Yearly Archives: 2010

Deception + fear + humiliation != education

I hate fear-based approaches to education. I grew up on the “this is your brain on drugs” messages and watched classmates go from being afraid of drugs to trying marijuana to deciding that all of the messages about drugs were idiotic. (Crystal meth and marijuana shouldn’t be in the same category.) Much to my frustration, adults keep turning to fear to “educate” the kids with complete disregard to the unintended consequences of this approach. Sometimes, it’s even worse. I recently received an email from a friend of mine (Chloe Cockburn) discussing an issue brought before the ACLU. She gave me permission to share this with you:

A campus police officer has been offering programs about the dangers inherent in using the internet to middle and high school assemblies. As part of her presentation she displays pictures that students have posted on their Facebook pages. The idea is to demonstrate that anyone can have access to this information, so be careful. She gains access to the students’ Facebook pages by creating false profiles claiming to be a student at the school and asking to be “friended”, evidently in violation of Facebook policy.

An ACLU affiliate received a complaint from a student at a small rural high school. The entire assembly was shown a photo of her holding a beer. The picture was not on the complainant’s Facebook page, but on one belonging to a friend of hers, who allowed access to the bogus profile created by the police officer. The complainant was not “punished” as the plaintiff above was, but she was humiliated, and she is afraid that she will not get some local scholarship aid as a result.

So here we have a police officer intentionally violating Facebook’s policy and creating a deceptive profile to entrap teenagers and humiliate them to “teach them a lesson”??? Unethical acts + deception + fear + humiliation != education. This. Makes. Me. Want. To. Scream.

“Transparency is Not Enough”

At Gov2.0 this week, I gave a talk on the importance of information literacy when addressing transparency of government data:

“Transparency is Not Enough”

I address everything from registered sex offenders to what happens when politicians don’t like data to the complexities of interpretation.  In doing so, I make three key points:

  1. Information is power, but interpretation is more powerful
  2. Data taken out of context can have unintended consequences
  3. Transparency alone is not the great equalizer

My talk is also available on YouTube if you prefer to listen to a different version of the same message (since my crib is what I intended to say and the video is what actually came out of my mouth).

Pew Research confirms that youth care about their reputation

In today’s discussions about privacy, “youth don’t care about privacy” is an irritating but popular myth. Embedded in this rhetoric is the belief that youth are reckless risk-takers who don’t care about the consequences of their actions. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

In my own work, I’ve found that teenagers care deeply about privacy in that they care about knowing how information flows and wanting influence over it. They care deeply about their reputation and leverage the tools available to help shape who they are. Of course, reputation and privacy always come back to audience. And audience is where we continuously misunderstand teenagers. They want to make sure that people they respect or admire think highly of them. But this doesn’t always mean that they care about how YOU think about them. So a teenager may be willing to sully their reputation as their parents see it if it gives them street cred that makes them cool amongst their peers. This is why reputation is so messy. There’s no universal reputation, no universal self-presentation. It’s always about audience.

The teenagers that I first started interviewing in 2004 are now young adults. Many are in college or in the army and their views on their reputation have matured. How they think about privacy and information flow has also matured. They’re thinking about a broader world. At the same time, they’re doing so having developed an understanding of these challenges through their engagement with social media. Are their ideas about these technologies perfect? Of course not. But they’re a whole lot more nuanced than those of most adults that I talk with.

Earlier today, Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project released a report entitled “Reputation, Management, and Social Media” which includes a slew of data that might seem counter-intuitive to adults who have really skewed mythical views of youth and young adults. They found that young adults are more actively engaged in managing what they share online than older adults. In fact, 71% of the 18-29s interviewed in August-September of 2009 who use social network sites reported having changed their privacy settings (vs. 55% of those 50-64). Think about that. This was before Time Magazine put privacy on their front page.

Now, let’s be clear… Young adults are actively engaged in managing their reputation but they’re not always successful. The tools are confusing and companies continue to expose them without them understanding what’s happening. But the fact that they go out of their way to try to shape their information is important. It signals very clearly that young adults care deeply about information flow and reputation.

Reputation matters. This is why Pew found that 47% of 18-29s delete comments made by others on their profiles (vs. 29% of 30-49s and 26% of 50-64s). Likewise, 41% of them remove their name from photos (vs. 24% of 30-49s and 18% of 50-64s). While Pew didn’t collect data on those under 18, I’d expect that this age-wise trend would continue into that age bracket. Much of this is because of digital literacy – the younger folks understand the controls better than the older folks AND they understand the implications better. We spend a lot more time telling teenagers and young adults that there are consequences to reputation when information is put up online than we do listening to ourselves. This is also because, as always, youth are learning the hard way. As Pew notes, young adults have made mistakes that they regret. They’ve also seen their friends make mistakes that they regret. All of this leads to greater consciousness about these issues and a deeper level of engagement.

As always, this Pew report is filled to the brim with useful information that gives us a sense of what’s going on. Here are some of my favorite bullet points:

  • Young adults are still more likely than older users to say they limit the amount of information available about them online.
  • Those who know more, worry more. And those who express concern are twice as likely to say they take steps to limit the amount of information available about them online.
  • The most visible and engaged internet users are also most active in limiting the information connected to their names online.
  • The more you see footprints left by others, the more likely you are to limit your own.
  • Those who take steps to limit the information about them online are less likely to post comments online using their real name.
  • More than half of social networking users (56%) have “unfriended” others in their network.
  • Just because we’re friends doesn’t mean I’m listening: 41% of social networking users say they filter updates posted by some of their friends.
  • Young adult users of social networking sites report the lowest levels of trust in them.

This Pew report does more than inform us about privacy and reputation issues. Its data sends an important message: We need more literacy about these issues. Ironically, I think that the best thing that’s going to come about because of Facebook’s ongoing screw-ups is an increased awareness of privacy issues. When youth see that they can do one of two things with their interests: delete them or make them publicly visible to everyone, they’re going to think twice. Sure, many will still make a lot of that content publicly accessible. And others will be very angry at Facebook for not giving them a meaningful choice. But this is going to force people to think about these issues. And the more people think about it, the more they actively try to control what’s going on. (Of course, we need Facebook to stop taking controls away from people, but that’s a different story.)

Pew’s report also counters a lot of myths that I’ve been hearing. For example, the desire for anonymity isn’t dead. Facebook tends to proudly announce that its users are completely honest about their names. Guess what? Many youth don’t trust Facebook. And they’re not providing them with real names either. Just take a look at this screen shot that I grabbed from a publicly accessible Facebook profile. This image isn’t doctored and while some of the names reflect real ones, there’s a lot of obscuring going on.

If you care about youth, if you care about issues of privacy and reputation, PLEASE read the Pew report. It is an example of brilliant research and tremendous reporting.

Quitting Facebook is pointless; challenging them to do better is not

I’ve been critiquing moves made by Facebook for a long time and I’m pretty used to them being misinterpreted. When I lamented the development of the News Feed, many people believed that I thought that the technology was a failure and that it wouldn’t be popular. This was patently untrue. I was bothered by it precisely because I knew that it would be popular, precisely because people love to gossip and learn about others, often to their own detriment. It was hugely disruptive and, when it launched, users lacked the controls necessary to really manage the situation effectively. Facebook responded with controls and people were able to find a way of engaging with Facebook with the News Feed as a given. But people were harmed in the transition.

Last week, I offered two different critiques of the moves made by Facebook, following up on my SXSW talk. Both have been misinterpreted in fascinating ways. Even news agencies are publishing statements like: “Microsoft wants Facebook to be regulated as a utility.” WTF? Seriously? Le sigh. (For the record, I’m not speaking on behalf of my employer nor do I want regulation; I think that it’s inevitable and I think that we need to contend with it. Oh, and I don’t think that the regulation that we’ll see will at all resemble the ways in which utilities are regulated. I was talking about utilities because that’s how Facebook frames itself. But clearly, most folks missed that.) Misinterpretations are frustrating because they make me feel as though I’m doing a bad job of communicating what I think is important. For this, I apologize to all of you. I will try to do better.

With this backdrop in mind, I want to enumerate six beliefs that I have that I want to flesh out in this post in light of discussions about how “everyone” is leaving Facebook:

  1. I do not believe that people will (or should) leave Facebook because of privacy issues.
  2. I do not believe that the tech elites who are publicly leaving Facebook will affect on the company’s numbers; they are unrepresentative and were not central users in the first place.
  3. I do not believe that an alternative will emerge in the next 2-5 years that will “replace” Facebook in any meaningful sense.
  4. I believe that Facebook will get regulated and I would like to see an open discussion of what this means and what form this takes.
  5. I believe that a significant minority of users are at risk because of decisions Facebook has made and I think that those of us who aren’t owe it to those who are to work through these issues.
  6. I believe that Facebook needs to start a public dialogue with users and those who are concerned ASAP (and Elliot Schrage’s Q&A doesn’t count).

As I stated in my last post, I think that Facebook plays a central role in the lives of many and I think that it is unreasonable for anyone to argue that they should “just leave” if they’re not happy. This is like saying that people should just leave their apartments if they’re not happy with their landlord or just leave their spouse because they’re not happy with a decision or just leave their job if they’re not happy with their boss. Life is more complicated than a series of simplified choices and we are always making calculated decisions, balancing costs and benefits. We stay with our jobs, apartments, and spouses even when things get messy because we hope to rectify problems. And those with the most to gain from Facebook are the least likely to leave, even if they also have the most to lose.

In the last few weeks, a handful of well known digerati have proudly announced that they’ve departed from Facebook. Most of these individuals weren’t that engaged in Facebook as users in the first place. I say this as someone who would lose very little (outside of research knowledge) from leaving. I am not a representative user. I barely share on the site for a whole host of personal and professional reasons. (And because I don’t have a life.) None of my friends would miss me if I did leave. In fact, they’d probably be grateful for the disappearance of my tweets. That means that me deciding to leave will have pretty much no impact on the network. This is true for many of the people who I’ve watched depart. At best, they’re content broadcasters. But people have other ways of consuming their broadcasting. So their departure is meaningless. These are not the people that Facebook is worried about losing.

People will not leave Facebook en masse, even if a new site were to emerge. Realistically, if that were enough, they could go to MySpace or Orkut or Friendster or Tribe. But they won’t. And not just because those sites are no longer “cool.” They won’t because they’ve invested in Facebook and they’re still hoping that Facebook will get its act together. Changing services is costly, just like moving apartments or changing jobs or breaking up in general. The deeper the relationship, the harder it is to simply walk away. And the relationship that Facebook has built with many of its users is very very very deep. When transition costs are high, people work hard to change the situation so that they don’t have to transition. This is why people are complaining, this is why they are speaking up. And it’s really important that those in power listen to what it is that people are upset about. The worst thing that those in power can do is ignore what’s going on, waiting for it to go away. This is a bad idea, not because people will walk away, but because they will look to greater authorities of power to push back. This is why Facebook’s failure to address what’s going on invites regulation.

Facebook has gotten quite accustomed to upset users. In “The Facebook Effect,” David Kirkpatrick outlines how Facebook came to expect that every little tweak would set off an internal rebellion. He documented how most of the members of the group “I AUTOMATICALLY HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK HOME PAGE” were employees of Facebook whose frustration with user rebellion was summed up by the group’s description: “I HATE CHANGE AND EVERYTHING ASSOCIATED WITH IT. I WANT EVERYTHING TO REMAIN STATIC THROUGHOUT MY ENTIRE LIFE.” Kirkpatrick quotes Zuckerberg as saying, “The biggest thing is going to be leading the user base through the changes that need to continue to happen… Whenever we roll out any major product there’s some sort of backlash.” Unfortunately, Facebook has become so numb to user complaints that it doesn’t see the different flavors of them any longer.

What’s happening around privacy is not simply user backlash. In fact, users are far less upset about what’s going on than most of us privileged techno-elites. Why? Because even with the New York Times writing article after article, most users have no idea what’s happening. I’m reminded of this every time that I sit down with someone who doesn’t run in my tech circles. And I’m reminded that they care every time I sit down and walk them through their privacy settings. The disconnect between average users and the elite is what makes this situation different, what makes this issue messier. Because the issue comes down to corporate transparency, informed consent, and choice. As long as users believe that their content is private and have no idea how public it is, they won’t take to the streets. A disappearance of publicity for these issues is to Facebook’s advantage. But it’s not to user’s advantage. Which is precisely why I think that it’s important that the techno-elite and the bloggers and the journalists keep covering this topic. Because it’s important that more people are aware of what’s going on. Unfortunately, of course, we also have to contend with the fact that most people being screwed don’t speak English and have no idea this conversation is even happening. Especially when privacy features are only explained in English.

In documenting Zuckerberg’s attitudes about transparency, Kirkpatrick sheds light on one of the weaknesses of his philosophy: Zuckerberg doesn’t know how to resolve the positive (and in his head inevitable) outcomes of transparency with the possible challenges of surveillance. As is typical in the American tech world, most of the conversation about surveillance centers on the government. But Kirkpatrick highlights another outcome of surveillance with a throwaway example that sends shivers down my spine: “When a father in Saudi Arabia caught his daughter interacting with men on Facebook, he killed her.” This is precisely the kind of unintended consequence that motivates me to speak loudly even though I’m privileged enough to not face these risks. Statistically, death is an unlikely outcome of surveillance. But there are many other kinds of side effects that are more common and also disturbing: losing one’s job, losing one’s health insurance, losing one’s parental rights, losing one’s relationships, etc. Sometimes, these losses will be because visibility makes someone more accountable. But sometimes this will occur because of misinterpretation and/or overreaction. And the examples keep on coming.

I am all in favor of people building what they believe to be alternatives to Facebook. I even invested in Diaspora because I’m curious what will come of that system. But I don’t believe that Diaspora is a Facebook killer. I do believe that there is a potential for Diaspora to do something interesting that will play a different role in the ecosystem and I look forward to seeing what they develop. I’m also curious about the future of peer-to-peer systems in light of the move towards the cloud, but I’m not convinced that decentralization is a panacea to all of our contemporary woes. Realistically, I don’t think that most users around the globe will find a peer-to-peer solution worth the hassle. The cost/benefit analysis isn’t in their favor. I’m also patently afraid that a system like Diaspora will be quickly leveraged for child pornography and other more problematic uses that tend to emerge when there isn’t a centralized control system. But innovation is important and I’m excited that a group of deeply passionate developers are being given a chance to see what they can pull off. And maybe it’ll be even more fabulous than we can possibly imagine, but I’d bet a lot of money that it won’t put a dent into Facebook. Alternatives aren’t the point.

Facebook has embedded itself pretty deeply into the ecosystem, into the hearts and minds of average people. They love the technology, but they’re not necessarily prepared for where the company is taking them. And while I’m all in favor of giving users the choice to embrace the opportunities and potential of being highly visible, of being a part of a transparent society, I’m not OK with throwing them off the boat just to see if they can swim. Fundamentally, my disagreement with Facebook’s approach to these matters is a philosophical one. Do I want to create more empathy, more tolerance in a global era? Of course. But I’m not convinced that sudden exposure to the world at large gets people there and I genuinely fear that possible backlash that can emerge. I’m not convinced that this won’t enhance a type of extremism that is manifesting around the globe as we speak.

Screaming about the end of Facebook is futile. And I think that folks are wasting a lot of energy telling others to quit or boycott to send a message. Doing so will do no such thing. It’ll just make us technophiles look like we’re living on a different planet. Which we are. Instead, I think that we should all be working to help people understand what’s going on. I love using Reclaim Privacy to walk through privacy settings with people. While you’re helping your family and friends understand their settings, talk to them and record their stories. I want to hear average people’s stories, their fears, their passions. I want to hear what privacy means to them and why they care about it. I want to hear about the upside and downside of visibility and the challenges introduced by exposure. And I want folks inside Facebook to listen. Not because this is another user rebellion, but because Facebook’s decisions shape the dynamics of so many people’s lives. And we need to help make those voices heard.

I also want us techno-elites to think hard and deep about the role that regulation may play and what the consequences may be for all of us. In thinking about regulation, always keep Larry Lessig’s arguments in “Code” in mind. Larry argued that there are four points of regulation for all change: the market, the law, social norms, and architecture (or code). Facebook’s argument is that social norms have changed so dramatically that what they’re doing with code aligns with the people (and conveniently the market). I would argue that they’re misreading social norms but there’s no doubt that the market and code work in their favor. This is precisely why I think that law will get involved and I believe that legal regulators don’t share Facebook’s attitudes about social norms. This is not a question of if but a question of when, in what form, and at what cost. And I think that all of us who are living and breathing this space should speak up about how we think this should play out because if we just pretend like it won’t happen, not only are we fooling ourselves, but we’re missing an opportunity to shape the future.

I realize that Elliot Schrage attempted to communicate with the public through his NYTimes responses. And I believe that he failed. But I’m still confused about why Zuckerberg isn’t engaging publicly about these issues. (A letter to Robert Scoble doesn’t count.) In each major shitstorm, we eventually got a blog post from Zuckerberg outlining his views. Why haven’t we received one of those? Why is the company so silent on these matters? In inviting the users to vote on the changes to the Terms of Service, Facebook mapped out the possibility of networked engagement, of inviting passionate users to speak back and actively listening. This was a huge success for Facebook. Why aren’t they doing this now? I find the silence to be quite eerie. I cannot imagine that Facebook isn’t listening. So, Facebook, if you are listening, please start a dialogue with the public. Please be transparent if you’re asking us to be. And please start now, not when you’ve got a new set of features ready.

Regardless of how the digerati feel about Facebook, millions of average people are deeply wedded to the site. They won’t leave because the cost/benefit ratio is still in their favor. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t suffering because of decisions being made about them and for them. What’s at stake now is not whether or not Facebook will become passe, but whether or not Facebook will become evil. I think that we owe it to the users to challenge Facebook to live up to a higher standard, regardless of what we as individuals may gain or lose from their choices. And we owe it to ourselves to make sure that everyone is informed and actively engaged in a discussion about the future of privacy. Zuckerberg is right: “Given that the world is moving towards more sharing of information, making sure that it happens in a bottom-up way, with people inputting their information themselves and having control over how their information interacts with the system, as opposed to a centralized way, through it being tracked in some surveillance system. I think it’s critical for the world.” Now, let’s hold him to it.

Update: Let me be clear… Anyone who wants to leave Facebook is more than welcome to do so. Participation is about choice. But to assume that there will be a mass departure is naive. And to assume that a personal boycott will have a huge impact is also naive. But if it’s not working for you personally, leave. And if you don’t think it’s healthy for your friends to participate, encourage them to do so too. Just do expect a mass exodus to fix the problems that we’re facing.

Update: Mark Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post reiterating their goals and saying that changes will be coming. I wish he would’ve apologized for December or made any allusions to the fact that people were exposed or that they simply can’t turn off all that is now public. It’s not just about simplifying the available controls.

Translations:

Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated

From day one, Mark Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to become a social utility. He succeeded. Facebook is now a utility for many. The problem with utilities is that they get regulated.

Yesterday, I ranted about Facebook and “radical transparency.” Lots of people wrote to thank me for saying what I said. And so I looked many of them up. Most were on Facebook. I wrote back to some, asking why they were still on Facebook if they disagreed with where the company was going. The narrative was consistent: they felt as though the needed to be there. For work, for personal reasons, because they got to connect with someone there that they couldn’t connect with elsewhere. Nancy Baym did a phenomenal job of explaining this dynamic in her post on Thursday: “Why, despite myself, I am not leaving Facebook. Yet.”

Every day. I look with admiration and envy on my friends who have left. I’ve also watched sadly as several have returned. And I note above all that very few of my friends, who by nature of our professional connections are probably more attuned to these issues than most, have left. I don’t like supporting Facebook at all. But I do.

And here is why: they provide a platform through which I gain real value. I actually like the people I went to school with. I know that even if I write down all their email addresses, we are not going to stay in touch and recapture the recreated community we’ve built on Facebook. I like my colleagues who work elsewhere, and I know that we have mailing lists and Twitter, but I also know that without Facebook I won’t be in touch with their daily lives as I’ve been these last few years. I like the people I’ve met briefly or hope I’ll meet soon, and I know that Facebook remains our best way to keep in touch without the effort we would probably not take of engaging in sustained one-to-one communication.

The emails that I received privately to my query elicited the same sentiment. People felt they needed to stay put, regardless of what Facebook chose to do. Those working at Facebook should be proud: they’ve truly provided a service that people feel is an essential part of their lives, one that they need more than want. That’s the fundamental nature of a utility. They succeeded at their mission.

Throughout Kirkpatrick’s “The Facebook Effect”, Zuckerberg and his comrades are quoted repeated as believing that Facebook is different because it’s a social utility. This language is precisely what’s used in the “About Facebook” on Facebook’s Press Room page. Facebook never wanted to be a social network site; it wanted to be a social utility. Thus, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Facebook functions as a utility.

And yet, people continue to be surprised. Partially, this is Facebook’s fault. They know that people want to hear that they have a “choice” and most people don’t think choice when they think utility. Thus, I wasn’t surprised that Elliot Schrage’s fumbling responses in the NYTimes emphasized choice, not utility: “Joining Facebook is a conscious choice by vast numbers of people who have stepped forward deliberately and intentionally to connect and share… If you’re not comfortable sharing, don’t.”

In my post yesterday, I emphasized that what’s at stake with Facebook today is not about privacy or publicity but informed consent and choice. Facebook speaks of itself as a utility while also telling people they have a choice. But there’s a conflict here. We know this conflict deeply in the United States. When it comes to utilities like water, power, sewage, Internet, etc., I am constantly told that I have a choice. But like hell I’d choose Comcast if I had a choice. Still, I subscribe to Comcast. Begrudgingly. Because the “choice” I have is Internet or no Internet.

I hate all of the utilities in my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them.

Your gut reaction might be to tell me that Facebook is not a utility. You’re wrong. People’s language reflects that people are depending on Facebook just like they depended on the Internet a decade ago. Facebook may not be at the scale of the Internet (or the Internet at the scale of electricity), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not angling to be a utility or quickly becoming one. Don’t forget: we spent how many years being told that the Internet wasn’t a utility, wasn’t a necessity… now we’re spending what kind of money trying to get universal broadband out there without pissing off the monopolistic beasts because we like to pretend that choice and utility can sit easily together. And because we’re afraid to regulate.

And here’s where we get to the meat of why Facebook being a utility matters. Utilities get regulated. Less in the United States than in any other part of the world. Here, we like to pretend that capitalism works with utilities. We like to “de-regulate” utilities to create “choice” while continuing to threaten regulation when the companies appear too monopolistic. It’s the American Nightmare. But generally speaking, it works, and we survive without our choices and without that much regulation. We can argue about whether or not regulation makes things cheaper or more expensive, but we can’t argue about whether or not regulators are involved with utilities: they are always watching them because they matter to the people.

The problem with Facebook is that it’s becoming an international utility, not one neatly situated in the United States. It’s quite popular in Canada and Europe, two regions that LOVE to regulate their utilities. This might start out being about privacy, but, if we’re not careful, regulation is going to go a lot deeper than that. Even in the States, we’ll see regulation, but it won’t look the same as what we see in Europe and Canada. I find James Grimmelmann’s argument that we think about privacy as product safety to be an intriguing frame. I’d expect to see a whole lot more coming down the line in this regards. And Facebook knows it. Why else would they bring in a former Bush regulator to defend its privacy practices?

Thus far, in the world of privacy, when a company oversteps its hand, people flip out, governments threaten regulation, and companies back off. This is not what’s happening with Facebook. Why? Because they know people won’t leave and Facebook doesn’t think that regulators matter. In our public discourse, we keep talking about the former and ignoring the latter. We can talk about alternatives to Facebook until we’re blue in the face and we can point to the handful of people who are leaving as “proof” that Facebook will decline, but that’s because we’re fooling ourselves. If Facebook is a utility – and I strongly believe it is – the handful of people who are building cabins in the woods to get away from the evil utility companies are irrelevant in light of all of the people who will suck up and deal with the utility to live in the city. This is going to come down to regulation, whether we like it or not.

The problem is that we in the tech industry don’t like regulation. Not because we’re evil but because we know that regulation tends to make a mess of things. We like the threat of regulation and we hope that it will keep things at bay without actually requiring stupidity. So somehow, the social norm has been to push as far as possible and then pull back quickly when regulatory threats emerge. Of course, there have been exceptions. And I work for one of them. Two decades ago, Microsoft was as arrogant as they come and they didn’t balk at the threat of regulation. As a result, the company spent years mired in regulatory hell. And being painted as evil. The company still lives with that weight and the guilt wrt they company’s historical hubris is palpable throughout the industry.

I cannot imagine that Facebook wants to be regulated, but I fear that it thinks that it won’t be. There’s cockiness in the air. Personally, I don’t care whether or not Facebook alone gets regulated, but regulation’s impact tends to extend much further than one company. And I worry about what kinds of regulation we’ll see. Don’t get me wrong: I think that regulators will come in with the best of intentions; they often (but not always) do. I just think that what they decide will have unintended consequences that are far more harmful than helpful and this makes me angry at Facebook for playing chicken with them. I’m not a libertarian but I’ve come to respect libertarian fears of government regulation because regulation often does backfire in some of the most frustrating ways. (A few weeks ago, I wrote a letter to be included in the COPPA hearings outlining why the intention behind COPPA was great and the result dreadful.) The difference is that I’m not so against regulation as to not welcome it when people are being screwed. And sadly, I think that we’re getting there. I just wish that Facebook would’ve taken a more responsible path so that we wouldn’t have to deal with what’s coming. And I wish that they’d realize that the people they’re screwing are those who are most vulnerable already, those whose voices they’ll never hear if they don’t make an effort.

When Facebook introduced the News Feed and received a backlash from its users, Zuckerberg’s first blog post was to tell everyone to calm down. When they didn’t, new features were introduced to help them navigate the system. Facebook was willing to talk to its users, to negotiate with them, to make a deal. Perhaps this was because they were all American college students, a population that early Facebook understood. Still, when I saw the backlash emerging this time, I was waiting and watching for an open dialogue to emerge. Instead, we got PR mumblings in the NYTimes telling people they were stupid and blog posts on “Gross National Happiness.” I’m sure that Facebook’s numbers are as high as ever and so they’re convinced that this will blow over, that users will just adjust. I bet they think that this is just American techies screaming up a storm for fun. And while more people are searching to find how to delete their account, most will not. And Facebook rightfully knows that. But what’s next is not about whether or not there’s enough user revolt to make Facebook turn back. There won’t be. What’s next is how this emergent utility gets regulated. Cuz sadly, I doubt that anything else is going to stop them in their tracks. And I think that regulators know that.

Update: I probably should’ve titled this “Facebook is trying to be a utility; utilities get regulated” but I chopped it because that was too long. What’s at stake is not whether or not we can agree that Facebook is a utility, but whether or not regulation will come into play. There’s no doubt that Facebook wants to be a utility, sees itself as a utility. So even if we don’t see them as a utility, the fact that they do matters. As does the fact that some people are using it with that attitude. I’d give up my water company (or Comcast) if a better alternative came along too. When people feel as though they are wedded to something because of its utilitarian value, the company providing it can change but the infrastructure is there for good.  Rather than arguing about the details of what counts as a utility, let’s move past that to think about what it means that regulation is coming.

Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)

At SXSW, I decided to talk about privacy because I thought that it would be the most important issue of the year. I was more accurate than my wildest dreams. For the last month, I’ve watched as conversations about privacy went from being the topic of the tech elite to a conversation that’s pervasive. The press coverage is overwhelming – filled with infographics and a concerted effort by journalists to make sense of and communicate what seems to be a moving target. I commend them for doing so.

My SXSW used a bunch of different case studies but folks focused on two: Google and Facebook. After my talk, I received numerous emails from folks at Google, including the PM in charge of Buzz. The tenor was consistent, effectively: “we fucked up, we’re trying to fix it, please help us.” What startled me was the radio silence from Facebook, although a close friend of mine told me that Randi Zuckerberg had heard it and effectively responded with a big ole ::gulp:: My SXSW critique concerned their decision in December, an irresponsible move that I felt put users at risk. I wasn’t prepared for how they were going to leverage that data only a few months later.

As most of you know, Facebook has been struggling to explain its privacy-related decisions for the last month while simultaneously dealing with frightening security issues. If you’re not a techie, I’d encourage you to start poking around. The NYTimes is doing an amazing job keeping up with the story, as is TechCrunch, Mashable, and InsideFacebook. The short version… People are cranky. Facebook thinks that it’s just weirdo tech elites like me who are pissed off. They’re standing firm and trying to justify why what they’re doing is good for everyone. Their attitude has triggered the panic button amongst regulators and all sorts of regulators are starting to sniff around. Facebook hired an ex-Bush regulator to manage this. No one is quite sure what is happening but Jason Calacanis thinks that Facebook has overplayed its hand. Meanwhile, security problems mean that even more content has been exposed, including email addresses, IP addresses (your location), and full chat logs. This has only upped the panic amongst those who can imagine worst case scenarios. Like the idea that someone out there is slowly piecing together IP addresses (location) and full names and contact information. A powerful database, and not one that anyone would be too happy to be floating around.

Amidst all of what’s going on, everyone is anxiously awaiting David Kirkpatrick’s soon-to-be-released “The Facebook Effect.” which basically outlines the early days of the company. Throughout the book, Kirkpatrick sheds light on why we’re where we are today without even realizing where we’d be. Consider these two quotes from Zuckerberg:

  • “We always thought people would share more if we didn’t let them do whatever they wanted, because it gave them some order.” – Zuckerberg, 2004
  • “You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” – Zuckerberg, 2009

In trying to be a neutral reporter, Kirkpatrick doesn’t critically interrogate the language that Zuckerberg or other executives use. At times, he questions them, pointing to how they might make people’s lives challenging. But he undermines his own critiques by accepting Zuckerberg’s premise that the tides they are a turning. For example, he states that “The older you are, the more likely you are to find Facebook’s exposure of personal information intrusive and excessive.” Interestingly, rock solid non-marketing data is about to be released to refute this point. Youth are actually much more concerned about exposure than adults these days. Why? Probably because they get it. And it’s why they’re using fake names and trying to go on the DL (down-low).

With this backdrop in mind, I want to talk about a concept that Kirkpatrick suggests is core to Facebook: “radical transparency.” In short, Kirkpatrick argues that Zuckerberg believes that people will be better off if they make themselves transparent. Not only that, society will be better off. (We’ll ignore the fact that Facebook’s purse strings may be better off too.) My encounters with Zuckerberg lead me to believe that he genuinely believes this, he genuinely believes that society will be better off if people make themselves transparent. And given his trajectory, he probably believes that more and more people want to expose themselves. Silicon Valley is filled with people engaged in self-branding, making a name for themselves by being exhibitionists. It doesn’t surprise me that Scoble wants to expose himself; he’s always the first to engage in a mass collection on social network sites, happy to be more-public-than-thou. Sometimes, too public. But that’s his choice. The problem is that not everyone wants to be along for the ride.

Jeff Jarvis gets at the core issue with his post “Confusing *a* public with *the* public”. As I’ve said time and time again, people do want to engage in public, but not the same public that includes all of you. Jarvis relies on Habermas, but the right way to read this is through the ideas of Michael Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics”. Facebook was originally a counterpublic, a public that people turned to because they didn’t like the publics that they had accessed to. What’s happening now is ripping the public that was created to shreds and people’s discomfort stems from that.

What I find most fascinating in all of the discussions of transparency is the lack of transparency by Facebook itself. Sure, it would be nice to see executives use the same privacy settings that they determine are the acceptable defaults. And it would be nice to know what they’re saying when they’re meeting. But that’s not the kind of transparency I mean. I mean transparency in interface design.

A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping.

Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see what doesn’t match up with reality. People think “everyone” includes everyone who searches for them on Facebook. They never imagine that “everyone” includes every third party sucking up data for goddess only knows what purpose. They think that if they lock down everything in the settings that they see, that they’re completely locked down. They don’t get that their friends lists, interests, likes, primary photo, affiliations, and other content is publicly accessible.

If Facebook wanted radical transparency, they could communicate to users every single person and entity who can see their content. They could notify then when the content is accessed by a partner. They could show them who all is included in “friends-of-friends” (or at least a number of people). They hide behind lists because people’s abstractions allow them to share more. When people think “friends-of-friends” they don’t think about all of the types of people that their friends might link to; they think of the people that their friends would bring to a dinner party if they were to host it. When they think of everyone, they think of individual people who might have an interest in them, not 3rd party services who want to monetize or redistribute their data. Users have no sense of how their data is being used and Facebook is not radically transparent about what that data is used for. Quite the opposite. Convolution works. It keeps the press out.

The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely unfair. It gives users the illusion of choice and hides the details away from them “for their own good.”

I have no problem with Scoble being as public as he’d like to be. And I do think it’s unfortunate that Facebook never gave him that choice. I’m not that public, but I’m darn close. And I use Twitter and a whole host of other services to be quite visible. The key to addressing this problem is not to say “public or private?” but to ask how we can make certain people are 1) informed; 2) have the right to chose; and 3) are consenting without being deceived. I’d be a whole lot less pissed off if people had to opt-in in December. Or if they could’ve retained the right to keep their friends lists, affiliations, interests, likes, and other content as private as they had when they first opted into Facebook. Slowly disintegrating the social context without choice isn’t consent; it’s trickery.

What pisses me off the most are the numbers of people who feel trapped. Not because they don’t have another choice. (Technically, they do.) But because they feel like they don’t. They have invested time, energy, resources, into building Facebook what it is. They don’t trust the service, are concerned about it, and are just hoping the problems will go away. It pains me how many people are living like ostriches. If we don’t look, it doesn’t exist, right?? This isn’t good for society. Forcing people into being exposed isn’t good for society. Outting people isn’t good for society, turning people into mini-celebrities isn’t good for society. It isn’t good for individuals either. The psychological harm can be great. Just think of how many “heros” have killed themselves following the high levels of publicity they received.

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don’t live in a lap of luxury. I say this as someone who is privileged, someone who has profited at every turn by being visible. But also as someone who has seen the costs and pushed through the consequences with a lot of help and support. Being publicly visible isn’t always easy, it’s not always fun. And I don’t think that anyone should go through what I’ve gone through without making a choice to do it. So I’m angry. Very angry. Angry that some people aren’t being given that choice, angry that they don’t know what’s going on, angry that it’s become OK in my industry to expose people. I think that it’s high time that we take into consideration those whose lives aren’t nearly as privileged as ours, those who aren’t choosing to take the risks that we take, those who can’t afford to. This isn’t about liberals vs. libertarians; it’s about monkeys vs. robots.

if you’re not angry / you’re just stupid / or you don’t care
how else can you react / when you know / something’s so unfair
the men of the hour / can kill half the world in war
make them slaves to a super power / and let them die poor
– Ani Difranco, Out of Range

(Also posted at Blogher)

(Translated to Italian by orangeek)

“Privacy and Publicity in the Context of Big Data”

I gave today’s opening keynote at the WWW Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina.  My talk was about methodological and ethical issues involved in the study of Big Data, focusing heavily on privacy issues in light of public data.  The first third focuses on four important arguments: 1) Bigger Data are Not Always Better Data; 2) Not All Data are Created Equal; 3) What and Why are Different Questions; 4) Be Careful of Your Interpretations. I then move into argue “Just because data is accessible doesn’t mean that using it is ethical,” providing a series of different ways of looking at how people think about privacy and publicity.  I conclude by critiquing Facebook’s approach to privacy, from News Feed to Social Plugins/Instant Personalizer.

Privacy and Publicity in the Context of Big Data

Please enjoy!!

Harassment by Q&A: Initial Thoughts on Formspring.me

(This was written for the Digital Media and Learning Project.)

Questions-and-answers have played a central role in digital bonding since the early days of Usenet.  Teenagers have consistently co-opted quizzes and surveys and personality tests to talk about themselves with those around them.  They’ve hosted guest books and posted bulletins to create spaces for questions and answers.  But when teens started adopting Formspring.me this winter, a darker side of this practice emerged.  While teens have always asked each other crass and mean-spirited questions, this has become so pervasive on Formspring so as to define what participation there means.  More startlingly, teens are answering self-humiliating questions and posting their answers to a publicly visible page that is commonly associated with their real name.  Why?  What’s going on?

When I first got online in high school, I found email chain messages entertaining.  I fondly remember receiving surveys about my friends’ favorite movies, most embarrassing moments, and food peculiarities. The task was to erase the content written by my friend, fill in my own content, send it to my friend and forward it to 10 more friends.  With every new genre of social media, surveys and quizzes keep coming back as popular ways to get to know the people around you. Some of the basics have gotten baked into the average profile, especially favorites that can help guide behavioral marketing.

Most quizzes and surveys and personality tests and other similar activities are pretty mundane.  Coke or Pepsi?  Which Star Wars character are you?  Etc.  But there have always been more risque versions of this.  I will never forget the first time I encountered the Purity Test and was absolutely horrified at the mere notion of having sex with someone who was dead.  I remember questionnaires meant to reveal crushes and illicit practices.  (Of course, only recently, it was popular among my 30-something peers to fill out Facebook surveys listing high school crushes and illegal acts committed during childhood…)

There’s something fascinating to people of all ages about answering questions about themselves.  I rely on this human tendency when I interview people about themselves. In such a role, I’m also acutely aware of the power that I have.  I can ask people very intimate or emotionally damaging questions and, most likely, they will answer my questions.  But, as a researcher, I have an ethical responsibility to be conscious of what I ask and how it will affect someone.  This is not the same logic that teenagers use when asking their peers questions.  And this is precisely why words may be as deadly as sticks and stones.

What is Formspring.me?

Formspring.me is a very simple question-answer service that launched in November 2009.  Create an account and you’ll get a public profile where questions you answer are posted in reverse chronological order.  Anyone can ask questions of anyone else – anonymously or attached to their name/account.  (Recently, the site has started allowing participants to mandate that questioners are logged in.)  Participants receive the questions in their inbox and can choose what to answer.  It’s a straightforward service and you can think of all sorts of reasonable uses for it.  An expert can answer questions about a subject matter.  A celebrity can answer questions about themselves.  A company can answer questions from the public.  This service was created by Formstack, a company dedicated to creating extensible online forms, like surveys, contact forms, event registrations, etc.  So a question-answer service was a natural extension.  To popularize Formspring.me, they hooked it up to Facebook so that participants could spread new answers to, and invite questions from, their network.

Somewhere along the line, teenagers found Formspring.  I’m not quite sure how this happened but the service has taken off like wildfire among the teen and tween set.  And so I’ve been lurking about trying to make sense of it.  A good chunk of it is relatively mundane and I’ve found all sorts of teen profiles with questions like “What is the best pop?” and “What’s the furthest you’ve ever traveled?”  Some of what is posted is nonsensical or not written as a question with “hi” and “…” being examples.  These questions and non-questions are sometimes posted anonymously, but often, there’s a username attached to them and clearly the participants know each other and are using it as a conversational medium or a place to get to know each other better.

Social banter isn’t what makes Formspring particularly interesting or controversial.  There are also plenty of anonymous sexual innuendos like “you’re cute” or “will you go out with me” questions, followed by “who is this?” as the answer.  There are also many more explicit versions of this, with some bordering on sexual harassment.  There are also anonymous posts that ring of bullying or harassment, from the relatively painless “you’re fat” to the more crass “fuck you slut.”  Finally, there are the ones that invite the participant to talk about a third party, often by full name (e.g., “don’t you hate Kristen?”).  Now, keep in mind that only questions that are answered are posted and participants have a choice in what they decide to answer.  So when you see crass questions followed by answers, the participant chose to answer the question and post it.  I don’t even want to imagine the questions that they receive and don’t answer…

Early Observations

Many questions need to be raised about this medium.  Who are the authors of these messages?  Why are teens answering them?  And why are such crass questions common across the Formsprings of teens from extremely different backgrounds and locations? While I cannot answer these questions, I feel the need to share my observations.

It seems like teen girls are much more likely than boys to be maintaining Formspring profiles.  Some of the mean-spirited anonymous questions appear to come from girls, but many also appear to come from boys.  The questions are usually short and poorly written; the answers are equally short and poorly written.  (Compare this to the adults using Formspring who write grammatically sound questions and respond with mini-essays.)  The answers that girls give to crass questions are usually written in a standoffish manner.

Example 1:

Q: “fagget!”
A: “you spelt faggot wrong … idiot.”

Example 2:

Q: “I’d rape you so hard.  You’re fucking hot”
A: “Gross on the first part.  Sanks on the second part I think?”

Some of the answers to anonymous questions also suggest that the respondent knows who wrote the question and, in my initial conversations, I found that many teens think that they know generally who is asking them questions.

Concerned Parents, Difficult Issues

So here’s my hypothesis…Teen girls engaged in responding to crass questions are using Formspring to prove that they’re tough to their peers.  Teen boys and girls are throwing curve balls at their peers to see how much they can handle, primarily using mean-spirited and sexualized language.  While staying tough is clearly part of the game, it’s also clear from my informants that the harassment is playing a psychological toll.  I’ve talked to numerous parents who are shocked by how their children’s peers are using this site and in most cases, knowledgeable parents demand that their children delete their profiles at once.  One parent told me the story of her daughter’s friend who didn’t want to take her profile down because it would “look weak.”  This girl and her mother got into a huge fight over Formspring because the girl didn’t want to let on that she cared about what people were saying about her on the site.  I can’t help but think about my own teen years and my attempts to look unfazed by swirling rumors while throwing up in the bathroom when no one was looking.

Formspring was not designed as a place for harassment, but some teens have clearly leveraged it to do precisely that, while others are using it to continue the long history of quizzes and surveys.  Why the different practices?  I’m not at all surprised that semi-anonymity results in people asking crass questions, but why are teens responding publicly for all of their peers to see?  What is it about today’s cultural dynamics that encourages teens to not only act tough when they’re attacked but to actively share the attacks of others as a marker of toughness pride?  And what is it about the way we’ve raised our children that makes it acceptable to actively humiliate and provoke?  Most likely, these two are interrelated.  While I’m sure that there are teens who are solely the object of cruel questioning, I strongly suspect that many respondents are also questioners.  Bullying is often cyclical and follows a pattern of escalation; I doubt that what we’re seeing on Formspring is much different.  How has the ethos of “suck it up, kid” and “fight back” become so commonplace amongst our youth while parents purportedly want to curtail bullying?

As I observe what’s unfolding on Formspring and begin talking to those enmeshed in it, I have more questions than answers.  But given how fast this phenomenon is taking off, I believe that we must start thinking through the implications sooner rather than later.

(Thank you to those parents out there who have pushed me to address this topic).

Image Credit: “Locker” by John Steven Fernandez http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenfernandez/2370347860/in/set-72157623510650436/

Big Data: Opportunities for Computational and Social Sciences

Scott Golder recently wrote blog post at Cloudera entitled “Scaling Social Science with Hadoop” where he accounts for “how social scientists are using large scale computation.” He begins with a delightful quote from George Homans: The methods of social science are dear in time and money and getting dearer every day. He then turns to talk about the trajectory of social science:

When Homans — one of my favorite 20th century social scientists — wrote the above, one of the reasons the data needed to do social science was expensive was because collecting it didn’t scale very well. If conducting an interview or lab experiment takes an hour, two interviews or experiments takes two hours. The amount of data you can collect this way grows linearly with the number of graduate students you can send into the field (or with the number of hours you can make them work!). But as our collective body of knowledge has accumulated, and the “low-hanging fruit” questions have been answered, the complexity of our questions is growing faster than our practical capacity to answer them. Things are about to change.

This is his bouncing off point for thinking about how “computational social science” provides new opportunities because of the “large archives of naturalistically-created behavioral data.” And then he makes a very compelling claim for why looking at behavioral data is critical:

Though social scientists care what people think it’s also important to observe what people do, especially if what they think they do turns out to be different from what they actually do.

By and large, I agree with him. Big Data presents new opportunities for understanding social practice. Of course the next statement must begin with a “but.” And that “but” is simple: Just because you see traces of data doesn’t mean you always know the intention or cultural logic behind them. And just because you have a big N doesn’t mean that it’s representative or generalizable. Scott knows this, but too many people obsessed with Big Data don’t.

Increasingly, computational scientists are having a field day with Big Data. This is exemplified by the “web science” community and highly visible in conferences like CHI and WWW and ICWSM and many other communities in which I am a peripheral member. In these communities, I’ve noticed something that I find increasingly worrisome… Many computational scientists believe that because they have large N data that they know more about people’s practices than any other social scientist. Time and time again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic. And this both saddens me and worries me, especially when we think about the politics of scholarship and funding. I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me start with a concrete example. Just as social network sites were beginning to gain visibility, I reviewed a computational science piece (that was never published) where the authors had crawled Friendster, calculated numbers of friends, and used this to explain how social network sites were increasing friendship size. My anger in reading this article resulted in a rant that turned into a First Monday article. As is now common knowledge, there’s a big difference between why people connect on social network sites and why they declare relationships when being interviewed by a sociologist. This is the difference between articulated networks and personal networks.

On one hand, we can laugh at this and say, oh folks didn’t know how these sites would play out, isn’t that funny. But this beast hasn’t yet died. These days, the obsession is with behavioral networks. Obviously, the people who spend the most time together are the REAL “strong” ties, right? Wrong. By such a measure, I’m far closer to nearly everyone that I work with than my brother or mother who mean the world to me. Even if we can calculate time spent interacting, there’s a difference in the quality of time spent with different people.

Big Data is going to be extremely important but we can never lose track of the context in which this data is produced and the cultural logic behind its production. We must continue to ask “why” questions that cannot be answered through traces alone, that cannot be elicited purely through experiments. And we cannot automatically assume that some theoretical body of work on one data set can easily transfer to another data set if the underlying conditions are different.

As we start to address Big Data, we must begin by laying the groundwork, understanding the theoretical foundations that make sense and knowing when they don’t apply. Cherry picking from different fields without understanding where those ideas are rooted will lead us astray.

Each methodology has its strength and weaknesses. Each approach to data has its strengths and weaknesses. Each theoretical apparatus has its place in scholarship. And one of the biggest challenges in doing “interdisciplinary” work is being about to account for these differences, to know what approach works best for what question, to know what theories speak to what data and can be used in which ways.

Unfortunately, our disciplinary nature makes a mess out of this. Scholars aren’t trained to read in other fields, let alone make sense of the conditions in which that work was produced. Thus, it’s all-too-common to pick and choose from different fields and take everything out of context. This is one of the things that scares me about students trained in interdisciplinary programs.

Now, of course, you might ask: But didn’t you come from an interdisciplinary program? Yes, I did. But there’s a reason that I was in grad school for 8.5 years. The first two were brutal as I received a rude awakening that I knew nothing about social science. And then I did a massive retraining as an ethnographer drawing on sociological and anthropological literatures. At this point, that’s my strength as a scholar. I know how to ask qualitative questions and I know how to employ ethnographic methods and theories to work out cultural practices. I had to specialize to have enough depth.

Of course, there’s one big advantage to an interdisciplinary program: it’s easy to gain an appreciation for diverse methodological and analytical approaches. In my path, I’ve learned to value experimental, computational, and quantitative research, but I’m by no means well trained in any of those approaches. That said, I am confident in my ability to assess which questions can be answered by which approaches. This also means that I can account for the questions I can’t answer.

Now back to Big Data… Big Data creates tremendous opportunities for those who know how to assess the context of the data and ask the right questions into it. But mucking with Big Data alone is not research. And seeing patterns in Big Data is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer.

I agree with Scott that there’s the potential for social science to be transformed by Big Data. So many questions that we’ve wanted to ask but haven’t been able to. But I’m also worried that more computationally minded researchers will think that they’re answering social science questions simply by finding patterns in Big Data. It’s the same worry that I have when graph theorists think that they understand people because they can model a narrow kind of information flow given the perfect conditions.

If we’re going to actually attack Big Data, the best solution would be to combine forces between social scientists and computational scientists. In some places, this is happening. But there are also huge issues at play that need to be accounted for and addressed. First, every discipline has its arrogance and far too many scholars think that they know everything. We desperately need a little humility here. Second, we need to think about the differences in publication, collaboration, and validation across fields. Social scientists aren’t going to get tenure on ACM or IEEE publications. Hell, they’re often dismissed for anything that’s not single author. Computational scientists often see no point in the extended review cycles that go into journal publications to help produce solid articles. And don’t get me started on the messy reviewing process involved on both sides.

We need to find a way for people to start working together and continue to get validated in their work. I actually think that the funding agencies are going to play a huge role in this, not just in demanding cross-disciplinary collaboration, but in setting the stage for how research will be published. Given departmental obsessions with funding these days, they have a lot of sway over shaping the future here.

There’s also another path that needs to be used: cross-bred students. Scott Golder, our fearless critic, is a good example of this. He was trained in computational ways before going to Cornell to pursue a PhD in sociology. This is one way of doing it. Another is to start cross-breeding students early on. Computer scientists: teach courses for social scientists on how to think about Big Data from a computational perspective. Social scientists: allow computer scientists into your core courses or teach core courses for them to understand the fundamentals of social science methodology and social theory. And universities: provide incentives for your faculty to teach students outside of their departments and for departments to encourage their students to take classes in other departments.

It’s great that we have Big Data but we need to develop the intellectual apparatus to actually analyze it. Each of us has a piece to the puzzle, but stitching it together is going to take a lot of reworking of old habits. It can be done and it is important. The key is to let go of our grudges and territoriality without letting go of our analytic rigor and depth.

Speaking about Privacy and Publicity

Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at SXSW to over 5000 people (OMG, that room was huuuuuuuge). My talk was about privacy and publicity and I spent a lot of time pushing back against the notion that “privacy is dead.” In some ways, the talk is a call to arms, an invitation for people to rethink their models of privacy so that we can collectively build a society we want to live in. As with many of my other talks, I wrote this one out so that I could share it with any of you who weren’t able to join me in Austin:

Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity

My hope is that this talk will also get you to think about these issues. I realize that this is a provocative argument and I would LOVE any and all feedback that you might be willing to share. I’m especially fond of folks who disagree with me. And I think that this topic requires some debating.

For those of you who are still in Austin, have a fantastic rest of SXSW! w00t!