Category: Social Networking

Beware Social Media’s Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO’s

Jeffrey R. Young has an article in the Technology section of The Chronicle of Higher Education enjoining us to Beware Social Media’s Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO’s (March 20, 2011). The article is about a South by Southwest Interactive conference that brought together researchers and industry.

One of the big trends is using crowdsourcing or micropayments to get work done for free or very little. Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor warned that this could be exploitative.

Mr. Zittrain began his argument against crowdsourcing with the story of the Mechanical Turk, a machine in the 18th century that was said to play chess as well as a human. But the contraption was a showy fraud; a man hidden inside moved the arms of a turban-wearing mannequin. Amazon, the online shopping giant, now offers a crowdsourcing service it calls Mechanical Turk, which lets anyone, for a fee, commission unseen hands to work on tasks like proofreading documents or identifying artists in musical recordings.

The similarity of crowdsourcing to a man shoved inside a box means the practice isn’t exactly worker-friendly, the professor argued. “In fact, it’s an actual digital sweatshop,” he said of the many sites that use the approach.

Fees paid for crowdsourced tasks are usually so meager that they could not possibly earn participants a living wage, Mr. Zittrain argued. He is familiar with one group drawn to the services: poor graduate students seeking spending money.

I wonder if anyone has proposed a code of ethics for crowdsourcing? Thanks to Megan for sending this to me.

The Battle for Control — What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About

From Humanist a pointer to a great blog essay by Kent Anderson about The Battle for Control — What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About. The essay starts by talking about all arguments for an against the internet making us smarter or stupider. He quotes Adam Gopnick’s nice essay “The Information; How the Internet gets inside us” in the New Yorker that divides us into three groups,

. . . the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic. . . . The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that . . . books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others.

Kent then turns historical looking at both the infoglut trope over time and then, in an original move, he looks at what some of the originators of the Internet thought it would be. He ends by concluding that it is really about control,

We may argue again and again whether the Internet is changing our brains, elevating us, lowering us, making us smarter, or making us stupid. But at the end of the day, it seems the real argument is about control — who has it, who shares it, and who wants it.

Cultivated Play: Farmville | MediaCommons

Thanks to Erik (again) I was pointed to this essay on Cultivated Play: Farmville by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz in MediaCommons.

The essay starts by asking why Farmville (a plug-in game for Facebook) is so popular. Why is harvesting virtual pumpkins (lots of clicks) fun for Facebook users? Patrick argues that Farmville is popular because we are polite people who want to be good to each other,

The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

Liszkiewicz goes on to argue that Farmville resembles work, but it is Zynga (and Facebook) that benefit. This game takes advantage of our natural civility and sense of neighborly obligation to exploit us. He ends up calling ita “sociopathic application” because it exploits our sociability to control us.

As someone who quit Facebook in a huff over how they were exploiting my information I can’t play Farmville and therefore I’m not sure that it has no redeeming qualities. I do, however, agree that we must examine what we are doing and quit those social sites that exploit us.

Glass

Thanks to Erik I have discovered an interesting web annotation feature called Glass. At the moment they are in beta and you have to get an invitation code to get an account, but they aren’t that hard to get.

Glass lets you add glass slides to web pages that you can invite other Glass users to see. These slides can hold conversations about a web site. You could use it to discuss an interface with a graphic designer. There might be educational uses too.

The interface of Glass is clean and it seems to nicely meet a need. Now … can we make a game with it? Can we do with it what PMOG (now called the Nethernet) was doing?

Transcribe Bentham

The Transcribe Bentham is an interesting crowdsourcing project in the humanities that has built an environment to involve people in the transcription of some 60,000 papers of Jeremy Bentham. The project is supported by University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities.

I’m impressed by how they have adapted tools to develop the participatory environment rather than developing from scratch. The transcription environment is MediaWiki which has been adapted so that you can manipulate a manuscript using Zoomify. They have changed the WYSIWYG editor so that the toolbar available while transcribing corresponds to the tagging they want users to use. Using a wiki gives them the basics of user accounts, versioning, and editing. They also use WordPress for the site about the project and they have added discussion forums to the MediaWiki. There is a nice feature Random Page that takes you directly to a random page in need of editing.

Twitter, Facebook, and social activism

Malcolm Gladwell has a nice essay in the New Yorker titled Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted (October 4, 2010.) He argues that social media are not well suited for sustained activism despite the stories told about Twitter and Tehran. He argues that activist movements tend to be discplined, strategic, hierarchical and built on strong ties. Social media, by contrast, support weak ties where lots of people do just a little (at no risk to themselves.) Social media are not likely to provide the strong social ties that gets people out to a sit-in. Social media don’t support the sort of strategic planning and hierarchical division of labor needed for activism. Finally, social media don’t support the discipline needed by, for example, non-violent tactics. You can’t train all your volunteers over Twitter. He concludes:

It (social media) makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world

Seth Priebatsch gave an interesting TED talk, The game layer on top of the world. He lists for game dynamics thatcan be used to motivate people.

  • Appointment Dynamic – you have to return somewhere to achieve something
  • Influence and Status – you play to get badges and other indicators of status
  • Progression Dynamic – you have to work up through levels
  • Communal Discovery – people work together to solve problems

He argues that the last decade was the decade of social and the next is the decade of games. He wants us to develop the game infrastructure right and use it for good. Facebook dominates the social by running what is effectively the great social graph that joins us. Do we want a single company monetizing our game layer?

A related project is XPArena – “a learning experience points platform” that allows educators to define points for learning achievements. This lets educators turn things into a game.

Thanks to Peter for this.

Hoppala! Augments

Lucio introduced me to a cool authoring environment from Layar called Hoppala!. Hoppala! Augmentation lets you author a Layar game on a map on the web. You can attach icons, media and text to the mapped points. We are using this as part of an authoring environment for PicoSafari (soon to be called fAR-Play). PicoSafari is a augmented reality game platform that humanities computing and computing science students created. It has been extended so that we can create adventures with questions you have to answer before you can see the next location. Our goal is to make it easy for people to author games and Hoppala! looks like a great tool.

Society for Digital Humanities Papers

With my graduate students and colleagues I was involved in a number of papers at the SDH-SEMI The Society for Digital Humanities / La Société pour l’Étude des Médias Interactifs conference at Congress 2010 in Montreal. They included:

  • “Exclusionary Practices: A Historical Look at Public Representations of Computers in the 1950s and Early 1960s” presented by Sophia Hoosien
  • “Before the Moments of Beginning” presented by Victoria Smith
  • I presented on “Cyberinfrastructure for Research in the Humanities: Expectations and Capacity”
  • Text Analysis for me Too: An embeddable text analysis widget” presented by Peter Organisciak
  • Daniel Sondheim talked about the interface of the citation from print to the web as part of a panel on INKE Interface Design.
  • “Theorizing Analytics” was presented by Stéfan Sinclair
  • “Academic Capacity in Canada’s Digital Humanities Community: Opportunities and Challenges” was presented by Lynne Siemens
  • “What do we say about ourselves? An analysis of the Day
    of DH 2009 data” was presented by Peter Organisciak
  • and I presented on “The Unreality of the Timeline” as part of a panel on temporal modeling at the CHA

As the papers get posted, I’ll blog them.