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NYTimes.com -- Are We Addicted to Facebook? It's Complicated.

'“You still feel good when everyone wishes you happy birthday on Facebook even though you know they were prompted to do it.” Dr. Rosen said the average person was not addicted to Facebook. Instead, he characterized the relationship as a compulsion. “Addictions are about finding pleasure,” he said. “Compulsions are born from anxiety, and Facebook is psychologically important. It allows us to project on the world, in a way that we’ve never been able to before, who we are and what we want to say about ourselves.” As a result, he said, Facebook “drives our behavior online.” He added: “We are always checking to see if anyone posted on our wall, if they liked a photo, responded to an update. For those who use it, they are feeling more of a need to look at it and check in and reduce the anxiety of feeling like they are missing out on something.”'

socialmedia socialnetworking tethered FOMO addiction
8 days ago by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Nir and Far -- Spotting the Next Facebook: Why Emotions are Big Business

'Facebook succeeded because it built new online habits around frequent offline behaviors. TheFacebook.com, as it was originally known, offered users a digital way to feel connected to others throughout the day and from anywhere they could access the web. The power of this universal human need for social acceptance and connection helps explain how the company grew well beyond college campuses and now touches one in eight people on the planet. Ask a devoted Facebook user why they log-in to the site several times per day and they’ll describe features they love and provide examples of how they use the service. They’ll tell you it’s a great way to share photos or keep up with their friends. But below the surface is the need for emotional gratification. Though we can all shift our emotional states ourselves, it’s not easy. Instead of going through the hard work of consciously changing the way we feel, we use ready-made solutions to do it for us. Facebook, and the companies like it, are the new tools we use to quickly elevate our moods. With Facebook, it’s often loneliness that cues a visit to the site. Twitter is cued when the user fears being out of the loop about what’s happening. Pinterest users feel the urge to capture and collect visual scraps of the web, worried they’ll lose the image lest they pin it. -- The more often an emotion is experienced by the user, the larger the potential market of a product that serves that feeling. -- People don’t realize they use products to satiate feelings so emotional needs must be translated into a concrete story.'

socialmedia socialnetworking ambientintimacy oxytocin dopamine addiction soma
8 days ago by adamcrowe

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Pinboard Blog -- The Social Graph is Neither

'Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers – that's the social graph. Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook. Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It's as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends (and staffing it, of course, with that Mormon bartender). We're used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it's worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors? We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they've built to document your entire online life.'

socialmedia socialnetworking socialgraph panopticon theadvertisedlife
november 2011 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- NMAWorldEdition: Facebook announces big changes at F8 conference

'The backlash has been fierce. But no matter how disgruntled, users find it hard to leave Facebook because all their friends are there.' -- The Facebook has you, Neo.

socialnetworking facebook thematrix from delicious
september 2011 by adamcrowe

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ClubOrlov -- Dead Souls

'...letting users die is bad for the economy: companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and numerous tech start-ups are judged based on the size of their user base. Some of them may not generate much in the way of revenue, but if they have millions of users then everyone assumes they must be worth something. ...the solution for the social networking tech start-ups, moving forward, is to leverage their dead users. This, after all, seems like a humane and caring thing to do: why let someone's online persona die with them? This is often a shock to the other users, who most likely have never even met the deceased person in real life, and don't particularly care whether he or she physically exists. ...generating entire blog posts that convincingly mimic those of a living user is an eminently surmountable technical challenge. But a much harder problem is to keep our dead user in the vanguard of exciting new social movements and fashions that sweep through the net with lightening speed.'

socialnetworking ponzi grifting replicants zombies puppetry daemon from delicious
july 2011 by adamcrowe

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The Daily Bell -- Wishful Thinking: Why The Economist Wants Social Media to Replace Blogs

'...the dark-suited gentlemen sitting erectly in your office indicating that as a "patriot" and successful businessperson you ought to be helpful to your country, is politely pressuring you. The young man was on a fast track. He wore a hoodie and kept quiet about his government associations. Eventually, like Bill Gates, he'll "donate" his enormous wealth to social causes. Actually, he'll be instructed to. It'll go to some Foundation the Anglosphere elites control. They don't leave outsize fortunes in private hands if they can help it. This is how the elite operates. They both support and control their enablers. One can see it with Julian Assange, another seeming Intel asset. The Economist is trying to present a kind of elite promotion. It is talking up social 'Net media – which the establishment can control fairly easily from the top – at the expense of myriad bloggers and websites. These are the writers and poets one could compare fairly to pamphleteers of days past. Not Zuckerberg.'

forcedmemes "transparency" internet socialmedia socialnetworking facebook honeypot precuperation oligarchy from delicious
july 2011 by adamcrowe

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rep.licants.org

'rep.licants.org is a web service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence (bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From keywords, content analysis and activity analysis, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users. The bot does not born with a fictitious identity, but will be added to the real identity of the user to modify it at his convenience. Thus, this bot can be seen as a virtual prothesis added to an user's account. With the aim to help him to forge a digital identity of what he would really like to be and by trying to build a greater social reputation for the user. Moreover, this bot can be perceived as a threat by defrauding even more the reality of who is really who on social networks and by showing the poverty of our social interactions on these so-called social networks.'

criticaldesign socialnetworking replicants bots selfservers simulacra from delicious
july 2011 by adamcrowe

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Wired UK -- How Badoo built a billion-pound social network... on sex

'"You pay to advertise yourself. If you want something to go faster, you pay. And some people pay tens of times every day to rise up." -- Is Andreev bothered by his site being accused, at the very least, of simply promoting promiscuity? "OK, which is bad?" he replies neutrally. "Badoo is not for sex, it's for adventure. If you go to a nightclub, of course you've got the opportunity to find a girl or a boy – but it's not necessarily for sex, it could be to enjoy five mojitos and nothing else. "Badoo simply continues the offline lifestyle. Badoo is just a casual way to hook up with people, as you do in the street or nightclub. But we make the world work faster."' -- Brotnet

socialnetworking proximity mobile location meatspace discovery brothel from delicious
april 2011 by adamcrowe

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The Daily Bell -- The Social Networking Buzz

'We think we can tell a sub dominant social theme when we see one. Social network companies get a lot of press and attention because they represent the controllable side of the Internet, in our view. Social networking is the "softer side" of the Internet from a power elite standpoint. A small intergenerational, familial elite has seen its secrecy ripped asunder by the Internet. But these sites, especially Facebook with some 500 million users, are far less challenging to elite plans for global centralization. If anything, one could argue that such networks offer the kind of naïve openness and frivolity that the elite is pleased to take advantage of. Social networking is perhaps a preferable Internet construct. It also provides a far more controllable template for manipulating public use of electronic communications. Outfits like the CIA never create ventures, but they do apparently encourage the growth of the ones that they deem most useful.'

internet facebook socialnetworking surveillance panopticon honeypot chokepoints minipax from delicious
december 2010 by adamcrowe

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The Automatic Earth presents: Stoneleigh's A Century of Challenges

Pay-walled. Recommended. -- When a pyramid scheme nears its inevitable end... "...the public insist on being handed the empty bag because they think they're going to make money, they want in on the game, everyone else has been making money, they feel left out so they insist on buying these things at the peak, and they are the ones who lose everything."

* civilization plutocracy wealth money economics oil energy finance reflexivity markets herd consensusreality pyramid ponzi bubble greaterfool peakoil credit inflation realestate speculation debt hologram deflation biflation negativeequity crackupboom greatestdepression collapse systems resilience communities localisation socialnetworking darknets NicoleFoss retribalization from delicious
october 2010 by adamcrowe

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Thimbl: Free open source and distributed micro-blogging

'Thimbl is a Manifesto for the Open Web written in code. The most significant challenge the open web will need to overcome is not technical, it is political. Welcome to thimbl, the free, open source, distributed micro-blogging platform. If you're tired of being locked in to one micro-blogging platform, or a single social network. Or you're weary of corporations hi-jacking your updates in the pursuit of money, then thimbl is for you.'

socialnetworking darknets retribalization
october 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

The Appleseed Project: Open Source Social Networking

'Appleseed is not a Walled Garden. Appleseed provides Open Access to all its users, while maintaining the privacy and security of your data.'

socialnetworking darknets retribalization
october 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Ampify: Decentralised Social Platform

'Ampify is a vision of an open and decentralised social platform. For comparison, perhaps imagine a bastardised mix between Git, Facebook, Unix, IRC, App Engine, Xanadu and Wikis.'

socialnetworking darknets retribalization
october 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

New York Magazine -- Defacebook: How Diaspora Is a Very Different Kind of Social Network

'What Moglen presented was less an abstract theory than a beautiful, hypnotic manifesto... Gullible civilians—the ordinary users of Facebook, iPhones, and Gmail—had given themselves up to the spymasters. Because they didn’t understand their own machines, or code itself, they’d been brainwashed into believing this was a fair trade, convinced their natural role was to be clients, reliant on servers. At the center of the speech was a call to arms, aimed at those who had the tools ordinary users lacked. Geeks spoke the language that made things happen. (There’s a reason some coders call programs “incantations” and “daemons.”) These powers could catalyze freedom, rather than take it away. “What we need is to make a thing that is so greasy there will never be another social-networking platform again,” Moglen announced, to applause. “Right? Can we do it? Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, if you don’t have a date on Friday night, let’s just have a hackfest and get it done.”'

diaspora socialnetworking darknets hackersvsvectoralists retribalization
september 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

The New Yorker -- Twitter, Facebook, and social activism

'As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. ...weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism. [Social media activism] doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. There are many things that networks don’t do well.'

networks weakties socialnetworking socialmedia activism slacktivism consensus spectacle narcissism MalcolmGladwell
september 2010 by adamcrowe

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TechCrunch -- Social Gaming Market Reaches Its Final Stage…and It’s Not Looking Pretty

'Outside of Facebook, Farmville simply can’t hold its own against games like Bejeweled and Scrabble when it comes to monetizing a casual audience... -- In the end, I believe that “social games” as we know them will be a forgotten internet fad, ultimately consumed by the already mature online market for downloadable and multiplayer games. The only NEW discoveries that remain will be the realization that social networking itself is a new kind of game play, social graphs are an extremely efficient way for games to market themselves and that microcurrency business models blended with advertising are a superior way to monetize online games in general. Everything else will be consumed by the highly competitive and established downloadable and multiplayer online game market. If some of the big names in social media gaming survive, it will be because they leveraged their abundant access to capital to transform themselves away from dependence on Facebook.'

gaming socialgaming casualgaming gaminggraph socialgraph socialnetworking virtualgoods businessmodels
september 2010 by adamcrowe

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Rough Type -- New frontiers in social networking

'The big news this week is the launch of a National Science Foundation-funded study aimed at "developing the NeuroPhone system, the first Brain-Mobile phone Interface (BMI) that enables neural signals from consumer-level wireless electroencephalography (EEG) headsets worn by people as they go about their everyday lives to be interfaced to mobile phones and combined with existing sensor streams on the phone (e.g., accelerometers, gyroscopes, GPS) to enable new forms of interaction, communications and human behavior modeling."'

socialnetworking cyberbrain collectiveunconscious mercerism PKD
august 2010 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- N'IMPORTE COMMENT - THE TOXIC AVENGER FEAT ORELSAN

I see Facebook people.

augmentedreality socialnetworking facebook
august 2010 by adamcrowe

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Assisted Serendipity - Your Foursquare powered wingman

'Assisted Serendipity is a free service that notifies you a soon as the male/female ratio turns in your favor at your favorite local hangouts. Using Foursquare's check-in data, we monitor the venues you are interested in, and notify you as soon as the ratio "tips". Meet new people through the power of location-based social networking.'

foursquare socialnetworking dating stalking tools
august 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

NYTimes.com -- Crafting Fictional Personas With the Language of Facebook -

'Everything is extreme: So-and-so “is obsessed with.” So-and-so “just had the longest day EVERRRRRR.” They are in a perpetual high pitch of pleasure or a high pitch of crisis or sometimes just a high pitch of high pitch. Holden Caulfield might have called it “phoniness.” -- One of the other great adolescent poses of Facebook is irony at all times. So if you say, “can’t wait for the Lady Gaga concert,” you might add “lol” or you might say “Hey you are at camp and I’m in England, but I just wanted to let you know that I miss youuuu hahaha” to make it clear that you are not really looking forward to anything or expressing an actual emotion in a way that might be overly earnest or embarrassing.'

socialnetworking behaviours sousveillance identity performance ambivalence masks phatic communication fake from delicious
august 2010 by adamcrowe

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New York Magazine -- Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past?

'The default interaction on ChatRoulette is roughly three seconds long: assessment, micro-interaction, "next." This might seem like yet another outrage of the Internet era—the Twitter-fication of face-to-face interaction. As Internet culture has grown, we’ve come to romanticize certain kinds of unmediated, old-fashioned “human” interactions. But this fantasy ignores how much of normal social interaction is fleeting, bite-size, instant, tweetlike. Humans have always talked to each other via a kind of analog Twitter. These new technologies just get us there with maximum efficiency. Meeting a new person is thrilling, in a primal way—your attention focuses completely, if only for a nanosecond, to see if the creature in front of you has the power to change your life for better or worse. ChatRoulette creates this moment over and over again.'

chatroulette internet web socialnetworking behaviours identity masks intermittentvariablerewards gambling windowshopping shopping boredom from delicious
august 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

YouTube -- South Park: Facebook Tron

"Here's some pictures of my dog. Can you comment on these?" -- Comment or it didn't happen.

southpark socialnetworking behaviours friendship ambientintimacy selfobjects objects from delicious
august 2010 by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia -- You Have 0 Friends

'Kyle, Cartman and Kenny make Stan a Facebook profile against his will and he becomes embroiled and frustrated with everyone asking him for friend requests. Cartman introduces Kyle to Chatroulette as a way to make new friends, but all Kyle finds are men masturbating on webcam. Meanwhile Stan now has almost a million friends on his account and has decided to commit "online suicide" by deleting his account only to find Facebook refuses to allow him to. Instead of deleting his account, he is forcibly transported by the software into the virtual world of Facebook, where he meets "profiles" of everyone he knows, who talk to him in Facebook language, and is forced to engage in Facebook activities such as Yahtzee.'

southpark facebook popculture socialnetworking behaviours friendship peerpressure culture from delicious
august 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

NYTimes.com -- The Way We Live Now - I Tweet, Therefore I Am

'Among young people especially [Sherry Turkle] found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculptured and refined in response to public opinion. “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are. But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.” Referring to “The Lonely Crowd,” the landmark description of the transformation of the American character from inner- to outer-directed, Turkle added, “Twitter is outer-directedness cubed.” -- I am trying to gain some perspective on the perpetual performer’s self-consciousness. That involves trying to sort out the line between person and persona, the public and private self.' -- I am Jack's Social Object

psychology socialnetworking socialmedia behaviours identity performance masks selfservers selfobjects socialobjects objects SherryTurkle from delicious
july 2010 by adamcrowe

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Guardian -- The night I was cyberstalked on Foursquare

'Standing at the front desk of a restaurant on the phone with a complete stranger was the absolute last thing I expected from a harmless tweet about meeting friends from the internet and a link to my location. "I like to hang out with people from the internet too. Maybe we should hang out sometime. What do you think about that?" -- I haven't been able to stop thinking about what happened. I'm angry. I feel like someone violated an understanding that all of us generally nice people online have – you don't cross the line. I'm also terrified. Who is this person? Who would do something like that?'

socialnetworking location ambientexposure sousveillance surveillance privacy stalking from delicious
july 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

WindMill Networking -- Facebook in Japan: Will it Blend? How to Compete with Mixi?

'#1. Mixi Users Tend to Use Nicknames. #2. Who’s Viewed Your Facebook Profile? We don’t know who’s viewed our Facebook profile. Mixi users feel safe in using Mixi because they can see who has viewed their profile with the “ashiato” (“footprint”) functionality. This is not a for-fee service like LinkedIn: it is a fundamental part of the Mixi platform that is guaranteed for all users. Will Facebook create this functionality for the Japanese market? #3. Mixi is Community-Centric. Aligned with using nicknames, Mixi users join a lot of communities where they can learn new information all the while keeping their anonymity. Facebook has its share of Groups, which are similar to Mixi communities, but again, there is no anonymity in Facebook. This could potentially make it harder to create the same types of strong communities that are one of the cornerstones of Mixi.'

japan socialnetworking privacy anonymity pseudoanonymity anonequiveillance equiveillance from delicious
july 2010 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- In-Helmet Social Networking: One Influential Ex-General’s Vision of Future War

'“What does a soldier need? ‘I’m lonely,’” Scales says. “As the battlefield expands, the space between soldiers expands geometrically, and primal fear escalates. The need for psychic glue increases an order of magnitude.” Which is why he’d like to have veterans, translators, cultural experts, and battle buddies all connected in a social network for war. “Soldiers don’t break from hunger, thirst or poor leadership. They break from emotional collapse, maybe someone far away, like [National Security Agency headquarters] Ft. Meade, could monitor [troops] for emotional and biological signs — heart rate, galvanic skin response, a tremor in a soldier’s voice — and then aggregate it into a dashboard.” -- All soldiers are toys --> Halo expansion pack it

socialnetworking affectivelabour augmentedreality militaryentertainmentcomplex war from delicious
july 2010 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- Self-Service: The Delicate Dance of Online Bragging

'The self-aggrandizement that offended the group is standard fare in my Twitter feed — my own posts too often included. (BTW, I’ll be appearing on TV this week.) But far from clearing out the virtual bar, expressions of vanity online are usually rewarded with a cascade of back-patting: a virtual thumbs-up, a hearty “congrats!,” a “proud-to-know-you” retweet. Social networking sites have inverted the rules of privacy and etiquette, and no cultural norm is tossed aside more often on the Web than plain old modesty. This raises an existential question: When you celebrate yourself online, are you a willing participant in a brave new social future, or are you just being an ass?'

socialnetworking behaviours status statusupdates ambientexposure selfservers vanity fame celebrity theadvertisedlife psychology from delicious
july 2010 by adamcrowe

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BBC -- Facebook unveils child safety 'panic button'

POKE. PANIC. SNITCH.

socialnetworking facebook stasi snitching bigbrother from delicious
july 2010 by adamcrowe

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superfluid | we keep things fair

'superfluid provides social currencies that compensate real efforts, without requiring conventional money. Social networks, online and off, allow for lots of productive collaborative relationships, and superfluid keeps them fair.'

LETS barter virtualmoney socialnetworking peerproduction p2p retribalization
june 2010 by adamcrowe

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Software Freedom Law Center -- Freedom In the Cloud (Anti-Facebook Rant)

'What do we need? We need a really good webserver you can put in your pocket and plug in any place. It should know how to collect all your stuff out of the social networking places where you’ve got it. It should know how to send an encrypted backup of everything to your friends’ servers. It should know how to microblog. ...it should know how to be you in a free net that works for you and keeps the logs. You can always tell what’s happening in your server and if anybody wants to know what’s happening in your server they can get a search warrant. Then we go to people and we say $29.99 once for a lifetime, great social networking, updates automatically, software so strong you couldn’t knock it over it you kicked it, used in hundreds of millions of servers all over the planet doing a wonderful job. You know what? You get “no spying” for free. -- Mr. Zuckerberg richly deserves bankruptcy. Let’s give it to him. For Free.'

facebook backlash networks internet socialnetworking darknets cryptoanarchism hackersvsvectoralists diaspora
may 2010 by adamcrowe

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Software Freedom Law Center -- Freedom In the Cloud (Anti-Facebook Rant)

'The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. Because he harnessed Friday night. That is, everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, “I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time”. And it works. Facebook is the Web with “I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?” It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts. -- I’m not lamenting progress of a sort of democratizing kind. On the contrary, I’m lamenting progress of a totalizing kind. I’m lamenting progress hostile to human freedom. We have to fess up if we’re the people who care about freedom, it’s late in the game and we’re behind. '

networks internet socialnetworking panopticon surveillance privacy identity facebook rentseeking sharecroppping backlash diaspora rent
may 2010 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- Foursquare, a Social Network Site, Puts Users Face to Face

'The system awards points and virtual badges to players depending on how often they go out and which places they visit. Users who frequent a particular place enough times are crowned “mayor” of that particular location. “People are very territorial about their mayorships,” Mr. Crowley said. “It’s almost like bragging rights.”'

behaviours socialnetworking foursquare location scentmarking narcissism selfobjects objects
may 2010 by adamcrowe

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The Onion -- New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It

'By "checking in," users can earn tangible, real-world rewards. For instance, the Foursquare user with the most points at any given venue earns the designation of "mayor" and can receive discounts, free food, or other prizes that, quite honestly, we're thoroughly disgusted with ourselves for having actually researched. In addition, please, kill us already. "Through its competitive elements like badges and points, Foursquare helps generate brand loyalty," said the Ph.D.-holding individual, whose decades in higher education were basically shit upon by our inane questions about various bits of Foursquare ephemera. "It's a unique and transformative social networking tool." "Can I go now?" he added.'

TheOnion socialnetworking complianceprofessionals theadvertisedlife lulz satire
may 2010 by adamcrowe

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New York Press -- Social networking applications like Foursquare, Blippy and SubMate seem like fun and games but pose a threat to civil liberties

'Not too long ago, if someone were spying on you, you’d feel creeped out. But now the concept of personal privacy is nearly dead. That’s right: Millions of Americans are obsessively spying on themselves for fun. By far these youth-marketers’ most awe-inspiring triumph is to paint privacy as a refuge of the unhip. An army of new-media strivers eagerly deploys corporate-friendly concepts like “social capital” and “migrating social patterns.” In reality, frequent corporate spokesman and new-media guru Clay Shirky cooked up these phrasings inside a think tank—they are lent a tinge of genuine popular phenomena, and parroted by the establishment media. “Privacy… is a small price to pay for peace, especially since we’re headed toward radical transparency anyway.” What Horgan and kindred spirits, like Shirky and Google’s Chris DiBona, don’t tell you is that intelligence is only good if you have the power to use it.'

socialnetworking surveillance panopticon datamining realitymining happytalk complianceprofessionals 1984 militaryentertainmentcomplex
may 2010 by adamcrowe

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diaspora

'#1. the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network -- It is our one and only goal to get Diaspora in the hands of every man, woman, and child at summer’s end. September 2010 will signify the release of the project in its first iteration, fully open-sourced under the AGPL. This release will be comprised of several key features for Diaspora, mainly: Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances); End to end GPG; External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data); Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation; Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code.' -- A rag-tag fleet fleeing the tyranny of facebook's casino gulag.

diaspora socialnetworking darknets decentralisation p2p opensource cryptoanarchism casinogulag countermeasures retribalization decentralization
may 2010 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- Mandatory Social Networking

'Is this true: Not having a Facebook page or an active Twitter account proves you have something to hide? Thanks, everybody, for making confessing everything on Facebook seem so normal. Despite “connecting” us more securely with others online, social networking has made our real-life, non-online identities more insecure than ever. With a new tool to investigate what we don’t immediately disclose up front, there is less reason for anyone to take us at face value. I guess people just Google us while nodding along and ignoring what we say. Soon we will be totally isolated, cocooned in data, altogether indifferent to any forms of reciprocity that can’t be measured and adjudicated and put to work in networks.'

socialnetworking panopticon stasi selfservers identity sharecropping immateriallabour
may 2010 by adamcrowe

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Umair Haque -- The Social Media Bubble

'Thin relationships are the illusion of real relationships. Real relationships are patterns of mutual investment. I invest in you, you invest in me. The "relationships" at the heart of the social bubble aren't real because they're not marked by mutual investment. At most, they're marked by a tiny chunk of information or attention here or there. #Trust. If we take social media at face value, the number of friends in the world has gone up a hundredfold. But have we seen an accompanying rise in trust? ...social isn't about beauty contests and popularity contests. They're a distortion, a caricature of the real thing. It's about trust, connection, and community.' -- Attention economy is a ponzi?

criticism internet web socialmedia socialnetworking attention sharecropping UmairHaque
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog -- A typology of crowds

'#Social production crowd: consists of a large group of individuals who lend their distinct talents to the creation of some product like Wikipedia or Linux. #Averaging crowd: acts essentially as a survey group, providing an average judgment about some complex matter that, in some cases, is more accurate than the judgment of any one individual. #Data mine crowd: a large group that, through its actions but usually without the explicit knowledge of its members, produces a set of behavioral data that can be collected and analyzed in order to gain insight into behavioral or market patterns. #Networking crowd: a group that trades information through a shared communication system such as the phone network or Facebook or Twitter. #Transactional crowd: a group used to instigate and coordinate what are mainly or solely point-to-point transactions, such as the type of crowd gathered by Match.com. -- Some crowds become more useful as they get bigger; others work best when kept to a small scale.'

internet web groups communities networks markets socialnetworking socialproduction crowdsourcing p2p collectiveintelligence datamining sharecropping
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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LogMeIn - Virtual Networking with LogMeIn Hamachi²

'Connect multiple users and computers together on a secure, private network, regardless of location, over the public Internet.'

vpn networks socialnetworking p2p security privacy darknets
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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Remobo - Instant Private Network ™ Application

'Remobo creates an Instant Private Network ™ (IPN) between users. It's like a computer network for your social network.'

vpn networks socialnetworking p2p security privacy darknets
march 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Generation Bubble -- Limited Inc.: A Jobless Future and the Narcissist Economy

'Society needs people to elaborate the rituals, to espouse the markers, to prove them in the public process of consumption. As the process accelerates, this becomes more and more difficult and time-consuming to keep up with. Enter Web 2.0, a real-time trend tracker and data harvester, and enter the newly “unemployable” youth leisure class, which may actually be busily working on reproducing the ideology of consumerism online. When a self-conscious group of hyperconsumers take to the internet to chart their retail course among friends and stake out their identity, they are simultaneously working as cultural functionaries, taming the promiscuous field of goods, doing the grunt work in developing the marking services that help the haute-consumer classes perfect its privilege. They secure the appropriate set of meanings to preserve the status of the class to which they have pretensions of belonging.'

socialnetworking socialmedia hipsters trends curation culturalcapital selfservers narcissism identity sharecropping exploitation immateriallabour unemployment subsistenceclicking
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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Inside Facebook -- Facebook Can’t Go to China, But Chinese Game Developers Are Coming to Facebook

'In 2010, we’re beginning to see what could become a larger and quite interesting trend: Chinese developers moving into western markets via Facebook, and even some western Facebook game developers beginning to move into China. The trade routes for virtual goods exports are picking up. Despite their absence to date, we’ve been hearing more rumors lately of China’s gaming giants preparing to put “large amounts” of capital into establishing a presence on the Facebook Platform – in some cases, over $50 million. “Who else is going to challenge Zynga?,” one industry veteran says. -- Restaurants in Taiwan are giving out coupons for virtual currency in Facebook games to attract customers.' -- Neo colonisation via social networking games. Crazy but true.

thegamingofeverydaylife ludocapitalism socialnetworking facebook virtualgoods virtualmoney globalization labour arbitrage subsistenceclicking china
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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Vimeo -- chat roulette by Casey Neistat

'a movie about chat roulette. "This is called getting 'nexted': when a random stranger clicks the next button immediately after seeing what you look like."'

internet socialnetworking chat chatroulette behaviours exhibitionism voyeurism strangers windowshopping shopping boredom intermittentvariablerewards documentaries psychology
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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The Observer -- My bright idea: Jaron Lanier

Lanier: "Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting. Initially people aren't sure what the pack is. Somebody tries to ridicule something else, and other people who want to play it safe join in so that they're not the target. Gradually, the pack forms. You can tell it's formed by two things: an internal enemy and an external enemy. The internal enemy is the low person on the totem pole who gets ridiculed. And then there's the external enemy, the "other"." -- Krotoski: "We see this in playgrounds, we see this pack mentality in other, non-web environments. -- Lanier: "That's because it comes from the people, not from the machine."

criticism internet web cyberspsychology socialsoftware socialdesign socialmedia socialnetworking groups behaviours smartmobs dumbmobs commonenemy status hierarchy conformity consensus JaronLanier
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- Clive Thompson in Praise of Online Obscurity

'...socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” Evans says. So the conversation stops. Evans isn’t alone. I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting. The lesson? There’s value in obscurity. -- Maybe we should be designing tools that reward obscurity — that encourage us to remain in the shadows. Sure, we’d be connected with fewer people, but we’d be communicating with them, and not just talking at them.'

socialnetworking socialmedia fame communities dunbarsnumber darknets obscurity intimacy #bandwidth #socialization
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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BBC -- The Virtual Revolution: Homo Interneticus?

'Aleks examines the popularity of social networks such as Facebook and asks how they are changing our relationships.' -- Sherry Turkle: "There's a new personality type: It moves from, 'I have a feeling, I want to make a call,' to, 'I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call.' There's a sense in which you almost need a sense of validation and the support of the community to feel the feeling in the first place. Bringing other people into the loop of feeling your feeling, this is very seductive."

internet web cybernetics socialnetworking statusupdates realtime feedback addiction reflexivity literaryculturevsoralculture SherryTurkle documentaries AlexKrotoski psychology narcissism
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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Michael Zimmer -- Why Pete Warden Should Not Release Profile Data on 215 Million Facebook Users

'... just because these Facebook users made their profiles publicly available does not mean they are fair game for scraping for research purposes. ...the purpose of this public availability is to help people—humans, not bots—find [people]. ...my profile is only “public” if a human being takes specific and conscious action to find me. -- Warden’s actions, however, violate this implicit understanding for making profiles publicly searchable. Rather than trying to find me, Warden is systematically sought everyone, letting a script to the work of seeking and harvesting my data. There is no genuine desire to find me, to friend me, and so on. He’s just collecting data. The point is whether the 215 million Facebook users who now have some of their information in Warden’s database contemplated such harvesting and aggregating when they built their profile and configured their privacy settings.' -- Asperger's social web?

socialnetworking socialmedia facebook datamining publics leaky ambientexposure surveillance ethics
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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Times Online -- Children paid to plug junk food on Facebook and Bebo

'Children are being given rewards to promote Fanta, Nintendo and other products to their Facebook friends in a controversial form of stealth marketing. In some cases children as young as seven have been offered the chance to become “mini-marketeers” to plug brands by casually dropping them into postings and conversations on social networking sites. They can earn the equivalent of £25 a week for their online banter — sometimes promoting things that they may not even like. The marketing agencies advise their young recruits to target different sets of online friends with different brands and coach them to sound “natural and unrehearsed”.' They should prepare their product pitch by “thinking deeply about how you would describe it to your best friend ... Write down the key points in your own words and make sure it doesn’t sound too rehearsed. Be natural; be you”.' -- via @MaxKeiser

socialnetworking advertising children predation brandmodels astroturfing immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
february 2010 by adamcrowe

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SFGate.com -- Can your comments affect your credit? Yup.

'In hopes of identifying good credit customers, some financial institutions are tapping into the information you and your friends reveal online. The idea is that the friends you keep and data you disclose may help them make more accurate business decisions. -- ...profiles provide banks with insight into your behavior patterns - what you like and dislike, want and don't want, do well and do poorly. Creditors can see if people in your network have accounts with them, and are free to look at how they are handling those accounts. The presumption is that if those in your network are responsible cardholders, there is a better chance you will be too. So, if a bank is on the fence about whether to extend you credit, you may become eligible if those in your network are good credit customers. -- Having a robust online social network can also expedite loan acceptance. If you're connected to a lot of people who are great credit risks, it can speed you through the process.' -- Brave New World

datamining surveillance socialnetworking socialmedia socialgraph socialengineering class financialization quantifiedself whuffie risk credit bravenewworld
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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danah boyd -- "Do you See What I See?: Visibility of Practices through Social Media"

'The public and networked nature of the Internet creates the potential for visibility. We have the ability to see into the lives of so many people who are different than us. But only when we choose to look. So who is looking? Why are they looking? And in what context are they interpreting what they see? By and large, those who are looking are those who hold power over the person being observed. Parents look. Teachers look. Employers look. Governments look. Corporations look. These people are often looking to judge or manipulate. Given the powerful position they are in, those doing the looking often think that they have the right to look. But do they have the right to judge? The right to manipulate? This, of course, is the essence of conversations about surveillance. And so we argue and argue and argue about the right to privacy in public spaces. -- One of the reasons why people fear the technologies we make are because they make thing visible that we don't like.'

socialnetworking socialmedia behaviours ambientexposure surveillance anonequiveillance voyeurism transparency privacy performance signalling civility DanahBoyd psychology equiveillance
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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apophenia -- Facebook's move ain't about changes in privacy norms

'Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we've changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn't be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don't have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they'd like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don't think that this is truly what we want. -- It kills me when the bottom line justifies social oppression. Is that really what the social media industry is about?'

socialnetworking socialmedia facebook sharecropping privacy DanahBoyd
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- Moronization and the End of Privacy

'...social networks [erode] the possibility of privacy even further while all the while making its surrender seem voluntary. (Just have a look at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, proclaiming the end of privacy as a social norm.) ... we elect to give up privacy to participate in the “media of amusement and elevation”... And with that we surrender our ability to be self-directed, to create our own wants, to think, to be other. Instead we look for distinctions within the social language of commercial objects and activities, and then we look to promote ourselves through them. This is what it means by and large to be social, to interact with other people, particularly through a medium like Facebook, which simultaneously records these exchanges and transforms them into marketing and demographic data. Hence, that data is what we are choosing to reduce ourselves to. As a result of this ongoing process of needs administration, we can end up feeling helpless when the apparatus is disabled.'

socialnetworking sharecropping precuperation consumering theadvertisedlife
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- Fake friends

'Deresiewicz: "As the traditional face-to-face community disappeared, we held on to what we had lost—the closeness, the rootedness—by clinging to the word, no matter how much we had to water down its meaning. What we have, instead of community, is, if we’re lucky, a “sense” of community—the feeling without the structure; a private emotion, not a collective experience. And now friendship, which arose to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going the same way." -- The crux of social networking is naturalizing the idea that identity is nothing more than consumer preferences. Then it entices us to elaborate ourselves in those terms, enhancing the value of various brands and commercial services. Seen from the outside, Facebook is an alienation machine, forcing us to make ourselves repeatedly strange in the effort to capture some new catchy essence of ourselves to market. [Every] attempt to escape is just another signifying gesture of neutralized rebellion.'

socialnetworking alienation precuperation consumering signalling selfservers brandmodels theadvertisedlife
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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Trendwatching.com -- 10 CRUCIAL CONSUMER TRENDS FOR 2010

'#URBAN PRIDE: in thriving mega-cities, inhabitants’ identities will be closely tied to a city's culture, its brand, its heritage, its 'being'. Look for big brands, delivering city-specific products, services and communications #LIMITED LOCATIONS: for shoppers, it brings back the thrill of (literally) having to go places to pick up something for others or themselves. #MASS MINGLING: the more people can get their hands on the right info, at home and on the go; the more they date and network and twitter and socialize online, the more likely they are to eventually meet up with friends and followers in the real world. ...temporary meet-ups of strangers, mobs and crowds with similar interests, hobbies, political preferences, causes and grievances. Many of these meet-ups will revolve around generating public attention, or getting something done. #TRACKING and ALERTING: count on everything being tracked and alerted on: from friends to enemies to fuel prices ... to any mentions of oneself.'

trends recession localism socialnetworking smartmobs surveillance foraging gangs blackmarkets prices retribalization
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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Spiked -- The right to privacy in the Age of Facebook

'Seligman argues that there is a fundamental difference between *trust in people* (interpersonal relationships) and *confidence in institutions*. (The same would apply to technological systems, though this is not Seligman’s focus.) -- This goes to the heart of what trust actually is: a relationship that is not based upon reciprocal calculation, but is open-ended. Trust is therefore a very rare thing indeed. And because it is based on free will, trust cannot be demanded, only offered and accepted. -- Our relationships with state institutions are based upon confidence rather than trust: roles are ascribed while outcomes are intended and expected. There is neither unconditionality nor active engagement, but a passive relationship based on prescribed roles that are not subject to change or control. -- The defence of privacy as a political right needs to be re-established... Individuated conformity is not the basis upon which a robust defence of privacy can be mounted.'

sociology socialnetworking panopticon conformity privacy trust freedom
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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Web 2.0 Suicide Machine -- Sign out forever!

'Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego. The machine is just a metaphor for the website which moddr_ is hosting; the belly of the beast where the web2.0 suicide scripts are maintained. Our service currently runs with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn! Commit NOW!'

web socialnetworking socialmedia backlash delete amputation tools
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- The Onion: Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of 'Friendster' Civilization

'Researchers conducting the Friendster excavation say the site has been deserted since the year 2005 A.D.'

TheOnion socialnetworking friendster internet archaeology history lulz satire
december 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility Annex -- Costs of consuming information goods

'...the "release" of informational goods produced and distributed in social networks is not free; there is a cost to the user in stress, in insecurity, in the fear of exclusion, of not knowing, not keeping up, being hopelessly out of style, being obscure. The self -- the individual subject -- within systems of social production is fundamentally insecure and unstable, and is compelled to continue to produce information by consuming other information and goods in a social forum under conditions the require the consumption to be competitive, signifying. -- The value of social production is that can exploit that source of emotional motivation without having to provide any wage compensation.'

socialnetworking socialedia attention status signalling immateriallabour selfobjects socialobjects objects
december 2009 by adamcrowe

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Welcome to Seppukoo: Assisting your virtual suicide

'Seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body from any identity constriction in order to help people discover what happens after their virtual life and to rediscover the importance of being anyone, instead of pretending to be someone.'

socialnetworking facebook suicide
december 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Apophenia -- Sociality Is Learning

'Helping children develop social skills is viewed as a reasonable educational endeavor in elementary school, but by high school, educators switch to more "serious" subjects. Yet, youth aren't done learning about the social world. Conversely, they are more driven to understand people and sociality during their tween and teen years than as small children. -- The practice of hanging out is consistently demonized by educationally-minded folks as a waste of time. Yet, it is in that space where youth learn to navigate social situations, make sense of impression management, and develop the social skills necessary to be productive adults. -- Youth turn to [social media] to reclaim unstructured social encounters, to create a public space that allows them to simply hang out with their friends, peers, and cohort. The flirting, gossiping, and joking around that takes place is not proof that social media is useless, but proof that it's extremely valuable.'

socialnetworking socialmedia teens youth emotionalintelligence learning hierarchy status DanahBoyd
december 2009 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- His Facebook Status Now? ‘Charges Dropped’

'“This is the first case that I’m aware of in which a Facebook update has been used as alibi evidence,” said John Browning, a lawyer and member of the Dallas Bar Association who studies social networking and the law. “We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become.” -- Mr. Reuland acknowledges that, in principle, anyone who knew Mr. Bradford’s username and password could have typed the Facebook update, but he regards it as unlikely in this case. “This implies a level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this; he is not Dr. Evil,” Mr. Reuland said, adding that the Facebook entry was just “the icing on the cake,” since his client had the other alibis. -- Joseph Pollini said prosecutors should not have been so quick to drop the charges. “...there is a multitude of reasons why someone of that age would have the knowledge to do a crime like that.”' -- Exploitable

socialnetworking socialmedia facebook statusupdates surveillance sousveillance lifecasting plausibledeniability alibi dopplegangers puppetry crime paranoia 1984
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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O'Reilly Radar -- Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age: Part Three

'#The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control. -- Social technologies are cloaked in a rhetoric of liberation (customers are in control, the internet fosters democracy, social technologies propagate truth etc.) that tend to obscure the fact that never before have we handed so much personal information over in exchange for so little in return. This loss of control over personal information is on a collision course with the law of unintended consequences... Amidst this barrage of good news for how much power we wield in the transaction of commerce one has to wonder if we are giving away something quite precious in the bargain.' -- Give all your information over to Facebook and they'll rent your identity back to you.

internet web behaviours socialmedia socialnetworking socialgraph facebook datamining selfservers identity rent #socialization #complexity rentseeking
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- The Goods May Be Virtual, but the Profit Is Real

'Most of the momentum in the virtual goods market comes not from gifts but from social games, where people buy items to improve their performance in the game or just to build up a collection that will impress friends. Unlike traditional games, social games are generally free, and the vast majority of players never spend any money. In Zynga’s games, less than 3 percent of players pay for something, said Mark Pincus. Game creators talk openly about their strategies to make people pay for virtual goods: get them addicted, then steer them to purchases that speed up the pace of the game and help them succeed. In FarmVille, for example, the tractors’ gasoline tanks replenish themselves slowly over the course of a day. Instead of waiting, players can pay to buy gas — something that might be considered cheating in more traditional games. “You put intentional friction in, and a small number of people who value their time and want to play at a faster pace can spend money,” Mr. Pincus said.'

casualgaming socialnetworking virtualworlds virtualgoods functionalitems scarcity competition status envy
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility Annex -- Predictive search's black box, horizons of identity in social networks

'Web 2.0 platforms want to tell us what we want before we know we want it... Because these predictive systems aren't openly disclosed, we can't know if the ways in which they prescribe our identity are benign, in our best interests, or if they are producing subjects (and subjectivities) suitable for a system engineered to exploit them. -- "...there is no contradiction anymore between the marketing of user information and the subjective enrichment of users..." -- ...all transactions are deeply personalized and specific, and thus seem identity-validating. ...consumerism is now the inverse, hyperpersonal identity mongering, with the "unique identity" as the perpetual product being sold and resold to the same individual subject. Web 2.0 is letting us sell out before our authentic self even exists. Selling out becomes the prerequisite for having an authentic seeming self, validated by the predictive systems online and fixed in illusory flux of social networks.'

socialnetworking socialmedia consumerism self selfservers identity authenticity subjectivity circumscription blackboxes #specialization theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility Annex -- Filtering information to suit the self

Reminiscent of McLuhan's insight that people dress themselves in newspapers rather than read them. -- 'Information can now be a matter of facts, data, opinions, or retail purchases -- anything that could be deployed in signaling. The goal is not to become informed so much as to signal a tentative, tactical self in the marketplace of identity. Choice in informing oneself is now driven by the social-networking self (the self that can be ranked and archived and broadcast to ever-more people), which covertly serves the ends of the corporations that control those networks. Less important to be informed than to know the passwords to admission into chosen hierarchies structured in networks online.'

socialnetworking signalling culturalcapital content news statusupdates themediumisthemessage media
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Whuffie Bank - Reputation is Wealth

'The value of your Whuffie is obtained from your online reputation by tracking your interactions with social networks and the feedback from your contacts.' -- Ponzi rises to the top. All gladhands on deck. Cult of reciprocity. Or is that just me being needlessly cynical?

socialnetworking socialmedia economics reputation whuffie influence attention markets reciprocity socialcapital currency ponzi cults
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- Where Nobody Knows Your Name and They Never Know You Came

'...what happens when markets become non-anonymous is that we become reliant on consumption more than ever to mediate our relations with others, so that friendships happen only within the context of brand communities and branded social networks and shared affinities for the same products. “Social networking, blogging, etc. have created a huge incentive for people to put themselves on display, when previously they may have just kept their opinions mostly to themselves.” It is that incentivizing that worries me ... its conflation with commercialized self-display and personal branding. Social networks keep score of attention in measurable ways, heightening the stakes, and our physical isolation erodes the traditional mitigating forces of courtesy (which is where the stigma against performing, of hogging attention, arose from in the first place). The danger is that performance as a gift, a carefree act of self-forgetting, instead becomes an ongoing requisite act of self-definition.'

* socialnetworking behaviours attention whuffie reputation consumerism consumering identity selfservers performance signalling masks status sharing socialcapital culturalcapital cults immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility Annex -- More on "Consumer Emancipation"

'One must invent a community, an adoring audience, in order to imagine that self-expression is a gift. and things like Facebook serve to make that fantasy easier to sustain, by making positive feedback thoughtlessly implementable. The ordinary impersonal markets ... are suspended to force participants to sell their own "radical self-expression" instead as a self-conscious product, for approval and attention and status and a stable position in an emerging social hierarchy. This is allowing identity-driven consumerism to supplant capitalist consumption. -- The market is an atavistic structure that works against the sort of self consumerism exalts -- markets prefer anonymous subjects engaging in exchanges ruled entirely by rationality rather than the vagaries of social relations and social/cultural capital. -- ...social networks seize upon the mechanisms Burning Man evinces for creating a community built on coercive sharing, but tosses out the impermanence that excuses the coercion.'

* socialnetworking attention whuffie reputation consumerism consumering identity selfservers performance signalling masks status sharing socialcapital culturalcapital cults immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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Generation Bubble -- Public Image Unlimited: Consumerism and Anonymity’s End (3)

'The main purpose of social networks ... is to guarantee us a place to display our consumption. The point is to discourage online anonymity, to get us invested in the notion of reputational capital. We begin to publicize every purchase, to authenticate every choice by broadcasting it. We strengthen our communal ties with every singularized transaction. We will have reason to believe that everything we buy has an impact on our reputation, on how we are seen, on who we really are. We will respond accordingly, stylizing and designing the most mundane commodities so that they can elucidate some aspect of personality. If we share, we contribute information, we add value to the network and we know that our voice has been aggregated. Our drop was added to the demographic data pool, but more important, our own personal archive has been enriched. We become more findable. We can begin to keep score of how often we’re found, how real we are to the world.'

socialnetworking attention whuffie reputation consumerism consumering identity selfservers performance signalling masks status sharing socialcapital culturalcapital cults immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

BBC -- Facebook 'memorialises' profiles

'It follows some cases of members receiving updates about dead friends. If a user is reported as deceased, Facebook will remove sensitive information such as status updates and contacts. When reporting a death, users must offer "proof" by submitting either an obituary or news article. Memorialised accounts will have new privacy settings so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. "We understand how difficult it can be for people to be reminded of those who are no longer with them, which is why it's important when someone passes away that their friends or family contact Facebook to request that a profile be memorialised."' -- Proof. Is fb becoming a global Births, Marriages and Deaths database?

socialnetworking facebook avatars selfobjects puppetry death zombies darknets data database psychology
october 2009 by adamcrowe

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Inside Facebook -- Will Facebook and Twitter Become Communication Tools or Identity Platforms?

More on the fuckbook theory of fb. '...men are more interested in following women who they can find real information about, but women in general share less personal information (like you’d find on their Facebook profile) on Twitter, so as a result men follow women less on Twitter.'

socialnetworking socialmedia behaviours facebook twitter identity lurking stalking sex
october 2009 by adamcrowe

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Times Online -- Generation reveal: there's nothing they won't post online

'Harry, a diffident 32-year-old charity campaigner, tells me, “The first girl I fell in love with couldn’t keep anything off her profile. It gave me a weird sense of out-of-body experience. Maybe I would have been self-conscious anyway, but I found myself thinking not, ‘What do I want to say to her?’ but ‘How will this play on her page?’ I wasn’t just after her approval, but that of an entire community. -- What we are talking about here is nothing less than a new means of symbolising relationship, and new methods of constructing a romantic identity: the virtual affair, the untagged husband, the status-update-parcelled-out self. As Lucy observes, “I still find myself ‘self-tweeting’. Every little thing that happens has the potential to go public, and it is a game to find a concise, witty way to make it viral." -- "...you realise it’s all just so many pixels on a screen.” Pixels with more permanence than some of the relationships they depict.'

socialnetworking socialmedia statusupdates behaviours lifecasting confession relationships performance
october 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Tech Shrink -- Twitter attack: Crisis of disconnectivity

'At the lowest level, there is #Disconnectivity Anxiety, which I define as a persistent and unpleasant condition characterized by worry and unease caused by periods of technological disconnection from others. Some Tweeters may have devolved to the next level related to our overly connected world, #Disconnectivity Panic, which involves a frenzied and unfocused effort to get reconnected. Others may have sunk even lower to #Disconnectivity Catatonia, psychological and physical paralysis due to loss of technological connection. Though a truly scary thought, the endpoint of this continuum may be Disconnectivity Suicide, where life is just not worth living without technological connection. Though I have never heard of it happening, I will predict (sadly) that it will occur in the near future if it hasn't already.'

psychology socialnetworking socialmedia behaviours twitter ambientimmediacy extensionsofman centralnervoussystem networks #bandwidth amputation
october 2009 by adamcrowe

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Guardian -- The evolving face of networks

'"It's hard to quantify the influence that people exert. Ideas are replicators, and influence makes them replicate: but when that happens, there usually isn't a birth certificate." That's another way in which evolutionary graph theorists may have an impact. Evolutionary graph theory provides a quantitative language for describing how replicators behave on networks – and may lead to new ways of quantifying the value of influence on the web. "The idea we need to explore is this: what is the likelihood that a particular stimulus within a social network leads to a particular response?" says Lieberman. "In my opinion, as we get better at measuring what happens within social networks, I predict a lot more organised marketing efforts on social networks as well as systematic influence campaigns."'

socialnetworking networks memetics influence propagation
october 2009 by adamcrowe

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Psychology Today -- Understanding the Psychology of Twitter

'I twitter, therefore I am. I matter. -- Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist: "Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognize you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won't cure it." -- Twitter's software designers were clever enough to program in tenacious intermittent reward systems, so you end up like a loser in Vegas, behaviorally trapped at the slot machines of life. -- Perhaps a more enlightened way to look at it is that you're really just enjoying a cyber-zen moment of mindfulness to be present and tweet thyself. We're all interconnected now - each of us acting like a single neuron in humanity's brain, firing bits of electricity at one another, slowly coadunating and collectively struggling toward a great awakening. That awakening could turn out to be the next stage in our evolution, and a single tweet the butterfly's wings that eventually leads to a big bang of global meta-consciousness.' -- OM...

psychology internet web behaviours twitter socialnetworking attention lifecasting celebrity narcissism masks existentialism statusupdates status intermittentvariablerewards addiction themediumisthemassage extensionsofman centralnervoussystem immunesystem hivemind one fame media
october 2009 by adamcrowe

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Salon Life -- Why we can't stop looking

'Peep culture involves watching and being watched, snooping and spying, gawking and gossiping; it means exposing our intimacies with an eye toward bonding with others and growing comfortable with the increasingly common slippage between public and private. Peep culture, like pop culture, informs the atmosphere — it is the atmosphere — in which we live. Writes Niedzviecki, “It’s like that famous line about pornography: you know it when you see it. And you do see it. All the time, everyday, everywhere. -- ...people like Twitter because it's connection with low expectations. And that's a phrase that has stuck with me and has become almost an overarching explanation for the whole peep culture phenomenon. ...we want the feeling of connection without the weight of being expected to do something.”

psychology internet web behaviours ambientintimacy panopticon voyeurism sousveillance equiveillance lifecasting selfservers oversharing performance masks attention narcissism celebrity transparency privacy leaky socialnetworking weakties feedback #socialization fame
september 2009 by adamcrowe

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Mashable -- Trapped Girls Updated Facebook Status Instead of Calling For Help

'The 10- and 12-year-old girls updated a Facebook status to say they were lost in a drain on Honeypot Road at Hackham in Adelaide’s southern suburbs on Sunday night. Glenn Benham from the MFS says it was fortunate a young friend was online at the time and was able to call for help for them. “It is a worry for us because it causes a delay on us being able to rescue the girls,” he said. “If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000, so the point being they could have called us directly and we could have got there quicker than relying on someone being online and replying to them and eventually having to call us via 000 anyway.”' -- IM. TAKING. MY. LAST. BREATH. LOL

socialmedia socialnetworking behavours statusupdates addiction tethered lifecasting performance drama help
september 2009 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- Not Enough Facebook ‘Friends?’ Buy Them

'An Australian online marketing company is selling friends and fans to Facebook members after offering a similar service to Twitter users.“The simple fact is that with a large following on Facebook, you have an instant and targeted group of people you can contact and promote whatever it is you want to promote,” he added. “The only problem is that it can be extremely difficult to achieve such a following, which is where we come in.” The company offers packages for Facebook, the world’s number one social networking site, that start at 1,000 friends up to 10,000 friends at costs ranging from $177 to $1,167. “All we do is send them a welcome message or friend request from the client. If they decide to go ahead and add that person as a friend or a fan then they will; if not, then they won’t." -- Surely someone can write a friend bot to do that.

socialnetworking socialmedia twitter facebook socialgraph attention marketing spam
september 2009 by adamcrowe

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CNReviews -- China SNS Gaming Applications: What’s Next?

'Gaming provides a different avenue for establishing new “relationships” with their real world friends. Our focus group participants expressed a great desire for role-playing games set in historic periods. In China, the Three Kingdoms period is an enduring favorite as evidenced by recent video games, television shows and blockbuster films, such as John Woo’s Red Cliff, that depict the glory of Chinese military history: "I want more strategy games based on China’s long military history. I want to wage war and form alliances with friends to build a new empire."' -- Hmm... on so many levels.

china socialnetworking socialmedia socialgraph guanxi gaming rpg roleplay simulation reenactment thegamingofeverydaylife
september 2009 by adamcrowe

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