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)

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!

Empowering Parents & Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape

The FCC published a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) on the important topic of empowering parents and protecting youth in an era of an evolving media landscape. John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and I took the opportunity to respond to the NOI on behalf of the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative at the Berkman Center. What we wrote should not surprise any of you who are following our work, but our research-grounded response may be of great value for those of you who are interested in this topic. For this reason – and because we all believe in transparency – we have decided to publicly share the document that we crafted.

Empowering Parents & Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape

We welcome all feedback and thoughts!!

ChatRoulette, from my perspective

I’ve been following ChatRoulette for a while now but haven’t been comfortable talking about it publicly. For one, it’s a hugely controversial site, one that is prompting yet-another moral panic about youth engagement online. And I hate having the role of respondent to public uproar. (I know I know…) More importantly though, I find it difficult to respond to the fears because I find it endearing. ChatRoulette reminds me a lot of the quirkiness of the Internet that I grew up with. Like when I was a teen trolling through chatrooms, ChatRoulette is filled with all sorts of weird people. And most users ignore most other users until they find someone they find interesting or compelling. While the site was designed by a teen, minors do not dominate there (although there are plenty of young adults there). And, not surprisingly, teens on the site have ZERO interest in talking to older folks – even old folks like me. It’s the strangest pairing dynamic… You can click Next and they can click Next until something gels. And even though I might want to talk to teens on the site, they have no desire to talk to me. Imagine if I was a sketchy guy. Right: no interest. Likewise, the people who most want to talk to me – a young woman – are the people that I don’t want to talk to. So on and on and on we go clicking next until there’s a possible spark. It’s a game played by flaneurs walking the digital streets.

What I like most about the site is the fact that there’s only so much you can hide. This isn’t a place where police officers can pretend to be teen girls. This isn’t a place where you feel forced to stick around; you can move on and no one will know the difference. If someone doesn’t strike your fancy, move on. And on. And on.

I love the way that it mixes things up. For most users of all ages – but especially teens – the Internet today is about socializing with people you already know. But I used to love the randomness of the Internet. I can’t tell you how formative it was for me to grow up talking to all sorts of random people online. So I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc. So I hate how we vilify all strangers as inherently bad. Did I meet some sketchballs on the Internet when I was a teen? DEFINITELY. They were weird; I moved on. And it used to be a lot harder to move on when everything was attached to an email that was paid for. So I actually think that the ChatRoulette version allows you to move on with greater ease, less guilt, and far more comfortably. Ironically – given the recent media coverage – it feels a lot safer than any site that I’ve seen that’s attached to a name or profile with connections to people or identifying information. Can youth get themselves into trouble here? Sure… like in most public places. And there are definitely youth who are playing with fire. But, once again, why go after the technology when the underlying issues should be the ones we address? Le sigh.

Anyhow, I was hemming and hawing about what to say about this and I’m still not sure what to say because, truthfully, I like the reminder of ye-olde-Internet culture. I like the fact that there are still a small percentage of folks out there looking for some amusement because they’re bored and they want to connect with randomness, folks who recognize the joy of meeting strangers in a safer space than most physical spaces where that’s possible. I realize that this creates the potential for seeing some pretty gross and/or problematic things and I certainly don’t want to dismiss that, but I’m pretty certain that teens are responding the same way that I’m responding – by clicking Next. Is that ideal? Probably not. And I’d certainly love a filter – not just for teens but for my own eyes. (Then again, I’d also like a spam filter too… Especially here on my blog. Cuz really, who of you who are reading this want to get porn ads here either?) I’m not sure that immature folks of any age (or the easily grossed out) should be on this site. But I do hope that we can create a space where teens and young adults and the rest of us can actually interact with randomness again. There’s a cost to our social isolation and I fear that we’re going to be paying it for generations to come.

So I’m still not sure what to say except that I feel this weighted sense of Le Sigh. The same mix of depression and exhaustion I felt this morning when I was playing peek-a-boo with a smily child in an airport and her parents whisked her away, glaring at me as though I was the devil incarnate. I realize that many parents think that they’re doing good by their kids when they choose to limit their exposure to the randomness of the world, but it just makes me deeply deeply sad. And so I simultaneously am amused by ChatRoulette and depressed because I realize that so many folks would prefer to keep themselves and their teens/college-aged-kids sheltered rather than giving them a way of thinking about systems like this and teaching them to walk away when things get weird. And this deserves a Le Sigh Royale.

Post translated:

ChatRoulette by Sarita Yardi

Sarita Yardi has been doing a lot of thinking about ChatRoulette these days and I wanted to share a short essay she wrote to explain ChatRoulette to the uninitiated. I think that this is a fantastic introduction for those who aren’t familiar with the site. (And I’ll follow up with my own thoughts in the next post.)

BY SARITA YARDI

ChatRoulette is a new website that connects you face to face with Internet users around the world. When you go to the site and hit Play your webcam turns on and you’re connected to another person. Most times you’ll hit Next within a few seconds and be connected to someone else. Sometimes people stop to chat. Basically, instead of surfing the web, you’re surfing people.

ChatRoulette evokes patterns of behavior that are as old as the Internet. Our fascination with spontaneous and random forays into anonymous online interactions echo those of early text-based chatrooms and bulletin board systems in the 1990s and even earlier. Shock, boredom, play, and voyeurism characterized these early online environments as much as they do now. In ChatRoulette, there is no registration or login; staring into the bedroom of a complete stranger is fascinating and completely disconcerting.

ChatRoulette reminds me of when people said blogging was like making a private diary public. The idea of sitting in your bedroom showing your face to anyone in the world is simultaneously anonymous yet deeply revealing. This violates almost all social norms of the offline world. If someone walked up to you at a cocktail party, stared at you intensely, then simply walked away, you would feel confused and probably offended.

I was recently asked, “If a parent wanted to know if their kid should be on ChatRoulette, what would you tell them?” My experience on ChatRoulette has been about 10% sexual voyeurs, about 10% performance art (people dressed in cat costumes), and about 10% signs (show me your [x]!). There are a few older people, but the remaining majority is young people (high school and college kids) mostly just hanging out, some giggling, some looking vaguely bored. Like with anything their kids do online or offline, I would advise parents to reflect on what they consider to be socially appropriate material for their own child and to teach their kids how to weigh the costs and benefits—and risks and rewards—of any site that they decide to hang out on online.

There are a couple of quickly emerging norms on ChatRoulette:

Clicking Next is not only socially acceptable, but it is expected.
Flashing signs or stuffed animals—unless they’re particularly amusing or clever—is considered trolling. People want to be face to face with other people.
People wouldn’t want to see people they know.
It’s like window-shopping where real people are behind the window. You can look, but you can’t touch, and you can move on if you’re not interested.

There are a number of fascinating things about ChatRoulette. One is that it was written by a 17 year-old boy (Andrey Ternovskiy) who likes socializing with his friends and learned to code when he was 11. He also has an entrepreneurial spirit; he rewrote the code a few times for it to scale and he got his extended family to invest in the site so he could get more servers. In an interview with Russia Today, he says he built it so he and his friends could start doing things together online like watching movies or making things. In most contexts, we would love to hear stories of kids making cool stuff online.

Another spin is that video chat could enable kids to be more in control of their own safety than text chat. If most teens are in fact looking to chat with other teens, it is much easier for them to screen out older adults and anyone who’s doing explicitly sexual things. Imagine if we’d started with video chat 20 years ago and now, all of a sudden, we had this new “text-based chat”. We would be far more concerned because it’s so easy to deceive with text. What’s interesting is that the pervasive fears that arise with anonymous and ephemeral online interactions are actually mitigated in ChatRoulette. It’s actually *harder* to lie—it’s more difficult to lie about your age, gender, or physical features when the camera is focused directly on you.

With that said, it’s like an online Lord of the Flies, and it probably won’t last the way it is currently. There are too many unacceptable cultural and moral boundaries that are crossed—like random and unpredictable exposure to nakedness—for it to persist in its present state. This brings up interesting questions of governance. Wikipedia’s governance structure didn’t emerge in a day, nor did those of Usenet or IRC chatrooms. If ChatRoulette is more than a fad—and I suspect it is—one direction it might take is to grow and split out into categories where communities can develop roles and social norms for self-governance, like on Craigslist.

I’m not convinced that ChatRoulette is truly anonymous. The plethora of screenshots of the most outrageous (read: NSFW) and amusing webcam matchups make it possible to reveal people’s identities using facial matching algorithms or IP addresses or visual search. That’s not a criticism of ChatRoulette or a call for policing the Internet. As my adviser says “In 20 years, no one will be eligible to be president.” We’re still searching for the right balance between protecting our own privacy and being able to live out our social lives online without feeling that the rest of the world is out to get us.

Upcoming Mary Gray talk on on “Out in the Country: Youth, Media & Queer Visibility in Rural America”

It used to be the case that all of the queer youth living in rural America ran away to the city to find others like them. The Internet has dramatically changed this. More and more, rural queer youth are building out networks of other queer rural youth, helping generate a rural queer identity. Think about what this means for the health and safety of queer youth. Think about what this means for the future of tolerance.

It is with great pleasure that I will be hosting Mary Gray at Microsoft Research on February 10 to discuss her latest book: “Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America.” Mary is going to talk about her findings so that we can get into a fun conversation. This will also be a great opportunity to connect with queer scholars and activists throughout New England so please join us for an evening of fun!

OUT IN THE COUNTRY: YOUTH, MEDIA & QUEER VISIBILITY IN RURAL AMERICA
February 10, 2010 from 6:30-9:00PM
Microsoft Research, Cambridge, MA
http://marygray.eventbrite.com/

Talk Description:

Join acclaimed author, Mary Gray as she discusses her latest book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press), which examines how young people in rural parts of the United States fashion queer senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media–particularly the internet–play in their lives and political work.

Drawing on her experiences working for close to 2 years in rural parts of Kentucky and in small towns along its borders, Mary will map out how lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and questioning (LGBTQ) youth and their allies make use of social media and local resources to combat the marginalization they contend with in their own communities as well as the erasure they face in popular representations of gay and lesbian life and the agendas of national gay and lesbian advocacy groups.

Against a backdrop of an increasingly impoverished and privatized rural America LGBTQ youth and their allies visibly—and often vibrantly—work the boundaries of the public and media spaces available to them. This talk will explore how youth suture together high schools, public libraries, town hall meetings, churches, and the web that construct spaces for fashioning their emerging queer identities. Their triumphs and travails defy clear distinctions often drawn between online and offline or rural and urban experiences of identity, fundamentally redefining our understanding of the term ‘queer visibility’ and its political stakes.

Register today to join the discussion! After the presentation, Mary will be available for book signings. http://marygray.eventbrite.com/

About Mary Gray:

Mary L. Gray is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research looks at how everyday uses of media shape people’s understandings and expressions of their social identities. She is the author of In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (1999). Her most recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press) examines how young people in rural parts of the United States fashion queer senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media–particularly the internet–play in their lives and political work.

Public by Default, Private when Necessary

This post was originally written for the DML Central Blog. If you’re interested in Digital Media and Learning, you definitely want to check this blog out.

With Facebook systematically dismantling its revered privacy infrastructure, I think it’s important to drill down on the issue of privacy as it relates to teens. There’s an assumption that teens don’t care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary. What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways. When teens argue that they produce content that is “public by default, private when necessary,” they aren’t arguing that privacy is disappearing. Instead, they are highlighting that both privacy AND publicity have value. Privacy is important in certain situations – to not offend, to share something intimate, or to exclude certain people. Yet, publicity can also be super useful. It’s about being present in social situations, about chance encounters, about obtaining social status.

Once upon a time on Facebook, participants had to be a vetted member of a community to even have an account. Privacy was a deeply held value and many turned to Facebook because of the ways in which it protected them from making public mistakes. This was especially core to youth participation. Parents respected Facebook’s attitudes towards privacy and, in a shocking moment of agreement, teens did too.

Slowly, things have changed. Most recently, Facebook made it possible for users to make Facebook content public (presumably to compete with Twitter). When participants signed in, they were asked whether or not they wanted they wanted to change their privacy settings. Many were confused and just clicked through, not realizing that this made their content more public than it was before. This upset some legal types and Facebook was forced to retreat, making the status quo the default instead of tricking folks into being public.

Recently, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg made comments that amount to “the age of privacy is over” as justification for why the company has decided to get with the times and make things more public. This prompted me to rant about Facebook’s decision.

Social media has enabled new forms of publicity, structures that allow people to connect as widely as they can build an audience. Teens are embracing this to do all sorts of powerful things. But they aren’t doing so to eschew privacy. They are still keeping intimate things close to their hearts or trying to share content with narrow groups of people. It’s just that, in many situations, there is more to be gained by accepting the public default than by going out of one’s way to keep things private. And here’s where we see the shift. It used to take effort to be public. Today, it often takes effort to be private.

While Facebook has justified its decisions by citing shifts in societal expectations, they are doing a disservice to those who value Facebook precisely because of its culture of keeping things more close. It’s not so much that posting things on Facebook was ever private; no teen sees the Wall as a private space. It’s that the default was not persistent, searchable, and scaled to a mass degree. Just because teens choose to share some content widely does not mean that they wish all content could be universally accessible. What they want is a sense of control. And what Facebook is doing is destabilizing the system in a way that complicates control, especially for teens who are most vulnerable of having content go down on their permanent record.

danah boyd | apophenia

making connections where none previously existed