Author Archive
Flickr
I’ve chosen to explore Flickr as a new media environment because of the unique community that this social website for photo sharing and storage has created and the possibilities that this form of “new media” has afforded that would not have otherwise been possible. Flickr is a website where anyone can upload photos, tag them (in fact, part of the birth of popularity of tagging, I think, is in part due to Flickr’s early implementation of it), and share them. Flickr has millions of users, and thousands of photos are uploaded every minute.
Flickr is a powerful example of how “social media” that bring large numbers of users together can make a relatively unremarkable tool (after all, you can upload photos and tag them practically anywhere these days) an amazing resource for images and visual record of the world. I was in Hong Kong over the winter break when I saw a stunning “suspended” Christmas tree in a mall. I wanted to share this sight with my friend, and unfortunately didn’t have a camera on me at the time, but once I got home and searched Flickr - I came up with dozens of photos. What’s perhaps more interesting is that fact that I had no doubt that I would come up with photos I was looking for.
So, through Flickr, I hope to explore what makes social media successful and powerful.
LeechBlock
Hi folks, I left a comment about the Firefox Ad-on LeechBlock on the “A Week Without Google” post and put it on our del.icio.us, but Mushon wanted me to post it so everyone would see it… so here it is. LeechBlock will help you abstain from Google by blocking it (it was originally designed to help you block distracting sites when you should be working).
Steps:
1. Install
2. Restart Firefox
3. Go to Tools -> LeechBlock -> Options
4. Enter google.com, gmail.com, blogger.com, youtube.com, and whatever else (no commas, separated into lines) into the first field
5. Click “All Day†on the right, about halfway down
6. Click “Every Day,†a little bit further down
7. Press “OKâ€
WARNING: Do NOT check “Prevent access to options for this block set at times when these sites are blocked†or you will never be able to turn off the block again!
Alternatively, if you want to get fancy, follow those steps except enter only one URL for each Block (they’re tabbed at the top), then change the page to show instead. So for Block Set 1 enter “google.com†in the first field, then after clicking “All Day†and “Every Day,†enter “search.live.com†or “search.yahoo.com†in the field labelled “Enter the fully specified URL of the page to show instead of these blocked sites.â€
Good luck everyone! Post a comment if you have a question!
Identity (Verification) on the Web
Since a post has been written about the idea of OpenIDs, I thought I’d throw in some musings on the general concept of identity and identity verification. This is something that is always on the forefront of security issues, both on- and offline. We face this issue everyday, whether we are having our IDs checked when we buy alcohol or tobacco or we have our passports examined and fingerprints when we enter certain countries. Identity verification is a frustrating problem to overcome online. How do we know if someone is over 13/18/21? How can a bank ensure that the person logging into an account is indeed the account’s rightful owner? How do we know we can trust someone who is selling us something online? These questions at the moment are largely met with the answer “we can’t.” Furthermore, identity theft is becoming a growing issue.
A great resource of information on this issue is Kim Cameron’s IdentityBlog. Kim Cameron is Microsoft’s “Identity Architect” and all-around expert on the issue. Here are some basics I’ve learned from the time I’ve followed that blog (these are the ideas and opinions of Kim Cameron).
- A digital identity is “a set of claims made by one digital subject about itself or another digital subject” (e.g. I claim that I am Patricia Trattoria, my NYU ID # is N12345678, and I am at least 18 years old)
- The goal of an identity system is to be able to verify such claims when necessary, and only those claims. That is to say, if the system needs to know if I am over 18, it does not need to know whether I am 21 or 92, that my hometown is Athens, Georgia, or that I like puppies.
- It is important for the identity system to work in multiple ways and cover all digital subjects. A bank, for example, is a digital subject as long as it has a website or some sort of official representation on the web. When users visit a site that looks like (and by function, claims to be) their bank’s website, they need to be sure (have some sort of verification of claims) that it really is the official bank website before they provide their login details.
- The identity system must offer a plurality/diversity of options within a universal identity metasystem capable of dealing with all sorts of claims. As Nicole expresses in her post (linked above), there is a discomfort and concern with using the same ID to log-in to a bank website and your Facebook.
That’s all for now… probably a lot of gibberish to process already.
Altruism
The discussions in “The Trap” regarding self-interest and the concept of animals (including humans) as merely a gene’s way of getting itself passed on made me think about altruism. The dearth of altruism in animals other than humans seems to suggest that they are indeed driven by the need to pass on their genes. The cases in which animals display some level of altruism are akin the purported case of tribe fights presented by Napoleon Chagnon, they only seem to help those that they are related to - this is called “kin altruism.” The other incidents of altruism in animals are “reciprocal altruism.” But humans display altruistic behaviors that seem contrary to a gene’s “desire” to be passed on and the idea that all humans are solely driven by self-interest. The questions is whether or not altruistic behaviors are indicative of the presence of altruistic motivations. Phoebe and Joey from Friends explore this in the episode “The One Where Phoebe Hates PBS”.
Joey: Well, yeah, it was a really nice thing and all, but it made you feel really good right?
Phoebe: Yeah. So?
Joey: It made you feel good, so that makes it selfish. Look, there’s no unselfish good deeds, sorry.
The post ends here because I can’t help but watch this whole episode of Friends…
Network Neutrality
Adam Curtis’ “The Trap” and its explorations of the concepts of freedom and positive and negative liberty made me think of network neutrality, an issue that may have great bearing on “new media.” For those of you unfamiliar with network neutrality, it is the concept of the lack of restrictions on communications networks (broadband internet in particular). In this way, it is the concept of negative liberty applied to the internet. Examples of restrictions that advocates of network neutrality fear include charging users for access to certain sites, charging websites for bandwidth (i.e. the time a site takes to load may depend on how much they are paying), or even complete blocking of certain sites.
As Isaiah Berlin predicted, the desire for this negative liberty has resulted in a desire for positive liberty - a call for regulation. Many advocates of network neutrality believe that government regulation is necessary to prevent the private companies who run these communications networks from placing restrictions. However, others argue, the internet is what it is today because of a lack of regulation and control, and enforcing (perhaps forcing) a certain model would be wrong and detrimental. As professor Tim Wu points out in his page about network neutrality, “The hard question, of course, is what exactly is ‘neutral?’” Blogger Cory Doctorow expands on this by pointing out that “Asking [the FCC] to write a set of rules describing “neutrality” and then enforce them seems like a recipe for trouble to me.”
Furthermore, this brings up the issue of whether or not the free market should be allowed to sort such issues out on its own. As suggested in the documentary, perhaps decisions made in the context of a free market are more democratic than those made by elected government. Advocates of government regulation may also be presenting a false argument between liassez-faire and the will of the people.
Here are some interesting articles/pages for exploring the issue further:
- Hands Off the Internet (an anti-regulation website/blog)
- Save the Internet (a pro-regulation website)
- The Benefits and Risks of Mandating Network Neutrality, and the Quest for a Balanced Policy (a looong journal article)
