Pictures and Vision by Robin Sloan, May 2012

the titanic showdown between Facebook and Google might not be the News Feed vs. Google+ after all. It might be Facebook Camera vs. Project Glass.

It might, in fact, be pictures vs. vision.

Facebook is the world’s largest photo-sharing site. Google’s new Project Glass augmented-reality specs are about sharing your vision.

Google is getting good, really good, at building things that see the world around them and actually understand what they’re seeing.

In this context, Google+ is not the company’s most strategic project. That distinction goes to Glass, to the self-driving cars, and to Google Maps, Street View, and Earth: Google’s detailed model of the real, physical world.

Maybe in twenty years we’ll think of Google primarily as a vision company—augmenting our vision, helping us share it—and, oh wow, did you realize they once, long ago, sold ads?

I am absolutely not going to mention the N** A******** here

What I like about Sloan’s piece is that it suggests an inversion of what Google Goggles is about. The usual approach has been to think about the glasses as an extra screen where Google can project information - augmented reality, but also omnipresent ads. Glasses as a means to serve more Google Stuff.

But what if Glasses are about looking over showing? What if they’re more observant than instructive? What if they’re about what you see? What if they put the user’s vision first? …& take all that the user sees and do a fuckton of processing up in the cloud and then use it for recommendations on all the other screens and devices where we’re more amenable to ads and suggestions rather than bombarding a thousand advertisements millimetres from our corneas…

…What if Google Glasses are more a camera than a display? It’s a much less aggressive user experience - feeling like one that’s built around you, the user, that helps you share moments in how you see the world (witness that second photo up top).

And that is a really fundamental human drive: this is how I see the world. This is who I am. Understand me. Sharing moments of vision is sharing a really personal kind of connection. Currently that’s mediated by cameras/phones - what if it comes from a device a centimetre from your eyeball, and what if viewers can see those images on a screen a centimetre away from their eyeballs?

Step closer to getting inside each others’ minds, innit.

Jesse Darling, The Frame: Ikea, Facebook, Bodies and Performance, 21 May 2012.
Transcript of a talk given at Fierce Festival, more details here.

Whenever we encounter a new temporality or spatiality, there’s a lot of talk of survival; it’s hard to imagine now, but the big cities in which many of us grew up were once brave new metropoles, socio-economic hives of a density seldom seen before in cultural memory (at least in the Western world, quote unquote). Back then, psychiatrists and urban theorists were talking a lot about agoraphobia and claustrophobia, which are spatial malaises concerning the scale and density of place; nowadays, meanwhile, everyone’s talking about Asperger’s syndrome and ADHD, which can be seen as pathological sensitivities to [hyper]stimulation. Or otherwise, perhaps, as evolutionary prototypes for survival in a blinking, popping, semio-capitalist world of wall-to-wall screens and nonstop hyper-connectivity. So if this talk jumps around a lot, it’s because I’m especially contemporary in that sense.

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately, in my own work and research, is how and why IKEA and Facebook have become such ubiquitous, omnipotent, world-dominating psycho-spatial paradigms. My current conclusion is that it’s because they offer a very seductive illusion, or mirage, of a kind of order that simply doesn’t exist any more. They offer us a frame to exist in, to shelter in, when all else is in flux and crisis. Right now I can’t see this [image] as anything other than a brilliant, genius, terrifyingly cynical play on the psychological homelessness of not just one generation but several.

Download your information from Facebook? This option was new to me - and surprising.

Closer inspection revealed - of course - that it’s only a copy of the content you’ve uploaded to Facebook, not all the information you’ve given them or all the data they hold.

Europe-V-Facebook.org has correctly identified this as misleading:

According to European data protection law every individual has the right to get a copy of all personal data a company holds about him (right to access). This law is applicable to Facebook too. […]

By sending an access request you get an idea about the use of your personal data by Facebook. It also shows Facebook that users care about their data and privacy.

Note: Facebook has made it more and more difficult to get access to your data. The legal deadline of 40 days is currently ignored. Users get rerouted to a “download tool” that only gives you a copy of your own profile (about 22 data categories of 84 categories).

Rob Horning (Marginal Utility, Popmatters) notes that Zuckerberg “intends to rewire the way sociality works in the world” in his “grandiose” IPO letter quoted above.

Obviously Eli Pariser’s “filter bubble” takes on Z’s “diverse perspectives” argument and argues it’s not necessarily substantiated - friends & family are mostly people a lot like us, so the information we get from them is not going to be diverse, quite the opposite.

I’d also question how far Facebook is “helping people form connections”, and how much it’s just a marking - a fixing, arguably a reterritorialisation - of connections we make very largely face-to-face in person. I’ve made friends online - thanks, Twitter! - but haven’t met anyone new through Facebook - and I think that’s very typical.

*

ETA: Interesting observation on this section in Tim Carmody’s annotated version of the IPO letter on WIRED:

“if there’s anything Zuck’s truly passionate about, it’s this: that there’s something broken about how we hide and mask ourselves with other people, and that our lives would be better if we were more open”

Gigaom’s Matthew Ingram notes:

“He doesn’t just want to enable these changes in society — on a fairly fundamental level, he wants to control them.”

And as Rob Horning (Marginal Utility, PopMatters) puts it:

“The message is: We will reprogram you to see privacy as some sort of despicable antisociality and corral you all into a kind of mandated intersbjectivity”

*

But what does criticism of Zuckerberg’s hyperbole really mean when this IPO is going to make him so very, very rich?

Notes on the semantics of the internet

By 1423 on Diaspora, based on 1950s public health posters about syphilis (here)…

By 1423 on Diaspora, based on 1950s public health posters (here)

By 1423 on Diaspora, based on 1950s public health posters (here)…

• In a separate browser to my main internet use
• With cookies set to delete when I close the browser
• All Platform functionality turned off, likewise saying NO to using my details in ads, allowing friends to tag me in stuff, lalala
• Not Liking any brand pages
• Never clicking “Like” on content while roaming the web
• Checking security settings weekly, because it changes layouts, options and permissions about that frequently
• With Ad Block, Ghostery and Disconnect.me installed in all browsers I use, to respectively block ads, stop tracker cookies, and disable FB “Like button” tracking
• Considering making my Wall private
• And removing all photos with my face in (I’ve got less than 100 up anyway)

In short, under duress.

Given this rigmarole, it’s somewhat extraordinary is that I use Facebook at all. The key driver: Events. I want to be invited to stuff; I want people to come to my parties. Leaving would require a lot more texting, getting people’s email addresses and - gasp! - phoning to make a social life happen.

May yet do it.

To extend this beyond anecdote, I was doing some analysis last week on a few international online research community tasks about Facebook. Though the tone was overall positive, everybody - and I mean everybody, Indonesia to Mexico - expressed some concern about personal security and sharing online.

Really interesting and strange place for a brand to be - so popular, and yet deeply untrusted.

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to share. He doesn’t much care if you want to share. Sharing, in Zuckerberg’s view, has morphed from an affirmative act—that video was hilarious, I think I’ll Like it!—to something more like an unconscious state of being. I watched that video, and therefore it will be shared.[…]

Zuckerberg calls this “frictionless” sharing. What he means is that I don’t have to bother with the “friction” of choosing to tell you that I like something. On Facebook, now, merely experiencing something is enough to trigger sharing. Once I sign up for Spotify’s Facebook app, my consent is assumed: When I listen, I share. The same goes for the many other apps that Facebook’s partners are launching. [….]

This is a nightmare, but not for the reasons you might suspect. I don’t hate this new model because of its lack of “privacy,” or due to Facebook’s clear financial interest in collecting my personal information. […] My problem with “frictionless sharing” is much more basic: Facebook is killing taste […]

For as much as he’s invested in sharing, though, Zuckerberg seems clueless about the motivation behind the act. Why do you share a story, video, or photo? Because you want your friends to see it. And why do you want your friends to see it? Because you think they’ll get a kick out of it. I know this sounds obvious, but it’s somehow eluded Zuckerberg that sharing is fundamentally about choosing. You experience a huge number of things every day, but you choose to tell your friends about only a fraction of them, because most of what you do isn’t worth mentioning.

Now Zuckerberg wants to lower the bar. “One thing that we’ve heard over and over again is that people have things that they want to share, but they don’t want to annoy their friends by putting boring stuff in their news feeds,” he said during his keynote. To me, this doesn’t sound like a problem that needs solving. If Facebook users aren’t sharing stuff because they worry it will bore their friends, good! Thank you, people of Facebook, for your restraint in choosing not to bore me.

But Zuckerberg couldn’t let this undersharing stand. “Our solution was to create a new place that’s lighter-weight where you can see lighter-weight stuff—that’s how we came up with Ticker.” If you translate “lighter-weight” to boring, you’ll understand what Zuckerberg is saying: Facebook now has a place on its site reserved especially for boring updates

I think Manjoo - but potentially also Zuckerberg - has misunderstood something about sharing all this information. It’s not for your friends to read. If it’s useful, it’ll work in subtle and largely invisible ways - simply shaping the selection of music you get on Spotify so it’s stuff you’re more likely to like, or helping you be directed to the news stories you really want to read.

If the Facebook interface has got it wrong, however, it will indeed be bombarding users with the little stuff. Already the top right Latest Activity box is entirely useless - I don’t care whether a ‘friend’ I hardly know has Liked a stranger’s status update; “Like” means so little.

This bodes badly for the usability of the new Facebook design.

However what I also wanted to highlight was Manjoo’s other point about all this sharing producing “another bit of noise in their already noisy world”. It’s made me think about what I retweet and some of the things I post to Tumblr. Another quote? Another article? I only share things I think are good, but I’ll share “good” and not just “great” or “life-changing”. And I wonder whether this essentially amounts to clutter.

Already I spend too much time reading things on the internet, and not as much as I should thinking and writing. I don’t read anything that’s not interesting and engaging - I will close a boring or irrelevant article after the first couple of paragraphs - but nonetheless I would like to refine this further; to read only five mind-bending ideas a day, not fifty “that’s nice”.

All this content sharing and recommendation is information that could be used to help direct me to those five articles. (I use TweetedTimes.com already, and very relevant it is.) But still the volume’s just a bit too close to ‘flood’.

Google Plus’s real name policy has made it clear that they aim to be not just a social network but the leading identity provider for online activity.

Facebook’s Timeline can, I think, be interpreted as a similar move. As others have said it provides a structure that’s something like the personal webpages of 10 years ago gone interactive - a central place for the definition of “me” to be constructed, curated and broadcast. Again there’s a real name policy, although rather less vigorously enforced.

But this talk of their aims to become the leading identity question begs the question, how is identity provided online now, already? The answer (suggested the boy a couple of days ago) is email. In a world containing Jesse Owens (Olympic sprinter) and Jay Owens (blues musician), if you want to find me on social networks you can’t search my name, you need to search my email address. You have your email address on business cards - Twitter handle too, perhaps, but 140-char has to redirect to longer-form channels somewhere along the lines. What’s your log-in for most websites you use? It’s either an email address directly, or a username set up from reference to an email address.

And the cornerstone of this liberty is free, web-based email. Hotmail. Gmail, until recently. Mail.ru and Gmx.us and so on and so forth. This has not always been the case - email started out connected to your ISP (and thus subscriber details and physical address). Google are trying to take it back there.

So just something to bear in mind in the great squall of online identity debates. Free anonymous web-based email is not cool, or glamorous, and it’s easy to see how it could be threatened through recourse to anti-spammer rhetoric and Gmail perhaps one day privileging emails from real-name-certified accounts…

…But it’s something very important to defend.

What does Twitter make of it?

“	You have control over what’s in your #timeline #f8
	facebook September 22, 2011

“	Zuckerberg on stage at #F8 - You get the feeling they are just going to lay bare your whole life #endofprivacy
	mikebutcher September 22, 2011

“	after spending 5 yrs tricking ppl re. profile privacy, who believes this? RT @facebook You have control over what’s in your #timeline #f8
	hautepop September 22, 2011

“	Make no mistake. Your timeline is now your new resume. Don’t populate it with stuff you don’t want people to see. #f8
	derekhalpern September 22, 2011

“	Do I really want to “highlight and curate all my stories so people know who I really am”?? #f8
	ruskin147 September 22, 2011

“	Somehow timeline and the idea of self curating is re-centralising the self. Going back to personal webpages of the 90s, are we? #f8
	cgrltz September 22, 2011

Goodbye Geoshitties

DJ Damien

“	So Timeline will make it even easier to sell stuff to me and my family, right?
	joshuatopolsky September 22, 2011

Anthropology is having something of an intellectual moment. This sentence above could not have been said five years ago. But somehow something has happened to make the tech and business worlds recognise anthropological thinking to be relevant and valuable.

Yet this is a new scientised, technicalised anthropology - an anthropology that’s presumed to be the natural partner of comp sci network analysis.

It’s a depoliticised anthropology, too. Not that anthropology has ever had an official political position - left-leaning, to be sure, but not didactically so. Anthropology is, however, fundamentally concerned with understanding hierarchies and the operation of power - the ways in which social norms (the status quo) are socially reproduced and come to be seen as immutable.

This new corporate anthropology is only interested in that as far as it can further its own ends - which is to say it’s not interested in doing it properly at all.

To be interested in “anthropology” but not anthropological criticism, not critical anthropology - what does that mean? Is it intellectually coherent? How does it change the discipline?

The average 22-year old in the UK has a thousand Facebook friends - TNW Facebook

I’m seeing this bandied around all over the place but I’m skeptical.

I’m 25 and my most connected friends (club promotors, comedians, comedy promoters - i.e. the professionally socially promiscuous) have around 800 Facebook friends, not four figures. My finger-in-the-air average would be around 300. While I recognise personal anecdote isn’t data, the figure’s much higher than any others I’ve seen - enough to call it into doubt.

The company behind the research are being pretty close-lipped on their methodology - not least saying that this “average 22 year-old” claims to have 1000+ friends, rather than showing how they’ve verified this using FB stats. I’d also like to know whether this is a mean or median average.

What’s your take - is this really accurate?

(via matt-rhodes)