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Digital Culture Links: May 26th 2010
Links for May 24th 2010 through May 26th 2010:
- Facebook ‘hindering the police’ [WA Today] – The Australian Federal Police take on Facebook: “Facebook’s woeful relationship with law enforcement bodies is hampering police investigations and putting lives at risk, the Australian Federal Police says. The AFP’s assistant commissioner and head of high tech crime operations, Neil Gaughan, will fly to Washington DC today for a meeting convened by the US Department of Justice in which senior law enforcement officials from around the world will discuss their concerns with the social networking website. State and federal police have told the Herald’s sister paper, the Age, the company has been unwilling to provide police with the intelligence they need for investigations. They want Facebook to appoint a dedicated law enforcement liaison in Australia who can, for example, match user accounts to physical internet addresses.”
- Facebook told to set up warning system after new sex scam [The Age] – Just what Facebook needs, its own viruses: “A major computer security firm urged Facebook to set up an early-warning system after hundreds of thousands of users were hit by a new wave of fake sex-video attacks. British-based virus fighter Sophos warned users of the world’s biggest social networking site to be on guard against any posting entitled “distracting beach babes”, which contains a movie thumbnail of a bikini-clad woman. In a press statement, Sophos said the malicious posts appear as if they are coming from Facebook users’ friends, but it urged recipients not to click on the thumbnail. By clicking on it, users are taken to a rogue Facebook application informing them that they do not have the right player software installed, Sophos said. It tricks users into installing adware, a software package that automatically plays, displays or downloads advertisements to their computer, and the video link is spread further across the network.”
- Lady Gaga Says No Problem If People Download Her Music; The Money Is In Touring [Techdirt] – “… Lady Gaga admits she’s fine with people downloading her music in unauthorized forms because she makes it up in touring revenue:
She explains she doesn’t mind about people downloading her music for free, “because you know how much you can earn off touring, right? Big artists can make anywhere from $40 million [£28 million] for one cycle of two years’ touring. Giant artists make upwards of $100 million. Make music — then tour. It’s just the way it is today.”
Similarly, she knocks bands that don’t really try to work hard to please the fans, and who just expect them to automatically buy each album:
“I hate big acts that just throw an album out against the wall, like ‘BUY IT! F*** YOU!’ It’s mean to fans. You should go out and tour it to your fans in India, Japan, the UK. I don’t believe in how the music industry is today. I believe in how it was in 1982.”
- The Twitter Platform [Twitter Blog] – Twitter makes clear, that they will control advertising on Twitter, and no one else will: ” … aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.” (Their logic, while motivated by finances as much as anything else, does actually make sense in terms of user experience.)
- How The Australian fell in love with the iPad [mUmBRELLA] – Is The Australian an Apple customer or commentator? “While it’s fair to say that the world’s media has been pretty excited about Apple’s iPad, The Australian appears to be on the verge of spontaneously combusting over the device’s official arrival Down Under this Friday. Clearly the newspaper’s plans to launch its own paid-for iPad app are unrelated to that. Indeed, if it sells as many apps as it has written stories about the iPad, it will be well on the way to securing a digital future for itself. […] I’d love to bring you every article The Australian’s carried about the iPad. But Google tells me there are 4,790 of them. So I’d better stop there. Did I mention that The Australian’s got an iPad app?”
- Quitting Facebook is pointless; challenging them to do better is not [danah boyd | apophenia] – boyd’s discussion points:
“1. I do not believe that people will (or should) leave Facebook because of privacy issues.
2. I do not believe that the tech elites who are publicly leaving Facebook will affect on the company’s numbers; they are unrepresentative and were not central users in the first place.
3. I do not believe that an alternative will emerge in the next 2-5 years that will “replace” Facebook in any meaningful sense.
4. I believe that Facebook will get regulated and I would like to see an open discussion of what this means and what form this takes.
5. I believe that a significant minority of users are at risk because of decisions Facebook has made and I think that those of us who aren’t owe it to those who are to work through these issues.
6. I believe that Facebook needs to start a public dialogue with users and those who are concerned ASAP (and Elliot Schrage’s Q&A doesn’t count).”
Lost (without Twitter)
There were more than 400,000 tweets during the Lost season finale; I didn’t make any of them, or read any of them in real-time, but not for a lack of interest. Rather, as I write this post (on Tuesday, 25 May) Australia has still not screened the Lost finale; it’s scheduled for Wednesday night on Seven. While Seven have reduced the delay between US screenings and Australian broadcast times, as was noted in yesterday’s links, the finale was simulcast live in the UK, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Turkey, and Canada but that was not the case down under. To add insult to injury, Seven couched this decision as service to Australian Lost fans:
Channel Seven will not screen the 2½-hour finale until 8.30pm Wednesday. A spokeswoman for the station said a Monday afternoon simulcast was considered, but it was felt fans would find the show more easily in its current timeslot – although the finale has been upgraded from digital channel 7TWO to Seven. […] ‘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.”
Better to have said nothing, or spoken plainly that they’ve decided the ratings boost from the Lost finale would be insufficient to justify tinkering with their Monday line-up, but to have Seven claim that the delay is to make things easier for Lost fans in Australia is really pretty offensive.
On the 400,000+ tweets made during the Lost finale by those who could see it live:
“And that is a conservative estimate,” said Mark Ghuneim, chief executive [of WiredSet]. That beat the show’s average of 27,000 tweets during the season, but was still a smaller volume overall than an event like the Oscars, said Mr. Ghuneim. “We tracked about 780,000 tweets during the Oscars,” Mr. Ghuneim said. “But it’s still an impressive number.” In addition, he said, tweets about the show peaked during commercials. “Instead of running to the fridge during commercial breaks, people were running to their laptops and phones,” he said.
From those comments, Twitter is a boon to commercial television: a social media tool which encourages real-time viewing, which actually justifies the ad breaks as times to reflect, comment and connect with other fans (with the ads still blaring away rather than risk missing the opening of next act), rather than skipping the commercials altogether. For so many Lost fans, that sense of shared viewing made the finale much more meaningful event television, whether you loved it, or hated it. Spreading that conversation across North America and sizable chunk of Europe made it even richer, but those riches were denied Australians. What Seven fails to understand, is that a delay of just over two days may as well be two decades; most people I know in Australia have already seen Lost via means which aren’t legal, be that a peer to peer download, or circumventing the geographic restrictions for an online replay-service like Hulu. Lost succeeded admirably in creating dedicated fans across the web; Seven succeeded admirably in forcing them to look elsewhere.
Perhaps the greatest irony, and the surest sign that Seven doesn’t understand social media, is the fact that there will be a “Live Blog” on the official Seven Lost pages on Wednesday night. On the web, live means live globally, not live in an arbitrary national sales region bounded by water. Besides which, I live in Perth, on the west coast of Australia, and the live blog wouldn’t even be live here anyway; were I watching Lost in Australia, it’d still be one giant spoiler thanks to Perth being 2-hours behind the East coast.
I’ve written about the tyranny of digital distance before which, in a nut-shell, occurs when the real-time nature of digital information sharing isn’t fulfilled due to historical, political and commercial boundaries which were largely established before the internet, before the web. Not being able to participate in the Lost finale’s global commentary is a poignant example of the tyranny of digital distance in action, and has done nothing for my relationship with commercial broadcasting in Australia. In an era where the immediacy and real-time nature of commentary can add so much to the shared viewing experience, the boundaries which prevent that fan experience can be all the more disappointing and distancing.
For the record: I’ve now seen the finale, and I loved it.
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.”
Facebook faces a Diaspora
Ever since Facebook deployed their ‘instant personalisation’ tools (ie putting a ‘Like’ button on pretty much everything online), the backlash against the resulting privacy losses has been loud and clear; Facebook look to be going into PR damage control, as Read Write Web notes, they’re circling the wagons. Despite providing Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, a platform to directly engage with public concerns about Facebook earlier this week, the New York Times has seemingly turned on the social networking goliath today. First off the ranks, their article ‘Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking’ does a really good job at showing the huge problems with Facebook’s privacy settings, from the privacy policies massive (and growing) length, to a brilliant (and dumbfounding) infographic which illustrates the more than 170 privacy options users need to navigate and understand to have any ownership of your privacy on Facebook.
At the same time, the New York Times are asking ‘Is There Life After Facebook?’, in which they talk about the problems of social media evangelists who feel Facebook has crossed a line, and want to delete their own profiles. Yet the strongest critique of Facebook’s recent changes comes from the showcase ‘Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook’ which introduces the founders of Diaspora, a yet-to-be-released social network which will attempt to replicate the social elements of Facebook while providing clear privacy controls using an open-source framework. While it’s far too early to judge whether Diaspora will be successful, the fact that they’ve already raised more than $US60,000 via Kickstarter (with pledges from more than 1700 people!) shows that a lot of people are looking for a change.
At first glance, Diaspora’s aims might seem a little utopian (and thus technically quite hard to achieve):
Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.
Now that you have your information in your seed, it will connect to every service you used to have for you. For example, your seed will keep pulling tweets and you will still be able to see your Facebook newsfeed. In fact, Diaspora will make those services better! Upload an image to Flickr and your seed can automatically generate a tweet from the caption and link. Social networking will just get better when you have control over your data.
A seed will not just be all your existing networks put together, though. Decentralizing lets us reconstruct our “social graphs” so that they belong to us. Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them. Friend another seed and the two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead of through a superfluous hub. Encryption (privacy nerds: we’re using GPG) will ensure that no matter what kind of content is being transferred, you can share privately. Eventually, today’s hubs could be almost entirely replaced by a decentralized network of truly personal websites.
If Diaspora tells us anything, it’s that Facebook’s dominance is under threat, and the next Mark Zuckerberg (or Zuckerbergs in Diaspora’s case) might start with firmer principles in place. Privacy is one of the great bugbears of social media, we want to share, but we want at least a modicum of control over that. Facebook might roll back some of its worst ‘personalisation’ changes of recent weeks, but even then, many people have lost the will to trust Facebook; that loss might be their most expensive mistake ever.
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.”
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