Born This Way Foundation: guided by research

Yesterday, Cynthia Germanotta and her daughter Lady Gaga launched their new initiative to empower youth: the Born This Way Foundation. The Foundation wants to create a kinder, braver world so that youth can be the change-agents that we all need them to be. For youth to be empowered, the Foundation recognizes that 1) youth need to be safe; 2) youth need to have skills; and 3) youth need to have opportunities.

Lady Gaga and her mother are not going at this alone. They’ve worked closely with Connie Yowell at the MacArthur Foundation to learn how to create a foundation. They’ve tapped the California Endowment, Blue State Digital, and Harvard’s Berkman Center to help them. They’ve pulled in youth, researchers, and practitioners to advise them. They’ve asked the public to engage with them, to help make this a grassroots initiative. They want all who are willing and able to help to join in and contribute. In short, they want to change the rules of philanthropy in order to create a movement.

Alongside John Palfrey, I am proud to be a Research Fellow on this project. For the last few months, John Palfrey and I have helped coordinate researchers and synthesize research in order to help inform the foundation. As part of our efforts to advise the Foundation, John and I created a working paper series where we work with scholars to synthesize research and provide grounded advice. We’ve been putting together all sorts of research material in order to help the Foundation and the public make sense of the amazing work that scholars have been doing for years. The first five documents that we prepared are now publicly available:

All of these documents are currently in draft form because we’d love the public’s feedback. If you have critiques, pleased send them to kbw-feedback@cyber.law.harvard.edu.

We are super psyched to be embarking on this initiative. John and I have spent many years working to empower youth through research and we’re ecstatic to be given an opportunity to take this to the next level!

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Stop the Cycle of Bullying

[John Palfrey and I originally wrote this as an op-ed for the Huffington Post. See HuffPo for more comments.]

On 22 September 2010, the wallet of Tyler Clementi – a gay freshman at Rutgers University – was found on the George Washington Bridge; his body was found in the Hudson River the following week. His roommate, Dharun Ravi, was charged with 15 criminal counts, including invasion of privacy, bias intimidation, and tampering with witnesses and evidence tampering. Ravi pleaded not guilty.

Ravi’s trial officially begins this week, but in the court of public opinion, he has already been convicted. This is a terrible irony, since the case itself is about bullying.

Wading through the news reports, it’s hard to tell exactly what happened in the hours leading up to Clementi’s suicide. Some facts are unknown. What seems apparent is that Clementi asked Ravi to have his dormroom to himself on two occasions – September 19 and 21 – so that he could have alone time with an older gay man. On the first occasion, Ravi appears to have jiggered his computer so that he could watch the encounter from a remote computer. Ravi announced that he did so on Twitter. When Clementi asked Ravi for a second night in the room, Ravi invited others to watch via Twitter. It appears as though Clementi read this and unplugged Ravi’s computer, thereby preventing Ravi from watching. What happened after this incident on September 21 is unclear. A day later, Clementi’s body was discovered.

The media-driven narrative quickly blamed Ravi and his friend Molly Wei, from whose room Ravi watched Clementi. Amidst a series of other highly publicized LGBT suicides, Clementi’s suicide was labeled as a tragic product of homophobic bullying. Ravi has been portrayed as a malicious young man, hellbent on making his roommate miserable. Technology was blamed for providing a new mechanism by which Ravi could spy on and torment his roommate. The overwhelming presumption: Ravi’s guilty for causing Clementi’s death. Ravi may well be guilty of these crimes, but we have trials for a reason.

As information has emerged from the legal discovery process, the story became more complicated. It appears as though Clementi turned to online forums and friends to get advice; his messages conveyed a desire for getting support, but they didn’t suggest a pending suicide attempt. In one document submitted to the court, Clementi appears to have written to a friend that he was not particularly upset by Ravi’s invasion. Older digital traces left by Clementi – specifically those produced after he came out to and was rejected by those close to him – exhibited terrible emotional pain. At Rutgers, Clementi appears to have been handling his frustrations with his roommate reasonably well. After the events of September 20 and 21, Clementi appears to have notified both his resident assistant and university officials and asked for a new room; the school appears to have responded properly and Clementi appeared pleased.

The process of discovery in a lawsuit is an essential fact-finding exercise. The presumption of innocence is an essential American legal principle. Unfortunately, in highly publicized cases, this doesn’t stop people from jumping to conclusions based on snippets of information. Media speculation and hype surrounding Clementi’s suicide has been damning for Ravi, but the incident has also prompted all sorts of other outcomes. Public policy wheels have turned, prompting calls for new state and federal cyberbullying prevention laws. Well-meaning advocates have called for bullying to be declared a hate crime.

As researchers, we know that bullying is a serious, urgent issue. We favor aggressive and meaningful intervention programs to address it and to prevent young people from taking their lives. These programs should especially support LGBT youth, themselves more likely to be the targets of bullying. Yet, it’s also critical that we pay attention to the messages that researchers have been trying to communicate for years. “Bullies” are often themselves victims of other forms of cruelty and pressure. Zero-tolerance approaches to bullying don’t work; they often increase bullying. Focusing on punishment alone does little to address the underlying issues. Addressing bullying requires a serious social, economic, and time-based commitment to educating both young people and adults. Research shows that curricula and outreach programs can work. We are badly underfunding youth empowerment programs that could help enormously. Legislative moves that focus on punishment instead of education only make the situation worse.

Not only are most young people often ill-equipped to recognize how their meanness, cruelty, and pranking might cause pain, but most adults are themselves are ill-equipped to help young people in a productive way. Worse, many adults are themselves perpetuating the idea that being cruel is socially acceptable. Not only has cruelty and deception become status quo on TV talk shows; it plays a central role in televised entertainment and political debates. In contemporary culture, it has become acceptable to be outright cruel to any public figure, whether they’re a celebrity, reality TV contestant, or teenager awaiting trial.

Tyler Clementi’s suicide is a tragedy. We should all be horrified that a teenager felt the need to take his life in our society. But in our frustration, we must not prosecute Dharun Ravi before he has had his day in court. We must not be bullies ourselves. Ravi’s life has already been destroyed by what he may or may not have done. The way we, the public, have treated him, even before his trial, has only made things worse.

To combat bullying, we need to stop the cycle of violence. We need to take the high road; we must refrain from acting like a mob, in Clementi’s name or otherwise. Every day, there are young people who are being tormented by their peers and by adults in their lives. If we want to make this stop, we need to get to the root of the problem. We should start by looking to ourselves.

danah boyd is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a research assistant professor at New York University. John Palfrey is a professor of law at Harvard Law School.

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Are Librarians Encouraging Public Libraries to Abide by COPPA?

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) was created to prevent corporations from collecting data about children without parental permission. This law explicitly does not apply to public institutions, non-profits, and government agencies. Yet, many public institutions not only choose not to collect data about children; they forbid children from accessing information without parental permission. Much to my surprise, this includes many public libraries.

Dear Librarians… Will you help explain something to me?

Last week, I went to the Boston Public Library’s website to obtain digital access. In creating my account, I was surprised to encounter this clause:

“Anyone individual who lives, works, attends school, or owns property in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and is at least 13 years of age may register for an eCard. Library cards for corporations, businesses, libraries, institutions, and children under the age of 13 must be obtained in person at one of our locations.”

Surprised by finding the age restriction – and particularly curious about the fact that it’s 13 – I decided to write to the administrators about why they chose to restrict access to children. What I received in response made my heart sink:

The age restriction on eCard registration is required so that we comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law enacted in 1998. The law requires all web sites that collect personally-identifiable information from visitors (name, address, phone, etc.) to restrict registration to individuals of age 13 or older. It’s the same reason Facebook states that users must be 13 or older.

I wrote back to explain that COPPA does not apply to the Boston Public Library because of its non-profit, municipality-driven status. I pointed them to the FTC’s website that explains the rule and asked them for further clarification on why they were restricting access to children. I received the following in response:

I assure you that our intention is not to restrict access to children. However, in addition to staying on the safest side of COPPA, we also require a parent’s signature before issuing library cards to children under the age of 13. Please see http://www.bpl.org/general/circulation/whocard.htm for more information about borrower eligibility.

Amidst this, an amazing Harvard Law School librarian Meg Kibble sent John Palfrey a long note, indicating that BPL was indeed a non-profit and thus probably not required to follow COPPA. Still, she noted that many librarians used COPPA as a starting point:

BPL may be choosing to err on the side of caution. A number of library-related materials I found urge libraries to be aware of COPPA and one suggested adhering to COPPA even though it is not required:

  • A CLE on Legal Issues in Museum Administration (attached) by Hope O’Keefe, OGC at Library of Congress, includes creating an online privacy policy as part of best practices and suggests in it “Follow COPPA and document compliance (parental notice & consent to any information collection from children) even if COPPA doesn’t apply.”
  • ALA’s Privacy Tool Kit discusses COPPA in relation to school media centers: “The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) directly affects commercial Web sites targeted to children, as well as those sites that know they are collecting personally identifiable information from children 12 and under. . . .Although libraries are not directly impacted by COPPA, children using the Internet in a library may need help understanding the law and getting consent from their parents.”
  • ALA Introduction to COPPA states “Although COPPA does not impose any specific requirements on libraries, in order to provide the best possible service to families, librarians must be aware of the rules governing children’s privacy on the Internet if their libraries provide Internet access.”

BPL still seems to be going further than similar institutions. Some other privacy policies that discuss children/COPPA and seem to be complying with some elements of it (15 USC 6502B suggests regulations) by providing notice about how they collect/delete/otherwise handle children’s information, but mostly don’t prevent children from using their sites:

  • Library of Congress: Not copied because it’s long, but it’s very specific and mentions COPPA
  • Guggenheim Museum – Children 12 Years Old and Under: “Please note that the Site is not specifically dedicated to children and the Guggenheim does not actively solicit information from children. Children under the age of 12 are required to obtain permission from an adult before submitting information to the Site.”
  • Metropolitan Museum – Children Under Thirteen Years of Age: “The Museum takes special care to protect the safety and privacy of children. We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children under thirteen years of age.”
  • NYPL – Children’s Privacy: Another long one that doesn’t mention COPPA, but goes into detail about children not revealing personal info.
  • White House – Children and Privacy on WhiteHouse.gov: “We believe in the importance of protecting the privacy of children online and do not knowingly contact or collect personal information from children under 13. Our site is not intended to solicit information of any kind from children under 13. To notify us of our receipt of information by children under 13, please contact us through the Privacy Feedback form.”

I have the warmest of fuzzy feelings about libraries and librarians so this surprises me to no end. I recognize that librarians are deeply committed to privacy, for which I am deeply deeply deeply grateful. But I’ve always been under the impression that librarians are also committed to making sure that children have access to information, even information that might upset their parents. In other words, I thought that librarians recognized children’s privacy from adults as well as people’s privacy from institutions. I remember being absolutely delighted when I found out that parents could not get access to their children’s book borrowing history. I like to think of the library as a safe place. Even for children. And especially for children for whom home is not a safe space.

I find it seriously disconcerting that this is all framed around COPPA, as though 13 is a universal magic number. Public institutions like the library aren’t required to follow COPPA. And folks keep telling me that there’s no reason to worry about COPPA when it comes to public institutions because they’re not required to follow it. But, once again, it looks like they are following it, just to be on the safe side. And, more often than not, they’re doing it to restrict access rather than to be conscientious about the types of data that are collected or the usage of that data. Why? Why? Why?

And that’s my question back to librarians: Why are some libraries choosing to restrict children’s access to public information? I get why many adults who live in communities where the kids are AOK want to make sure that parents are involved in their children’s lives and activities. But not all kids are lucky enough to be in households where parent permission to access information is viable. Most of the librarians that I’ve met totally get that. They’ve seen abused children. They’ve seen kids who’ve struggled with their sexuality. They’ve seen children for whom access to information is critical to combating oppression. I wish that parents were always in the right. I wish that parents were always good actors. But they aren’t. And I thought librarians understood that.

So why are librarians implicitly accepting COPPA as the status quo even when you’re not required to abide by it? Why are they trying to pretend like they aren’t seeing under-13s rather than providing services that are especially helpful to under-13s? We don’t have many public sources of information available, let alone information sources that are so carefully and conscientiously curated. I hate to think that children are written out of public information spaces, including libraries and government sites. Just to be on the safe side.

I don’t know how popular online library access is with under-13s, but it depresses me to no end that libraries aren’t going out of their way to welcome children to their communities. I think it’s super important that children are free to be accessing library information, with or without their parent’s permission. What they can get through their public library is so much richer, so much better curated, so much better contextualized than generic online information. Why aren’t libraries actively inviting and encouraging children to join them? Why aren’t they targeting young people directly?

I don’t get it. Please… if you’re a librarian out there, can you explain to me what I’m missing?

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New Pew study on tone of social network sites

Pew Internet & American Life Project just released a new study called “The tone of life on social networking sites” where they examine adult meanness and cruelty. This complements their piece on “Teens, kindness, and cruelty on social network sites.”

Like teens, most adults find people on social network sites to be kind. But what fascinates me about both the adult and teen studies is that frequent users are more likely to witness negative exchanges. (Not surprisingly, young people are more likely to be frequent users which helps explain part of why young people report higher exposure to negativity. Cuz, guess what? Adults and teens aren’t that radically different.)

But what I want to know is: why?

Most folks will probably jump to the conclusion that SNSs produce the meanness and cruelty and, thus, frequent use means more exposure. I suspect that this isn’t the case. Instead, I suspect that the types of people who are drawn to and use SNSs frequently are more likely to engage in drama, meanness, and cruelty. But who are these people?

I especially want to know more about the adults who are more likely to have negative experiences. And I really want to know if there’s a connection between teens and adults when it comes to negative experiences. For example, are teens who have bad experiences online likely to have parents who have negative experiences? Or are they totally unrelated? I can imagine it going either way. More things to think about…

In the meantime, if you’re interested in the issues of bullying, drama, meanness, and cruelty, make sure to check out these two Pew reports. They’re fascinating!

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World Economic Forum: More than Meets the Eye

I spent the last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. When my friends (y’all) learned I was going, some were supportive while others were horrified. A few called me an outright traitor. Given how much mythology there is around this event, I want to take a moment and briefly share my own experience there.

If you read news articles about WEF, you get the impression that it’s a high stakes event where many of the world leaders gather to discuss governance and finance. (Journalists especially love to highlight when said leaders snicker or snark at one another.) Indeed, there is that part of the event, but that wasn’t actually the event that I attended. I spent the week primarily talking with civil society leaders, NGOs, representatives from the UN, and esteemed scholars. For example, I did a Refugee Run sponsored by Crossroads and the UN Refugee Agency which was a (gentle) simulation of life in a refugee camp followed by a few former refugees (including one child soldier) telling their story. I attended a Civil Society event where I spoke with representatives from human rights organizations, the union/labor movement, and NGOs working to address some of the hardest problems in society. I had a lunch with a university president talking about the role of technology in higher ed. I had dinner with an esteemed physicist, an author I admire, and a network scientist where we talked about how to engender and support creativity. I gave advice to a group of women trying to combat the societal valuation of consumption. I brainstormed with a group of young attendees who had done amazing work in the education sector around the globe. I attended a dinner with complexity analysts, newspaper executives, and brain scientists where we talked about how fear functions in society. I share these things not to brag, but because my conversations in Davos were inspiring, creative, and stimulating. I came out of the event feeling as though I was able to contribute to discussions among people who were truly working to make the world a better place. My hope is that my presence there affected others in the same way they affected me.

This is not to say that WEF/Davos is not an odd – and at times, deeply problematic – place. It is. It’s many things good, bad, and ugly. While I have never met a WEF employee who makes me depressed or angry, I cannot say the same for some of the attendees. The Forum desperately wants people from different sectors to learn from one another to address the world’s problems, but there are plenty of attendees who are more interested in maintaining the status quo. WEF evolves each year to try to find new ways to bring a social conscience into economic discussions, but that doesn’t mean that everyone wants to listen. For example, Desmond Tutu inspired the audience with his remarks about the importance of bringing women into the political and economic sphere, but I can’t say that the majority of those who needed to hear it were listening. To give this issue some context… Less than 20% of those in attendance were women. Among the young global leaders and global shapers (chosen by the Forum), it was close to 50/50. Many of the speakers (chosen by the Forum) were women. But among the corporate delegations (chosen by companies’ executives), I wouldn’t be surprised if the number was less than 5%.

Comparing WEF to any other event is hard, but I cracked a smile when Nick Bilton remarked that WEF is a lot like Burning Man. In so many ways, he’s right. A lot of people overwhelm one extreme weather location and battle non-normative conditions (Davos is crowded, covered in ice, and extremely difficult to navigate) to interact with others. In both events, there are so many different kinds of communities colliding – sometimes interacting and sometimes not. And both cost gobs of money to attend, thereby excluding all sorts of people. What differentiates the two events is how status is negotiated. At WEF, boundaries are explicitly managed: you are in or you are out, you are important or you are not. You are told over and over again whether or not you matter and access is strictly enforced. Bourdieu would call this “cultural capital.” Most people view Burning Man as much more open and accepting, but it too is governed by status games. The difference is that you don’t know whether or not you’ve been included in whatever is high status. Burning Man – like a lot of underground culture – is all about being “in the know.” Thornton would call this “subcultural capital.” You may instinctively think: “At least anyone can go to Burning Man!” That’s not true. Not only are the tickets expensive, but they’re now a lottery; both are exclusionary mechanisms. You may retort: “But BM tickets are only $400ish; it costs tens of thousands of dollars to go to Davos!” If you try to show up to BM without a ticket, you literally cannot get in. If you make your way to Davos, you can get into a surprisingly large amount of the event with only a hotel pass ($55). Yes, it’s brutally painful, but I met countless people squatting the event and engaging with folks outside of the core sessions. More importantly, I met numerous people from the public sector or civil society who were fully covered – their flight, hotel, and entrance completely paid for because they were doing good in the world without a large paycheck. Even BM attendees who come in for free because they work the event have to pay to get there and pay for their equipment. BM espouses openness while WEF is unabashedly elitist. I appreciate BM’s effort to become its idealistic self, but I also appreciate WEF’s brutal honesty regarding who it is.

One way of reading this post is as a justification of WEF and, in some ways, it is. Don’t get me wrong: there were a lot of people there who I think are to blame for the global economic crisis we’re in. And there were people there who have done serious damage to our planet in so many ways. But there were also people there who I think have radically changed the world for the better. It’s easy to hate WEF, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. I continue to be impressed by the thoughtfulness of the people at the WEF and Professor Schwab’s attempts to bridge divides. He and the WEF genuinely want to make the world a better place. We can reasonably argue about whether or not their tactics are effective, but declaring the institution evil achieves nothing.

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How Parents Normalized Teen Password Sharing

In 2005, I started asking teenagers about their password habits. My original set of questions focused on teens’ attitudes about giving their password to their parents, but I quickly became enamored with teens’ stories of sharing passwords with friends and significant others. So I was ecstatic when Pew Internet & American Life Project decided to survey teens about their password sharing habits. Pew found that one third of online 12-17 year olds share their password with a friend or significant other and that almost half of those 14-17 do. I love when data gets reinforced.

Last week, Matt Richtel at the New York Times did a fantastic job of covering one aspect of why teens share passwords: as a show of affection. Indeed, I have lots of fun data that supports Richtel’s narrative — and complicates it. Consider Meixing’s explanation for why she shares her password with her boyfriend:

Meixing, 17, TN: It made me feel safer just because someone was there to help me out and stuff. It made me feel more connected and less lonely. Because I feel like Facebook sometimes it kind of like a lonely sport, I feel, because you’re kind of sitting there and you’re looking at people by yourself. But if someone else knows your password and stuff it just feels better.

For Meixing, sharing her password with her boyfriend is a way of being connected. But it’s precisely these kinds of narratives that have prompted all sorts of horror by adults over the last week since that NYTimes article came out. I can’t count the number of people who have gasped “How could they!?!” at me. For this reason, I feel the need to pick up on an issue that the NYTimes let out.

The idea of teens sharing passwords didn’t come out of thin air. In fact, it was normalized by adults. And not just any adult. This practice is the product of parental online safety norms. In most households, it’s quite common for young children to give their parents their passwords. With elementary and middle school youth, this is often a practical matter: children lose their passwords pretty quickly. Furthermore, most parents reasonably believe that young children should be supervised online. As tweens turn into teens, the narrative shifts. Some parents continue to require passwords be forked over, using explanations like “because I’m your mother.” But many parents use the language of “trust” to explain why teens should share their passwords with them.

There are different ways that parents address the password issue, but they almost always build on the narrative of trust. (Tangent: My favorite strategy is when parents ask children to put passwords into a piggy bank that must be broken for the paper with the password to be retrieved. Such parents often explain that they don’t want to access their teens’ accounts, but they want to have the ability to do so “in case of emergency.” A piggy bank allows a social contract to take a physical form.)

When teens share their passwords with friends or significant others, they regularly employ the language of trust, as Richtel noted in his story. Teens are drawing on experiences they’ve had in the home and shifting them into their peer groups in order to understand how their relationships make sense in a broader context. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone because this is all-too-common for teen practices. Household norms shape peer norms.

There’s another thread here that’s important. Think back to the days in which you had a locker. If you were anything like me and my friends, you gave out your locker combination to your friends and significant others. There were varied reasons for doing so. You wanted your friends to pick up a book for you when you left early because you were sick. You were involved in a club or team where locker decorating was common. You were hoping that your significant other would leave something special for you. Or – to be completely and inappropriately honest – you left alcohol in your locker and your friends stopped by for a swig. (One of my close friends was expelled for that one.) We shared our locker combinations because they served all sorts of social purposes, from the practical to the risqué.

How are Facebook passwords significantly different than locker combos? Truth be told, for most teenagers, they’re not. Teens share their passwords so that their friends can check their messages for them when they can’t get access to a computer. They share their passwords so their friends can post the cute photos. And they share their passwords because it’s a way of signaling an intimate relationship. Just like with locker combos.

Can password sharing be abused? Of course. I’ve heard countless stories of friends “punking” one another by leveraging password access. And I’ve witnessed all sorts of teen relationship violence where mandatory password sharing is a form of surveillance and abuse. But, for most teens, password sharing is as risky as locker combo sharing. This is why, even though 1/3 of all teens share their passwords, we only hear of scattered horror stories.

I know that this practice strikes adults as seriously peculiar, but it irks me when adults get all judgmental on this teen practice, as though it’s “proof” that teens can’t properly judge how trustworthy a relationship is. First, it’s through these kinds of situations where they learn. Second, adults are dreadful at judging their own relationships (see: divorce rate) so I don’t have a lot of patience for the high and mighty approach. Third, I’m much happier with teens sharing passwords as a form of intimacy than sharing many other things.

There’s no reason to be aghast at teen password sharing. Richtel’s story is dead-on. It’s pretty darn pervasive. But it also makes complete sense given how notions of trust have been constructed for many teens.

(Image Credit: Darwin Bell)

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We need to talk about piracy (but we must stop SOPA first)

Much to my happiness, the internets are in a frenzy about the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (aka SOPA). Congress is currently in recess, but the House announced a hearing on the potential impact to the Domain Name Service on January 18 and everyone expects the Senate to begin discussing a similar bill “PROTECT IP Act” when they return to DC on January 24. There’s a lot to these bills – and the surrounding furor – and I’m not going to go into it, but I recommend reading the actual bill and Open Congress info, the Wikipedia article, EFF’s blog, and the various links at Stop American Censorship. Tomorrow – January 18th – a bunch of geeks are planning a SOPA Blackout Day to voice their discontent.

I abhor SOPA for the same reasons as other geeks. I’m horrified that Congress has crafted a law that will screw with the architecture of the internet in ways that will undermine free speech. I love Josh Kopstein’s post “Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works.” And I’m glad that geeks are getting vocal, even if – as Clay Johnson has pointed out – geeks don’t quite get how Congress works. I’m stoked that the White House has asked for a civil conversation around piracy (while also opposing SOPA’s key pieces). And I find it utterly hysterical that Rupert Murdoch has come to geeks’ turf (Twitter) to convey his pro-SOPA opinions, even as Obama steps in to state that he opposes SOPA.

In talking with non-geeks, I can’t help but be fascinated that the debate has somehow been framed in the public eye as “pro-piracy” vs. “anti-piracy.” Needless to say, that’s the frame that Murdoch is advocating, even as geeks are pushing for the “pro-internet” vs. “pro-censorship” frame. What’s especially intriguing to me is that the piracy conversation is getting convoluted even among politicos, revealing the ways in which piracy gets flattened to one concept. Teasing this issue out is especially important when we’re talking about regulations that are meant to help with piracy. There are many different aspects of piracy, but for simplicity sake, I want to focus on two aspects that feed into bills like SOPA and PROTECT IP: piracy as a competitive issue vs. piracy as a cultural issue. This can often be split as software piracy vs. media piracy, but not always.

There are actually reasons to not be in favor of all forms of piracy, even if you’re an unrepentant media pirate. Imagine that you are an appliance manufacturer in the United States. You make things like toasters. You are required to abide by American laws. You must pay your employees at least a minimum wage; you must follow American safety regulations. All of this raises the overhead of your production process. In addition, you must also do things like purchase your software legally. Your designers use some CAD software, which they pay for. Your accountants use accounting software, which they pay for. Sure, you’ve cut some costs by using “free” software but, by and large, you pay a decent amount of money to software companies to use the systems that they built.

You really want to get your toasters into Wal-Mart, but time and time again, you find yourself undercut by competitors in foreign countries where the safety laws are more lax, the minimum wage laws are nonexistent, and where companies aren’t punished for stealing software. Are you grouchy? Of course you are. Needless to say, you see this as an unfair competition issue. There aren’t legal ways of bending the market to create fair competition. You can’t innovate your way out of this dilemma and so you want Congress to step in and make sure that you can compete fairly.

Combating software piracy in the supply chain is a reasonable request and part of what makes bills like PROTECT IP messy is that there’s a kernel of this issue in these bills. Bills like this are also meant to go after counterfeit products. Most folks really want to know what’s in baby formula or what’s in the medicines they purchase. Unfortunately, though, these aspects of piracy quickly gets muddled with cultural facets of piracy, particularly once the media industries have gotten involved.

Since the rise of Napster, the media industry has been in a furor over media piracy. Not only do they get pissed when people rip and distribute media content on the internet, they throw a fit whenever teenagers make their own music videos based on their favorite song. Even though every child in America is asked to engage in remix in schools for educational purposes (“Write a 5-paragraph essay as though you were dropped into Lord of the Flies”), doing so for fun and sharing your output on the internet has been deemed criminal. Media piracy is messy, because access to content is access to social status and power in a networked era. Some people are simply “stealing” but others are actually just trying to participate in culture. It’s complicated. (See: “Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property” and “Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates” to go deeper.)

Most in the media industry refuse to talk about media piracy beyond the economic components. But the weird thing about media piracy is that Apple highlighted that the media industry could actually innovate their way around this problem. Sure, it doesn’t force everyone to pay for consuming content, but when was that ever the case? When I was in high school, I went over to friends’ houses and watched their TV and movies without paying for them. Even though the media industry is making buckets of money – and even though people have been shown to be willing to pay for content online when it’s easy – the media industry is more interested in creating burdensome regulations than in developing innovative ways for consumers to get access to content. (Yo HBO! Why the hell can’t I access your content legally online if I don’t subscribe to cable!?!?) I guess I shouldn’t be surprised… It’s cheaper to lawyer up than hire geeks these days.

Of course, it’s not like there aren’t a bazillion laws on the books to curb media piracy. What frustrates the media industry is that they don’t have jurisdiction over foreign countries and foreign web servers. Bills like SOPA aren’t really meant to curb piracy; they’re meant to limit Americans’ access to information flows in foreign countries by censoring what kinds of information can flow across American companies’ servers. Eeek. I can’t help but think back to a point that Larry Lessig makes in “Republic, Lost” where he points out that there are more laws to curb media piracy on the books than there are to curb pollution. Le sigh.

Don’t get me wrong: there are definitely piracy practices out there that I’d like to see regulators help curb. For example, I’m actually quite in favor of making sure that companies can’t engage in unfair competition. I agree with the White House that certain kinds of piracy practices undermine American jobs. But I’m not in favor of using strong arm tactics to go after individuals’ cultural practices. Nor am I interested in seeing “solutions” that focus on turning America into more of a bubble. Shame on media companies for trying to silence and censor information flows in their efforts to strong arm consumers. This isn’t good for consumers and it’s certainly not good for citizens.

As we go deeper into an information age, I think that we need to have serious conversations about what is colloquially termed piracy. We need to distinguish media piracy from software piracy because they’re not the same thing. We need to seriously interrogate fairness and equality, creative production and cultural engagement. And we need to seriously take into consideration why people do what they do. I strongly believe that when people work en masse to route around a system, the system is most likely the thing that needs the fixing, not the people.

These issues are challenging and they require people to untangle a wide variety of different conflicting and interwoven practices. Unfortunately, challenging cultural conversations are really hard to have when the government chooses to fast track faulty legislation on the behalf of one industry and to the detriment of another. SOPA has turned into a gnarly battle between old and new media, but the implications of this battle extend far beyond the corporate actors. My hope is that SOPA goes away immediately. But I also hope that we can begin the harder work of actually interrogating how different aspects of piracy are affecting society, business, and cultural practices.

In the meantime, I ask you to stand with me to oppose SOPA. Learn what’s happening and voice your opinion. Legislative issues like this affect all of us.

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Nancy Baym, Kate Crawford, Mary L. Gray to Join Microsoft Research

::bounce:: I am *ecstatic* to announce that Nancy Baym, Kate Crawford, and Mary L. Gray are all joining Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, MA. See Jennifer Chayes’ announcement. ::bounce::

Three years ago (this week), I joined Microsoft Research to help integrate social scientists and computer scientists. I have known about and admired MSR since my undergraduate days when I was studying computer science. From the perspective of a researcher, it seemed like heaven-on-earth. As I slowly shifted disciplines, I was saddened to think that I had moved myself away from MSR so I was utterly delighted when, in 2008, I learned that Jennifer Chayes wanted to start a lab that brought computer scientists and social scientists together in new ways. I was even more ecstatic when she invited me to help with this endeavor. Over the last three years, I’ve invited numerous scholars to come to MSR as visitors, postdocs, and interns. In particular, I’ve focused on bringing in social scientists from fields that haven’t commonly been in conversation with industrial researchers. This loose network of folks have come to be known as the “Social Media Collective.” Much to my absolute pleasure, Nancy, Kate, and Mary are going to come to MSR to join the Collective.

The Social Media Collective focuses on research related to socio-technical issues, primarily from a social scientific perspective. Most of us use qualitative research methods, but there are also quantitative, computational, and experimental folks among us. We primarily look at topics related to the rise of social media, but we do so from a variety of different disciplinary lenses. Our work tends to have implications for a wide array of audiences: scholarly, technical, policy, business, and public. Nancy, Kate, and Mary are three of the leading scholars in this arena and I’m ecstatic that they’ll be coming to MSR to advance this line of inquiry.

  • Nancy Baym is a communication scholar, currently at University of Kansas. She helped define the field of internet studies with her work on personal connections, fandom, and online communities.
  • Kate Crawford is a media studies scholar, currently at the University of New South Wales. She weaves together a diverse set of interests to examine mobile media, intimacy, and listening, with an eye towards public policy implications.
  • Mary L. Gray is an anthropologist, currently at Indiana University. Her work on rural queer youth has helped complicate our understandings of marginalized populations’ use of technology.

Each of these phenomenal scholars has a long history of helping us understand the relationship between technology and society and I’m sooo soooo soooo excited that they’re coming to MSR. As all of you who know me know, I love MSR. I also love Nancy, Kate, and Mary. So the combination makes me feel like a kid in a candy store.

MSR is a truly special place: an interdisciplinary home base for folks who are interested in studying issues related to technology. I still remember the day that Nancy, Kate, and Mary came back from talking to a group of computer scientists and mathematicians about the very meaning of “communication.” Needless to say, social scientists don’t use that term in the same way as mathematicians. But instead of being horrified, these three were glowing because they ended up diving deep into the kind of intense conversations that only scholars relish. That’s when I knew that MSR was the place for them.

Microsoft Research is so lucky that Nancy, Kate, and Mary are coming to MSR. And I’m super lucky that I’m going to have three more awesome colleagues. ::bounce::

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I am Generation Flux

I love talking with smart journalists. When they’re good at what they do, journalists can really prompt me to think deeply (and differently) about issues. Nothing makes me happier than coming out of a discussion with a journalist with my brain on fire. My conversation with Bob Safian from Fast Company did precisely that. I left that chat high as a kite with all my synapses buzzing. The funny thing? I didn’t know why he was asking all of those interesting questions. Then, a few weeks later, I was asked to do a photoshoot. And that too ended up being way way way too much fun. Totally silly. The groomer even got me to wear heels for the first time in 15 years. (When I was 18, I wore heels as part of a beauty pageant – yes, I entered a beauty pageant on a dare – and I fell off the stage. I haven’t worn heels since.)

Anyhow, that fabulous conversation and playful photoshoot ended up turning into a cover story for Fast Company: “The Secrets of Generation Flux.” I can’t tell you how honored and humbled I am to be featured on the cover of Fast Company along with some folks who I greatly admire: Beth Comstock, Baratunde Thurston, Raina Kumra, Bob Greenberg, DJ Patil, and Pete Cashmore. Plus, it makes me smile so much to be surrounded by so many fearless, goofy folks doing their thing because they believe in what they do. And I can’t tell you how good it feels to be recognized for being a troublemaker after so many years of being told that my rabble rousing would produce no good.

I am a very lucky girl and I thank my lucky stars for letting me be as successful as I’ve been. Who would’ve thought that I’d end up seeing my face on the newsstands?? ::giggle::

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I’m back….

OMG do I love vacation. A chance to live a different lifestyle, explore the world, and refresh my brain. This year’s adventure began in Easter Island where we traversed the island looking at the amazing Moai statues and engaging in all sorts of discussions about the fraught/uncertain history of the Rapa Nui people.

Next, we headed back to the mainland of Chile and ventured down to Patagonia where we managed to do the famed W trek in Torres del Paine, finishing only hours before the park was shut down due to a fire started by a tourist. It kills me to think that most of the amazing trail we trekked is now burnt to a crisp.

After finishing the W, we ventured into Argentina, first to El Calafate where we got to listen to Parito Moreno crackling its amazing glacier sounds. And then we headed up to El Chalten in order to trek all around Fitz Roy where we miraculously got a brilliantly cloudless day for our trek to the base.

And then we headed up to Buenos Aires. Needless to say, lots more happened amidst all of those adventures, but I’ll leave you with one final fun image. This is of me wearing my Selk’Bag (a fabulous alternative to sleeping bags for those who can’t sleep like a mummy).

Anyhow, I’m back and will be back to work momentarily. I hope you had a fabulous holiday!!!

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