I came across this review of Superfreakonomics and was pleased for a few moments. I learned that the authors had ill-advisedly chosen to use a chapter of their book to call into question the importance of global warming and that an “extensive uproar” ensued online, causing the book’s “public demise” and providing “a huge victory for democracy and common sense”. The article was full of links to the book’s detractors online but I have to say I had not heard of the criticism of the book before now so I checked out Amazon to see how it had fared.

Well if being the sixth most popular book on Amazon makes it a failure I hope my books do as poorly! Perhaps however this reception was in spite of a visible storm of protest and controversy around the book? Well I did find mentions of there being a controversy but when I Googled for “superfreakonomics global warming” I found a sympathetic review by Kevin Kelly in the Mercury News, the authors’ own “global warming fact quiz” and only then a short Atlantic Monthly piece which takes a moderately hostile line.

Alas, what Sahil Kapur the author of the piece I found in CampusProgress seems to fail to appreciate is that just because criticism of Superfreakonomics is filling up his RSS reader it doesn’t mean that those views are being encountered directly or indirectly by the public. The power of the mainstream media and of old-fashioned tools to influence public opinion like book promotion tours cannot be easily undermined by blogging alone.

Dr Aric Sigman’s recent comments have had wide media play - the BBC has interviewed him and some of the wilder reaches of the media have produced alarmist headlines like “Does Facebook Cause Cancer?“. Dr Sigman told the BBC:

interacting “in person” has an effect on the body that is not seen when e-mails are written. When we are ‘really’ with people different things happen,” he said.

“It’s probably an evolutionary mechanism that recognises the benefits of us being together geographically.

“Much of it isn’t understood, but there does seem to be a difference between ‘real presence’ and the virtual variety.”

All very interesting, so I got ahold of the paper in The Biologist he wrote that caused all the fuss (Sigman, A. (2009) “Well Connected? The Biological Implications of Social Networking”, Biologist, 56 (1), pp. 14-20.)

He starts by noting that most of us in the developed world are spending more time in front of screens. He mentions an editorial of the Journal of The Royal Society of Medicine saying social network site use

encourages us to ignore the social networks that form in our non-virtual communities. The time we spend socialising electronically separates us from our physical networks.

He then provides a great deal of evidence whose persuasiveness I cannot assess that social isolation, lack of social support and loneliness are bad for your health. Where, though, is the evidence presented for a biological difference between face to face and online communication? Nowhere.

He does cite one piece of social psychological evidence - Kraut, R., et al. (1998) “Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?”, American Psychologist, 53 (9), pp. 1017-1031. This study concluded internet use correlated with negative effects on social involvement and wellbeing. However this study while widely cited is now very controversial - indeed its lead author produced a followup Kraut, R., et al. (2002) “Internet Paradox Revisited”, Journal of Social Issues, 58 (1), pp. 49-74 which concludes that the opposite applies. More recently, studies are beginning to suggest that the use of Facebook helps people “maintain or intensify relationships characterized by some form of offline connection” Ellison, N., C. Steinfield and C. Lampe (2007) “The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12 (4).

There are of course different biologically-related points that can be made about excessive screen time being correlated with lack of exercise (which is bad for you) but that doesn’t enter into Sigman’s analysis. So until we can analyse some of the evidence that Sigman alludes to in his interview of a different biological response to face to face vs virtual contact I would suggest that his work can be used to assert that Facebook use (insofar as it may reduce loneliness) can be good for your health.

As a consulting researcher at MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, I’m happy to announce this year’s  Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Futures of Entertainment 3 conference! It will take place Friday, Nov. 21, and Saturday, Nov. 22, at the Wong Auditorium in the Tang Center on MIT’s campus.

Futures of Entertainment 3, an event sponsored by the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium is the third annual conference bringing together media industries professionals and media studies academics to discuss the current state and ongoing trends in media.  This year’s conference will include panels on how value is counted in the media industries, understanding audiences, social media, the comic book industry, franchising and transmedia, media distribution in a global marketplace, and the intersection of academia and the media industries.

Speakers at the conference include Kim Moses, executive producer of The Ghost Whisperer; Alex McDowell, production designer for Watchmen; Gregg Hale, producer of The Blair Wtich Project and Seventh Moon; Lance Weiler, director of The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma; and Tom Casiello, Daytime Emmy award-winning former writer for soap operas including As the World Turns, One Life to Live, Days of Our Lives, and The Young and the Restless; Peter Kim, a founder of the Dachis Corporation; as well as representatives from HBO Online, World Wrestling Entertainment, and other innovative media companies and projects.

The conference will also feature academics such as Henry Jenkins (MIT, founder of the Convergence Culture Consortium and author of Convergence Culture and Textual Poachers), Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School, author of The Wealth of Networks), John Caldwell (UCLA, author of Production Culture), Anita Elberse (Harvard Business School, author of “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?”), and Grant McCracken (author of Transformations).

More information on the conference, including the program and registration, is available at http://www.convergenceculture.org/futuresofentertainment/

Google has long insisted that it wasn’t interested in or involved with news gathering that involved human intervention - “we just serve stuff up using algorithms”, they say. (Of course the algorithms at Google News are continually tweaked to ensure that people using them get the kind of results that Google believes that they want, and the selection of news sources themselves is done by humans…) But I just noticed a new programme off in a corner of Google - Power Readers in Politics - essentially a group blog run by a small and Google-selected set of politicians and journalists, attached to Google Reader. Also see their Canadian version.

The charitable organization MySociety which builds civic websites in the UK has launched its first campaign - Free Our Bills. It’s a rather wonkish one but well worth supporting. Basically they are putting pressure on parliament to improve the way it publishes legislation online to make it easier for independent groups like them to parse the data and pull out key parts of the text (see their detailed description of the changes sought if you are interested).

A friend of mine, Robin Hamman who looks after the BBC’s blog trials recently brought to my attention this study of the expressed political views of BBC Facebook users which was put out by conservativehome - an independent right wing UK website - back in October and was picked up by the Daily Mail.

The study (whose figures I have updated here using the same Facebook ad tool that conservativehome used) showed that of the 11,040 BBC staff registered on the site, 1420 staff put themselves in the “liberal” or “very liberal” category, compared with just 120 who labelled themselves “conservative” or “very conservative”. 420 regard themselves as “moderate” (the rest did not specify their political views). This compares to roughly 160k liberals and 56k conservative Facebookers in London and 847k liberals vs 233k conservatives in Facebook across the UK. (For the curious - there are < 20 self-confessed liberals working for Fox News in the US on Facebook compared with 40 conservatives and an equal number of moderates).

Of course this is somewhat embarrassing for the BBC as it provides further ammunition for those who would accuse it of liberal bias. The sample is a self-selecting sample from a self-selecting sample however, therefore no more than suggestive - and of course it includes large numbers of staff not involved in politically-sensitive work.

I find it interesting to note that the information provided probably included a large number of people who specified that their profiles (including their political allegiances) should be private. The privacy does not, however, protect users from being aggregated in order to be sold to - it is Facebook's ad sales tool that enables anyone to 'mine' Facebook to find out the expressed interests, ages and - yes - political affiliations of its users, grouped by organization. As this example shows, even aggregate data can be harmful to an organization when made widely available.

I also note that it is possible to attempt to advertise to Facebook users as young as 13 - and the ad sales tool says nothing about relevant regulations.

The past two days I spent at MIT’s CMS’s conference ‘The Future of Entertainment 2′ bringing together top notch mobile, internet and entertainment professionals (MTV Networks, Yahoo!, TBS) to discuss where the entertainment industry is headed.

Transmedia is a hot topic - the development of content that can be delivered on many mediums is being used by both television shows and advertisers. Henry Jenkins discussed interactive television not just as clicking a button to be taken into an interactive on-screen experience, but instead as any form of interaction with a television show in the physical world, e.g. CSI’s involvement in Second Life.

I was especially impressed with the mobile media panel: Marc Davis, Yahoo!, Bob Schukai, Turner Broadcasting, Alice Kim, MTV Networks, Anmol Madan, MIT Media Lab

Alice Kim:
- How do we get compensated?
- How do we stay relevant to our userbase, which is very forward looking?

Marc Davis:
- In the next few years, 4 billion people with cell phones and wireless connections to each other
- Realtime sharing of video from billions of geolocated phones live
Anmol Madan:
- Computation models on how people share things in media
- Ultimate goal is to make all phone interfaces socially aware

Bob Schukai:
- 90% of our research is outside the US.
- The US is behind on mobile and broadband. Way behind
- We can learn a lot from other geographies

Also, ran into some familiar faces such as Laurie Baird (Turner) who introduced me to great other Turner folks, Todd Cunningham (MTV) and Jing Wang (MIT). Ended up at GamBit which is MIT’s terrific new research initiative to conduct digital games research. Oh, and heard a lot of FCC bashing… we may want to look into that a bit more…
All in all 2 great days!

(You can find detailed session reports here)

The local council covering London’s ever-shrinking red light district (in Soho) is using Bluetooth to warn tourists about so-called ‘clip joints’ that it said “lure people in with false promises of ‘adult entertainment’ but once inside security staff demand hundreds of pounds from visitors.”

I recognise the legal difficulties of prosecuting these people but this seems a bit of a ‘passive aggressive’ way of dealing with the problem. To say nothing of the ethical dubiousness of using ‘bluejacking‘ to send people unsolicited text messages…

David Brake

The British Academy has produced a report on Copyright and research in the humanities and social sciences which concludes inter alia while the law itself gives academics sufficient ability to use copyright work, “risk averse publishers, who are often themselves rights holders, demand that unnecessary permissions be obtained, and such permissions are often refused or granted on unreasonable terms” and “there are well-founded concerns that new database rights and the development of digital rights management systems (DRMs) may enable rights holders to circumvent the effects of the copyright exemptions designed to facilitate research and scholarship”.

David Brake

I have just been listening to NPR’s Technology podcasts and their coverage of the furore about strangers molesting children they first met through MySpace. I have some sympathy with the view that not enough had been done by the company to ensure the safety of children but some of the comments by those who are concerned make me worried as well.

Take for example the comments of Carl Berry, the attorney for a girl suing MySpace for letting an adult contact her “If they want to chat with each other that’s fine but I don’t see the social benefit of allowing children to talk to complete adult strangers online”, or those of Representative Diana DeGette (D) who told NPR, “we used to say to our children if a man comes up to you in the park or in the shopping mall don’t talk to them, run away. Now we have to translate that to the digital era.”

Are Americans really so terrified of each other? Fairly recent (2000) US research indicates only 7.5% of sexual assaults on children and adolescents were perpetrated by strangers (and quite a high proportion of assaults on teenagers are perpetrated by other teens, not predatory adults). The tens of thousands of ’stranger on pre-teen’ assaults in the US each year are terrible crimes but by far the majority of children will never face this danger. Is it worth creating a climate of pervasive fear and limiting childrens’ freedom to explore (and yes, even to make mistakes) in an attempt to tackle this? Just as adults’ civil liberties can be endangered in the ‘War on Terror’, those of children can be imperilled in the ‘War on Perverts’. And children arguably have even less of a chance to put their point of view than accused terrorists.
(Also see earlier posts Big Mother is Watching and The Death of Privacy).

David Brake