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Digital Culture Links: May 24th 2010
Largely Lost-centric links for May 24th 2010:
- Lost Finale: What the Web Wasn’t Made For [Mashable] – Why I’ll be off most social media today: “Those two wonderful facets of the web — on-demand viewing and instant communication between fans — tonight become a double-edged sword. The Lost Finale will be shown at 9pm ET on the East Coast, and 9pm PT on the West Coast. These time zone delays are the antithesis of what the web is about: Instant communication. The web is the perfect platform for the spread of breaking news, rumor, and those facts that corporations and politicians would rather keep quiet. In short: blogs, Facebook and Twitter make the spread of information immediate. But the web doesn’t understand the concept of the “spoiler”: The kind of information you’d like to avoid until a specific date or time. A TV blog can’t set its RSS feeds to be delivered later to the West Coast than the East. A Facebook update doesn’t get held back until you’ve watched the finale on your DVR. Your phone doesn’t know to block all Lost-related Tweets until you’ve watched the final episode.”
- Final episode Lost in transmission [WA Today] – Australian broadcasting is indeed, Lost, but not in a good way: “AT 2PM AEST today the final episode of supernatural drama Lost will be broadcast simultaneously in eight countries. Fans in the US, Canada, Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Israel and Turkey will sit down as one to discover how the big questions in one of television’s most diabolically complicated shows are resolved. The international simulcast aims to stave off piracy, while attracting viewers worldwide before spoilers hit the web. But not in Australia. Channel Seven will not screen the 2½-hour finale until 8.30pm Wednesday. […] ‘Ridiculous,” says comedian Wil Anderson, a Lost die-hard. ”If I was going to watch it on Wednesday, I could not go on the internet at all for two days. I will definitely have watched it by Wednesday.” Many Australian Lost fans have left free-to-air television for an alternate viewing reality, downloading, to join in discussions online…”
- Ahead of ‘Lost’ Finale, Fans Shut Off Virtual Hints [NYTimes.com] – “Erin Farley has her plans for Sunday all laid out. Two hours before the last episode of “Lost” is broadcast three time zones away, she will shut down her home Internet connection. TweetDeck? Off. Facebook? Off. Her cellphone? Stashed out of reach. “I’ll turn off the whole Internet just to avoid having anything spoiled,” said Ms. Farley, a 31-year-old freelance writer in Portland, Ore. “I don’t want to ruin the surprise.” The Internet in general, and social media like Twitter in particular, can be a minefield for those who are trying to keep themselves in the dark about an event or show so they can enjoy it later. When the Olympics and Grammy Awards are time-delayed, for example, armchair critics chattering about the wins and losses online can destroy the suspense in an instant. […] people who don’t live on the East Coast, where Lost is shown first, are especially at risk for online spoilers. Overseas fans may have to wait days for a local broadcast – several years in Internet time”
- Lost bows out – after 121 baffling episodes – with 5am TV simulcast to beat plot spoilers [Television & radio | The Guardian] – Closer to non-sporting global television events: “Early on Monday morning [UK time] , millions of Lost fans will be hoping that the mysteries of the US drama’s fictional island accumulated over five years are finally revealed when the show closes in a unique broadcasting event. The finale will be simulcast on ABC in the US and by seven broadcasters around the world. Lost fans in the UK will be switching on Sky1 at 5am on Monday for the two-and-a-half-hour climax to six series, and 121 episodes, of baffling TV. Fans in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Turkey, Canada, as well as the UK, will see the show at the same time it is aired by ABC on America’s west coast. The time lag between broadcast in America and in the UK used to be six months or more, but has been narrowing for the most popular imports to counter DVD piracy and illegal downloads. Sky1 has been broadcasting this year’s final series of Lost on Friday nights — five days after its US Sunday evening premiere on ABC.”
- LOST re-enacted by Cats in 1 minute.
- Fan-made Lost Finale Trailer
- Facebook, MySpace Confront Privacy Loophole [WSJ.com] – “Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers’ names and other personal details, despite promises they don’t share such information without consent. The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code. Advertising companies are receiving information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and the information a user has made public, include such things as a person’s real name, age, hometown and occupation.” [Also see Benjamin Edelman’s analysis.]
- PAC-MAN rules! [Official Google Blog] – After their first interactive logo, celebrating Pac-Man’s 30th birthday, Google makes their homage game available permanently: “We’ve been overwhelmed — but not surprised 🙂 — by the success of our 30th anniversary PAC-MAN doodle. Due to popular demand, we’re making the game permanently available at www.google.com/pacman. Thanks to NAMCO for helping to make this wonderful collaboration happen. Enjoy!”
- Watching for Iron Sky [The Chutry Experiment ] – Useful introduction to the crowd-sourced film Iron Sky (coming some time 2011) for Web 207.
Digital Culture Links: May 14th 2010
Links for May 13th 2010 through May 14th 2010:
- Well, These New Zuckerberg IMs Won’t Help Facebook’s Privacy Problems [Business Insider] – “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his company are suddenly facing a big new round of scrutiny and criticism about their cavalier attitude toward user privacy. An early instant messenger exchange Mark had with a college friend won’t help put these concerns to rest. According to SAI sources, the following exchange is between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Brutal. Could Mark have been completely joking? Sure. But the exchange does reveal that Facebook’s aggressive attitude toward privacy may have begun early on.” - Why, despite myself, I am not leaving Facebook. Yet. [Online Fandom] – “… Using Facebook with the rules I signed on for makes me a subversive user. That’s wrong. What I want is a Facebook that is premised on a belief that first and foremost human relationships are valuable and sacred, not the ground on which money trees grow, but that if the value of relationships is genuinely nurtured, there will be ways to earn money. I want a Facebook that really believes that people have a right to select how their information will be shared, instead of a belief that they’re too dumb to figure it out if the settings are too confusing so it’s okay to dupe them. I want a Facebook that can find creative ways to make a profit using the rules they originally set for their own game. I want an ethical Facebook. That shouldn’t be too much to ask.”
- Social networks and the end of privacy [ABC The Drum Unleashed] – Pesce on wanting to let go: “I want to quit. Like Michael Corleone, every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in! No, I’m not talking about the Mafia, though I am Sicilian. I’m talking about an organisation that’s more pervasive, and more insidious – Facebook. […] For now, I’ve cut back on Facebook. I’m not accepting new friend requests, or joining new groups. I’m still using Facebook to share interesting information – particularly if that information is about the problems with Facebook. It is possible that we can use Facebook to accelerate the transition to an alternative to Facebook. That would be the most appropriate end to a fun but unwholesome chapter in the Web’s history.”
- Apple ‘digital locker’ to allow online music stream [The Australian] – Apple iCloud: “The move could pose a significant threat to existing music operations such as Spotify and We7. According to music industry insiders, iTunes customers will be given access to a “digital locker” that will automatically store songs bought through Apple’s music store. At present, songs downloaded from iTunes can be stored only on a computer or iPod. Under the digital locker system, customers will also be able to access the tracks they have purchased by logging on to a website — expected to be called iTunes.com — where the songs could be streamed over the internet to any computer. Spotify and We7 are fledgeling services giving access to millions of songs that can be heard over the web and paid for through monthly subscriptions or advertising. Analysts have long expected Apple — acting before Google or Amazon — to create a system allowing people to store and access their music collections “in the cloud” on the internet.”
Digital Culture Links: May 12th 2010
Links for May 10th 2010 through May 12th 2010:
- Show us the money! Oz Budget under CC [Creative Commons Australia] – Perhaps the only outstanding thing about the Australian budget was the licensing of it (congrats to CC Australia!): “In the debate over the merits of last night’s conservative budget, there’s one thing we’d argue Swan did get right – the licensing. The entire budget has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. This means the material it contains – the deficit strategy, the fiscal aggregates, the government’s responses to the economic crisis – is all available for free reuse, by anyone, for any purpose, as long as the source is attributed. A single document, even one that’s 350 pages long, may not seem like that big a deal compared to some of the other open government initiatives over the last few years – like the release of the Australian Bureau of Statistic’s entire store of census data under CC. But as a public endorsement of CC as the licence of choice for the Australian Federal Government, it’s huge.”
- Roulette Russian: The teen-ager behind Chatroulette [The New Yorker] – A really odd feature from Julia Ioffe which is based on interviews with Andrey Ternovskiy, the Russian teenager who invented Chatroulette. Ioffe’s story is more about Ternovskiy leaving Russia for the US than anything else and it paints Chatroulette as a website built with equal parts of skill and naivete. It ends of a rather hollow note, implying that relationships built online are substantially less than ‘real’.
- Confusing *a* public with *the* public « BuzzMachine – Jeff Jarvis thinks ‘a public’ is a small group, while ‘the public’ is everyone; he think Facebook needs to think this, too: “I think Facebook’s problem lately with its disliked like button (and Google’s problem with the start of Buzz) is that they confuse the notion of the public sphere—that is, all of us—with the idea of making a public—that is, the small societies we create on Facebook or join on Twitter. Private v. public is not a binary decision; there is a vast middle inbetween that is about the control of our own publics. Allow me to explain…. […] That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private.”
- Obama stresses education over iPod, Xbox [Reuters] – “President Barack Obama told college graduates on Sunday the era of the iPod and the Xbox has not always been good for the cause of a strong education. Obama said today’s college graduates are coming of age at a time of great difficulty for the United States. They face a tough economy for jobs, two wars and a 24/7 media environment not always dedicated to the truth, he said. Added to the mix are the distractions offered by popular electronic devices that entertain millions of Americans. “With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.”
On Deveny, Devine and Twitter … in public!
By now everyone in Australia knows who Catherine Deveny is thanks to some particularly tasteless and provocative tweets during the Logies ceremony which proved the straw that broke the camels back; she was ‘dropped as a columnist for The Age after a storm of controversy’ with Editor-In-Chief, Paul Ramadge declaring that ‘the views she has expressed recently on Twitter are not in keeping with the standards we set at The Age’. Deveny defended her tweets claiming that Twitter is about “passing notes in class, but suddenly these notes are being projected into the sky and taken out of context” but this defense seems naive at best so it was hardly a surprise they The Age’s technology editor Gordon Farrer wrote a piece explaining just how public (and useful) Twitter is.
In a New Matilda piece, Jason Wilson points out that there is a lot more to the story and while many people won’t miss Deveny’s columns, the way in which she was dismissed has left a bad taste in many mouths:
Although her MO consists of antagonising people, there was something that reeked of mob justice in the way she was dismissed. Social media can be about sharing, conversation, and positive forms of activism — but they can also be a venue for a kind of outrage porn. This can be quickly satiated without effecting any lasting change, and any one of us might stir it up with an ill-advised tweet or two. There but for the Grace of God, etc.
Last week I had a chance to share some of my views on RTRFM as well, which you can listen to online here.
[audio:http://www.tamaleaver.net/cv/deveny.mp3]In this maelstrom, conservative columnist Miranda Devine wrote a rambling column which started like a sympathy-piece for Deveny, but ended with a wrap on the knuckles:
In a chaotic world of aggregators, of Google and Twitter and specialist web feeds, a newspaper is a "credible one-stop shop" of local news where all the hard choices have been made for the reader. Which is why not trashing the brand is more important than ever. Sorry, Catherine.
Devine’s position was unsurprising, but she clearly didn’t understand her own point when just a few days later she responded to criticism on Twitter by telling her critic that “you’ve had enough of rogering gerbils I see”. Devine may have realised she’d crossed a line, and deleted her tweet, only to be reminded that there is no delete button on the internet as screenshots of the exchange were rapidly circulated, but there appear to have been no reprimands for Devine (although she has spring cleaned and deleted a few more tweets, I think).
Last night on the ABC’s Q&A the panel touched on Deveny’s case and concluded, in a very round-about way, we need to remember that (unless you’ve got a private account) tweets are always public; in the first instance you might be talking with a smaller group, but once something is public, your readership is uncertain but is potentially very wide indeed. Jonathan Holmes probably made this point most clearly last week, noting of Deveny:
She also claimed she was taken out of context. I’m not the first to remark that Twitter has no context. Each tweet must stand alone, 140 characters max. Hard to convey irony, or amusement, or hate. Hard to convey that when you say you hope Bindi gets laid, you’re using satire "to expose celebrity raunch culture and the sexual objectification of women". Twitter is a treacherous medium. So fast, so simple, so easy to get wrong.
Thanks the ABC, Deveny has now provided the context she had in mind, and despite something of an explanation, and sort of a bit of an apology, she stands by what she wrote which, ultimately, will probably increase her stock as a comedian celebrity provocateur. For everyone else, we do need to remember that most social media is public (or can easily be copied and become public), whilst still making the most of the many uses of social media platforms like Twitter, and not just following Helen Razer and becoming a Twitter Quitter. Twitter is a powerful tool, but you should, of course, think before you tweet.
Digital Culture Links: May 10th 2010
Links for May 7th 2010 through May 10th 2010:
- An Early Look At Twitter Annotations Or, “Twannotations” [TechCrunch] – Twitter are adding annotations, or twannotataions, in the near future; it’ll let specific ‘things’ be identified. It’s a bit like turning Twitter into a semantic communication tool. Richard Giles asks if this will make Twitter (a privately owned) internet protocol be default, but either way annotations should make Twitter even more of a cultural barometer.
- The Tell-All Generation Learns When Not To, at Least Online [NYTimes.com] – Privacy concerns online cross all generational barrier, despite the myth of the millennial mindset: “The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud. While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry. They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves.”
- Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative [Wired.com] – Ryan Singel takes Facebook to task for the continual failings in respecting user privacy both in terms of their architecture (so many things simply can’t be turned off now) and their policies (basically, screwing with privacy one step at a time, while using a raft of lawyers to ensure it’s not illegal … but maybe unethical). Singel argues that everything Facebook currently provides could be achieved by a series of open tools and protocols which provide real and clear choices about what we do and don’t share with the world. Singel argues we need to make these choices now because Facebook, for many, has almost become our online identity.
- Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing [NYTimes.com] – From November 6, 2008: “On stage at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, was cheerfully unruffled. Mr. Zuckerberg pinned his optimism on a change in behavior among Internet users: that they are ever more willing to tell others what they are doing, who their friends are, and even what they look like as they crawl home from the fraternity party. “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.” Call it Zuckerberg’s Law.” The great thing about controlling the privacy settings for more than 400 million people, is it’s pretty easy to change things so more and more and their information is shared … even if many users don’t understand how and don’t think this is what they signed up for!
- The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook [mattmckeon.com] – A really useful inforgraphic by Matt McKeon which demonstrates five stages of Facebook’s default settings and how much information is public by default at each stage (short version: 2005 – not much; 2010 – almost everything!)
- Most pirates say they’d pay for legal downloads [News.com.au] – Peer-topeer sharers want legal options in Australia: “Most people who illegally download movies, music and TV shows would pay for them if there was a cheap and legal service as convenient as file-sharing tools like BitTorrent. That’s the finding of the most comprehensive look yet at people who illegally download TV shows, movies and music in Australia, conducted by news.com.au and market research firm CoreData. The survey canvassed the attitudes of more than 7000 people who admitted to streaming or downloading media from illegitimate sources in the past 12 months. It found accessibility was as much or more of a motivator than money for those who illegally download media using services like BitTorrent. More respondents said they turned to illegal downloads because they were convenient than because they were free … [More results here.]
- What Happens When You Deactivate Your Facebook Account [Read Write Web] – Facebook is a big part of millions and millions of peoples’ lives, but what happens when you pull the plug? Last night I met a man who walked to the edge of the cliff and nearly deactivated his Facebook account. He took a screenshot of what he saw after clicking the “deactivate my account” link on his account page – and it is pretty far-out. That man considered quitting Facebook because it was having an adverse emotional impact on him and I’ll spare him and his contacts from posting the screenshot he shared with me. I have posted below though a shot of the screen I saw when I clicked that button myself. Check it out. I bet you haven’t seen this screen before, have you? […] Can you believe that? How incredibly manipulative! And what claims to make. Facebook has undoubtedly made it easier to keep in touch with people than almost any other technology on the planet, but to say that leaving Facebook means your friends “will no longer be able to keep in touch with you” is just wrong.”
Digital Culture Links: May 6th 2010
Links for May 5th 2010 through May 6th 2010:
- Glitch Brings New Worries About Facebook’s Privacy [NYTimes.com] – Privacy concerns = declining trust! “For many users of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, it was just the latest in a string of frustrations. On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations. Not long before, Facebook had introduced changes that essentially forced users to choose between making information about their interests available to anyone or removing it altogether. Although Facebook quickly moved to close the security hole on Wednesday, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information.”
- Facebook Burning Through Its Most Valuable Asset [The NewsCloud Blog] – Why trust still matters: “Venture investors often focus on the burn rate of a startup to determine how long a company can operate before it becomes profitable. After last week, investors in Facebook should be asking how long the company can continue its phenomenal growth as it quickly burns through the trust of users that expected the company to protect their privacy. […] Now, I’ve even more amazed that after Google’s Buzz debacle, Facebook has drawn a line in the sand against common sense and the basic privacy expectations of its growing user base with its new social graph. Just as Microsoft employees, incredibly, seemed to think they could surreptitiously market exploitative sexting ads to teens by using a male rather than a female, Facebook thinks that it can sustain its growth while essentially pimping the private lives of its users to the highest bidder. There seems to be no adult supervision at either company.”
- Catherine Deveny Fired From The Age [The Age] – Yes, controversial/provocative comedian Catherine Deveny has been fired from The Age for tweets made during the Logies, including the now infamous “I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid”. Her humour is generally in poor taste, but is it worth sacking someone for, especially in their own time? Deveny certainly seems well within her rights to ask if there is actually a policy about social media at The Age. There probably should be. That aside, this little controversy has probably given Deveny – and the Logies – more free press than they’ve enjoyed in years. I’d suggest this “sacking” makes her more commercially viable as a personality, not less employable. I guess we’ll see.
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