“The dot com boom failed because people didn’t want to buy shit online. They were just talking to each other,” said Douglas Rushkoff in a recent keynote speech at the WebVisions conference in Portland. “Content was never king. Contact was always king.”
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Users for Sale: Has Digital Illiteracy Turned Us Into Social Commodities? - 1 views
mashable.com/...users-products-rushkoff
information_literacy evaluate critical_thinking digitalliteracy programmed markets
shared by David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
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We spoke to Rushkoff about the current state of web culture and his crusade to encourage programming literacy.
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You argue that users are not the true customers of social networks like Facebook. What are the ramifications of this?
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We understand that the job of the person working in the Gap is to sell us clothes.“Usually, the people paying are the customers. So on Facebook, the people paying are marketers.”But we don’t apply this same very basic logic to online spaces. The easiest way to figure out who the customer is in an online space is to figure out who is paying for the thing. Usually, the people paying are the customers.
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We are more likely to use our Facebook profile as a mirror, chalking up its deficiencies to the technology itself. We don’t consider that the ways in which Facebook screws with the way we see ourselves is its function, rather than some random artifact of social networking.
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s this different from TV networks selling commercials against popular shows that they deliver over the airwaves for free?
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But imagine what it would be like if you didn’t know that the evening news was funded primarily by Big Pharma. You would actually believe the stuff that they’re saying. You might even think those are the stories that matter.
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The only thing standing between you and total surveillance is the fact that they don’t yet have the processing capability to mine their data effectively.
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In answer to your question, engaging with people costs us privacy. It always has. I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.
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You warn against the dangers of “selling our friends” by connecting our social graphs to various networks and apps. How does this damage our relationships, even if we’re doing it unwittingly?
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Unwittingly, well, it’s more like when your friends keep inviting you to FarmVille or LinkedIn. When they unwittingly turn over their address book to one of these companies that’s really just in the business of swelling their subscriptions so that they can go have an IPO.
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You advocate “programming literacy” in the online platforms we use every day. How much can the average web user be expected to understand?
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If they don’t know how to make the programs, then I’d at least want them to know what the programs they are using are for. It makes it so much more purposeful. You get much more predictable results using the right technologies for the right jobs.
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I want people to be able to ask themselves, “What does this website want me to do? Who owns it? What is it for?”
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You note how our traditional social contracts (e.g. I can steal anything I want, but I won’t do it out of shame, fear, etc.) break down due to the anonymity and distance of the web. How can we change this and still maintain an open online culture?
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We have an economic operating system based in scarcity — that’s how we create markets — so we don’t have a great way yet of sharing abundant resources.
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rather than getting people to use the web responsibly and intelligently, it may be easier to build networks that treat the humans more responsibly and intelligently. Those of us who do build stuff, those of us who are responsible for how these technologies are deployed, we have the opportunity and obligation to build technologies that are intrinsically liberating — programs that reveal their intentions, and that submit to the intentions of their users.
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There Is No Digital Divide - Technology Review - 1 views
www.technologyreview.com/...there-is-no-digital-divide
digital divide technology Jessica Daniels rheingold
shared by David McGavock on 05 Jun 12
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I think we've all sort of accepted the "digital divide" framework, but there are some real problems with that. First of all, saying there is a "digital divide" presumes a shared understanding of that term and there's not one.
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Given that in the original research, the middle- and upper-classes, whites, and men were more likelyt to have access to technology, those sorts of questions about the characteristics of the "have-nots" just point us to old ways of thinking about class, about race, and about gender."
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My research finds that Black/Latina/o LGBT youth who are homeless - in other words, the very people who should be on the "other side" of so-called the "digital divide," are in fact, quite adept at technology and most have smart phones. They use this technology to survive - to find work, social services, avoid police or report police misconduct.
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Instead of "digital divide," other scholars have talked about "digital fluency," or even "digital entitlements" which I like better.
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I found that while they were very adept at some things (opening multiple browser windows, locating things online quickly), they weren't very good at some other, important tasks. For example, they weren't good at deciphering "cloaked" sites from legitimate ones.
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I'd point to the work of my friend Howard Rheingold and his new book "Net Smart," which is an excellent guide for how to be a digitally fluent user of all the technologies we have available to us now. It's an excellent book and I think the FCC should include it in their plan for training the digital educators going into schools!
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a recent New York Times piece, "Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era" (or, as Gawker put it, "Poor People Are Wasting Time on the Internet!") asserts that while all kids are spending more time with media, those with lower socio-economic status were spending even more of it, and on activities like Facebook that aren't exactly conducive to learning. In other words: even when you give poor people access to technology, they don't know what to do with it! Might as well give a paleolithic tribe access to a chip fab, pffft. Jessie Daniels, Associate Professor of urban public health at Hunter College and CUNY and author of a forthcoming book on Internet propaganda, tweeted her displeasure at the piece. (There's even a Storify of all her comments on it.)
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In a cutthroat world, some Web giants thrive by cooperating - page 3 - 3 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2011021902888_3.html
cooperation corporate google twitter facebook washingtonpost
shared by David McGavock on 20 Feb 11
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employees at Facebook, Google and Twitter work in semiautonomous teams, usually made up of experts from each department: design, programming, marketing, etc.
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"Twitter's growing really quickly, and something that allowed us to do so much with so few people early on was this culture of trust, where you knew people around you were smart and had the best of intentions," Mark Trammell,
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Trammell spends roughly 10 percent of his time helping his colleagues build personal relationships around "things that people are passionate about."