The Web Difference

Says a Center for Media Research Brief:

According to a recently published market report from AccuStream iMedia Research, user Generated Video (UGV) scored 22.4 billion views in 2007, up 70% over 2006.

[Tags: media video participatory_media ]

Here is a poem by Les Murray that ran in the January 28, 2008 issue of The New Yorker (which owns the copyright). It seemed apropos to our discussion in Class 1 about whether and how we can be friends on the Net.

Science Fiction

I can travel
faster than light
so can you
the speed of thought
the only trouble
is at destinations
our thought balloons
are coated invisible
no one there sees us
and we can’t get out
to be real or present
phone and videophone
are almost worse
we don’t see a journey
but stay in our space
just talking and joking
with those we reach
but can never touch
the nothing that can hurt us
how lovely and terrible
and lonely is this

For me, the key line is his idea that via telecommunication we cannot be “real or present.” But, then what are we on the phone or the Net? Unreal and not present? That seems plain wrong, especially since the bulk of the poem seems to be trying to explain how we’re present when using telecommunications devices. Is talking on the phone or participating in an online forum about politics or cancer or child-rearing really “lovely and terrible and lonely”? Jeez, someone should get him a copy of Elizabeth Edwards’ Saving Graces stat! (FWIW, I’ve posted about that book.)

And three snarkier questions, just because this poem irked me: 1. Shouldn’t an editor have flagged “almost worse” as either meaningless or cowardly? 2. What happened to the punctuation? Did he run out of commas? 3. Who wants to tell him that “the speed of thought” was already used, and by no one less than that great poet, Bill Gates?

The Wall Street Journal has an article today on how sites are shaping friendship and privacy.

From a comment by Ray Smith on my JOHO weblog:

…your class may be interested to know that a bill proposing criminal and civil liability for comments posted on Internet forums such as blogs passed a preliminary reading in Israel’s Knesset on 2008-01-16 by a majority of 29 Knesset members to two.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3495105,00.html

I completely blew my explanation of HTML 5, because I didn’t leave myself enough time. The handout I distributed at the beginning of class goes over the dreary details if you care about them, but I want to at least try to clarify why I brought it up at all. (Blogs mean never having to say you’re sorry?)

I wanted to give an example of answering the question “What is the Web?” So, let’s answer by saying, “The Web is a standard.” My plan then was to compare HTML to the Dublin Core; thankfully I didn’t try to get <u>that</u> into the last few minutes, too. Anyway, the Dublin Core is a standard for online documents that includes fields for author, language, and publisher, all of which are lacking in HTML. The proposed new version of HTML (HTML 5) makes a different set of decisions about what elements to include. My point was supposed to be that if the Web is a standard, that standard consists of decisions based upon anticipated uses…which is exactly what the End to End principle says we should <u>avoid</u> in network design. That’s not a criticism or a contradiction. In fact, standards always require us to make such decisions, based on anticipated and desired uses. Even the Internet’s design overall assumes that it’s good to pass information openly, freely, and in mass quantities.

But I jumped so far into the weeds of HTML 5, and tried to say too much too quickly, that there was no possibility that I communicated any of that. Sorry!

I hope the larger point of the session was clear, however. I’d say it’s something like this: We’re not going to be able to define the “it” of the course too clearly, but that’s fine. The Web is deep and important enough to resist easy definition, and there’s no reason why we should rule out of discussion areas of the Net based merely upon their technical protocols. Further, there are many useful ways of taking the Web: As standard, medium, social phenomenon, market, sphere, technical infrastructure, new public space, etc. These ways themselves stand in complex relations, each raising its own set of questions and issues. Since it’s not going to be a neat and tidy topic, we will do well to pay attention to how we’re taking the Web as we proceed with our discussions…

[NOTE: This is live blogging. It is therefore full of errors, omissions, bad paraphrases, and general misreporting.] After introductions — the course is over-subscribed, and there are about 35 people in the room — JP leads a half hour discussion of the “autoadmit” matter. As one of the students explains, AutoAdmit is an anonymous forum for people to compare law schools. The target audience is people trying to decide between law schools. One of the owners is a UPenn law student, and there may be a second, unknown owner. A while ago, people started posting some awful stuff: threats, name-calling, etc. E.g., one of the postings claimed that a particular student killed himself, although that was false. And there were allegations of sexual acts by that student. What was different about the fact these acts occurred at an online message board, JP asks.
A: The anonymity of the people posting. [Sorry, I don’t know student names at this point.]
A: Harder to figure out the responsibility of the host of the Web site. A newspaper might find it easier to track down who sent in an anonymous letter. So: 1. Should the host be liable? 2. If so, what is the duty of the host to find the name of the msg sender?

A: Many other users can reproduce the info and link to it.
JP: And the legal question is whether you can make someone liable for pointing to these nasty comments?
A: The repercussions are much broader because the site is public.
A: And it never goes away.
A: And that applies not only to the subjects of the defamation but to anyone who is involved in any way, including the host.
JP: It’s the difference between a river and a pool. If you overhear me say something, it’s gone in the river. If it’s online and you can search for it, it’s in the pool.
JP: ReputationDefender works in this space. These facts have given rise to a new industry.

A: One thing can be in multiple locations, raising jurisdictional questions.

A: Because there’s so much out there, defamatory postings may actually have less effect.

A: The transaction costs of spreading info are much lower.
JP: The cost of speech is almost zero. For whom else are the transaction costs lower?
A: The readers. The host.
JP: Maybe there’s a value to having slightly high transaction costs because it acts as a gate?
A: The lower costs means you can participate. You can be part of the story.
JP: Yes. Message diffusion takes on a different nature. And sometimes those messages get wrapped up in you. Maybe identity takes on a role here.
A: The person can respond exactly on the same page, not like if it were a printed pamphlet.
JP: Awesome. This is a read-write medium.
A: I’m interested in blogs where flame wars occur. E.g., a Yankees-RedSox site. In political flame wars, it can be who yells the loudest. People will keep repeating wrong info.
JP: What’s different about the Web?
A: The volume and the persistence.

A: It’s a question of authority. Anyone can say anything.
JP: This is a question about intermediaries: Who’s allowed to speak for whom? Dan Rather spoke for CBS.
A: The Internet makes it easier to know what’s been said about you, so you can respond faster.

JP: LT, what is the state of the law? Who do we hold liable?
LT: Generally the speakers. Not the intermediaries. Section 230 gives immunity to intermediaries.
JP: If it were a newspaper?
LT: They’d be liable.
JP: CraigsList has been found not liable for discriminatory ads that a newspaper would have been held liable for.

Then I lead the class in a discussion about whether friendship online is the same as offline. Is it possible? Is it the same? Most in the class think it’s possible. Some think the differences are negligible. Others think the differences are real. Conclusions (from my pov): 1. It can be difficult to identify differences and even harder to evaluate their significance; 2. Differences, possibly even small ones, can require us to think carefully about policy and software design decisions. [The discussion was more interesting than this preemptory summary. But I can’t live-blog and lead a discussion simultaneously.]
Corinna di Gennaro, of the Berkman Center, who has been sitting in, says that research shows that friendships do occur. Her research shows bloggers are less likely to make online friends and meet friends offline compared to email lists and social networking sites. [Interesting!] [Tags: webdiff autoadmit friendship john_palfrey ]

Slashdot is discussing the discovery that the Snopes site — a popular and trusted urban-myth buster — installs adware on the machines of the unwary. Here’s how one commenter (patio11) explains it:

A quick primer in online advertising, for those of you who block it:

At one end of the chain, we have Content Provider A. At the other end of the chain, we have Service Provider Z. Z wants to place advertising on A’s site but, importantly, doesn’t know how to do it, doesn’t generally know specifically who A is, and needs this to scale to potentially thousands of As. This is where participants B, C, D, E, F, Google, H… etc come in. There are advertising aggregators, affiliate networks, affiliates, affiliates of affiliates, affiliates of affilates of networks of affiliates who subdivide the advertising market into smaller and smaller slices before it finally gets on A’s site.

Now, somewhere in the chain, let us inject one person who is less than scrupulous. He doesn’t work at Snopes — this would tarnish a brand for a week’s worth of income, not a smart play. He probably has a steady stream of relationships with each of the numerous advertising concerns on the Internet, picking up and moving from one after he has collected a check or three and then had the banstick for TOS violations catch up with him. He is the one working for, most probably, affiliate of an affiliate of an affiliate of Zango.

This is the way most malware makes its way onto ad networks and, from there, onto high-trust sites. Volokh Conspiracy, one of my favorite blogs, had a nasty browser hijacker which affected non-US users for months before their advertising network caught wind of it. A few popular MMORPG sites have ended up hosting keyloggers in the same fashion. It is an unintended consequence of a system without central control — much like the Internet itself, actually. (The system being split up this way does have its advantages, for both endpoints of the chain and for everybody between. Google’s business model is based on snapping the chain and replacing it with a big cloud labeled Gooooooogle, but they’re not yet the only game in town.)

That’s the briefest summary of a very interesting report from University College London. A press release puts it this way:

A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web. 

Very interesting, and alarming. But it’s important to keep the scope in mind: This report is looking at the Internet as a library. Good scope but not the only one.

Here is Corinna’s article on friendship on the Web. A key finding (from the abstract) for the question of difference:

…multivariate analyses indicate that the dynamics of online friendships are
driven more by the idiosyncratic digital choices made by users of the Internet than
by any mechanistic social or technological determinism.

I haven’t tried this software yet, but I like how they’re developing it:

The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

It’s something we want to give you, along with some online media hosting, to see how you use it. The project will eventually turn into something else. Tell us what you think so we can figure out what that is.

Try it, you’ll like it. Find out more in the FAQ, or on the weblog .

Not so incidentally, I found out about this via a post by JP Rangaswami following up on a really terrific post about the incredible capacity of our new circulatory system (capillaries, not a fire hose, says JP). The follow-up post gives an example of capillary action at work. The first post frames the Net as how conversation — taken not just as chin-wagging but as how much of the the work and play of sociality are accomplished — scales. [Tags: jing screen_grab screen_capture jp_rangaswami conversation web_2.0 messiness ]