Making Social Media Roles Model Real Life

Facebook released new content sharing/filtering rules today and it got me to wondering why these social network sites make such a fundamental thing as modeling roles and relationships so difficult.

It seems in real life you have a version of (or role for) yourself that you expose to these general groups:

• You
• Family
• Close friends (usually less than 10)
• Coworkers
• Schoolmates
• Acquaintances (usually less than 100)
• Special Interest/Group/Club/Hobby Members
• General Public

So I have always been baffled why social content sites don’t use a similar model and let you simply check off which of these groups/roles you wish to publish/expose your content to. 

The Ben Franklin adage that you should “not do anything you don’t want to read about in tomorrow’s paper” is particularly apt in the social media world.  Especially given the number of stories about folks who were fired because coworkers or others saw inappropriate content intended only for close friends (advice on avoiding this here).  So for me personally, I have little interest in most social media until they can get the roles and relationships aspect right. 

To me, Flickr always seemed like the best/easiest site for doing this, but is nonetheless still somewhat restrictive because it only provides 4 role categories: private (you), friend, family, public (I think if they added a coworker category it would be a fairly complete and simple to use model).

Can I be Your Friend?

One of the problems with translating this simple model into the social-media world is that 2 people don’t always have the same view of a relationship.  Unlike your own private consciousness where you can define someone’s role and meaning to you without them knowing, in the social media world, people often know the role that you have assigned them.  You might be afraid that calling someone an “Acquaintance” rather than a “Friend” might hurt their feelings.  Or over time as relationships change, a “Friend” might become an “Acquaintance” and then eventually someone you hardly know at all.  “Demoting” these people from “Friend” to “Acquaintance” might also cause hurt feelings. 

The simple solution to this problem is to simply not let people know what you think their role is; this setting should be kept private and known only to you.  One again, the real world provides a compelling solution to even this dilemma.  The real world – now there is a concept for the Facebook generation.

Fahrenheit (Encryption Key) 451

Available as "Kindle"-ling

A really perceptive article in today’s CS Monitor: Kindle e-reader: A Trojan horse for free thought.

Until reading, I had not seen the great irony in the unfortunate naming of Amazon’s “Kindle” device and the title and subject matter of Ray Bradbury’s famous book. 

Some really thought provoking and sensible arguments in the article include:

That we are trading ownership for access – access that requires the pre-authorization of a corporation and “thingamajig.”

Well-established principles of Fair Use and First Sale are being marginalized and sweep away.

“…What the Kindle should be igniting is serious debate on the fundamental, inalienable right to property in a digital age – and clarifying what’s yours, mine, and ours.”

The article’s author (also a librarian) also includes a great Ray Bradbury quote on how ”You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get people to stop reading them.”  (or he might have added- just convince them to stop thinking they own them).

Happy ‘Buy Nothing Day’

Buy Nothing Day from AdBusters

No doubt completely lost in news of Christmas sales and Black Friday specials is the news that today is in fact “Buy Nothing Day.”   Little wonder if you have never heard of it, no major media outlet ever built a successful ad-revenue-based business model by encouraging people not to buy things.  But nonetheless, the idea that happiness is not derived from consumption and consumerism is an idea whose time hopefully has finally come to the general population. 

Amongst all of the bad economic news we frequently hear, the US has been in an unprecedented period of economic growth for about the last 25 years (since 1982).  Yet bigger houses, more cars, and bunches of more “stuff” have done very little to change or improve our daily lives.   A McMansion is just a house, a big, expensive TV is just a TV, an iPod is just a record/cassette player and a gas-guzzling SUV is just a car.  So perhaps it is finally time to abandon the naïve notions pimped by manufacturers, advertisers, and the associated culture of consumerism.

Sure, it may be as ineffective as the “Great American Smokeout,” but “Buy Nothing Day” is certainly a step in the right direction.  And the first step to a cure is always to first acknowledge that you have a problem to begin with. 

Go ahead and spend a day cleaning your house and not buying more stuff.   Spend some time with friends and loved ones and reflect how maintaining those relationships will return far greater value than buying yet another sweater or purse.  Afraid that if you don’t buy that gift sweater that it may in fact hurt those relationships?  That is a valid concern, but there are plenty of alternate gift ideas that can be very personal and meaningful that don’t involve much spending.  These include such things as a family tree, a framed photo, an address book (with friends/family contact info already filled in), a self-assembled food basket, and many other things limited only by your creativity.

So, Happy Buy Nothing Day – now wasn’t that much more satisfying (not to mention warmer and safer) than camping in front of Best Buy all night – and your basement and/or garage may just be cleaner for it.

Community, Civics, and Cyberspace

Several years ago at the local strip-mall shopping center, I watched the then-new local Walmart knock down the old Ames that had in turn knocked down the Sears that had knocked down the Woolworths*.  So I started thinking about which community artifacts are truly stable and can even be counted on to last more than a generation (retail stores obviously not being among them). 

My conclusion?  Churches, Civic Organizations, Bowling Alleys, Government Buildings, Bars, and Liquor Stores

Now, because of declining interest and participation, in this generation even the first three items on that list are at risk.  What that means in the long term I don’t know, but it probably isn’t a good thing.  At least not if you believe the work of Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam who wrote the book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival Of American Community.**”  Written in 2000 (disclaimer: I have not read), Putnam laments our lack of community sharing, our increasing disconnectedness from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, and the resulting “decline in stock of social capital.”   After observing this decline in American civics and social connectedness, he then argues that if America is to continue to succeed this civic mindedness must be reinvented and restored. 

Some will argue that technology and social networking are doing just that.  Personally, I’m not convinced.  The anecdotal evidence I see is that far from bringing us together in the real world, these technologies are just stratifying us and pushing us further apart.  Granted that many of these online ecosystems can truly be considered “communities,” but many are merely homogeneous, and perhaps even stagnant, associations of loosely connected people who generally think and act exactly the same.  Another difference is this same not-easily-defined concept of rootedness.  As the Internet collective hive-mind jumps to whatever the next hip-thing is, these tenuous Internet associations quickly break down.  Don’t believe me?  Try and find those old Geocities or AngleFire pages you did.

I hope I’m wrong and that computer networking technology can lead to ”hyperlocalization,” an increased social connectedness, and a renewed sense of community.  But more likely, when Facebook virtually plows under the MySpace that plowed under GeoCities, we’ll be just as disintegrated and disconnected from our real-world communities as we ever were.  At least we’ll still have our local bars and liquor stores to help ease our pain.

________________

* That same Walmart then abandoned that site and moved Borg-like up the road a mile to the local indoor mall and proceeded to knock one third of it down for a Super Walmart.
** Although I did not see a lot of civic-mindedness displayed by “The Dude” and his bowling league in the Big Lebowski – there was definitely diversity.

Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2008

In Honor of William S. Burroughs

For Al Bundy
In hopes he is still on the couch

Thanks for the candy hearts and Hallmark cards, destined to be perfunctorily purchased -

thanks for an Expression to despoil and poison -

thanks for FTD florists to provide an escape from neglectful guilt -

thanks for St. Valentine and the Martyrs, to forget their lives and meaning -

thanks for a mandatory dinner at Applebee’s or Red Lobster -

thanks for the idea of TRUE LOVE to commoditize and sell until it stimulates the economy -

thanks for the MPAA, for judges who forget the First Amendment, for prudish soccer moms incensed about Janet Jackson’s breast -

thanks for “I (Heart) My Dog” bumper stickers -

thanks for dove-patterned bulk tableware -

thanks for “two months salary” and Diamond Eternity Rings -

thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to think on their own -

thanks for a nation of consumers – yes,

thanks for all the memories… all right, let’s see your credit cards… you always were a simple tender heart -

thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human emotions.
 

Smoking and Obesity – a Boon to Saving Health Care Costs?

In a refreshing breath of academic honesty, a study debunks the nanny state myth that smoking and obesity increase government health care costs.  So it may be time to dispense with this oft repeated myth.  A myth that has long been used as a major justification for governments’ intrusions into these health aspects.    

This should have been simple common sense, but unfortunately common sense just doesn’t work with bureaucracies hell bent on arbitrarily stamping out things they don’t like.  So a formal study was required.  The not-so-surprising findings and conclusions?  Smokers and the obese die earlier and thus have far less overall lifetime health care costs than the otherwise ”healthy.”  Moreover, smokers actually provide the added government “benefit” of paying extra taxes. 

Of course, as anyone who has ever watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” knows (“Zuzu’s Petals!”), when a person dies early (or as in the movie, ceases to exist) there are actually costs that are intangible, difficult to quantify, or impossible to know, so purely looking at lifetime health care costs in itself may not be a true measure of overall cost; but it is at least a start down the road of academic honesty.  An honesty that is sorely needed as governments seek to regulate more and more aspects of peoples’ private lives and behaviors.

Smoking Bans and other “Feel Good” Legislation yet Government just can’t Quit the Smoking Habit

Legislative smoking bans and the general outright social disdain for smoking seems to have had some interesting consequences that I wonder if their proponents ever foresaw:

• A dramatic increase in the number of smoke shops (exempt from smoking bans) where people smoke far more dangerous things than cigarettes such as cigars and even hookahs
• An increase in the use of smokeless tobacco – even new kinds of smokeless tobacco are being developed and marketed, such as Snus, and are immensely popular (smokeless tobacco use is increasing something like 10% a year – well in excess of the increase of the redneck population)
• Smoking ends up being as rebellious and anti-establishment as it ever was

You see, the issue is simply this: for any “low-grade” vice you can think of, there is a certain percentage of the population who is going to engage in that vice – often regardless  of the consequences.  Legislative solutions to these classes of problems have consistently been shown not to work.

Governments’ half hearted attempts to limit drinking and smoking are particularly disingenuous and cynical when they use the tax revenues generated to support budget shortfalls and normal operating costs.  Remember that big umpty bazillion dollar State Tobacco Settlement that was supposed to go toward (1) funding government health care for smokers and (2) smoking cessation efforts?  It didn’t – it went into state coffers to be squandered on completely unrelated state budget items.

When it comes to complex social ills such as vices, you can be sure of only one thing: that simple, “feel good” solutions won’t work and will probably make the problem far worse.  Can they be solved?  Sure – we were able to get the Romans to stop feeding Christians to lions for entertainment, weren’t we?  But it takes a genuine commitment beyond the simple, superficial, “feel good” type. 

And above all you have to be honest and consistent in your message.  If you say something is evil and deadly, you then don’t take this “blood money” and use it to fund your state budgets.  Governments are the first ones who need to quit the smoking habit – perhaps then others will follow their example.  
 

Cough Medicines Too Risky for Kids but Psychotropic Drugs are Just Fine

Here in the Middling Years of the Nanny State, it is with little surprise that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has decided to ban cold medicines for young kids.  Like most such prohibitions, the ban is not completely without its merits: the argument that adult remedies rarely work the same on kids and that they may not work at all and the fact that 750 kids per year had to go to the hospital for reactions or side-effects (though this hardly sounds like a statistically significant number in a nation of 300 million – 150 children a year actually die from bee stings but we haven’t outlawed bees yet).

So OK, now that we have this evil cough syrup menace taken care of, wonder if the FDA can be troubled to turn its attention to far more serious drugs that are specifically marketed and targeted to children: serious hard-core psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin, Paxil, and many others (which are mostly speed/amphetamines - remember when those things were bad?). 

Sometimes given with good cause, sometimes irreverently referred to as a “straight-jacket in a bottle,” these drugs have skyrocketed in use in children over the past 15 years.  Yet,  no-one (except the drugs companies and medical professionals who profit no doubt) even knows exactly what percentage of kids are on this stuff (estimates seem to place the number at 5 million US kids).  

Far more disturbing are the consequences of these policies of mass medication: 

• the number of foster kids who are given these drugs without their (or any guardian’s) consent
• anecdotal evidence that strongly suggests that another drug problem has been created by kids trading and selling these drugs in school
• no-one knows what the long term effects will be of this massive drug experiment on our kids

Government drug policy makers must be on some serious mind-altering drugs themselves when they prioritize relatively benign medicines such as cough remedies before these incredibly potent drugs.  Where is a Nanny State when you need one?

Lead Causes Violence, Lack of Pirates Causes Global Warming

I have seen so many theories for the cause of the significant reduction in violent crime in the US since 1993 that I am starting to lose track, let me try to recall just a few from memory:

• 3 Strikes, Mandatory Minimums, and other ”Tough on Crime” Measures  enacted in the 1980’s
• Stricter federal enforcement of gun control initiatives including the Brady Law 
• Abortions (in Freakanomics, and the retort to an error in their methodology)
• Long-term results of social programs started in the mid-1960s
• Improved overall economic conditions that began in the early 1990s

But the cause reported on the NewsHour tonight (in a story on leaded toys or “Toxic Toys” from China) is perhaps the most ludicrous: environmental lead (in particular in the form of leaded gasoline).  I am not making this up, a study release from what I now formally considered a prestigious source, the University Of Pittsburgh Medical Center (Lead In The Environment Causes, 2005) directly attributes this drop to efforts in the US to reduce exposure to lead.  These efforts were primarily through: phasing out leaded gasoline, lead paint, and lead plumbing.  Now this meme has apparently wriggled its way out of the crackpot journals of UPMC and into the mainstream news thanks to the NewsHour. 

This theory is just slightly more specious than the farcical Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s Pro-Pirate argument (that the rise of global temperatures, hurricanes, and tornadoes is inversely proportional to the number of pirates).  Hmmmm, I guess these geniuses at UPMC couldn’t imagine that poorer and less educated people, i.e. those already at a significantly higher risk of becoming violent offenders to begin with, are more likely to live in older houses in which lead is still a problem.  Or they also couldn’t somehow wrap their heads around the fact that countries with lead levels significantly higher than the US (many countries still sell leaded gas in fact) still have much lower levels of violent crime than the US.    

So unless the PBS NewsHour wants to start reporting on the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its pro-Pirate initiatives, they should not give credence to such equally meretricious arguments.

The Death Penalty for Parking Tickets – and for Pre-Crime

Steve Martin used to joke about giving “the death penalty for parking tickets” but with stories of the overuse of Tasers and the unintended consequences – i.e. death - abound this may no longer be a joke. 

You need look no further than the “Don’t Tase me Bro’” guy to see that over-eager police may be over-using these handy devices.

And now stories of people being killed by Tasers for relatively minor offenses are starting to surface with some regularity – some 200 deaths since 2002 according to this ZDNet article.   One has to wonder if there were 200 accidental police shooting deaths for minor offences if the public would notice that either (incidentally, accidental police shooting deaths are not even tracked nationally in the US). 

It just seems a little creepy to me that these new technologies could be turned loose on a citizenry without some strict protocols on how they should be used as well as strict monitoring of how they are in fact used in the field. 

No doubt we will be seeing more of these devices – not less – until we have a perfected some Minority Report-like Halo device to throw on any government suspected “pre-criminals.”   So perhaps we had better decide – and quickly – what amount of newly-enslaving technology is allowed to be unleashed on an unwitting population.