#socioculture

[noosphe-re]

Razza Umana, Oliviero Toscani

[bikepsycho]

another #socioculture when fly-thru in a #donmuengairport

[reindoctrinated]

As products of a sociocultural tempest, we must learn to tread a path of harmony in our principles.

Hassam Ansari

[erikap-blog-blog]

Why My Intawebs Need A Little Feminism (and the intawebs are everywhere)

So, you may have heard in the last week or two that feminist activists and female politicians in the UK have been subject to a barrage of tweeted threats of bombings and rape. 

Again.

It may have been a new experience for these women in particular, but threats of physical and sexual violence are not news for women online.  The sheer scope and longevity of gendered violence in virtual environments and online social spaces have long been remarked on in spaces beyond the mainstream media.  Talented, clever, witty and interesting female bloggers, vloggers, tweets and social butterflies have all been burned by what is, disingenuously, bundled under the label 'trolling.'

This is a form of violence.  And, finally, we might be at the tipping point where this enters into the main discourse about social behaviour online.

'But!' I hear echoing out from under the nearest Minecrafted bridge.  'It's just words.  It's trash talk.  Get a grip!  Toughen up!  It doesn't mean anything!'

It means something.  It means that the recipient of this violence never knows what is going to end at a nasty tweet and what is going to end with a hand around her throat (summed up beautifully as Schrodinger's Rapist in this post here).  It means a kind of hypervigilence, already a feature of being gendered in the world, taken to whole new levels that can't be escaped from by closing a door.

It means something in a world where violence against women is already at epidemic levels (1 in 3 women globally).

It means something when women's voices are already significantly under-represented in the news media and public affairs, and in media representation more generally.  It means something when those who are heard are critiqued on the skirt they wear rather than the ideas they present.

What these women, and countless others before them, were subjected to was not 'rough debate,' or 'free speech,' or any of the countless other apologies I've seen.  It was violence intended to silence.

Let's hope the result is the conversation about this just keeps getting louder.

[erikap-blog-blog]

Disclosure by Design

In case you haven't seen/heard me talking about this already, the Pew Internet and American Life Project has released their Teens, Social Media and Privacy report.  And it's interesting reading.  I'm still unpacking in my head some of its findings, but I'd like to think out loud for a moment on one particular statistic - the rapid increase of cell phone number disclosure.

     (from Part Two)

At first glance, a lot of people I know looked at that graph and took it as confirmation that teens cared less about privacy.  But having read the rest of the report, plus my own research, have led me to ponder different interpretations (again: I am still digesting the report, so these are just preliminary speculations).

Firstly, I think graphs like this make sense when you think about online and offline identity not as disconnected but as part of a coherent whole.  We persist in using language like online/offline identity which I think is doing a disservice to the sense of continuous presence and the sophisticated management of identity that is perceived by these users not as two parts, but as one identity -- as the report notes, legal name is often used on the primary social media account, which hints to and helps maintain continuity across performance spaces.  Anecdotally, my informants have spoken about picking up conversations started online mid-flow when they meet again in a physical space.  It's all one as far as they are concerned, and the selection, management and curation of ties maintained through social media make disclosure of things like city or town of residence a non-issue.

Secondly, and continuing on from that, the rapid jump in disclosure of a cellphone number might be explained by the idea that cellphones are increasingly a tethered communicative object and portal -- people report feeling distressed when they forget their phones for the day.  The cell phone is not a restricted channel, but rather a part of the core performance of identity, and an important marker of both selfhood and access, and so we mgiht read disclosure of cellphone numbers as parallel to the disclosure of legal names -- as part of the claiming of an extension of selfhood and presence from the embodied stage onto these mediated stages not as distinct performances but as part of the same performance to the same people.  Think of it this way: we do not bemoan the loss of privacy when students exchange cellphone numbers in class to faciliate the work of a group project.  I suspect that, for these users, the exchange of cellphone numbers in their online profiles is mentally seen as the same as swapping numbers face to face.  I think later parts of that report, which talk about the maintenance of user-to-user privacy settings supports the rough direction of this idea.

Finally, I suspect that a lot of these respondants were talking about their Facebook profile as their main profile, despite the growth of tumblr in this demographic.  As you might have experienced yourself, sites are increasingly demanding, pestering, and even flat-out requiring disclosure of information as part of the cost of using the site (has Youtube asked you to use your 'real' name on the site yet?)  Disclosure is part of the design of these sites, which ties back to the economic and business imperatives of social media as a business.

What do you think?  Is privacy dead, or are we just redefining what is 'private'?

[erikap-blog-blog]

I'm sorry, Dave, you can't watch that

The successor to the highly successful XBox 360, the XBox One, was recently announced.  And sifting through the various (though still somewhat stagemanaged and controlled) technical details, the One is proving to be a very interesting piece of kit in terms of its social impacts.

The XBox One is not so much a gaming console as the heart of an entire media entertainment suite - it connects to tv, cable/satellite feeds, uses skype, plays all kinds of disk-media (such as bluray) and draws these various feeds through the central process so you can move (according to the PR) seamlessly between all these different channels, or even use them simultaneously.  To facilitate user input, and to mediate between all the different UX inherent in these different channels, the One uses voice and gestural command (though a version of its Kinect system, which, tbh, I kind of love in terms of its responsivity).  Therefore, the One needs to have AV awareness of its environment at all times, so it is ready to respond when you say "XBox, on."

And here's where things get interesting.  Individually, a network connection, 'cloud' capacity, an AV interlink to its environment and memory are all harmless.  Put together, you have a system that can recognize faces and voices, scan a room for occupants, monitor them down to the level of a heartbeat, register over time what they are doing in their private living space in terms not only of media consumption but also interactivity, and can feed that back to a central database.  It is easy to envision an environment where your face is a 'key' to a DRM-eqsue media protection system.  Now, no-one argues that a child lock on your Skybox is a bad thing -- but that is set by the household. When it is set by external parties, or is set for financial reasons rather than personal choice is where we might see a backlash.

Most people skip through that screen on DVDs which say it is for private use only, cannot be viewed on oil rigs or in prisons, etc, etc.   What happens if, say, you download a movie off a paid and legit media sharehouse (something pay-per-view or Hulu-ish) -- and instead of flashing that screen, the camera scans the number of people in the room and refuses to play your content until it can see less that, say, seven people.  Eight is a public viewing, and breaches the media license (even though, from your user perspective, it is not 'public,' but you, your housemates, and their partners settling in on a rainy night to eat pizza and watch a movie).  Can the machine be sophisticated enough to nuance its way through definitional ambiguity in licenses or usage rights?  Can it always an accurately judge legitimacy, or should it play whatever it is given.  Users may want the latter, but I suspect content providers might seek the former as part of their conditions for participation in early One deployments.

Even just logging biometric and consumer data is problematic.  I can see this data being of massive interest to media monitoring companies and advertisers -- when do people sit through the ad breaks, leave the room, turn away.  What content sends them to sleep and what gets their hearts racing.  Are they watching, or are they split-screening a tv show with a skype call, for instance.  Those people on skype, are they watching the same content on their split screens, or something else?  What are reasonable expectations of privacy, what can be aggregated, and what can be found out by datamining the massive amounts of usage and interface data the One sends back to its home base (since the One needs a network connection to function in its current iteration).  We may surrender a lot of private data to the network already, but as we know from prior cases of webcam 'spying,' sharing a liking of a band on Facebook and having video recorded of you lip-synching to the song are two entirely different things.

What about you?  What would be your conditions for letting a One watch your living room day and night?

[erikap-blog-blog]

That Which We Call A Screenname Would Still Smell As Sweet

I put a call out on twitter for 'suggest-a-tumblrpost' and urbanfortress requested: "the identitity & interweb username/handle thing." So with apologies to the Bard, here's the thing on identity and usernames.

One of the most annoyingly persistent ideas that I see propagated, particularly by those who see the internet as a tool rather than as a place, is that screen names and pseudonyms are false identities, something 'less-than'....something that's never clearly articulated.  I suspect these online identities are seen as less than an idealized, monolithic, impregnable ideal of an identity, something fixed, natural, and eternal - and, I suspect, biologically-centric and embodied.

So in order to explore why usernames are still names, we first need to bust some myths about identity.  Identity is not fixed, innate, automatic, or unchanging.  Our identities are in constant flux,  in terms of how we see ourselves, how we interact with others, and how those interactions influence us in return.  Identities are malleable -- I'll leave it to the psychologies to discuss traits and personality markers, but in terms of the social performance of identity, it's not a 'one-size-fits-all.'  To greater or lesser degrees, we perform different facets of identity based on need or intent, context, platform, and who we are interacting with.

As Goffman's biggest fangirl, I particularly like the stage metaphor of performing identity.  When we are on stage, we judge our audience, consider our intent, make use of props, and interact with other actors on the stage, to present a 'performance of self.'  We get feedback on these performances, and (as social beings) see how the performances of others are perceived and received, and amend our own strategies accordingly.

If you're not convinced, and think you perform the same "me" regardless, just think about how you are around your mates, your boss, and your mother.

For a lot of people, there is consistency across all their performances.  Other people, for various reasons, have large disconnects -- for example, when a desired identity performance would receive sanctions, whether they be disapproval or actual physical threat.  Levels of perceived 'shyness' also fluctuate wildly in different contexts and communicative environments.

That's a whole area of interest in and of itself, but I want to come back now to usernames, avatars, and handles.  One of the key elements of identity presentation is that it is persistent -- over time, people associate a particular identity performance with a particular marker of that identity.  That marker may be Bob or Mary, or it may be Thunderwizard369.  Labels are one of the most obvious markers, though with a rising visuality of online presence, avatars or icons are also important.  Anecdotally, we can see this when people announce and reconfirm identity when they change their user picture on their tumblrs (and why I am so reluctant to change my avatar from the drawing of War from Good Omens I use here!)  Usernames are tightly controlled by service providers (who build the stage and constrain the use of certain types of signs and props) but there is a lot more freedom in icon usage.  I might not be erikap everywhere, but my War avatar is a constant marker of this identity, and the type of identity performance I am constructing.

This persistence means that identities form histories within communities.  People remember Bob or Mary or Thunderwizard369, and start to associate traits, personalities, and past behaviours. They remember that Mary is generous with her art, or that Bob tells mean jokes, or that Thunderwizard369. They develop a mental image of a personality, even if mediation separates that performance from a sense of embodiment.

What needs to be emphasized, even if it seems obvious, is that these traits may or may not be markers of the identities these people display to others in other contexts.  But that does not make one facet of identity any 'less than' any other.  The intensity of online friendships, the rising numbers of romances started online, the possessiveness felt and displayed by people racing to claim handles as part of 'their' identity in new social media environments, all underline the fact that online identities, and the markers that indicate them, are no less than any other form of identity performance.

[erikap-blog-blog]

You Should Know Stuff No-one Taught You

I saw this article bob by on my twitter stream this lovely snow day.  The comments pretty viciously tear it down, but I want to pick up on a larger theme I seem to be coming back to a lot these days.  You might have heard it.  Let's generalize it into "Kids Don't Know X These Days."

Now, X might be how to address a snailmail envelope.  X might be how to write a thank you note.  X might be to keep your banking information or other personally valuable data out of the public domain.  X might be how to work in long-form writing styles, or how to evaluate different sources of information. We've all got an X we find ourselves dropping into that sentence.

Invariably, the X in question is some learned skill or behaviour that still has cache today, but which is sliding away from the daily lived experience of people first experiencing the world -- mainly youth.  Take addressing an envelope.  Between pre-printed return envelopes and "would you prefer to reply online via our handy app/website/bank code/whatever" and even good old-fashioned email, think about how many envelopes a young person even sees, let alone addresses.  Then, as they are wracking their brains trying to remember the last envelope they saw, their parent looming over them in exasperation, they are further weighed down by that horrible though: am I stupid for not knowing this?

I've written about this fear of appearing stupid before, when talking bout the digital native, and as the article went on to describe, a quick google provided a template from which to proceed.  I will freely admit, I have to google examples whenever I format a formal, printed letter: even though I probably should "know" how to do it, I do it so rarely, and see examples so infrequently, it's something I can't do intuitively.

Everyone has an X of their own.  Everyone has an X that frustrates them when they see it in others.  It's interesting to think back to when you first learned your own X, how you learned it, and whether that opportunity for learning still exists.  There are skills these days that just aren't passed on in a formal or routine way anymore.  Some are for lack of time (cursive handwriting might soon be a victim of this one).  Some are for lack of need.  Some are making a comeback, such as with the recent boom of interest in cooking and handcrafts like knitting and embroidery.

I'm sure someone, somewhere, is dreaming up a wiki, howto or youtube video series full of all those skills you wish someone had taught you but you had never learned.

Hopefully, whoever they are, will cover how to write a formal letter.  And how to address the envelope it goes in.  That'd be helpful.