Commentary by Mark Wahl, CISA
Organizing principles for identity systems:
Anti-utopian social networking #2 (20070811)
In an earlier post on anti-utopian social networking, I outlined a scenario in which An anti-utopian social networking site is a social networking site that has developed a flaw that "spoils" it, and one flaw could be the misapplication of undercover/viral marketing strategies
.
Another problem which could be a flaw in social networking is hyperreality, a term used by the theorists Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco. One possible definition of hyperreal could be made in contrast to what is "real":
The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction... The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal...which is entirely in simulation.(Jean Baudrillard)
1. Just because you're not a celebrity doesn't mean millions of people couldn't be watching your every move.
One impact is the sense an individual would have from "always being viewed". In part, social networking services give anyone with Internet connectivity the ability to share minutae of their life with others, regardless of boundaries of time or distance. Everyone is encouraged to self-publish: blog their life, update their status on Twitter, write about their feelings in specialized feeling-recording Facebook or MySpace apps, upload their family photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube. Not only do people enjoy uploading, people enjoy watching. Without LiveJournal/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr/MySpace/YouTube, would those same authors write in their diaries, show their snapshots to friends at parties, etc? To some, the magnification available from publishing to these services must offer an appeal, but with it often comes a cost to the participants: both the authors, and the viewers searching for the "real" in self-generated content. Jean Baudrillard wrote in the section "The End of the Panopticon" of Simulations, concerning a TV documentary capturing an "actual typical American family":
"It is again to this ideology of the lived experience, of exhumation, of the real in its fundamental banality, in its radical authenticity, that the American TV-verite experiment on the Loud family in 1971 refers: 7 months of uninterrupted shooting. 300 hours of direct non-stop broadcasting, without script or scenario, the odyssey of a family, its dramas, its joys, ups and downs - in brief, a "raw" historical document, and the "best thing ever on television, comparable, at the level of our daily existence, to the film of the lunar landing." Things are complicated by the fact that this family came apart during the shooting: a crisis flared up, the Louds went their separate ways, etc. Whence that insoluble controversy: was TV responsible? What would have happened if TV hadn't been there.
More interesting is the phantasm of filming the Louds as if TV wasn't there. The producer's trump card was to say: "They lived as if we weren't there". An absurd, paradoxical formula - neither true, nor false: but utopian. The "as if we weren't there" is equivalent to "as if you were there". It is this utopia, this paradox that fascinated 20 million viewers, much more than the "perverse" pleasure of prying. In this "truth" experiment, it is neither a question of secrecy nor of perversion, but of a kind of thrill of the real, or of an aesthetics of the hyperreal, a thrill of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a thrill of alienation and of magnification, of distortion in scale, of excessive transparency all at the same time..."
The popularity of these social networking services gives millions of people around the world the ability to simultaneously 'drop in' on any randomly-chosen individual in a way that never would be physically possible before. The BBC reports that footage of a teenage kid swinging a golf ball retriever, not intended to be shown to anyone, has been viewed 900 million times, making the victim a "worldwide object of ridicule": It was simply unbearable, totally. It was impossible to attend class
.
As people are objects in social networking services, these services are designed to make it easy for the users to find other people they know, and learn more about them. Chris Ceppi writes about the people search engine Spock and the New New Transparency that
Spock automates the retrieval of those bits - if your age is published on LinkedIn, MySpace, a random online bio, or any other number of sources that Spock sorts and surfaces - then it will be front and center on Spock.
Also, many social networking sites encourage users to add comments about each other. Gossiping is a natural human activity, that now is magnified through technology to allow the gossip to be available on a vast scale. As a result, individuals find that they are not in control of their story as commentary aggregates and swirls around and about them. Pamela Dingle wrote in her blog post "The Dating Mashup (or my Facebook Adventure)":
Why wouldn't someone from some other part of my life or history cruise through and add his own dating history into that photo thread? Heck, maybe my husband will chime in, he's on Facebook too. If there was enough interest, I do believe that an entire timeline could be constructed, and what could I do? I could scream and freak out and have the photo removed I'm sure. But such anti-social behaviour would become the object of discussion in turn. When you protest, people assume you are afraid of something :). Taken separately, nobody's dating history is secret - but peer-to-peer publishing of cumulative results makes me feel vulnerable to the same phenomena occurring around some other, less innocent set of facts.
Bob Blakley has discussed this in his blog post "On the Absurity of Owning One's Identity", and the fear of computer systems and organizations conspiring behind one's back is based on real concerns, as shown in an article earlier this year by Liz Pulliam Weston in MSN Money entitled "Insurers keep a secret history of your home" discusses the ChoicePoint Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange (CLUE) database:
Jan and Kevin Garder of Bremerton, Wash., discovered this the hard way. The Garders thought they were doing the right thing when they told their insurance company, State Farm, about some minor water damage caused by a rainstorm last year. The couple, who say they had been with their insurer for 30 years without filing a claim, ultimately decided not to file one this time, either. That didn't stop State Farm from dropping them as customers, they say. Not only that, but they say State Farm also shared the damage information with the CLUE database. When the Garders applied for coverage elsewhere, the other insurers cited State Farm's damage report as the reason they wouldn't write a policy, Jan Garder said.
Here, as the information flow paths in social networking services are based on one's "friends", "coworkers" and other more nebulous relationships, this time, it's personal
.
Thus one flaw of social networking might be that it provides anyone with the ability to drill into the details (facts, opinions, speculations, connections real or implied) of another's life, and to the target, the sense that this could occur at any time and come from anywhere.
The former, taken to extremes, can be anti-social behavior. It is not necessary to know everything about a person to be their friend/coworker/neighbor, and conversely knowing everything of a person's biography does not make them one's friend, as I mentioned in the example of the King of Comedy.
2. The Replica replacing the real
The second flaw might be that the unreal world of online interaction might come to affect real-world interaction.
Internet users are conditions to not accept certain people as real. There are not hundreds of rich widows in Nigeria seeking help in moving their fortunes; it is a variant of the Spanish prisoner scam:
Fellow says him and his sister, wealthy refugees, left a fortune in the home country. He got out, girl and the money stuck in Spain. Here is her most beautiful portrait. And he needs money to get her and the fortune out. Man who supplies the money gets the fortune and the girl. Oldest con in the world.
On the face of it, as Pamela Dingle noted in "Breaking the TOS before you even start", the terms of service of various social networking sites require the user to provide 'true' information. Some sites would delete "fake" profiles for non-real persons, as a 2003 article in SF Weekly states
Jonathan Abrams, the 33-year-old software engineer who founded Friendster to improve his own social life ... abhors the phony profiles. He believes they diminish his site's worth as a networking tool and claims that fakesters' pictures -- often images ripped off the Web -- violate trademark law. Abrams' 10-person Sunnyvale company has begun ruthlessly deleting fakesters and plans to eventually eradicate them completely from the site.
Yet if there is commercial value in having certain "non-person" characters present, then those are allowed, as a 2004 article in Wired states
"What Friendster is doing with these movie-character profiles is actually a brand-new paradigm in media promotion," Friendster spokeswoman Lisa Kopp said. "We are working directly with a number of production houses and movie studio partners to create film-character profiles, or 'fan' profiles, that allow our users to share their enthusiasm about the film with their friends."
Social networking services can further be subverted with characters that have no existence outside of the services themselves. An Internet celebrity may not necessarily be a "real" person or even a "real" (pre-existing) character, as in the example of lonelygirl15:
To further the initial illusion that Bree was a real girl, a MySpace page was set up for her and she began meaningfully corresponding with many of her fans. Several fans of lonelygirl15's video posts began to wonder if Bree was, in fact, a real person or if the posts were part of a teaser campaign for a television show or an upcoming movie (similar to the viral marketing used to hype The Blair Witch Project). Others felt that the blog might be part of an alternate reality game.
If all one sees are replicas, does it become harder to recognize the real? For an extreme example, in the movie Galaxy Quest, an alien civilization, the Thermians, has intercepted Earth's TV transmissions from the 1960-1970s. Yet their mental models are different and they do not 'get' that the television shows are sometimes fictional. They believe Gilligan, the Skipper, "and the rest" really were stranded on an island. They also believe that the episodes they receive of the sci-fi show "Galaxy Quest" were "historical documents" describing the adventures in space of the crew of the NSEA Protector, a thinly-veiled Starship Enterprise. Using their advanced technology, the Thermians transport the actor Jason Nesmith, who portrayed the captain of the Protector, to an actual interstellar spaceship they have constructed with the appearance of the Protector from these "historical documents". Jason Nesmith, having of course never seen an actual spaceship, doesn't recognize it as being 'real', believing it to be only a fan's reconstruction:
This is great. Usually it's just cardboard walls in a garage.
The second impact of social networking is that 'unreal' statements made on the Internet about interpersonal relationships might replace the 'real' statements: the vocabulary of the software becomes a "Newspeak" that reframes the participants' expressions. Suppose the term friend is used to mean any connection: people who are interested in me, people who have a pretty picture on their home page, people who I was at the same school at, people whose friends I know, etc. Can changes such as these affect people's behavior?
In an article in last month's New Scientist on "The rise of cyberbullying" several contributing factors are cited, including the typical scapegoat of anonymity, the magnification of attacks from the wide distribution possible online, the 24x7 connected lifecycle of the participants, and
The lack of face-to-face contact might tempt bullies to new levels of cruelty. "On the playground, seeing the stress and pain of the victim face-to-face can act as an inhibitor to some degree," explains Carr. "In cyberspace, where there is no visual contact, you get more extreme behaviour." Kowalski says the effect is unique to computer-mediated communication. "There is a distancing of the self and immediacy in response that we don't have in any other form of communication," she says. "On the computer, it's like it's not really you."
Furthermore, unlike traditional online games (e.g., Nethack) where people play behind personas defined by the game, game-like interactions embedded in social networking services have such no layer of isolation: the players are playing "as themselves".
The article also notes that 2000 abuse reports are filed each day in Second Life, and that
"It's adults hassling other adults," says Thomas Chesney of the University of Nottingham, UK, who has encountered pushing, swearing and shooting there. Chesney and colleagues recently set up an office in Second Life where they interviewed more than 100 inhabitants about bullying. Chesney says that because many people come to Second Life with a background in gaming, they bring preconceived notions of violence and aggression with them. "They're playing games like World of Warcraft - where the aim is to kill everybody - and they take that attitude into Second Life," he says. "It's a bit depressing that we haven't progressed beyond hassling one other, but not surprising given all we know about workplace bullying."