The World And Its (Imaginary) Friend
Posted on September 11, 2007
Filed Under Business, Web Publishing | Leave a Comment
If you thought it was only on Big Brother that people would (even when sober) claim that someone they had only met ten minutes before was their best friend and they loved them, you need to get out more.
No, not out in the real world! Don’t panic! You need to join a social networking site like FaceParty or MiceSpace. There, everyone will be your friend and you will be everyone else’s friend. You do not need to meet them or speak to them or know who they are, just say, like a child on their first day at school “Can I be your friend?” and they all will. Hurrah!
Oh, but look at this. Apparently, having 27 043 friends is not quite realistic; and thinking that a few lines of text and a blurry photo of a half-dressed creature being sick makes that imaginary person your friend actually signals that you have mental health problems, rather than a flourishing social life.
Dr Will Reader of Sheffield Hallam University has actually made a study of the phenomenon.
Timesonline has this:
Most people have about five close friends and know about 150 people in total, most of them acquaintances with whom they are on nodding terms.Cyber-users have the same number of close friends but many more casual acquaintances. Dr Reader was speaking yesterday about the initial findings into a study of how MySpace and Facebook are changing relationships.
He said that the biggest impact was being experienced in the number of “casual relationships on virtual nodding terms”. Sitting at a computer was no longer a solitary act: the computer could be a social hub bringing people together from all over the world.
“The web was solitary. This is bringing back the social side of human interaction.” But, he said, this had been carried to an extreme by many users who went by quantity rather than quality and had become the trainspotters of the virtual world.
“To have in excess of 1,000 friends is not uncommon,” he said. “It can be a bit like trainspotting. They just want to get as many people on to their list as possible.
“It does upset some people. They start by feeling good that they appear to have made a new friend only to find out that they are simply being added to a list. They’re not wanted for themselves; they’re wanted to extend a list.”
The Enquirer puts it this way:
He confirmed to AFP that all those people who say they are your friends on Facebook and Myspace are actually lying. Playing around with them will not help fill that pitiful, painful, empty void which is your sad lonely soul as you journey onwards towards a death alone, Reader said, or least words to that effect.
Such friends are about the same number of people you would probably meet in real world contact. In the real world you would not count any of them as friends, unless you were really, really drunk.
Humans see face-to-face contact as “absolutely imperative” in building close relationships and that it was “very easy to be deceptive” over the Internet, Reader said.
As a footnote and a warning, Dr Reader used to live alone with a hamster before making his study. He now has 17 327 very close friends and is being treated for nervous exhaustion.
So, do you want to be my friend?
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Lonely Planet, Lonely People
Posted on August 16, 2007
Filed Under Business, Web Publishing | Leave a Comment
In Eleanour Rigby, The Beatles sang about the loneliness of ordinary people:
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from ?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong ?
One place all the hyped social networking and so-called web 2.0 sites would like them to belong is within the realms of their money-making websites. There is the idea that the web links people together, although when a site has more members than most countries, it is hard to fathom how that is actually forming a tight community as opposed to an amorphous mass.
Back in the last century, the last millennium, people in Britain, at least, used to go to pubs to socialise. Again, this was mainly lonely people hoping to meet another lonely person to team up with and share loneliness together. One pub would become popular for a time: would be the place to be seen and then, after a while it would fall out of favour and gradually slide into the category of the place not to be seen dead in.
This means that anyone wanting to make money from this type of site will need to make it fast. Not only will the fickle members swan off to another place as soon as an upstart arrives, but the whole idea of this somewhat artificial pretence of socialising will soon have had its day.
It may be wiser to wait and see what Web 3.0 brings. Web 1.0 was when everything was new and fun and innocent. Web 2.0 is when everyone sees the internet as a moneymaking scheme: the easing-in of the status quo. Perhaps Web 3.0 will be the global police state or a return to a mythical golden age.
This is the current state of play, apparently:-
This precis on Reuters from The Financial Times:
FACEBOOK’S POPULARITY SWELLS
The social networking website Facebook will this week join rivals, MySpace and Bebo, among the UK’s top 20 most popular online destinations. In a ranking to be published by the internet measurement group ComScore, the figures will show that while social networking sites have made the transition from niche concepts to mass appeal, it is taking them much longer to persuade advertisers to follow suit despite the fact that the average rates for online banners on social network websites in the UK are typically 30 percent to 50 percent lower than on internet portals such as Yahoo and MSN. Sceptical advertisers have for instance questioned whether the relatively uncensored natured of social websites are appropriate for their brands.
Business Week has the pros and cons:
Social-networking sites prove more of a distraction than a tool. The inundation of friend requests and insignificant news feeds on sites like Facebook eat up valuable time that could be spent solidifying contacts in person. “The most effective networking is face to face,��? says Stanford business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer. “There’s no substitute for real human contact. It’s less personal online.��?
Plus, sometimes a level of cyber-anonymity is more convenient than total Web exposure. While sites like LinkedIn and others allow old colleagues, acquaintances, and business clients instant access to your contact info, it might be more hassle than help to sift through uncensored blasts from the past. It opens up a Pandora’s box of social-professional ambiguity when Spence-who-used-to-mumble-to-his-stapler from Finance sends you a friend request.
[…]
Facebook’s group-making options allow young and seasoned professionals alike to gather virtually, exchanging ideas, business tips, and industry news. The site’s messaging system and personalized privacy controls make following up on the wine vendor you met at last week’s convention simple and safe—he won’t be able to see those pictures of you dancing on a table at last year’s Christmas party until he accepts your friend request.
Similarly, LinkedIn’s clean-lined, corporate-looking site offers opportunities to make new business contacts. Bright-eyed young professionals can search for people using industry keywords such as “investment banking��? or “newspaper.��? The site then offers the option of sending these contacts messages.
The Telegraph has this warning:
John Delaney, analyst at technology consultancy Ovum, said: “What we saw, particularly after News Corp took MySpace over, was that the average age of MySpace users went up. It seems to be losing its youth appeal.” Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bought MySpace for $580m (£290m) in 2005.
“You have the feedback areas on these sites and you see a lot of comments saying, ‘We like you guys because you haven’t sold out like MySpace’,” Mr Delaney said.
“You are getting a lot of younger people who are shunning MySpace because it is seen to be part of the establishment.”
If you want to see what people who are supposed to be at the forefront of the web think about all this, there is an excellent article at .net Magazine.
For the moment, and from the .net Magazine article, let someone who has been at the leading edge of the internet for years have the last word:
Activist
Oxblood Ruffin
HacktivismoSocial networking, like Web 2.0, is a great big marketing wank. Social networks have had quite a few names over the years. “Affinity groups” is one term that comes to mind. That terminology isn’t so offensive. It didn’t, at least as far as I can tell, try to suck users into participating in a marketing plan. The best social networks are common interest listservs or boutique wikis. The last thing I would do would be to hang out on MySpace hoping to make a new friend. OK, maybe I’d try to promote something on MySpace to make a buck, but I wouldn’t fool myself into thinking that it wasn’t just another advertising medium. Social networks are the new AdWords, or maybe they’re just the new grey. It’s so hard keeping up.
Oxblood Ruffin is the founder of Hacktivismo, and is an active campaigner against web censorship.
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By Your Data Shall Ye Be Known
Posted on August 8, 2007
Filed Under Politics, News | Leave a Comment
Some years ago, it was claimed that although governments gathered a lot of information about their citizens, they did little with it, whereas criminals or private operators collected small amounts of data, but used it very precisely.
The idea was, don’t worry about the lumbering leviathan of the state, but keep an eye on the rogue individuals.
The UK state proved its competence some months ago, when it managed to put all the private data it had collected about junior doctors on the internet for everyone to see. It claimed it was a security breach, but, like the current foot and mouth disaster, it was actually plain old incompetence.
Every time you fill in an electronic or paper form, buy something with a credit card, answer questions on the telephone or browse the internet, data is collected about you which could be used in evidence against you in court, or perhaps just lose you your job or house.
Here is something interesting from The Register. Speaking about all the minor details of our life which leave an “electronic footprint” which could be used against us, it says:
But obviously there has to be some kind of limit on the process. A cop with a normal warrant from a judge - fine. A spook with a secret warrant from a politician - well, maybe. But what about a repo man? Or a cop or spook with no oversight, who can track you merely because he feels like it, or because a computer has profiled you as dodgy in some way, or some lying nark of theirs has fingered you as a terrorist?
What about when you find it more expensive to get a mortgage, because you use the bus a lot and the lenders decide that bus users are more likely to default on loans? What if, in general, poor people began to find everything more expensive as a result of burgeoning databases?
What about when private detectives buy or hack databases, and search them for individuals? Uh-oh. Those guys can be working for anybody - your hateful ex-spouse, your mad bunny-boiling ex-lover, your business rivals, that guy you got in a flame war with last month. May be they are that guy. Bad news.
[…]
Arguably, the spooks at MI5 have busted a lot of these guidelines in recent times, when they told American spies that Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, and Abdallah el-Janoudi had left the UK for the Gambia and that they had previously been arrested in possession of parts for a car bomb.
This was not actually true at all, and - as it turned out - definitely a case of transferring data abroad without adequate protection. The men were snatched by US agents shortly after arrival in the Gambia and readied for transport to a secret holding facility in Afghanistan.
In the event, MI5 partially redeemed themselves by getting the two British nationals among the group released before this could happen; but the other pair were held in secret jails and then Guantanamo Bay for years.
Do we anticipate an MI5 prosecution under the Data Protection Act? Perhaps not. We’ll have to hope that the Information Commissioner does better with some of the other database miscreants currently on the loose.
As always, the wonderful systems of safeguards always break down due to some small human error or transgression or lackadaisical attitude.
When the UK government introduces ID cards, expect everything about your personal life to be available to anyone, perhaps for a small fee. As for anyone else holding data on you, they normally put it in a skip or dustbin, so it is free for all.
Once you have read this, erase your computer’s memory, eat any notes you have made on paper and emigrate to a country with no technology. Unless, of course, the police marksmen are already outside your door, in which case, try saying this: “OK, guv, it’s a fair cop, I’ll come quietly”.
They will probably shoot you anyway, but it’s worth a try.
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