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Djiezes Kraaijst

I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07awareness-t.html

facebook internet intimacy psychology society twitter web

shared by Djiezes Kraaijst on 07 Sep 08 - Cached
  • Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.
  • It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness.
  • Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.
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  • “It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”
  • This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business.
  • Yet Ahan knows that she cannot simply walk away from her online life, because the people she knows online won’t stop talking about her, or posting unflattering photos. She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what’s being said about her. This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world.
  • “These technologies allow you to be much more broadly friendly, but you just spread yourself much more thinly over many more people.”
  • an even more subtle danger: that the sheer ease of following her friends’ updates online has made her occasionally lazy about actually taking the time to visit them in person.
  • Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people.
  • It is also possible, though, that this profusion of weak ties can become a problem. If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships.
  • This rapid growth of weak ties can be a very good thing. Sociologists have long found that “weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems.
  • But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well.
  • Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. Constant online contact had made those ties immeasurably richer, but it hadn’t actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that.
  • Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?
  • He theorized that ape and human brains could manage only a finite number of grooming relationships: unless we spend enough time doing social grooming — chitchatting, trading gossip or, for apes, picking lice — we won’t really feel that we “know” someone well enough to call him a friend. Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average.
  • In 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time.
  • But Seery made a point I heard from many others: awareness tools aren’t as cognitively demanding as an e-mail message. E-mail is something you have to stop to open and assess. It’s personal; someone is asking for 100 percent of your attention. In contrast, ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they’re not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip some.
  • Ambient intimacy becomes a way to “feel less alone,” as more than one Facebook and Twitter user told me.
  • You could also regard the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation
  • It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart.
  • This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives
  • The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world.
    • Djiezes Kraaijst
      Djiezes Kraaijst on 07 Sep 08
       
      cfr: McLuhan: 'the Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis' (1964)
  • In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”
  • Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.
  • he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”
  • Users’ worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends.
  • Zuckerberg, surprised by the outcry, quickly made two decisions. The first was to add a privacy feature to News Feed, letting users decide what kind of information went out.
  • Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it was now like being at a giant, open party filled with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time.
  • the first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends
  • a single page that — like a social gazette from the 18th century — delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around the clock, all in one place. “A stream of everything that’s going on in their lives,”
  • News Feed, a built-in service that would actively broadcast changes in a user’s page to every one of his or her friends
  • Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
Djiezes Kraaijst

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace - 1 views

homes.eff.org/...Declaration-Final.html

1996 barlof cyberspace eff industry internet manifesto www

shared by Djiezes Kraaijst on 07 Sep 08 - Cached
  • These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
  • Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
    • Djiezes Kraaijst
      Djiezes Kraaijst on 07 Sep 08
       
      great quote (barlow, 1996)
  • Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you.
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  • I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us
  • We have no elected government
  • I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.
  • A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>
François Dongier

Speech on Building Britain's Digital Future | Number10.gov.uk - 0 views

www.number10.gov.uk/Page22897

Gordon Brown Institute of web science TBL semanticweb

shared by François Dongier on 22 Mar 10 - Cached
  • A transcript of a speech given by the Prime Minister on Building Britain’s Digital Future in London on 22 March 2010.
  • Underpinning the digital transformation that we are likely to see over the coming decade is the creation of the next generation of the web - what is called the semantic web, or the web of linked data. This next generation web is a simple concept, but I believe it has the potential to be just as revolutionary - just as disruptive to existing business and organisational models - as the web was itself, moving us from a web of managing documents and files to a web of managing data and information - and thus opening up the possibility of by-passing current digital bottlenecks and getting direct answers to direct requests for data and information. It will change fundamentally the way we conduct business - with new enterprises by-passing traditional media communications and governmental organisations: new enterprises spun off from the new data, information and knowledge that flows more freely. And in both the content and delivery of public services the next stage of the web will transform the ability of citizens to tailor the services they need to their requirements, to feedback constantly on their success, to interact with the professionals who deliver them and to put the citizen not the public servant in control. Today I can announce the first funding for the next stage of this research - £30m to support the creation of a new institute, the institute of web science - based here in Britain and working with government and British business to realise the social and economic benefits of advances in the web. It will assemble the best of world scientists and researchers and be headed by Sir Tim Berners Lee, the British inventor of the world wide web - and the leading web science expert Professor Nigel Shadbolt. This will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the semantic web and other emerging web and internet technologies, and ensure that government is taking the right funding decisions to position the UK as a world leader. And we will invite universities and private sector web developers and companies to join this collaborative project.
  • also looking at how the new technologies can open the door to a reinvention of the core policy-making processes and towards a renewal of politics itself.
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  • it will enrich our democracy by giving people new ways of communicating complaining and challenging vested interests.
  • we must use this technology to open up data with the aim of providing every citizen in Britain with true ownership and accountability over the services they demand from government.
  • Building on the outstanding work Sir Tim and Nigel Shadbolt who have been leading on ‘making public data public’, I can now announce that we are determined to go further in breaking down the walled garden of government, using technology and information to provide greater transparency on the workings of Whitehall and give everyone more say over the services they receive.
  • Revitalising our politics, our governance and our democracy means going beyond simply increased openness about previously secret information - it requires the policy-making monopoly of ministers and the civil service to be challenged - where practicable - through a step change in the opportunities for people to engage with and interact with government in its policy proposals.
  • open the door to new ways of enabling people to influence and even decide public policy
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