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Social Media and Cooperative Surveillance

Posted June 20th, 2011 by Bill

So the Bruins won the Super Bowl. Or something like that.

And in the aftermath, people rioted in Vancouver. And in those riots, pictures and videos were taken.

And some people took it upon themselves to identify the rioters.

Stanley Cup

And after the aftermath - with nearly 170 people treated in hospitals, volunteers cleaning up the city, people began to ask questions about surveillance and the role of social media.

In the comments of her post linked above, Alexandra Samuel extends her original thoughts to include the "slippery slope" argument:

I don't see how we can claim to be uncomfortable with mass surveillance -- to fear Big Brother -- but then make exceptions when it's convenient, or feels important. This is a slippery slope and we can't draw too many simple lines -- even a line based on exposing illegal behaviour (as opposed to legal but controversial). Remember that there are places where it's illegal to smoke dope, or criticize the government, or hold hands with someone who is the same gender as you. Do we accept social media surveillance in those contexts?

To start, it's worth pointing out that most slippery slope arguments aren't worth the air required to set them loose. A "slippery slope" argument assumes that we live in a world with moral absolutes, and that making a "wrong" choice plunges us into the abyss of uncertainty and ambiguity.

But with that said, to all those who argue that using social media to identify rioters to the state are engaging in community surveillance/crowdsourcing big brother/engaging in nefarious deeds to further the expansion of the omnipresent nanny state: you are late to the game. That ship has sailed. People are reporting on one another, and have been for years, well before the advent of the social web. Perversely enough, people using Facebook are complicit in building their own Panopticon. And, in using sites like Facebook - where people throw their contact information, their interests, the places they like to go, the people they like and dislike, things they buy, games they play (and how they play them), what they look like, what their friends look like, etc, etc - people leave a broad data trail. Even rough data shows a lot about individuals; more sophisticated datasets allow for more sophisticated predictions.

It would be interesting to look at what could be discerned from a person's datastream on Facebook, combined with the data accessible via the phones and laptops we use, and how close that woud come to supporting the data needed to make the Information Awareness Office a reality.

But to return to the argument of what constitutes an appropriate use for social media, and what level of privacy is reasonable to expect: we need to ground these conversations within the historical reality that people have been disagreeing, behaving badly, attempting to avoid responsibility - and then talking about it - for centuries (as an aside, Augustine would have had an AWESOME twitter feed). Social media just lets us get the word out faster.

And, if you are now concerned about privacy, and the relationship between surveillance, privacy, and the state, there is one thing you can do right now to make it better: stop using Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, etc, as outreach and communication tools. To use social media is to participate in a continuous act of cooperative surveillance: sometimes we're watching ourselves, sometimes we're watching others, sometimes we're being watched, but the difference between sharing and observing is largely a matter of the side of the window you're on.

For the many self-proclaimed "social media consultants": stop advocating an expanded use of Facebook, Twitter, etc, to the detriment of an organization's primary web site. If you have engaged in such unseemly behavior in the past, it's never too late to admit your mistakes. Just stop repeating them. And if you have been working in social media for more than 15 minutes and are actually surprised by privacy implications, you can always go back to selling cars.

Seriously, though, if you are giving advice to an organization that does social justice work, be very careful of the relationships you encourage them to foster on external social sites. Given Facebook's unclear direction in China, the ease in which apps can access and store user data, the way bugs leak private data, and Facebook's own hamfisted "privacy" efforts (from Beacon to facial recognition and everything in between), encouraging social justice-oriented groups to work on Facebook could be putting people at unnecessary risk.

As we talk about privacy and surveillance, we need to remember that a key difference between a surveillance tool and a tool for individual or collective empowerment is who controls the data, and how that data is used.

Image Credit: "Patrice Bergeron" taken by slidingsideways, published under an Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license.

When It Works, It Works

Posted August 7th, 2010 by Bill

When people talk about uses for twitter, the conversations tend to remain abstract. Statements like "twitter is useful for finding information" lead to other statements about "the power of the Network;" and this devolves into other generalizations with equally dubious utility or meaning.

And it's understandable; when Twitter is useful, it's often useful in subtle ways; it's difficult to describe how one has slowly become more tuned in to a range of topics via a gradual process of fleeting, informal interactions.

At the risk of diminishing the event by using it as an example, I'd like to point out a conversation that shows a concrete event where the medium made an immediate, positive difference for people.

screenshot of responses

Dave and Bonnie - glad to hear things are settling down.

Thoughts on Journalism and Social Media

Posted November 8th, 2009 by Bill

Over at TechCrunch, Paul Carr is taking an individual to task for her role in broadcasting information about the Fort Hood shootings. At the outset, I agree with a central point of Carr's argument: a person at the scene of a tragedy has an obligation to do what they can to make the situation better. Our first obligation is to the people in the world around us.

And with that said, I don't know enough about the specifics of her situation to render anything that approaches judgment. Also, the twitter account in question has been locked, so I have not been able to read the accounts Carr references. So, my only source of this information is secondhand, via Carr's post.

However, Carr states:

"And yet, the first news and analysis out of the base didn’t come from the experts. Nor did it come from the 24-hour news media, or even from dedicated military blogs – but rather from the Twitter account of one Tearah Moore, a soldier from Linden, Michigan who is based at Fort Hood, having recently returned from Iraq."

While the analysis that comes from mainstream media outlets (aka, the people who used to be known as professional journalists) often resembles something as sloppy as a twitter stream, the two should not be confused. A twitter stream is raw, unverified information, where we assume (often erroneously) that "analysis" coming from "professionals" has undergone more thorough vetting. This is a failing of traditional media, and while it is convenient to lay this at the blame of social media, this blame is misplaced. Initial accounts will by nature be inaccurate. With complex events, an accurate accounting can only be created through synthesizing multiple perspectives of the event. You just won't get this from a single source. Carr's point also begs the question as to why the mainstream media would elevate hearsay into news.

I will also admit a certain amount of skepticism about cautionary tales on social media coming from a writer on Techcrunch, which has breathlessly celebrated "news" of social media startups for more years than I care to remember.

In an earlier article on Techcrunch, Carr describes his experience at an invite-only event put on by MySpace. In this earlier post, he takes his experience (a bunch of people at a social media event) and generalizes it to the world at large. His argument is that social media has converted the general population into voyeurs and narcissists. Just for the record, many of us who have the excellent fortune to work in/with technology outside the Hype/Bullshit Bubble that envelops parts of Silicon Valley can actually use social media when we want to, without an obsessive need to tweet every detail. We can both talk and live; experiences without an audience are just as significant.

Case in point (and this is anecdotal, so take it for what it's worth): last week, the house across the street from mine experienced a fire. The inhabitant of the house -- an elderly woman -- was saved by a neighbor who kicked in the back door and pulled her to safety. His wife called 911. No one died, the house was saved, and no one tweeted about it. To the world of social media, this event never happened. To those of us in the neighborhood, our neighbor is a hero.

And that's exactly the point. Unless something gets dropped on Twitter (or any other social media app), it remains below the radar of social media, and therefore outside of the conversation within social media. Social media can only concern itself with what is visible within the world of social media -- this is normal, as you can't see what you can't see (duh). But the nearly unforgivable conceit of many people who write about social media is that human nature can be defined by what you see on social media. I don't know whether this is cluelessness, arrogance, lack of life experience, or just plain oversight, but the reality is that much of life transpires beyond the view of social media. Video clips that go viral offer us a deep, often terrifying glimpse of corners of human nature that are frequently left unexplored, but these deep glimpses should not be confused with balanced, broad insights. Good social media resembles, more than anything, a great piece of microfiction: a snapshot that encapsulates a truth about a larger whole, told from an individual viewpoint.

At the risk of stating the obvious, details coming from social media should be regarded as suspect, just as any unverified information coming from a single source should be regarded as suspect. To blame this on social media, however, misses the larger point: people who are paid to report the news should verify what they report, or indicate how reliable(or unreliable) it is. Be transparent. Be honest. And if you happen to be at a situation where you can help, don't video the event rather than make it better.

But that's also just common sense. Before social media, these were the types of people who ran away from an emergency without doing anything. Now, ironically, they broadcast their inactivity, often using one of the many social media startups celebrated on the pages of Techcrunch.

PS: To find out about the latest and greatest mobile hardware, just browse Techcrunch's mobile section: http://www.mobilecrunch.com Then, in a few months, they can complain about how you use the technology they cover.

Social Media Has Changed Everything! Really! Except It Hasn't.

Posted November 7th, 2009 by Bill

I've stumbled across a few conversations recently where people have been trying to push the notion that, as a result of social media, the audience has changed.

Social media has changed what interactions look like, but they haven't changed the nature of interaction.

The idea that social media has wrought a change in human nature is laughable. Two things, however, have shifted: more people now have the means to join in the conversation; and the combination of better search and social networks make it easier to find the conversations that are relevant to you.

As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to engage in a one sided conversation. It has also become increasingly difficult to control your message, or even to stay on top of/ahead of where your message goes.

A recent and ongoing example: at the NYSCATE conference, a vendor selling filtering tools titled his presentation The Enemy Within: Stop Students from Bypassing Your Web Filters. As one might suspect, there were people who took issue with the title, and began leaving comments on the editable web page linked to earlier in this paragraph (also, on the chance that the company doing the presentation would attempt to control some of the PR fallout by deleting the page, I took a snapshot of it, available here).

This situation provides a perfect example of what has changed, and what hasn't. Here's our situation:

1. A vendor/sponsor does a session at an education conference. Someone (probably the marketing folks) comes up with a "cute" title -- this title also happens to be offensive, but in defense of marketers they are not often the best to spot these issues.

So, far, nothing new.

2. In the olden days before social media, the people at the conference would have been offended. Maybe someone would have brought it up during the session. Maybe someone would have written a letter to the company, or the conference organizers. However, the key factor: some people would have been annoyed. The people who were annoyed, however, would have lacked the means to convey their dissatisfaction to a broader audience.

3. Now, however, people are annoyed. They are blogging about it. They are posting about it on Twitter. And the wiki page created for the presentation is filled (for now, anyways) with comments registering this disapproval.

The disapproval is not new. The means for expressing it, and the means by which the topic can be discovered, however, have changed.

The lessons from all this:

First, if you're going to try and be cute, make sure you're not saying anything offensive. Nothing destroys cute like offensive.

Second, let your work be your publicity. Do good things. Talk about them. If you're worried about the balance between doing good things and talking about what you are doing, err on the side of doing.

Third, if you can't be fully transparent about what you are doing, be transparent about your reasons why. The intarwebs hate bullshit artists. Just ask anyone who tried to sell Vista or host a Windows 7 launch party.

But most importantly: realize social media exists, and realize that -- to a small but growing segment of the population -- it matters. Talk with people. This doesn't mean that you should hire a "social media guru," as this is the equivalent of buying digital snake oil. And if you are trying to figure out how or why the audience has changed, stop wasting your time. The audience hasn't changed. They can just talk now. And good companies doing good things will know enough to listen.

The meme, however, that social media has changed everything is all around us, and really, it is time it went away. It gets in the way of more people understanding how to use the communication channels that are currently available. It's also worth noting that an effective use of social media involves listening, a markedly low-tech skill.

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