscow yet (and Twitter use is minor though on the rise). Facebook of course has to compete with vkontakte here that happens to have what they themselves call 'an unfair advantage'. Vkontakte is the largest database of pirated music and video in Russia at the moment, all contributed by its users. So far, it has been able to do so with impunity, however, just the other day it has received its' first legal challenge from a local content-distribution entrepreneur.
The IT community in Russia and generally the technical elite is heavily using Twitter, FriendFeed, LiveJournal, FaceBook and other networking, self-presentation social software all at the same time. It is also a fairly small and interconnected community. Small enough that apparently my short visit had generated enough generally positive noise on Twitter to even get back to me as weird sort of third-party feedback that hopefully will pave the way to more productive meetings in St. Petersburg.
30 May, 2010
Moscow colors and specificities
First impressions are often most striking and at the same time most faulty, sensitive as they are to the random collection of momentary images. Moscow greeted me with long lines at the border, taxi hawkers, a very nice airport to city train and rush hour in the metro where trains arrive every 20 to 30 seconds, all of them full to bursting with a mass of people that pretty much carries you in and out of the stations. Moscow is modern, it has a sense of Europe, there is a coffee house on every block (sometime several in a row), internet cafe's nearby with a reasonable rich city frequency nestling inside hip galleries and public libraries, expensive stores, lots of street food and old grandmothers selling flowers and greenery on the corners. The metro is one of the most efficient transport systems in the world but it does not quite manage the flow of people despite the effort. The traffic is frightening and the tourist guide suggests using ONLY cross-walks and underground crossings if one were to desire to remain unharmed by the crazy driving patterns.
For the last decade Moscow has had blue-siren cars of the very important people that have the right to break all the rules, drive against traffic pass on the sidewalks, etc, in order to get around traffic with impunity. In the last few months, after futile attempts of the Moscow government to remove these privileges, citizens took matters into their own hands, making fun of the important people by attaching blue plastic buckets onto the roofs of their cars or putting them on their heads.
http://rutube.ru/tracks/3254325.html?v=24063637140b9b1b4be96cc28018a9ae
http://www.rferl.org/video/7064.html
I am looking for people to interview and I am starting with house cleaning ladies, young IT professionals and Encounter players (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_%28game%29) along with my usual collection of young and well to do professionals and occasionally their parents. Odnoklassniki still rules and so does vkontakte, Facebook is for foreign contacts and now it is also for hip Moscovites and all of St. Pete is on vkontakte just because. Things have changed and they have stayed the same as I walked along Tretyakovskaya Gallery with A. Voiskonski who has been studying mediated communication in Russia for the last 15 years and knows all of the big HCI names in the business. The internet is pushing, pulling, creating opportunities and I hear a lot of mentions of odnoklassniki and vkontakte as I walk along the streets and I sit in cafe's. These usually come in the context of talking about finding people and about being found... being found seems to be a more uncomfortable experience because being found is usually by those classmate and contacts that are less welcome. The contact with the past is still very important but little of it actually moves toward creating new ties or new experiences or opportunities. It is about the past, the pictures, the catching up and the experience of being similar back then. It is still important....
Moscow is all colors and gorgeous people and ugly moments, as when I watched the paramedics roughly throw in and zip up a corpse of a middle-aged tattooed man in a sailor shirt and dirty rolled up khakis into a black plastic bag before loading him into an ambulance. This in the center of a gorgeous green boulevard, just down the street from a photo exhibit with many drunk youth hanging out just feet away and laughing at the silent horror of the moment. A man in a tight biking outfit on an expensive bike held out his phone, recording the whole thing on video, likely to show up later some place on youtube. The cops just looked on and the medics moved quickly, roughly but efficiently. We walked on, along with crowds of other people, off toward the historic Arbat street, discussing the latest atrocities of Moscow, the frivolities of police - http://abcnews.go.com/International/human-shield-tactic-latest-moscow-police-scandal/story?id=10083153 and the general firm knowledge that the only thing that protects anyone from anything in this place is money and a lot of it. And yet in the story of the human shield and the blue buckets, the Internet had played an important and interesting role of making it less possible to simply ignore what is happening and making it possible to at least question if not actually affect change...
For the last decade Moscow has had blue-siren cars of the very important people that have the right to break all the rules, drive against traffic pass on the sidewalks, etc, in order to get around traffic with impunity. In the last few months, after futile attempts of the Moscow government to remove these privileges, citizens took matters into their own hands, making fun of the important people by attaching blue plastic buckets onto the roofs of their cars or putting them on their heads.
http://rutube.ru/tracks/3254325.html?v=24063637140b9b1b4be96cc28018a9ae
http://www.rferl.org/video/7064.html
I am looking for people to interview and I am starting with house cleaning ladies, young IT professionals and Encounter players (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_%28game%29) along with my usual collection of young and well to do professionals and occasionally their parents. Odnoklassniki still rules and so does vkontakte, Facebook is for foreign contacts and now it is also for hip Moscovites and all of St. Pete is on vkontakte just because. Things have changed and they have stayed the same as I walked along Tretyakovskaya Gallery with A. Voiskonski who has been studying mediated communication in Russia for the last 15 years and knows all of the big HCI names in the business. The internet is pushing, pulling, creating opportunities and I hear a lot of mentions of odnoklassniki and vkontakte as I walk along the streets and I sit in cafe's. These usually come in the context of talking about finding people and about being found... being found seems to be a more uncomfortable experience because being found is usually by those classmate and contacts that are less welcome. The contact with the past is still very important but little of it actually moves toward creating new ties or new experiences or opportunities. It is about the past, the pictures, the catching up and the experience of being similar back then. It is still important....
Moscow is all colors and gorgeous people and ugly moments, as when I watched the paramedics roughly throw in and zip up a corpse of a middle-aged tattooed man in a sailor shirt and dirty rolled up khakis into a black plastic bag before loading him into an ambulance. This in the center of a gorgeous green boulevard, just down the street from a photo exhibit with many drunk youth hanging out just feet away and laughing at the silent horror of the moment. A man in a tight biking outfit on an expensive bike held out his phone, recording the whole thing on video, likely to show up later some place on youtube. The cops just looked on and the medics moved quickly, roughly but efficiently. We walked on, along with crowds of other people, off toward the historic Arbat street, discussing the latest atrocities of Moscow, the frivolities of police - http://abcnews.go.com/International/human-shield-tactic-latest-moscow-police-scandal/story?id=10083153 and the general firm knowledge that the only thing that protects anyone from anything in this place is money and a lot of it. And yet in the story of the human shield and the blue buckets, the Internet had played an important and interesting role of making it less possible to simply ignore what is happening and making it possible to at least question if not actually affect change...
29 May, 2010
Moscow, here we go again...
I am heading to Moscow today to start another two weeks of fieldwork in Moscow and then in St. Petersburg. I am not treating these trips as intended to actually collect a lot of user data, but as set up trips for more contacts for the future. I am meeting more with academics and IT professionals than doing interviews, because the bulk of interviews, I am hoping to get in Novosibirsk and Tumen' in July. Moscow and St. Pete are not Russia, they are beasts onto themselves that are completely different experiences of Russianness than anywhere else. Nevertheless, these are important because they are central both for money and for education.
Russia greeted me with the usual collection of issues of getting in - the visa was ridiculously expensive and the organization that apparently is inviting me to do business happens to be the Olympic committee of Russia (which incidentally issues lots of invitations to a wide range of people and is the most common invite source). I am guessing this is how someone in the Olympic committee makes money while they do not need to invite lots of athletes - the down-times activity. Russia is a place where everything can be solved with money and I occasionally catch myself for starting to think that this is a normal way of doing things in the world... At least I will feel right at home in China then later on in the year...
Russia greeted me with the usual collection of issues of getting in - the visa was ridiculously expensive and the organization that apparently is inviting me to do business happens to be the Olympic committee of Russia (which incidentally issues lots of invitations to a wide range of people and is the most common invite source). I am guessing this is how someone in the Olympic committee makes money while they do not need to invite lots of athletes - the down-times activity. Russia is a place where everything can be solved with money and I occasionally catch myself for starting to think that this is a normal way of doing things in the world... At least I will feel right at home in China then later on in the year...
18 April, 2010
BarCamp 2010 Almaty
I am at BarCamp this weekend, flew here straight from Aktau and it feels so good to be surrounded by a huge number of geeks! Here they are, dragging around laptops, wires and charges, video cameras and AV equipment and it's really familiar and refreshing. BarCamp this year is tending toward more commercial, with a lot of new projects presenting their wearz, and lots of glitter from sponsors. There was little actual talk of policy, politics and issues was rare and mainly showed up in intimate little circles around the tables in the break room.
Finally, on the second day the Soros foundation sponsored a panel where they invited a government and a civic representative of the organizations responsible or somehow positioned in charge of controlling and developing kaznet. The politics is boiling underneath and it came out immediately boiling and unordered... There are a lot of opinions and a lot of arguing and the conversation immediately reminded me the kind of non-conversation that shows up whenever things like DRM is discussed in the US... The main thing is - regulating the Internet is very very difficult and basically impossible and it is all about politics and political leanings and ideas. The tempers run high but the majority of the audience is bored... the girl next to me is playing sudoku on her phone.
There is a lot of criticism, but there is little concrete suggestion, there are many fairly myopic statements and the professional commentators point out the issues with the commentary. They talk about the reality of central asia where users are powerless and regulating is a hard question. The most disconcerting thing about this panel is that it is very short (only an hour) and includes five very smart people from all over FSU, but only two are giving presentations and accepting questions from the audience. It was a space to vent and people vented but as the only time to vent it was not very constructive.
In general, however, barcamp was a lot of fun despite my general allergy to all easy net-based money-making schemes and pronouncements on the account of the brilliant future of the Internet. The energy of IT guys was really infectious and the fact that some people managed to smuggle kyrgyz bloggers across the very much closed border to participate was impressive. There were bloggers and IT developers from Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia, Armenia and of course Kazakhstan. These appear to be the most active countries on the Internet from the FSU space if you don't count the baltic region (who have a wholly different relationship to the FSU in general). What was curious was that there weren't many actual IT developers and many bloggers freely admitted they had very little IT knowledge. There was little overt and official political discussion, but politics was everywhere, in the very presence of the Kyrgyz, in the occasional snippets of personal conversations around various tables, in the very groupings of people (who they sat with and who they talked with). There was little discussion of social impact and even less discussion of the political potential of the Internet, but the subtext was obvious...
Overall, there was an impressive amount of energy and the startups were interesting because many were not only about advertisement money but also developed as real attempts to change the physical environment through new media and to do it both on the level of the government and on the level of the average user, interested in where they live. These people really cared not only about developing great successful resources that might make them money, but in some cases the kinds of resources that actually might change their world.
There were other interesting moments, however. At some point, one of the biggest Kazakh bloggers who had won a bunch of awards for his blog, pointed something really important out to me. The kazakh language bloggers were not mixing with everyone else. They talked to the Kyrgyz a bit and to the Uzbeks but generally they were hanging out by themselves. He pointed out one particular ethnically Kazakh blogger who blogged in both languages (kazakh and russian) but because he was hanging out a lot with the russians, the kazakh tended to shun him and to ignore his posts. 'You just can't win and this is really dangerous', my guide told me and fretted, 'it's just starting and it is already really evident and we just can't afford this kind of splitting, we won't be able to accomplish anything then!' For their part, the Russian language bloggers simply dismissed these worries, although occasionally acknowledging the presence and the influence of the kazakh language bloggers. I heard a lot of straight out racist - 'the kazakh are just lazy and besides they don't have a diaspora, who do they need to talk to' kinds of statements even from people who are deeply aware of the politics and generally tend to be very much of a liberal bend. It was startling and at the same time kind of expected - these ethnic tensions have been in place here (and everywhere else in FSU) for eons, there is no reason for them to change and there is every reason for them to become glaringly obvious as they get reflected on the Internet.
After Barcamp was over, I kept running into various participants all over town. Almaty is a small city and the wireless hotspots are well known it appears.
Finally, on the second day the Soros foundation sponsored a panel where they invited a government and a civic representative of the organizations responsible or somehow positioned in charge of controlling and developing kaznet. The politics is boiling underneath and it came out immediately boiling and unordered... There are a lot of opinions and a lot of arguing and the conversation immediately reminded me the kind of non-conversation that shows up whenever things like DRM is discussed in the US... The main thing is - regulating the Internet is very very difficult and basically impossible and it is all about politics and political leanings and ideas. The tempers run high but the majority of the audience is bored... the girl next to me is playing sudoku on her phone.
There is a lot of criticism, but there is little concrete suggestion, there are many fairly myopic statements and the professional commentators point out the issues with the commentary. They talk about the reality of central asia where users are powerless and regulating is a hard question. The most disconcerting thing about this panel is that it is very short (only an hour) and includes five very smart people from all over FSU, but only two are giving presentations and accepting questions from the audience. It was a space to vent and people vented but as the only time to vent it was not very constructive.
In general, however, barcamp was a lot of fun despite my general allergy to all easy net-based money-making schemes and pronouncements on the account of the brilliant future of the Internet. The energy of IT guys was really infectious and the fact that some people managed to smuggle kyrgyz bloggers across the very much closed border to participate was impressive. There were bloggers and IT developers from Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia, Armenia and of course Kazakhstan. These appear to be the most active countries on the Internet from the FSU space if you don't count the baltic region (who have a wholly different relationship to the FSU in general). What was curious was that there weren't many actual IT developers and many bloggers freely admitted they had very little IT knowledge. There was little overt and official political discussion, but politics was everywhere, in the very presence of the Kyrgyz, in the occasional snippets of personal conversations around various tables, in the very groupings of people (who they sat with and who they talked with). There was little discussion of social impact and even less discussion of the political potential of the Internet, but the subtext was obvious...
Overall, there was an impressive amount of energy and the startups were interesting because many were not only about advertisement money but also developed as real attempts to change the physical environment through new media and to do it both on the level of the government and on the level of the average user, interested in where they live. These people really cared not only about developing great successful resources that might make them money, but in some cases the kinds of resources that actually might change their world.
There were other interesting moments, however. At some point, one of the biggest Kazakh bloggers who had won a bunch of awards for his blog, pointed something really important out to me. The kazakh language bloggers were not mixing with everyone else. They talked to the Kyrgyz a bit and to the Uzbeks but generally they were hanging out by themselves. He pointed out one particular ethnically Kazakh blogger who blogged in both languages (kazakh and russian) but because he was hanging out a lot with the russians, the kazakh tended to shun him and to ignore his posts. 'You just can't win and this is really dangerous', my guide told me and fretted, 'it's just starting and it is already really evident and we just can't afford this kind of splitting, we won't be able to accomplish anything then!' For their part, the Russian language bloggers simply dismissed these worries, although occasionally acknowledging the presence and the influence of the kazakh language bloggers. I heard a lot of straight out racist - 'the kazakh are just lazy and besides they don't have a diaspora, who do they need to talk to' kinds of statements even from people who are deeply aware of the politics and generally tend to be very much of a liberal bend. It was startling and at the same time kind of expected - these ethnic tensions have been in place here (and everywhere else in FSU) for eons, there is no reason for them to change and there is every reason for them to become glaringly obvious as they get reflected on the Internet.
After Barcamp was over, I kept running into various participants all over town. Almaty is a small city and the wireless hotspots are well known it appears.
16 April, 2010
laws, politics and the everyday
I've been looking for explanations of how people who run Internet resources here in Kazakhstan deal with government control. Today, I got a story complete with details of each move and what happened and how things are managed. I wanted to post it here and suddenly realized that I can not because even if there is that vanishingly small possibility of this post being seen and read and figured out by someone from here that might do damage, I simply can not afford that chance. So I will simply contain my observations to generalized commentary and some stories of some less controversial that I had today. I guess like everyone who has done research in areas like this, at some point you encounter stories that explain a lot about what is going on, but turn out to be ethically untellable, unless in intimate company with a lot of drink, safely out of the way of any public forums. This place is complicated, the Internet IS politics and the people that talk to me end up trusting me if they tell me stories like this. I am lucky because I have what they call here 'a light hand' - that is in the course of hanging out with me people find that things, random events, seem to come out the right way and luck generally comes together. So people tend to trust me, they tell me that I am so American in being so open, but they enjoy it and somehow tell me things with little prodding and with minimal convincing that their stories are safe with me... But they are safe...
Aktau is in many ways unique because they are not one of the two main cities, they are a small town but they are fueled by oil money and a steady number of foreigners hang out here on that account. That means that there is a reason for developing the Internet and making it available and there is a steady base for internet-based businesses or at least one of them to develop and make money. The particular business in question is focused on providing a business directory to the local consumer and they have done well enough to generate a separate business (now owned by someone else) that includes a forum for discussions (because people desperately wanted to talk). The most interesting thing about the business directory is that it includes a system of comments by the users, where the owner spent a lot of time cultivating a culture of cogent, smart commentary, often even deleting comments that were within the rule boundaries but were basically nonsensical. After installing a rating system for comments, he finally got the space to the level the majority of commentary is of very intelligent level that is useful to others. Of course he constantly moderates comments and tells me that he basically does not sleep because a lot of commentary is made at night. He also drives around the town every couple of days because a lot of his business partners and clients require in-person TLC for the extraction of money owed for the services. This is an Internet-business with an intense in-person aspect which is typical of Kazakhstan in general but is probably even more important in areas outside Almaty and Astana.
Generally, in my conversations with average Internet users in Aktau, this particular site shows up among people interested in local events and in the goings on in the country in general. It was telling when the 20-year old I interviewed yesterday brought up the site and the most important, but then expanded on how she self-educated and is interested in the local developments in the country on the account of her chosen profession of international relations. The bunch of 20-year olds that I spoke to today, did not look at anything that did not initially smell and act like a major search engine (yandex.ru or google.kz) or a social network site (moimir.ru). Whereas their a bit older boss immediately brought up not only the local site but also several other very much kazakhstan-related news sites like nomad.su or zonakz.net and even admitted to occasionally checking respublika-kz.info (and given here bashful admission of occasionally checking this oppositional site I did not start pressing whether she might have checked the comments section to, since that section is actually normally blocked in Kazakhstan in most places although not in Aktau, but that is where the sharpest and the most oppositional opinions are discussed).
As she sat there, in her office, underneath the portrait of the president, I did not have the heart to press her about her political curiosities, given the amount of time that she had devoted to me. Instead we talked lightly about how the youth was less interested in the local and found the global connections so much attractive, how they are not yet interested in the place where they actually live. I wondered why that may be the case and when I asked the group what they would do if tomorrow someone had turned off the Internet for good, they all gasped in horror. But when I asked what they would do if tomorrow someone had turned off the SNSs and other socialization tools, the reaction was one of resignation- well then some of those connections will get lost... and that's not so good, but not so bad either, because the people you care about, you already have their phone number. Besides, everyone needs a break from SNSs from time to time anyway because they get boring, so that's ok.
The most fascinating thing about today though, was to realize just how scared people here are, especially people in business of the 'big guys' and how powerless they feel. All of the youngsters were talking about either Russian or Western sites like Yandex, Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte, Mail.ru, Facebook or Google as their main sources of social contact or information. Even if their eventual destination is some place inside the kaznet space, they start with the search engine anyway and it is always either yandex or google, where they normally get their news as well. The business owners are simply waiting for Google, Ebay etc to come into the market and take over, and they hope that they will be the logical choice for the local representative. I can no longer count how many times I heard the statement - we have no chance, we just have to hope we don't remain in the stone age for too long. I must admit the fear it logical because Kazakhstan has few resources and even fewer sources of knowledge and brilliance, given that education is for sale and the particulars of power make sales, contacts and immediate gain far more important than longer range planning. The fear, the desperation and the resignation is palpable... and then this morning I got woken up by a phone call telling me that the largest forum in Kazakhstan has been shut down... what gives?
Aktau is in many ways unique because they are not one of the two main cities, they are a small town but they are fueled by oil money and a steady number of foreigners hang out here on that account. That means that there is a reason for developing the Internet and making it available and there is a steady base for internet-based businesses or at least one of them to develop and make money. The particular business in question is focused on providing a business directory to the local consumer and they have done well enough to generate a separate business (now owned by someone else) that includes a forum for discussions (because people desperately wanted to talk). The most interesting thing about the business directory is that it includes a system of comments by the users, where the owner spent a lot of time cultivating a culture of cogent, smart commentary, often even deleting comments that were within the rule boundaries but were basically nonsensical. After installing a rating system for comments, he finally got the space to the level the majority of commentary is of very intelligent level that is useful to others. Of course he constantly moderates comments and tells me that he basically does not sleep because a lot of commentary is made at night. He also drives around the town every couple of days because a lot of his business partners and clients require in-person TLC for the extraction of money owed for the services. This is an Internet-business with an intense in-person aspect which is typical of Kazakhstan in general but is probably even more important in areas outside Almaty and Astana.
Generally, in my conversations with average Internet users in Aktau, this particular site shows up among people interested in local events and in the goings on in the country in general. It was telling when the 20-year old I interviewed yesterday brought up the site and the most important, but then expanded on how she self-educated and is interested in the local developments in the country on the account of her chosen profession of international relations. The bunch of 20-year olds that I spoke to today, did not look at anything that did not initially smell and act like a major search engine (yandex.ru or google.kz) or a social network site (moimir.ru). Whereas their a bit older boss immediately brought up not only the local site but also several other very much kazakhstan-related news sites like nomad.su or zonakz.net and even admitted to occasionally checking respublika-kz.info (and given here bashful admission of occasionally checking this oppositional site I did not start pressing whether she might have checked the comments section to, since that section is actually normally blocked in Kazakhstan in most places although not in Aktau, but that is where the sharpest and the most oppositional opinions are discussed).
As she sat there, in her office, underneath the portrait of the president, I did not have the heart to press her about her political curiosities, given the amount of time that she had devoted to me. Instead we talked lightly about how the youth was less interested in the local and found the global connections so much attractive, how they are not yet interested in the place where they actually live. I wondered why that may be the case and when I asked the group what they would do if tomorrow someone had turned off the Internet for good, they all gasped in horror. But when I asked what they would do if tomorrow someone had turned off the SNSs and other socialization tools, the reaction was one of resignation- well then some of those connections will get lost... and that's not so good, but not so bad either, because the people you care about, you already have their phone number. Besides, everyone needs a break from SNSs from time to time anyway because they get boring, so that's ok.
The most fascinating thing about today though, was to realize just how scared people here are, especially people in business of the 'big guys' and how powerless they feel. All of the youngsters were talking about either Russian or Western sites like Yandex, Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte, Mail.ru, Facebook or Google as their main sources of social contact or information. Even if their eventual destination is some place inside the kaznet space, they start with the search engine anyway and it is always either yandex or google, where they normally get their news as well. The business owners are simply waiting for Google, Ebay etc to come into the market and take over, and they hope that they will be the logical choice for the local representative. I can no longer count how many times I heard the statement - we have no chance, we just have to hope we don't remain in the stone age for too long. I must admit the fear it logical because Kazakhstan has few resources and even fewer sources of knowledge and brilliance, given that education is for sale and the particulars of power make sales, contacts and immediate gain far more important than longer range planning. The fear, the desperation and the resignation is palpable... and then this morning I got woken up by a phone call telling me that the largest forum in Kazakhstan has been shut down... what gives?
15 April, 2010
Aktau and the Caspian sea
I made it to Aktau this morning and I am fascinated. The city is a combination of oil development and pure old soviet aesthetic. The Caspian is pure emerald in the distance but turns into an odd boiling brown soup of algae right by the shore in the city. People fish and kids catch shrimp among the sea rocks - the whole thing is oddly serene and beautiful in a very run-down falling-apart kind of way. The people are really open and nice, nothing like those in Almaty and Astana.
There are two interesting things about Aktau. One is that because it is an oil town, there is quite a bit of money to go around so the town is considered rather wealthy despite the appearances of it being rusty and run-down (although the rumors of it being extremely expensive did not turn out to be true). This means that many people have access to the Internet, even those living in the little villages surrounding the city (or so my taxi driver from one such village claimed as he complained about the Internet being very slow). The second is that Megaline, the Kazakhstan main provider does not offer much of the Internet service here. This is left to one of the smaller providers here who is using the Azery hardware and happens to kind of forget about that whole blocking thing. So there basically is no blocking here in Aktau - LJ, Blogger and everything else is available. I was at first taken aback when my first interviewee told me that she had HEARD about blocking but never actually experienced it... now it makes sense why that is so.
The hotel where I am staying is one of the old legacy soviet hotels, which means there is no Internet there. However, there is a bar next door that offers free wifi with the purchase of a beer and I am one of the three laptop equipped customers here at the moment (the only three really). Every single one of my four cabbies so far has Internet at home, complains about its slowness and tells me how really, the Internet is very important these days. Mostly.... it's important for skype... with relatives. In fact, Skype remains the winner in just about every conversation - the all-important equivalent of the phone but free or very cheap and when free, it comes with the added benefit of being able to see the interlocutor. Even when people explain their use of SNSs, there comes a moment where they explain that the most important moment was getting everyone's phone numbers and skype id's, but now they just go see the updates and really it's a lot less important. Russia and Kazakhstan took to cellphones like wildfire as it somehow fit into the specific cultural needs of relational maintenance and live interaction. They talk about the emotions they experience when hearing each others voices.
In one story, a girl told me how one of the russian websites was running a free calling promotion where it was possible to call home phones in Russia from anywhere in the world for free during the International Women's day via the skype setup of the site. She called one of her best friends who now lives in Russia but the connection was so bad, the best friend couldn't hear her at all. She texted the best friend and said - I can hear you fine, just talk to me - and the best friend talked, telling her about everything happening in her life. She was near tears by the end with emotion and still unable to say anything in return. She still talks about this incident with a lot of passion - because hearing someone's voice and their intonation is important if you can't see them.
Generally, Aktau seems much more relaxed and genial. There are two young people sitting at a table near me, in the sports bar where I am using the Internet and incidentally eating some of the best shashlik of the trip so far. The both showed up with laptops. She has been hanging out on vkontakte from the beginning while he put on headphones and turned on skype for the first half hour, talking to a friend until his laptop died. Now he is waiting for the laptop to charge as she is typing away on her laptop across the table from him. Maybe it's time to barge in and see if they are as nice as everyone else that I had met in Aktau so far...
There are two interesting things about Aktau. One is that because it is an oil town, there is quite a bit of money to go around so the town is considered rather wealthy despite the appearances of it being rusty and run-down (although the rumors of it being extremely expensive did not turn out to be true). This means that many people have access to the Internet, even those living in the little villages surrounding the city (or so my taxi driver from one such village claimed as he complained about the Internet being very slow). The second is that Megaline, the Kazakhstan main provider does not offer much of the Internet service here. This is left to one of the smaller providers here who is using the Azery hardware and happens to kind of forget about that whole blocking thing. So there basically is no blocking here in Aktau - LJ, Blogger and everything else is available. I was at first taken aback when my first interviewee told me that she had HEARD about blocking but never actually experienced it... now it makes sense why that is so.
The hotel where I am staying is one of the old legacy soviet hotels, which means there is no Internet there. However, there is a bar next door that offers free wifi with the purchase of a beer and I am one of the three laptop equipped customers here at the moment (the only three really). Every single one of my four cabbies so far has Internet at home, complains about its slowness and tells me how really, the Internet is very important these days. Mostly.... it's important for skype... with relatives. In fact, Skype remains the winner in just about every conversation - the all-important equivalent of the phone but free or very cheap and when free, it comes with the added benefit of being able to see the interlocutor. Even when people explain their use of SNSs, there comes a moment where they explain that the most important moment was getting everyone's phone numbers and skype id's, but now they just go see the updates and really it's a lot less important. Russia and Kazakhstan took to cellphones like wildfire as it somehow fit into the specific cultural needs of relational maintenance and live interaction. They talk about the emotions they experience when hearing each others voices.
In one story, a girl told me how one of the russian websites was running a free calling promotion where it was possible to call home phones in Russia from anywhere in the world for free during the International Women's day via the skype setup of the site. She called one of her best friends who now lives in Russia but the connection was so bad, the best friend couldn't hear her at all. She texted the best friend and said - I can hear you fine, just talk to me - and the best friend talked, telling her about everything happening in her life. She was near tears by the end with emotion and still unable to say anything in return. She still talks about this incident with a lot of passion - because hearing someone's voice and their intonation is important if you can't see them.
Generally, Aktau seems much more relaxed and genial. There are two young people sitting at a table near me, in the sports bar where I am using the Internet and incidentally eating some of the best shashlik of the trip so far. The both showed up with laptops. She has been hanging out on vkontakte from the beginning while he put on headphones and turned on skype for the first half hour, talking to a friend until his laptop died. Now he is waiting for the laptop to charge as she is typing away on her laptop across the table from him. Maybe it's time to barge in and see if they are as nice as everyone else that I had met in Aktau so far...
14 April, 2010
Mobiles, Internet and forms of control
I am inside a small cafe on the Left bank of the river in Astana where all of the new government buildings have been built. The cafe is empty as I strategically arrived here just after the lunch rush. There is one table occupied besides mine, where three people are hanging out with their iphones on the table in front of them. They periodically pick up the iphones and check on a point in conversation, usually in jest. There is wifi here so they are freely browsing the Internet, talking about googling (googlit' in Russian) and the particulars of Russian and Kazakh languages and how transliterations return really funny results.
These kinds of moments are common both here in Astana and in Almaty. A lot of people carry more than one phone and many carry a regular phone and what they call a "communicator" - usually an iphone or some form of smart phone. They use these devices to access the Internet extensively. In fact accessing the Internet through the phone is common, even for people who do not own a computer or really have much access to the Internet outside limited access at work or through an Internet cafe. Even regular phones with small screens are often used to read and respond to email and check status updates from any one of the three popular social network sites. I once spent an evening hanging out with five young Astana professionals. It turned out that between the five of them, they carried 13 phones of various kinds. At least four were 'communicators'. These weren't very rich 'professionals', but people who thought long and hard whether to spend about the equivalent of $8-10 on a meal and usually refrained. Young and only a few years out of college, they considered the Internet an integral part of their life so data costs were important and food could be bought cheaper elsewhere. Phone calls and data are NOT cheap here and many cut costs by having several phone numbers one on each provider because they are usually deals for within-network calling, but this isn't case all the time. Sometimes an old simcard is used to call just three or four phone numbers exclusively because that's the number that's always been used. Sometimes a phone is used because data costs on that simcard are cheaper and calls are cheaper on another one, both from the same provider. The practice is so common that there are special pouches for sale that accommodate more than one phone. There are now phones that can take two or more simcards and switch between them with a click of a button.
Mobile Internet is an important part of life and it is used here far more frequently than I have seen it used in Europe or US especially by non-iphone users. Many times I've heard the statement to the tune of 'we don't have the money for a laptop, but you can access the internet with your phone and check email, so you don't really need anything else." Once again, this is a case of Internet is for finding people and talking with them rather than for information seeking. The majority of information seeking seems to be more work-related for people who do not use the Internet extensively. Some of it has to do with showing off the websites of relatives to co-workers but these are rare occasions. Moreover, workers know that their IT managers watch their Internet use closely, sometimes clamping down with severe sanctions. In one story a young man was using a social network site that he usually left on in the background while he worked. After a few months of this he got a notice that indicated that he had used the Internet improperly and that as a sanction, his access to the Internet was going to be cut off for two months, which happened the same day. This almost sounds like a parent grounding their child and indeed at first he was distraught, but now he is used to it, although he is really looking forward to next week when his Internet will finally get turned back on. No, he won't be accessing SNSs anymore... but there are other things to do on the Internet.
The two most common jokes that I had heard about the Internet so far have been: you get on the internet for 10 minutes and 3 hours rushes by; and... if you are in the internet.. there is nothing but you don't want to leave anyway, that's why farmville is so popular (yes farmville is here and LOTS of people play it). In general though, the Internet is still peripheral to some extent - an opportunity, a way to maintain relationships, but the real maintenance happens through phone calls and visits anyway. Yes there are instances of reconnection with long lost friends or relatives, but these are exciting and at the same time uncertain and vaguely unsettling. There are stories of activating remote social ties in work situations, when a quick translation or advice is needed, but with many companies blocking SNSs this doesn't happen very often anymore. Certainly there are stories of finding life partners on the Internet, but it is seen as just another place to meet at first... the real test comes in physical encounters. In many ways, it is almost as if the Internet adds to the background noise of possibilities but the gray reality of the everyday takes over, especially here in Astana, where people work inordinate amounts, usually get paid very little if they work on government jobs, and feel exposed because they know they are constantly watched.
These kinds of moments are common both here in Astana and in Almaty. A lot of people carry more than one phone and many carry a regular phone and what they call a "communicator" - usually an iphone or some form of smart phone. They use these devices to access the Internet extensively. In fact accessing the Internet through the phone is common, even for people who do not own a computer or really have much access to the Internet outside limited access at work or through an Internet cafe. Even regular phones with small screens are often used to read and respond to email and check status updates from any one of the three popular social network sites. I once spent an evening hanging out with five young Astana professionals. It turned out that between the five of them, they carried 13 phones of various kinds. At least four were 'communicators'. These weren't very rich 'professionals', but people who thought long and hard whether to spend about the equivalent of $8-10 on a meal and usually refrained. Young and only a few years out of college, they considered the Internet an integral part of their life so data costs were important and food could be bought cheaper elsewhere. Phone calls and data are NOT cheap here and many cut costs by having several phone numbers one on each provider because they are usually deals for within-network calling, but this isn't case all the time. Sometimes an old simcard is used to call just three or four phone numbers exclusively because that's the number that's always been used. Sometimes a phone is used because data costs on that simcard are cheaper and calls are cheaper on another one, both from the same provider. The practice is so common that there are special pouches for sale that accommodate more than one phone. There are now phones that can take two or more simcards and switch between them with a click of a button.
Mobile Internet is an important part of life and it is used here far more frequently than I have seen it used in Europe or US especially by non-iphone users. Many times I've heard the statement to the tune of 'we don't have the money for a laptop, but you can access the internet with your phone and check email, so you don't really need anything else." Once again, this is a case of Internet is for finding people and talking with them rather than for information seeking. The majority of information seeking seems to be more work-related for people who do not use the Internet extensively. Some of it has to do with showing off the websites of relatives to co-workers but these are rare occasions. Moreover, workers know that their IT managers watch their Internet use closely, sometimes clamping down with severe sanctions. In one story a young man was using a social network site that he usually left on in the background while he worked. After a few months of this he got a notice that indicated that he had used the Internet improperly and that as a sanction, his access to the Internet was going to be cut off for two months, which happened the same day. This almost sounds like a parent grounding their child and indeed at first he was distraught, but now he is used to it, although he is really looking forward to next week when his Internet will finally get turned back on. No, he won't be accessing SNSs anymore... but there are other things to do on the Internet.
The two most common jokes that I had heard about the Internet so far have been: you get on the internet for 10 minutes and 3 hours rushes by; and... if you are in the internet.. there is nothing but you don't want to leave anyway, that's why farmville is so popular (yes farmville is here and LOTS of people play it). In general though, the Internet is still peripheral to some extent - an opportunity, a way to maintain relationships, but the real maintenance happens through phone calls and visits anyway. Yes there are instances of reconnection with long lost friends or relatives, but these are exciting and at the same time uncertain and vaguely unsettling. There are stories of activating remote social ties in work situations, when a quick translation or advice is needed, but with many companies blocking SNSs this doesn't happen very often anymore. Certainly there are stories of finding life partners on the Internet, but it is seen as just another place to meet at first... the real test comes in physical encounters. In many ways, it is almost as if the Internet adds to the background noise of possibilities but the gray reality of the everyday takes over, especially here in Astana, where people work inordinate amounts, usually get paid very little if they work on government jobs, and feel exposed because they know they are constantly watched.
Internet and gaming - virtual and real
I was never particularly interested in games even if it was MUDs that got me into this whole HCI business in the first place eons ago in a galaxy far far away, called undergrad. After undergrad I did not want to have anything to do with games. Not that I found games uninteresting, I just knew that if I were to start studying games I would never graduate - I am addictive like that. So I never looked for games and gaming really, here in Kazakhstan... gaming however, had other plans. When I was in Almaty, gaming showed up a little bit here and there... some old classmates told me how playing counter-strike was the big motivator to upgrade both their computing hardware and internet connection exclusively for this purpose (for everything else the very old comp with a very slow connection, apparently was just fine). Some people mentioned getting addicted to farmville or several other SNS-based games. During one meeting, one of the people in the room simply couldn't stop playing a silly little game on her smartphone even as she explained how she really didn't have any time for the Internet. Every now and then I would come across a large internet-cafe directed exclusively at multiplayer games. In one such space I was blatantly told 'sorry lady, we don't have JUST internet here' as the kids around the room made excited noises while playing WOW. Most of the time though, games did not make appearances in conversations, did not play a significant role in observations and generally were not all that visible.
Astana, however, was a different story and games seem to be waiting for me nearly at every corner, rearing their heads in random conversations, appearing out of nowhere. Games and chatting... games and a way to make friends in a new place... games and a way to find like minds... games and a way to disconnect from the everyday... games and business ventures... in short, games everywhere. There of course is the striking proliferation of Internet cafes here with mostly gaming contingent present (this may have to do with the fact that there are more bored and moneyless youth here since work is harder to come by). So the young boys play WOW and Counterstrike and some russian games nearly everywhere. Even in very small internet cafes with really bad equipment some gaming is going on, but mostly there are the dedicated clubs with relatively cheap access. There are, also, references to SNS-based games and the kind of addiction these games breed, motivating players to wake up early in the morning to check in at Farmville or to plant strategically so that they can limit the need to have to check on their crops.
But there are also chat-based games, where there are whole chatrooms devoted for example exclusively to playing Mafia or Word and Question games. These chatrooms are old and some have been around since 04-05, based on very rudimentary clients. These are still in circulation although I am starting to get the sense that the players are there now mostly out of some nostalgic sense of things past. And then... there is encounter and the hybrid reality nature of it. They call it 'alternative entertainment' here. At this point I have spoken to about a half dozen various participants and players who all agree on at least one thing - playing encounter enables them to grow their social network. By building connections through very very silly activities (like racing child-tricycles) and by meeting in random basements of abandoned buildings in the course of solving a puzzle, they get to know people from pretty much every walk of life. These are like-minded people and so they become a sort of distributed yet local community, situated and connected through the physical exploration of the city while following internet-based clues.
Why is it that such games are so popular here, in Russia, in various other countries of the FSU, in China... what is it about this hybrid of physical, local and technological that pushes together strangers and makes them into what some would call friends, others would call guanxi relationships? Is there something specific to the historical, social, political and economic factors mixed with cultural peculiarities that makes such game more attractive, or am I just not aware of similar games in the West (or maybe they do mean something different here)?
One late evening, I was hanging out with a group of entrepreneurs several of whom were just starting a media company producing TV soaps. We talked about the Internet and media possibilities for the new venture although they were tepid on that account. One thing there were willing to discuss, however, was the idea of creating an entertainment-gaming space to accompany the soap opera. Is it possible? Can something innovative be created here in Kazakhstan, or do we have to go outside Kazakhstan for talent? I had to remind these gentlemen that for example Skype (which they ALL use) was developed by Estonians and Chatroulette was an after-school project of a Moscow teen. The notion of games is attractive for business but it is also oddly seen as not serious enough, as an unlikely source of income, as somehow a foreign notion.
Astana, however, was a different story and games seem to be waiting for me nearly at every corner, rearing their heads in random conversations, appearing out of nowhere. Games and chatting... games and a way to make friends in a new place... games and a way to find like minds... games and a way to disconnect from the everyday... games and business ventures... in short, games everywhere. There of course is the striking proliferation of Internet cafes here with mostly gaming contingent present (this may have to do with the fact that there are more bored and moneyless youth here since work is harder to come by). So the young boys play WOW and Counterstrike and some russian games nearly everywhere. Even in very small internet cafes with really bad equipment some gaming is going on, but mostly there are the dedicated clubs with relatively cheap access. There are, also, references to SNS-based games and the kind of addiction these games breed, motivating players to wake up early in the morning to check in at Farmville or to plant strategically so that they can limit the need to have to check on their crops.
But there are also chat-based games, where there are whole chatrooms devoted for example exclusively to playing Mafia or Word and Question games. These chatrooms are old and some have been around since 04-05, based on very rudimentary clients. These are still in circulation although I am starting to get the sense that the players are there now mostly out of some nostalgic sense of things past. And then... there is encounter and the hybrid reality nature of it. They call it 'alternative entertainment' here. At this point I have spoken to about a half dozen various participants and players who all agree on at least one thing - playing encounter enables them to grow their social network. By building connections through very very silly activities (like racing child-tricycles) and by meeting in random basements of abandoned buildings in the course of solving a puzzle, they get to know people from pretty much every walk of life. These are like-minded people and so they become a sort of distributed yet local community, situated and connected through the physical exploration of the city while following internet-based clues.
Why is it that such games are so popular here, in Russia, in various other countries of the FSU, in China... what is it about this hybrid of physical, local and technological that pushes together strangers and makes them into what some would call friends, others would call guanxi relationships? Is there something specific to the historical, social, political and economic factors mixed with cultural peculiarities that makes such game more attractive, or am I just not aware of similar games in the West (or maybe they do mean something different here)?
One late evening, I was hanging out with a group of entrepreneurs several of whom were just starting a media company producing TV soaps. We talked about the Internet and media possibilities for the new venture although they were tepid on that account. One thing there were willing to discuss, however, was the idea of creating an entertainment-gaming space to accompany the soap opera. Is it possible? Can something innovative be created here in Kazakhstan, or do we have to go outside Kazakhstan for talent? I had to remind these gentlemen that for example Skype (which they ALL use) was developed by Estonians and Chatroulette was an after-school project of a Moscow teen. The notion of games is attractive for business but it is also oddly seen as not serious enough, as an unlikely source of income, as somehow a foreign notion.
13 April, 2010
Internet and politics in KZ
By some odd stroke of luck, the hotel where I am staying in Astana was the site of a KazMedia event the first evening I was there. By another stroke of luck, the people I was meeting at my hotel for an interview, knew several people involved in the event. This event was notable for two specific reasons. First, this was the birthday of 'KazContent' which turned one year old and second, this event marked the launch of several local kazakh resources - social network (ilive.kz), a blogging platform, and most notably, a legal music and movie distributor (urta.kz).
A little bit of history to explain why this is actually notable. Several years ago, the venerable father has ordered that KazNet is physically created (that is the Kazakh infrastructure for Internet - the fiberoptic lines, the cables, the servers, dialup connections and eventually broadly accessible broadband, etc). Kazakhtelecom dutifully created the infrastructure (although the reports of its extensiveness are difficult to verify, given the amount of money actually spent on building is hard to identify). At the time, there was little actual content that was specifically Kazakhstan-related so the majority of internet traffic went outside the country to Russian and International resources. There is a tendency in every post-soviet country to think in terms of 'our' and 'theirs' and to see connections outside the country as unpatriotic. In order to remedy this situation, Kazakhtelecom created 'kaztorka.kz' - a membership torrent site for downloading movies and music. Within a few months several other torrent sites joined the official one and the internal Internet traffic in Kazakhstan soon overtook external connections and they could proudly report this fact to the government. In Kazakhstan, nearly every user accesses the Internet more for downloading movies and music than for anything else (of course this has more to do with the speed of downloads that often takes days of dedicated attempts). In my conversations with a range of people I repeatedly heard that yes, there is a lot of internal traffic but KazNet is still empty (i.e. there are few useful and interesting .kz local sites to visit) and Kazakhtelecom is not particularly happy that nearly all of the internal traffic is torrents because they overload the network but there is no money to be made on that.
About a year ago, the venerable father discovered the fact that KazNet is empty (there are many stories of exactly how this happened but none seem even remotely plausible). He was incensed at the fact and ordered concerted development of KazContent which resulted in the creation of a company by such name (which of course took seed money and then money for their project) and in the creation of a company called KazNetMedia to do the design and development of base sources that can motivate the populace to create their own content. Both companies are for-profit but heavily government funded (otherwise, why would anyone do any of this) and there has been an inordinate amount of money promised for the projects.
Six months ago, the minister in charge of Internet development was told he was not doing a good enough job because well... KazNet was still empty, so he was replaced with the head of KazakhTelecom who actually is an engineer and an IT professional rather than simply a manager. In fact the two were swapped in their positions so the effect might be interesting given that KazakhTelecom will have to undergo changes in its practices as well. At about the same time, Beeline, a Russian telecom company, entered the market not only as a cellphone provider but also as an eventual Internet provider as they were putting in a fiberoptic line connecting to their Russian network, rather than renting the KazakhTelecom hardware. The internet offering is just about to start and Kazakhtelecom companies are feeling the pressure and lowering their tariffs. What is interesting about the whole system that there is a law on the books that everyone must follow, that states that telecom operators and Internet providers are equated to infrastructure projects and thus can not charge differential tariffs based on population density. So Almaty residents get the same tariff as the residents of the tiny villages around Taldy Kurgan (in those areas where there actually is coverage, although theoretically there is supposed to be coverage everywhere). So the lowering of tariffs has to happen everywhere, not just in areas where Beeline is available. So Beeline's presence in Astana and Almata and it's presences as an Internet provider only in Almata is actually likely to result in price-cuts everywhere in the country.
Beeline's presence has another small implication - Beeline has very little incentive to block any internet sites that Kazakhtelecom blocks. The government has no official policy on the matter and Kazakhtelecom prefers to act as if no actual blocking is occurring on any of the resources except for LJ since there actually is a court-order for that one. Nevertheless, none of the blocking is official and to continue blocking and to compel providers like Beeline to block, the government would have to develop an official policy that then can be officially attacked. A quick note about blocking - Opera Turbo servers are inaccessible here in Astana and became inaccessible just a few days ago (according to my informants) along with several other well known proxy servers. Either the blocking in Astana is simply more earnest, or something else is going on.
Now let's go back to the launch that I accidentally got to attend upon arrival here in Astana. The most remarkable thing about all of the presentations was the emphasis on production of local, Kazakhstan based content that would be about life in the country as well as the lives of its people. It was about both professionally producing interesting content and about creating platforms that would encourage citizens to produce their own content. The platforms were a crazy hodgepodge of everything that is already out there, apparently built on the idea that it is possible to take all of the best features, put them together and the result would be something everyone would want to use. Moreover, the social network resource was to attempt bringing the content from all of the social network sites where users are already involved together into one place, thus motivating users not just to switch social network platforms, but to consolidate everything they have on one. Attractive notion, don't you think?
Then there was urta.kz - a site that was committed to changing the illegal pirating practices of Kazakhstan citizens and finally paying royalties on content, thus becoming a law abiding internet space. I spoke to the owners of urta.kz and asked them how they planned on changing the prevailing culture of free that kazakhtelecom in fact built up. They told me that they were committed to the changes and they are in fact financially committed because as soon as they are launched they start to pay royalties on the content so they have to make sure they advertise and educate in a way that makes them money eventually. At the end of the conversation though, as I kept pushing about that culture thing, the guy simply said - look, we just make getting it for free very difficult, we can do that, we have a very good relationship with kazakhtelecom and besides they are already doing that in Russia so we just do the same in Kazakhstan and people will simply have to buy. There was no mention of Beeline... and their servers and their access and the fact that the only place in Russia where there is any movement to really curb pirating is some posturing in Moscow in the last few months with some seizure of servers. So there really isn't any attention to them 'people' but the traditional brute-force approach of getting things to pay... eventually... when government coffers run out.
A little bit of history to explain why this is actually notable. Several years ago, the venerable father has ordered that KazNet is physically created (that is the Kazakh infrastructure for Internet - the fiberoptic lines, the cables, the servers, dialup connections and eventually broadly accessible broadband, etc). Kazakhtelecom dutifully created the infrastructure (although the reports of its extensiveness are difficult to verify, given the amount of money actually spent on building is hard to identify). At the time, there was little actual content that was specifically Kazakhstan-related so the majority of internet traffic went outside the country to Russian and International resources. There is a tendency in every post-soviet country to think in terms of 'our' and 'theirs' and to see connections outside the country as unpatriotic. In order to remedy this situation, Kazakhtelecom created 'kaztorka.kz' - a membership torrent site for downloading movies and music. Within a few months several other torrent sites joined the official one and the internal Internet traffic in Kazakhstan soon overtook external connections and they could proudly report this fact to the government. In Kazakhstan, nearly every user accesses the Internet more for downloading movies and music than for anything else (of course this has more to do with the speed of downloads that often takes days of dedicated attempts). In my conversations with a range of people I repeatedly heard that yes, there is a lot of internal traffic but KazNet is still empty (i.e. there are few useful and interesting .kz local sites to visit) and Kazakhtelecom is not particularly happy that nearly all of the internal traffic is torrents because they overload the network but there is no money to be made on that.
About a year ago, the venerable father discovered the fact that KazNet is empty (there are many stories of exactly how this happened but none seem even remotely plausible). He was incensed at the fact and ordered concerted development of KazContent which resulted in the creation of a company by such name (which of course took seed money and then money for their project) and in the creation of a company called KazNetMedia to do the design and development of base sources that can motivate the populace to create their own content. Both companies are for-profit but heavily government funded (otherwise, why would anyone do any of this) and there has been an inordinate amount of money promised for the projects.
Six months ago, the minister in charge of Internet development was told he was not doing a good enough job because well... KazNet was still empty, so he was replaced with the head of KazakhTelecom who actually is an engineer and an IT professional rather than simply a manager. In fact the two were swapped in their positions so the effect might be interesting given that KazakhTelecom will have to undergo changes in its practices as well. At about the same time, Beeline, a Russian telecom company, entered the market not only as a cellphone provider but also as an eventual Internet provider as they were putting in a fiberoptic line connecting to their Russian network, rather than renting the KazakhTelecom hardware. The internet offering is just about to start and Kazakhtelecom companies are feeling the pressure and lowering their tariffs. What is interesting about the whole system that there is a law on the books that everyone must follow, that states that telecom operators and Internet providers are equated to infrastructure projects and thus can not charge differential tariffs based on population density. So Almaty residents get the same tariff as the residents of the tiny villages around Taldy Kurgan (in those areas where there actually is coverage, although theoretically there is supposed to be coverage everywhere). So the lowering of tariffs has to happen everywhere, not just in areas where Beeline is available. So Beeline's presence in Astana and Almata and it's presences as an Internet provider only in Almata is actually likely to result in price-cuts everywhere in the country.
Beeline's presence has another small implication - Beeline has very little incentive to block any internet sites that Kazakhtelecom blocks. The government has no official policy on the matter and Kazakhtelecom prefers to act as if no actual blocking is occurring on any of the resources except for LJ since there actually is a court-order for that one. Nevertheless, none of the blocking is official and to continue blocking and to compel providers like Beeline to block, the government would have to develop an official policy that then can be officially attacked. A quick note about blocking - Opera Turbo servers are inaccessible here in Astana and became inaccessible just a few days ago (according to my informants) along with several other well known proxy servers. Either the blocking in Astana is simply more earnest, or something else is going on.
Now let's go back to the launch that I accidentally got to attend upon arrival here in Astana. The most remarkable thing about all of the presentations was the emphasis on production of local, Kazakhstan based content that would be about life in the country as well as the lives of its people. It was about both professionally producing interesting content and about creating platforms that would encourage citizens to produce their own content. The platforms were a crazy hodgepodge of everything that is already out there, apparently built on the idea that it is possible to take all of the best features, put them together and the result would be something everyone would want to use. Moreover, the social network resource was to attempt bringing the content from all of the social network sites where users are already involved together into one place, thus motivating users not just to switch social network platforms, but to consolidate everything they have on one. Attractive notion, don't you think?
Then there was urta.kz - a site that was committed to changing the illegal pirating practices of Kazakhstan citizens and finally paying royalties on content, thus becoming a law abiding internet space. I spoke to the owners of urta.kz and asked them how they planned on changing the prevailing culture of free that kazakhtelecom in fact built up. They told me that they were committed to the changes and they are in fact financially committed because as soon as they are launched they start to pay royalties on the content so they have to make sure they advertise and educate in a way that makes them money eventually. At the end of the conversation though, as I kept pushing about that culture thing, the guy simply said - look, we just make getting it for free very difficult, we can do that, we have a very good relationship with kazakhtelecom and besides they are already doing that in Russia so we just do the same in Kazakhstan and people will simply have to buy. There was no mention of Beeline... and their servers and their access and the fact that the only place in Russia where there is any movement to really curb pirating is some posturing in Moscow in the last few months with some seizure of servers. So there really isn't any attention to them 'people' but the traditional brute-force approach of getting things to pay... eventually... when government coffers run out.
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