February 2012
18 posts
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“If the nature of the threat and the coping strategies to be used against it are...”
– I pulled this quote out of my notes from Coping With Threatened Identities by Glynis Breakwell (1986: Routledge; Chapter 3: The structure of threats) that I took during my MSc.
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A Disciplined Business →
An NYT profile of kink.com
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Online Damage: Porn in the 21st Century →
originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 18 January 2009.
Blurb:
Penny Marshall examines the effects of the rapid expansion of online pornography on UK society. She talks to those who use online porn, including couples trying to repair the trust and intimacy dented by the persistent and secretive use of porn sites. She also hears from psychologists who are concerned that young people are in...
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Tech Weekly podcast: Cyber security and online sex →
From February 2011.
the team are joined by Feona Attwood of Sheffield Hallam University, the editor of the book Porn.com, to talk about how the web has transformed our attitudes to sex. Charles wonders if teledildonics – sex toys that are networked via the internet – are for people with intimacy issues, while Kyle Machulis of slashdong.org explains who uses them, and how.
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Obscenity and Indecency on the Usenet: The Legal... →
Bilstad, B. T. (1996). Obscenity and Indecency on the Usenet: The Legal And Political Future of Alt.Sex.Stories. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol 2(2).
full text.
Here’s the abstract:
This paper discusses the emerging prevalence of erotica and pornography on the Internet (in particular on the Usenet) and addresses legal and political questions raised in light of news...
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“…the contextual issues involved in this specific case…”
– British watchdog backs down over Wikipedia image of nude girl (from ZDNet)
In which British watchdogs did not understand context and broke Wikipedia.
A problem of internet content regulation.
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“The internet - in part - is revealing the so called ‘private mind’....”
– from commenter Binra, on the UTTW column about sex, published 6 February 2011.
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“an emerging global village represents only one outcome from a range of...”
– Van Alstyne, M & Brynjolfsson, E. (1996). Electronic Communities: Global Village or Cyberbalkans?, MIT.
The first publication of the word “cyberbalkanization,” the phenomenon the researchers proposed could result from the global information infrastructure, leading to “the...
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“Plato observed that even a habitually just man who possessed such a ring would...”
– Online, Anonymity Breeds Contempt. A historical perspective on anonymity from an article on internet trolling on NYT.com in 2010.
BUT! Anonymity isn’t the only issue. Here’s a report from The Guardian in 2007 including this quote from Dr Chris Fullwood, “internet...
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Roots of violent radicalisation (House of Commons... →
a report by the Home Affairs Committee, published 31 January 2012.
Primarily focussed on “terror threats” and radical Islam. Doesn’t talk much about other hate groups.
Bottom line (for Untangling the Web’s Hate chapter purposes): the internet is blamed by many, but there’s not a lot of evidence to support this. convictions have gone down since 2006/7. antagonism...
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“…if you use Facebook, and your friends sign up for social applications,...”
– Luluvise’s date-rating site shows where your Facebook data can end up
from The Guardian on 8 Feb 2012.
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“A person’s contacts are so sensitive that Alec Ross, a senior adviser on...”
– Anger for Path Social Network After Privacy Breach - NYTimes.com
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People using pseudonyms post the highest-quality... →
two interesting things in this article from Poynter:
1) “real identity” is described as “verified by Facebook”
2) “many news sites have been using [Facebook’s plugin] to verify identity… and raise the level of discourse”
I’m ISO any research that correlates “raising the level of discourse” and “real identity”....
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Perceived impact of cyberbullying
• Picture/video... →
Interes granular look. Reminds me of the emotional response that the online rape described by Julian Dibbell in A Rape In Cyberspace invoked in the victims of that incident.
from the 1996 publication, AN INVESTIGATION INTO CYBERBULLYING, ITS FORMS, AWARENESS AND IMPACT, AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AGE AND GENDER IN CYBERBULLYING: A Report to the Anti-Bullying Alliance by Peter Smith, Jess...
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Deviance in the Dark →
Anonymity doesn’t always produce anti-social behaviour, despite the Online Disinhibition Effect (aka GIFT theory). Here’s the pdf of a study by Kenneth Gergen, Mary Gergen and William Barton from October 1973 in Psychology Today that describes an altogether different kind of reaction when people are experimentally anonymised.
This was referenced by Johnson, R. D. & Dowling, L. H....
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Pat (Saturday Night Live) and the A/S/L marker of... →
Saturday Night Live’s version of A/S/L. The Pat character was problematic because people didn’t have what - in its absence - becomes a very important cornerstone for identifying how to interaction with someone.
Perhaps more eloquently, here’s danah boyd in 2001 (pdf) on “the role of identification in online communities” and this “standard formulation of...
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“In this work we examine the complex interplay between the needs and desires of...”
– From:
Diakopolous, N. & Naaman, M. (2011). Towards quality discourse in online news comments. Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperarative Work. New York, NY.
A few notes/quotes from the article:
Early work in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) has documented...
January 2012
4 posts
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“While online, some people self-disclose or act out more frequently or intensely...”
– Suler, J. (2004). The Online Disinhibition Effect. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, Vol 7(3): 321-326.
Just the abstract. AKA GIFT.
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Topic: Addiction
There may be only 39 working days until I deliver the Untangling the Web book manuscript, but I’m still looking for contributions, stories, links and ideas on a few topics to produce the five exclusive chapters that will join the extended Untangling the Web columns
This week, I’m looking at addiction - one of the many evils levelled against the Web. To what extent can people become...
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I, (Virtual) Narcissus →
LOOK AT ME, say our tweets, photos, tumbls, videos and blogposts. But is our online activity reputation-management, identity play or a reflection of a cultural trend towards an increase in self-reflective, digitally encouraged narcissism?
There’s a great overview of the research on generational shifts in narcissism called Reflecting on narcissism: are young people more self-obsessed than ever...
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[Untangling the Web] The Book →
cross-posted from alekskrotoski.com
Over two billion people around the globe, from Peterborough to Pretoria, from Torquay to Timbuktu, from Amersham to Abu Dhabi, use the Web. There are over 2.5 billion searches for information and insight on Google every day. 800,000 people connect and share on the world’s largest social network, Facebook. And millions of people tell friends, lovers, strangers...
December 2011
6 posts
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Interview: Dr Vaughan Bell (Institute of...
Hot on the heels of Sunday’s School of Life sermon by Baroness Susan Greenfield (the media’s go-to scientist for scaremongering soundbites about the affects of technologies on our neurologies, our cognitions and our attentions), I spoke with Dr Vaughan Bell, the neuropsychologist who testified the opposing view to Greenfield in the 2010 House of Lords debate.
I asked him a few...
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Mind Hacks →
by Vaughan Bell & Tom Stafford.
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Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is... →
Impressive polemic.
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WatchBaroness Susan Greenfield at the BBC for the launch of The Virtual Revolution asking, ‘is the web changing our brains?’
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“What is the potential impact of technology, such
as computer gaming, on the...”
– pdf of the keynote seminar of the all-party group on scientific research in learning and education in the House of Lords in March 2010.
An epic battle between Baroness Susan Greenfield (it’s infantilising our brains) and Dr Vaughan Bell (evidence for increased attention + contextual analysis...
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Searching for the Google Effect on People's Memory →
Coverage of the well-publicised article published by Science 5 August 2011, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertip by B
etsy Sparrow,
Jenny Liu,
and Daniel M. Wegner.
The article itself is behind a paywall, but you can hear the podcast for free.
November 2011
6 posts
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“This article explores teenagers’ practices of social networking in order...”
– Livingstone, S. (2008, June). Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression. New Media & Society, vol 10(3): 393-411.
abstract only. boo.
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“I have defined privacy as the claim of an individual to determine what...”
– Westin, A. F. (2003). Social and Political Dimensions of Privacy. Journal of Social Issues, Vol59(2).
Full text (pdf)
Great overview of the evolution of contemporary concepts of privacy in the West as an artifact of integrating technologies, legislation and cultural shifts. It describes why...
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“Facebook is deeply integrated in users’ daily lives through specific...”
– Here’s one about the same network four years later.
Debatin, B., Lovejoy, J.P., Horn, A-K, Hughes, B.N. (2009). Facebook and Online Privacy: Attitudes, Behaviors, and Unintended Consequences. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Vol 15(1): 83-108.
(full text)
why it was rated as...
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Take This Lollipop →
Clever intervention that takes Facebook data and integrates it into a personalised video about online privacy and its implications.
I’m curious about the frequency of cyberstalking.
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“In this paper we study patterns of information revelation in online social...”
– Gross, R. & Acquisti, A. (2005). Information revelation and privacy in online social networks. In WPES ‘05 Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society. New York: New York.
Full text (.pdf)
Some choice quotes. It’s about “the Facebook”. A...
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1. Notice: Online consumers should be given notice... →
Sheehan, K.B & Hoy, M.G (2000, Spring). Dimensions of privacy concern among online consumers. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Vol. 19(1): 62-73.
The US Federal Trade Commission’s five core principles to guide online content providers’ privacy policies. In 2000.
October 2011
35 posts
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“Similar to a personal Facebook page, a “Living Headstone” archive site contains...”
– Add a QR code, readable by a smartphone, to a granite gravestone.
Living Headstone™ | QR Code Turns Headstone into Interactive Memorial
HT @tamaleaver’s presentation, “The Ends of Online Identity” at IR12 (October 2011, Seattle, WA).
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“…digital technology and global networks are overriding our natural ability...”
– Mayer-Schönberger, V. (2010). Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton University Press.
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Death and social media: what happens to your life... →
Ars Technical outlines what Facebook, MySpace and Twitter do with the information associated with your account after you die.
Published in 2010.
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“Three dimensions regarding digital death were identified.
First dimension...”
– From DigitalDeath.eu, a site inspired by the 2009 paper, “Digital Death” (full text) by researchers in the Design Department at Goldsmiths (University of London) and the Department of Social & Political Sciences (University of Cyprus):
S. Pitsillides,S. Katsikides, M. Conreen....
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Digital Death Day (11 November 2011) →
This is the fourth Digital Death Day organised by this group. It will be held this year in Amsterdam at the TropenMuseum during their Death Matters exhibit.
Death Matters shows how people deal with death in different parts of the world. How they mourn and commemorate: whether privately or openly, soberly or exuberantly, alone or communally. Various forms of leave-taking, mourning and...
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zefrank.com: need some insight on death and... →
Ze Frank, the US web personality, asked for examples of post-mortality commemoration on his blog in March 2010.
He received an incredible flood of personal stories.
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i-shrine →
A BBC Radio 4 documentary from 21 May 2010.
No longer available to listen again. Boo.
You can read the article on the BBC news website, though. Here’s an interesting quote about the psychological value of online shrines:
Doctor Elaine Kasket, a counselling psychologist, has found that a surprising number of messages are written to the deceased as if they are still present and...
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I met Evan Carroll and John Romano, authors of...
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“It was a very strange feeling,” Dana Tonnies, Mac’s mother, told me, describing...”
– Cyberspace When You’re Dead - NYTimes.com
On the death (and digital afterlife) of Mac Tonnies. Featuring @ritajking, who’s written extensively about Mac and digital death here.
HT @josholalia
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“I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun...”
– I love the treatment Cory Doctorow gives to death in the digital age in his 2003 novel Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom.
My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weekly backup reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his niche. I waved good-bye at her back and walked...
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“…to be toaded means to be kicked out, deleted or killed. This is in...”
– Urban Dictionary: toading
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“The Digital Beyond is a blog about your digital existence and what happens to it...”
– The Digital Beyond
I saw the authors of this blog speak at SxSWi this year and interviewed them after their session (to be posted soon).
It’s a fascinating topic and this blog is full of interesting things.
Here’s their list of services that can help you plan for the inevitability.
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Told you I was ill: all about digital death →
from our own jemimakiss & Robbie Clutton, reporting on the Digital Death panel at SxSWi 2011:
You’re dead, your data isn’t: what happens now? 14 March 2011, 9.30am 4 / 5
Digital technology is changing the way we live and changing the way we die. Digital death probably isn’t high up the development list for Facebook, but what happens when a user dies? Who has access to that...
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“Facebook is to introduce a feature allowing members’ profiles to be...”
– Facebook introduces ‘memorial’ pages to prevent alerts about dead members - Telegraph
from 27 October 2009 (I meant 2009, not 2011 as I initially posted. Oops.).