Co-authored by Doris C. Rusch, Ph.D., assistant professor for game design, and Anuradha Rana, MFA, MA, instructor in digital cinema at DePaul University.
The darkness is closing in around you. You know what to do to make it stop, to keep the rising anxiety at bay -- you perform the ritual that has become so familiar, it's almost a part of you. A ritual that is both cure and curse. Curse, because it keeps you stuck in a labyrinth without exit. You don't want to be stuck anymore, compelled to go through the same motions over and over again. But the alternative is unthinkable, scary. Still, doing nothing will keep you trapped in this cycle forever. You could try to break out. What if you faced and endured the fear? You stop, wait. Darkness engulfs you. It sounds like an army of tentacle monsters is getting ready to have you for dinner. But it's just an illusion. The danger feels real, but it isn't. If you don't give in to the urge of performing the ritual, a way out becomes possible -- a light appears somewhere in the darkness. It points towards an exit. You approach it. You leave.
You just beat "Through Darkness," a video game about obsessive-compulsive disorder. More importantly, you just experienced the struggle associated with resisting an overwhelming urge. The game can only be won by not giving in to that urge (just like OCD cannot be overcome by continued obsessive, compulsive behavior). "Through Darkness" is one of four short games that we -- a team of students at DePaul University in Chicago and Doris C. Rusch as game design faculty, producer and designer -- made as part of the interactive documentary, For the Records. The other games deal with an eating disorder, bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder. For the Records is intended to make the lived experience of mental health issues tangible to a broad audience in order to increase understanding and alleviate isolation and stigma.
While there are strong arguments for the games' unique potential as vehicles for a deep, experiential understanding, it is our experience that these kinds of mental health games tend to polarize. As seen with Rusch's previous games, "Elude" (a game about depression) and "Akrasia" (a game about substance abuse), the discourse around what games are supposed to be and what they are allowed to model is complex and filled with strong opinions.
How games can improve a dialogue on mental health?
Many social problems surrounding mental health issues are founded in insufficient understanding of the fullness of experience (not merely the cognitive understanding of symptoms or physio-psychological mechanisms). Lack of such an experiential understanding contributes to stigma and often burdens relationships between people with mental health issues and those without. For friends, family and providers of people struggling with mental illness, this can complicate the difficulties of constructively dealing with aspects of the disorders, leading to feelings of helplessness, frustration and anger, and fueling the experience of stigmatization, isolation and disconnectedness by persons with mental illness.
Games are excellent tools to enable embodied, first-hand experiences, as renowned educational game researcher James Paul Gee states in his book What Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. No other medium allows you to truly experience life from somebody else's perspective, to take on new identities and explore what the world feels like, walking in someone else's shoes. That is because game rules create realities. By submitting herself to the rules of the game, making choices and having to deal with the consequences of these choices, the player gains first-hand, lived, embodied experience of the world that the game models, and her role within it. This is fundamentally different from experiences other media provide, which only allow you to witness someone else's choices and consequences. While we might feel empathy for someone struggling with depression in a movie, we may remain oblivious to the forces that bind the protagonist to the bed. We see the symptoms, but not the sources.
Games are different in that regard. Instead of describing: "X just didn't have the energy to get up," games can take the ability of movement away from the player. You might want to get out of bed, but you just can't. Willpower has nothing to do with it, which is an important realization particularly for friends and relatives of persons who are depressed.
Why mental health games irritate and what we can do about it.
As powerful as they can be, games like these also have a tendency to irritate. They provoke, disturb and trouble players for various reasons. One is that they rub against the expectations we have of games as a medium dedicated to our entertainment and instant gratification. Games ought to be fun, right? Don't we play them to escape our meager, little lives, our human limitations? Don't we embrace athletic, resourceful Lara Croft precisely because she makes us feel hardcore and powerful? Why would anyone want to play a game that puts you in the position of someone with a debilitating mental illness?
It's this expectation (that games are supposed to facilitate power fantasies) that keeps the medium from growing up, from expanding its emotional range, and from taking its place amongst other works of art that tackle the whole bandwidth of the human condition. The only counterargument to "But mental health games aren't fun!" is don't play them. AAA mainstream games won't go away because of them. The existence of Ulysses did not prevent the writing of 50 Shades of Grey, either. No reason to hate.
But games about the experience of mental illness can irritate for other, more complicated reasons -- their rules model "what it feels like." They embrace the subjectivity of someone's lived experience and might thus portray this experience as more desperate or hopeless as the friends, relatives or therapists want to believe. Of course, it's not an objective fact that meeting friends is impossible during depression. Believing that there are effective strategies to catapult oneself out of a depressive phase and overcome feelings of hopelessness is an important part of recovery.
It's equally important, however, to accept that it might not feel that way to those who are depressed. No one says it should stop with this acceptance, but it would be helpful if any kind of dialogue about mental illness, let alone therapeutic process, began with as much of a shared understanding of the experience as possible. There's value in acknowledging these inner truths, as desperate as they may seem, rather than denying them. We can go from there together, as collaborators on the road to recovery, rather than perpetuators of patient/provider misunderstandings and power imbalances.
Another source of doubt about these types of video games is the question about the games' "correctness" and the adequacy of their modeled experiences. How do we know that what they make us feel is an accurate representation of what, for example, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorder or bipolar disorder feel like? Both are valid concerns. As we see it, the gameplay experience is always a collaborative effort between designer and player. Without the willingness to take the game seriously (any game, for that matter), its potential emotional impact will be diminished.
Also, as with any medium, the factors that enable personal resonance are complex and are located on the side of the medium just as much as on the side of the recipient. The game might "hit the spot" for one player but not for another -- or it may resonate today but not tomorrow. There's no guarantee that whatever experience is inscribed within the rules and mechanics of the game and its audio-visual design, is retrieved by the player.
Embracing subjectivity of embodied experience
Although there will always be deviations and different interpretations, the range of experiences afforded by a game is not random. Why should we be less inclined to live with a certain ambiguity in games when we expect it as a mark of high quality in other media?
As for the "correctness" of the inner truths mental health games model (regardless of what players experience when they are playing them): Obviously, there are always abstractions. To claim that one could model the whole complexity of living with a mental illness would be an irresponsible overstatement.
One can only focus on salient aspects of it. Are these salient aspects true "across the board"? Probably not. While there are common denominators, the misdiagnoses of mental health issues point towards the diversity of their subjective instantiations. Everyone's depression, OCD, bipolar disorder, eating disorder -- you name it -- has a different flavor. Does that mean any attempt at understanding and modeling other people's experiences is doomed to fail?
Not at all.
Two things were important to us when we designed the games for For the Records: one, including people with lived experience in the design process. All games in For the Records have been produced either with people in leading roles who have lived experience of the mental health disorders portrayed in the game, or in close collaboration with them. For the latter, there was a constant dialogue and exchange between us -- as designers and subject matter experts. Feedback to play tests was the main guideline for design iterations. Doing their experiences justice seemed like the best way to ensure the games' integrity and phenomenological accuracies.
The second important thing to promote understanding and ease players' concerns about the authenticity of the modeled experience is to be transparent about this subjective design approach: to communicate clearly that each game is only one voice from a polyphone choir that is more or less dedicated to the same song.
Without the individual voices, the choir would not exist. It's worth listening, and it's worth leveraging the unique experiential potentials of video games to make these voices heard.
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Friday, April 18, 2014
Why the Future Belongs to Google -- Part II
If you have read the first part of this series, I have written about the strengths and foibles of two enormous tech giants -- Apple and Microsoft. In the final part of this series, I am turning my attention to another giant and delving deep into the big G.
Big as a Galaxy
They're responsible for a sixth of Korea's economy, played the protagonist in the Miracle on the Han River, tower above giants in an elite group of conglomerates called chaebols; and if you happen to visit Seoul, the name 'Samsung' is a leitmotif and its influence, epic.
Most people do a double take when they're told that a brand we associate most with phones and televisions was also the primary contractor for the world's tallest building, are the second largest shipbuilder around, fancy aeronautics and weaponry and own a theme park to round it off. Reminds you of some sovereign ruler? This is Samsung, and its $288 billion empire is huge, multifarious and flourishing.
Samsung electronics is the crowning jewel of the Samsung group, a powerful arm which has earned it high praise, immense recognition and multiple billions. It employs more than 370,000 people and prides itself on being the world's largest maker of LCD screens and mobile phones. Founded as a trading company, Samsung forged its legend through the Korean War and a prolonged period of economic turmoil to become the titan that it is today.
Their rise to prominence in the consumer electronics segment has been accentuated by some stellar mobile devices they've produced. When no smartphone could hold a candle to the mighty iPhone, Samsung's Galaxy SII got heads turning with its brilliant execution of an Android OS which was still nascent. It was fast, bright and asserted that the world will not be dominated by just one company's ideas. Following it up with an even more imperious Galaxy SIII a year later, Samsung really took the bull by its horns. While the competition was still learning the ropes of creating truly great devices, Apple, dented by Samsung's increasing prowess, took the Koreans to the courtroom to ban handsets, dictate interfaces and allege theft. It wound up to be a vicious, protracted battle fought with such ferocity that at one point, the judge held up an iPad and a Galaxy Tab above her head for a Samsung attorney to tell them apart. He couldn't.
Yes Samsung's devices changed their profile radically in the wake of the iPhone because they had to compete with an entirely new animal. The iPhone fired everyone's imagination when it came out and continues to inspire designs even today, but that's perfectly alright; they're inspired, not ripped off. Samsung's Galaxy line is their interpretation of the smartphone, just like the iPhone is Apple's. If Apple wants to blur the line between inspiration and copying, well I am afraid, they themselves owe the court an explanation for a few new iOS 7 features then.
Samsung has already paid Apple more than a billion dollars in 'damages' and if Apple has their way, Samsung will have to shell out a couple more billions. Notwithstanding the steady courtroom, jibes, Apple still continues to ink deals with Samsung in the boardroom. Irony abounds!
Still, Samsung has its own problems, and they're not about the megapixels in their next camera.
People inside Samsung describe a state of crisis, abetted by a persistent fear that the company might lose everything at any moment. There are no breaks to celebrate wins; there's only what's next. The workplace is run by martinets. It's normal to see employees bow to their superiors. With little power vested in small teams, innovation entails going through a labyrinthine hierarchy to get approvals, and yet being coerced into rushing a product to the market, even if it's not truly first-rate, just like the unwieldy Galaxy Gear.
Never known for producing top-tier applications, Samsung has lately been panned for choking phones with slipshod apps that are, at best, show boats. Truly well designed, practical interfaces have been regular fair in organizations like Apple and Google. Samsung though is either yet to hire those developers or give them the laissez-faire to write elegant code. While an iPhone 5s or a Nexus 5 will never be manufactured ingenuously in Apple or Google, their operating system is coded to the T by the Americans. It's an open secret the installed software creates experiences; hardware is just a vessel to host it. Samsung puts together probably the best hardware available but the same can't be said for the software they push. Looking into the crystal ball, they want to ship devices with a home-grown operating system, creating a seamless experience for the user and maybe forgoing Google's Android in time. It is a far-fetched idea, one that is still a reverie, but first Bada and now Tizen are determined to get a foot in the door.
One of the people behind Samsung's new-fangled focus is David Eun, a Korean-American executive who has worked at AOL and Google. In a stroke of genius, he suggested that some top Samsung executives go round Silicon Valley and explore software's polestar.
The road trip proved illuminating. Samsung decided a base in Silicon Valley was in order if it truly wanted to compete with software giants.
Lee Kun-hee did not take long to execute perhaps his most ambitious move yet; trying to bring a bit of the Silicon Valley culture to Samsung. A 10-story building geared towards research, sprouting in the tony San Jose, a bold accelerator program and a little startup ethos are signs of things to come. They welcome the fading puritanism in the Korean powerhouse, and underpins that Samsung could really be onto what they've painted on a wall in their upcoming 1.1 million square feet office -- "The Next Big Thing."
"OK Google!"
This company has a canny knack of knowing where you are, what you're about to do next, when you leave for that meeting and for the club later in the evening.
It's extraordinary that a service which occupies so much mind share uses a an absolutely stark homepage. What seems like brilliant design now was actually born out of its creator's thirst for express searches and some ineptitude at HTML. Early tests on the website had users gawking at their screens, waiting for the page to load, which it already had, seconds ago. Simplicity is a feature and limited knowledge, a latent advantage.
What this spawned, over the next few years, was the true democratization of the Internet. As with most things, we did not know we needed better search before it became indispensable. We did not know that threaded conversations were better than disjointed emails. We wished for, but never knew that cars might seriously be driven by computers in a not so distant future.
This is Google. By their own proclamation, they do "cool stuff that matters" and prefer not being evil, a claim validated when they rent goats instead of lawn mowers to trim weed at the Googleplex, in an activity they say is both "cute" and "low-carbon."
It might not be best product possible when Google releases it, but they will iterate and hone it so quickly that version 1.0 would soon become a relic. The sheer speed and tenacity with which Google moves to augment functionalities and simplify interfaces is a study in itself. Every now and then, when you open Gmail, YouTube or Search itself, a revised look or a fresh feature appears, dissolves without a trace and cumulatively improves the quality of the service. Gmail was infact famously kept in beta even after it had been widely adopted. Chrome too, has quietly been through thirty-four iterations. Its innards have been tweaked and fine-tuned for an experience which Internet Explorer, Safari or Firefox aren't capable of, despite a huge head start.
With Google, change is constant and happens fast; within two years Android has gone from clunky to elegant, Maps have been redesigned from the ground up, Drive, with peerless pricing has truly arrived, and good old search just keeps getting smarter.
Continuous improvement is precisely what separates the companies that stay relevant from those which don't. There's hardly any room for slack in organizations which are truly committed to their cause. People ask, 'Why fix it if it isn't broken?' To which I say, 'Why wait for it to break?' Why can't we honestly assess ourselves and work on our weaknesses? Didn't we learn that prevention is better than cure?
Design -- changing it before it breaks
Traditionally, Google was never known for excellent software or hardware design. That honour was always Apple's to enjoy. The summer of 2011 however, was going to wreck the status quo. Within a week of taking over as CEO, Larry Page got together the people in command and presented a vision of a revamped Google which is so delightful that searching for something seemed more like doing magic than using technology, one where all apps look consistent and speak the same design language. He called it "One Beautiful Google." They did not appoint a Jony Ive. Instead, they gave free rein to design leads and their teams to collaborate and concoct what they feel would appeal to the user. There were no design 'standards' to conform to. There was just an appeal -- to make it great.
Google's designers employed an enduring design trend called the card. These little white boxes of information are designed to serve up nuggets of information, display items of importance and strip away distracting gradients. Carrying neat typography and sharp icons, cards soon became a dominant design motif and made their way to Google+, Google Now and even Google Glass.
Always strutting its data-driven efforts, Google has been known to examine traffic logs to find out which of its 41 shades of blue garner the most clicks on the search results page. A rather progressive analysis of user data was carried out to design Gmail's new compose window which was going to sit in a corner instead of overlaying the inbox view. Designers burrowed into logs to grasp the average length of sentences and arrive at the right size of the window. They also realized that most people never used to format text, so they hid all those buttons for formatting inside one single button. Neat.
That Google really empowered its designers to create something new came to the fore during the inception of the intelligent mobile assistant Google Now. The key technologies for accomplishing this were well in place. What wasn't, was a way to articulate the reams of dynamic information. Here for the first time in Google's history, designers determined how a product would work. Teams from search, mapping and the likes worked together, prototyped and polished what turned out to be a truly remarkable interface for providing answers when you need them.
Google's approach to beautiful design is a company-wide thrust which is also rubbing off on Android and Chrome OS. The Chromebook Pixel is a another shining example of stellar industrial design with a price to match. The immensely popular Nexus family of devices on the other hand, is proof that good-looking, cutting edge devices can be sold at very attractive prices.
The design revolution at Google is real. There was never a better time to be a designer at Google.
Android -- it came, it saw, it conquered
The world's most used mobile operating system, loved by millions and the sole reason why a certain fruit company is bleeding. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin set out to acquire Android, Eric Schmidt wasn't even in the know. Andy Rubin sold it off at a price so low that it has never been revealed.
It was one of those acquisitions which Google makes every week and would have probably gone unnoticed had it not made it big. The earliest version of Android was an experiment, a callow project, whose potential no one fully understood. HTC Hero, the first Android powered smartphone looked exactly like one of those devices from the time which stood up to the mighty iPhone only to be humiliated. Only a few sagacious minds said that Android could at least make a mark if not a crater. What Android did- created a crater, invited everyone to contribute to the party and presented free desserts to the rest of the world. Android advanced at breakneck speed, its features multiplying with every release and optimizations coming in thick and fast. Geeks loved its openness, Symbian users went gaga over the fluidity, iPhone users were hard to convert, but secretly admired the ability to customize a phone. Google knew it needed a Herculean effort to match the eloquence of iOS, let alone surpass it. Eventually, Android dethroned iOS in spectacular manner. The fledgling software, came of age; from a frail 1.5 Cupcake to the now mature 4.4.2 KitKat, and the difference between the two is like night and day.
Yes, the fragmentation issue is unsettling. It hurt the Android of yore terribly. Moving forward, a bit more benevolence from device manufacturers in issuing timely updates has greatly mellowed the din against the biggest F word for Android. Moreover, the latest version of Android is designed to run smoothly even on lower-end devices, bolstering its endeavor to have everyone on the same page and ease development.
Today Android represents the wide gamut of opportunities present in gadgets that had long been accepted as being far removed from computing. With Android Wear, Google is making a serious foray into wearable computers. Moto 360, running on Wear, looks like someone has finally cracked the smartwatch after several failed attempts. Expect to be notified of heavy traffic, unaccomplished fitness goals or cab reservations at a flick of the wrist. It won't take long to erect a sizable app selection for wearable tech given Google's affinity for open-source development. More importantly, unlike with Android, Google wouldn't have to work its tail off to stay ahead of the curve; it just created the curve. Android Wear gives it a real shot at transforming more electric gadgets into electronic ones.
What Google has created from Android is unmatched. They have shaped a malleable operating system which is free for all and can be installed on everything from refrigerators to game consoles. Everything is tied into one giant ecosystem and controlled from simple gestures or voice commands. That is one big inroad into obtaining the keys to the future.
Having their cake and eating it too
While Google strives to sharpen existing products, it never loses the foresight to work on some completely offbeat projects which might have no connection with their current line of businesses. Called 'moonshot' projects by Page and conceived at the clandestine Google X Labs, this is where Google aims to generate truly disruptive ideas. Google Glass, driver-less cars, robots and internet delivery via balloons are dogged about creating reality from fiction. They are harbingers of tomorrow. Thermostats, drones, watches -- seemingly humble devices are being thrown into the web of boundless power. They are a peek into the future -- crazy ideas which could be called brilliant inventions in hindsight. As Internet companies like Amazon and Google start infiltrating markets with tangible products, it is becoming clear that they want to interact with customers at a more personal level. This isn't just organizing information and making it easily accessible, it's much more.
When the air conditioners and ovens in our households finally start talking to our mobile devices, it wouldn't be a battle for supremacy between a Hitachi or a Siemens but instead between companies whose customers are connected to the Internet. It is an opportunity for anyone to grab, yet very few tech companies seem genuinely interested. Imagine asking your self-driven car to open the door to your house, ignite the fireplace, set off ambient lighting and park itself in the garage when you return home from a busy day at work. Sounds like a ton of convenience, but in Google's world, we're barely scratching the surface of technological dexterity.
Google knows when to acquire a company and when to retire an existing service. The Nest acquisition was perfectly timed. Motorola's acquisition did not exactly turn out to be a money-spinner, but it did give them rights to an enviable dossier of patents which won't be leaving their hands even after Lenovo overtakes Motorola. Likewise, it is swift when it comes to shutting down services which never really took off or are no longer relevant, allowing them to focus on stuff that really matters.
For a company whose revenues have grown multiple folds on the back of targeted advertising across all its services, it is but natural that at some point, these had to begin feeling intrusive. The adage goes 'If you're not paying for a product, you are the product being sold'. Truth is, ads have been here since before the dawn of electronic media and are here to stay. Commercial breaks have been fed to us since time immemorial. Brands pay millions every year for a few seconds of presence at the Superbowl. The only difference between online and offline advertising is that the former can be made relevant to each user. Therein, lies the key to making ads likable. An example -- if a search for a 'Blue striped polo' throws up sponsored results from e-commerce websites where I have a history of making purchases and am inclined to again, ads are helping me out and I am all in. However, if the sponsored results are sprinkled with bleak, obscure websites which I've never heard of and which can't guarantee good service, the chorus against advertising will just get shriller. Tailor ads to really be helpful, make them more personal and meaningful, and attitudes will change.
At the moment, Google is hard at work to make our lives easier, more connected and rather enjoyable. This has always been a company with a proclivity towards the human touch to keep its customers smiling. This becomes evident with those clever easter eggs, well-timed doodles for very occasion and impassioned product videos; the one which tells the story of a reunion of two childhood friends separated during the partition of India and Pakistan really warms the cockles of the heart.
There are many things which sets Google apart from its contemporaries. Beneath it's facade of a crusading Silicon Valley giant, it has got happy (and well-fed) employees which make it happen. It fosters innovation and has been continuously rated as one of the best places to work for. Despite an enviable suite of services Google is more than just a sum of its parts. It understands the power in people and their potential impact on technology like no one else.
It is often said that on the Internet, nothing is too big. Everything eventually crumbles and makes way for new order. But what if one held the keys to the future and the resources to start working on it today. That is Google, and the future belongs to them.
Mudit is an engineer, analyst and writer. Register for the soon to be launched ProsePot.com
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Can You Follow Too Many On Twitter?
Scores of books and blogs explain the value of following people on Twitter. But does there come a point when you are following one too many?
How do you manage the relationships between the people you follow and the tweets they write? Do you feel guilty that you won't see everyone's tweets? What tools do you use to manage your relationships; and does the tool matter?
I asked these questions to seven Twitter users who collectively follow 1.9 million people and are followed by over 3 million.
These are influencers. Some of them tweet nonstop, including automated tweets while they sleep; and others tweet when the mood strikes. While their patterns and frequencies differ, they are united by following tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
I thought you'd enjoy reading their responses...
Britt Michaelian (@BrittMichaelian)
follows 38,800, followed by 102,000
The conversations that I have on Twitter usually arise out of attending chats, reading blog posts, or if I happen to check in on a stream to see what someone is sharing.
I am pretty good at responding to tweets, but if I am not able to, I at least try to go back and click 'favorite' so that followers know that I saw their tweet. I am also a big believer in a retweet for a retweet so when someone RTs my tweets, I like to check out their stream to see if there is anything interesting to share with my followers.
Twitter lists are like Google+ circles. The list feature is a great way to categorize people by interest. I have lists for specific groups or people in my network. So, when I am looking to connect with literary agents (like I was this morning) I will check in with that list to see what they are talking about and if there is anything that I would like to share.
I like to follow people who follow me who are writers, artists, journalists, people who share common interests. I check out just about everyone who follows me if I have time. I unfollow if they send spam or inappropriate DMs or if they promote their own content too much in the stream. I unfollow if they promote weight loss or get rich quick schemes. I also use Manage Flitter to unfollow people who are not active.
Because I use Twitter as a way to meet and connect with new people, why not follow a lot of people? I don't understand celebrities and people who only follow a few hundred people. That just feels so rude and elitist. How can you tweet with people on Twitter and not check out their profile to see who they are and follow a few of them?
Twitter is a big party and, as long as you play by the rules and use good manners, you deserve to be included!
Tools used: Twitter.com, Manage Flitter
Jessica Northey (@JessicaNorthey)
follows 87,500, followed by 586,000
I treat Twitter like TV and radio stations. Depending on my mood depends what I watch and listen. Having ADHD, I've trained myself over the years to look through stuff fast and hyper focus. I see through spam and just regular shouts. Hashtags help me discern.
Sometimes I play Twitter roulette and look at everything to determine whether to observe or respond.
In the beginning I followed everybody back and tried to just follow people who were following things I was interested in. I would do it a little differently now. Over on Google+, where I have 1.4 million followers, I only follow 500. On Instagram, I have 124,000 followers and I follow 1,200.
I use lists and hashtags to listen. I have nearly 100 lists -- and most are private.
I try to respond and talk to as many people as possible. I am sure there are other ways to make it all work. I use platforms differently and they fit into my lifestyle. As you can tell from my 150,000+ tweets, 80% are conversational, 15% are about the #CMchat hashtag, and 5% express my tomfoolery.
Tools used: Twitter.com, TweetDeck
Calvin Lee (@MayhemStudios)
follows 94,500; followed by 89,000
I don't feel bad that I don't get to see everyone's tweet. That the nature of Twitter. I try to reply to everyone but can't always. I don't follow everyone back. I go through nightly to see who has followed me and, if I want to follow them back, I check out their profile and stream.
I love Twitter lists. I have a couple lists that I look at. I don't look at my regular Twitter stream. I have people on the list that I usually talk to, admire, and assorted news channels.
Tools used: Twitter.com
Aaron Lee (@AskAaronLee)
follows 127,000, followed by 473,000
Back in 2009 no one knew who I was and I knew no one other than a bunch of my college friends. I had to start following a large group of people and engage with them. I didn't want to limit myself. People started following back and engaging back with me.
That is where it really took off for me and I've continued to engage with many and built closer relationships with them on Facebook too.
I try my best to respond to everyone. Most of the time I'll respond to tweets at the moment, but I also use Social Engage to only show me tweets that need responses. Social Engage has a feature that will show only replies. That way I won't feel bad for missing people's tweets. I think I see 90% of all the tweets sent to me and I'll respond to most of them.
I would tweet if there wasn't a list feature but I'd probably be more of a promoter than engaging with my followers.
On following many: You can either wait to be followed or start following relevant people first.
Tools used: Twitter.com, Social Engage
Ted Coine (@TedCoine)
follows 316,000, followed by 342,000
I follow just about everyone who follows me, so I miss a TON - even mentions, unfortunately (that started at about 200k people). I don't look at my phone when with a client or at meals, so hours will pass when everything just slips by. It's the ephemeral nature of social, and I just have to hope it doesn't alienate people.
I love working off lists to manage the volume. I keep making new ones! My most general is called The Circle. It has over a thousand people which is why it's my favorite.
I don't comprehend people who find some folks more important or worthwhile than others because of fame. Didn't we all get over that in high school? People fascinate me - all sorts of people. My Mom isn't famous but she's more interesting than most of Hollywood or the faculty of Harvard.
Tools used: HootSuite, Echofon
Martin Zwilling (@StartupPro)
follows 467,000, followed by 726,000
The reason for following people is to let them know that you exist, you care, and that following them allows them to send you a direct message.
Every business and every consultant should try to follow all their customers, to get feedback, and follow all prospective customers, to stay a step ahead of competitors.
It's just another way that businesses foster other businesses, and everyone wins.
Tools used: TweetDeck
Jonah Lupton (@JonahLupton)
follows 809,000, followed by 738,000
For the first five years I tweeted, I didn't use lists -- which meant it was basically a 1-way outgoing conversation. It was very hard for me to engage with anyone since my feed was full of people I didn't know.
I follow about 500 new accounts every day. I prefer following people interested in fitness but I'm quickly running out of ways to find more.
Lists enable me to curate my timeline with people to respond. Lists allow me to see tweets from the people I truly care about the most and want to interact with more.
I follow lots of people because it's a way to get noticed. People are more likely to follow me if I follow them first. At the end of the day, Twitter is a marketing tool so having more followers does create a more valuable resource for me.
Tools used: Twitter.com
As for me, tweeting at @AriHerzog, I used to auto-follow everyone and it was so noisy I unfollowed everyone. Looking back over my years of tweeting, I flip-flopped every year because I wanted to follow more but I knew that following more meant I would see less.
I used to be the person scoffed by Britt. Last year, I followed about 15% of everyone who followed me. I had lists (both my own that I curated and others' that I subscribed to) but I never correlated following someone to listing someone. It was always this or that.
I started 2014 with a desire to embrace chaos and to find order. Martin's and Jonah's perspectives changed me -- and in recent weeks, I began following more and more.
And you?
Do you think you follow too many? Or might you follow too little?
How do you manage the relationships between the people you follow and the tweets they write? Do you feel guilty that you won't see everyone's tweets? What tools do you use to manage your relationships; and does the tool matter?
I asked these questions to seven Twitter users who collectively follow 1.9 million people and are followed by over 3 million.
These are influencers. Some of them tweet nonstop, including automated tweets while they sleep; and others tweet when the mood strikes. While their patterns and frequencies differ, they are united by following tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
I thought you'd enjoy reading their responses...
Britt Michaelian (@BrittMichaelian)
follows 38,800, followed by 102,000
The conversations that I have on Twitter usually arise out of attending chats, reading blog posts, or if I happen to check in on a stream to see what someone is sharing.
I am pretty good at responding to tweets, but if I am not able to, I at least try to go back and click 'favorite' so that followers know that I saw their tweet. I am also a big believer in a retweet for a retweet so when someone RTs my tweets, I like to check out their stream to see if there is anything interesting to share with my followers.
Twitter lists are like Google+ circles. The list feature is a great way to categorize people by interest. I have lists for specific groups or people in my network. So, when I am looking to connect with literary agents (like I was this morning) I will check in with that list to see what they are talking about and if there is anything that I would like to share.
I like to follow people who follow me who are writers, artists, journalists, people who share common interests. I check out just about everyone who follows me if I have time. I unfollow if they send spam or inappropriate DMs or if they promote their own content too much in the stream. I unfollow if they promote weight loss or get rich quick schemes. I also use Manage Flitter to unfollow people who are not active.
Because I use Twitter as a way to meet and connect with new people, why not follow a lot of people? I don't understand celebrities and people who only follow a few hundred people. That just feels so rude and elitist. How can you tweet with people on Twitter and not check out their profile to see who they are and follow a few of them?
Twitter is a big party and, as long as you play by the rules and use good manners, you deserve to be included!
Tools used: Twitter.com, Manage Flitter
Jessica Northey (@JessicaNorthey)
follows 87,500, followed by 586,000
I treat Twitter like TV and radio stations. Depending on my mood depends what I watch and listen. Having ADHD, I've trained myself over the years to look through stuff fast and hyper focus. I see through spam and just regular shouts. Hashtags help me discern.
Sometimes I play Twitter roulette and look at everything to determine whether to observe or respond.
In the beginning I followed everybody back and tried to just follow people who were following things I was interested in. I would do it a little differently now. Over on Google+, where I have 1.4 million followers, I only follow 500. On Instagram, I have 124,000 followers and I follow 1,200.
I use lists and hashtags to listen. I have nearly 100 lists -- and most are private.
I try to respond and talk to as many people as possible. I am sure there are other ways to make it all work. I use platforms differently and they fit into my lifestyle. As you can tell from my 150,000+ tweets, 80% are conversational, 15% are about the #CMchat hashtag, and 5% express my tomfoolery.
Tools used: Twitter.com, TweetDeck
Calvin Lee (@MayhemStudios)
follows 94,500; followed by 89,000
I don't feel bad that I don't get to see everyone's tweet. That the nature of Twitter. I try to reply to everyone but can't always. I don't follow everyone back. I go through nightly to see who has followed me and, if I want to follow them back, I check out their profile and stream.
I love Twitter lists. I have a couple lists that I look at. I don't look at my regular Twitter stream. I have people on the list that I usually talk to, admire, and assorted news channels.
Tools used: Twitter.com
Aaron Lee (@AskAaronLee)
follows 127,000, followed by 473,000
Back in 2009 no one knew who I was and I knew no one other than a bunch of my college friends. I had to start following a large group of people and engage with them. I didn't want to limit myself. People started following back and engaging back with me.
That is where it really took off for me and I've continued to engage with many and built closer relationships with them on Facebook too.
I try my best to respond to everyone. Most of the time I'll respond to tweets at the moment, but I also use Social Engage to only show me tweets that need responses. Social Engage has a feature that will show only replies. That way I won't feel bad for missing people's tweets. I think I see 90% of all the tweets sent to me and I'll respond to most of them.
I would tweet if there wasn't a list feature but I'd probably be more of a promoter than engaging with my followers.
On following many: You can either wait to be followed or start following relevant people first.
Tools used: Twitter.com, Social Engage
Ted Coine (@TedCoine)
follows 316,000, followed by 342,000
I follow just about everyone who follows me, so I miss a TON - even mentions, unfortunately (that started at about 200k people). I don't look at my phone when with a client or at meals, so hours will pass when everything just slips by. It's the ephemeral nature of social, and I just have to hope it doesn't alienate people.
I love working off lists to manage the volume. I keep making new ones! My most general is called The Circle. It has over a thousand people which is why it's my favorite.
I don't comprehend people who find some folks more important or worthwhile than others because of fame. Didn't we all get over that in high school? People fascinate me - all sorts of people. My Mom isn't famous but she's more interesting than most of Hollywood or the faculty of Harvard.
Tools used: HootSuite, Echofon
Martin Zwilling (@StartupPro)
follows 467,000, followed by 726,000
The reason for following people is to let them know that you exist, you care, and that following them allows them to send you a direct message.
Every business and every consultant should try to follow all their customers, to get feedback, and follow all prospective customers, to stay a step ahead of competitors.
It's just another way that businesses foster other businesses, and everyone wins.
Tools used: TweetDeck
Jonah Lupton (@JonahLupton)
follows 809,000, followed by 738,000
For the first five years I tweeted, I didn't use lists -- which meant it was basically a 1-way outgoing conversation. It was very hard for me to engage with anyone since my feed was full of people I didn't know.
I follow about 500 new accounts every day. I prefer following people interested in fitness but I'm quickly running out of ways to find more.
Lists enable me to curate my timeline with people to respond. Lists allow me to see tweets from the people I truly care about the most and want to interact with more.
I follow lots of people because it's a way to get noticed. People are more likely to follow me if I follow them first. At the end of the day, Twitter is a marketing tool so having more followers does create a more valuable resource for me.
Tools used: Twitter.com
As for me, tweeting at @AriHerzog, I used to auto-follow everyone and it was so noisy I unfollowed everyone. Looking back over my years of tweeting, I flip-flopped every year because I wanted to follow more but I knew that following more meant I would see less.
I used to be the person scoffed by Britt. Last year, I followed about 15% of everyone who followed me. I had lists (both my own that I curated and others' that I subscribed to) but I never correlated following someone to listing someone. It was always this or that.
I started 2014 with a desire to embrace chaos and to find order. Martin's and Jonah's perspectives changed me -- and in recent weeks, I began following more and more.
And you?
Do you think you follow too many? Or might you follow too little?
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
The Writers Workbench: The Flashlight Edition
I hadn't really expected to devote much attention to what are basically flashlights. In fact, when I came across the new series of Energizer products, I only contacted the company about reviewing one of them, an item which I thought would be appropriate for using when on the road. But the representative really wanted to send as much of this new line as I'd we willing to look at, so I figured, what the heck, okay, send me the whole thing. (Well, almost the whole thing. One light overlapped another a bit, so I passed on that.) As it turned out, I ended up quite glad I got them all. Though similar, they each serve a unique function, and best of all, I never expected to be so impressed with... flashlights?! But these are really good, each of them. So, I figured I'd devote the whole column to them -- yes, flashlights. Go figure.
The flashlights use what Energizer calls Light Fusion Technology. Honestly, I have no idea what that ultimately means -- companies all have their priority descriptions, and my experience is that sometimes they have meaning, and sometimes they don't. But what matters most is how well they work. Whatever Light Fusion Technology is -- it works well.
These aren't your standard, traditional flashlights. They use LED. My experience in the past has been that LED lights suffice but never much more than that. These are bright and powerful. And they offer additional capabilities that you don't get with a traditional bulb light. In fact, I have a couple of flashlights laying out for easy grabbing when I plan to wander somewhere at home in the dark, and more often than not, I find myself grabbing for the "2 in 1 Light" than my old fave flashlight. More on the "2 in 1" below.
I had one quibble with all the Energizer lights at first. They all have a TryMe test feature, which is certainly nice when sitting on a shelf in a store. But there was no information on how to turn the feature off until you read through the manual and found the explanation in in small print. And honestly when was the last time you thought of reading an instruction manual of a flashlight? The good news is that I've been told that info on turning off the TryMe feature has now been added to the product (or box) with a sticker. So, you should be fine now.
***
ENERGIZER LED 2 in 1 LIGHT
At its heart, this appears at first glance as a standard flashlight. It has a directional light that delivers a bright 75 lumens and should run for about 10 hours.
Where the "2" part comes in is that it also can serve as an area light. If you hold down the on-off switch, the front light stays off, but the handle brightens up and becomes like a flood light. (It's all in one direction -- only one side of the handle lightens, so it shines in just one direction, not 360 degrees.) The area light provides 100 lumens.
Then another nice feature kicks in. The light is dimmable. By clicking the on-off switch, you can toggle through the settings. And at its lowest output, you can get up to 100 hours.
(Side Note: For all the lights, I had difficulty getting exact information on runtimes. What the box says would sometimes differ with what was on the website, which was different from the information in the manual. And that was occasionally a little different from what the company rep would tell me. I've tried my best to give as accurate details as I can, balancing what I was told with what makes the most sense.)
There is a convenient hanging hook, which particularly comes in handy when using the area light. And the device is water resistant. It comes with four AA batteries included.
At the time of writing, the "2 in 1 Light" retails for $25, but it could be found online for $17.50. Certainly you could fine a cheap, basic flashlight for less (and some for more), but it offers several convenient features that you wouldn't get with a standard flashlights, if such things are valuable to you, notably the area light, and dimming.
ENERGIZER LED POP UP LANTERN
My initial reaction when receiving the Pop Up Lantern was that it wasn't something I'd be interested in writing about, but after using it for a while, I came to appreciate it a great deal. Particularly nice is that it's collapsible and can function in either mode, while being very portable. At full use it's seven inches tall, and has a long neck which is illuminated on both sides -- like a lantern -- so you get full, 360-degrees of light. It delivers a powerful 150 lumens and has a 100 hours runtime. (I believe this is likely at the dimmest setting. Again, by clicking the on-off switch, the lantern is dimmable.)
You can lower the neck though and turn the thing into a compact package only four inches high. It still will deliver a bright-enough light to illuminate a room somewhat.
There is a big looping handle that makes this very convenient for hanging almost anywhere, and it's therefore particularly ideal for camping -- like any lantern -- or perhaps outdoor patio use. But what I also found and appreciated is that when collapsed to the compact mode, it made a terrific night light for a bed table. If you have to wander through a dark room at night, the compact light is plenty enough to help, but not overpowering like it might otherwise be at full floodlight height.
It too is water resistant, comes with four AA batteries, and retails for $25, though I found it for $18 online.
ENERGIZER LED FOLDING LANTERN
I wasn't quite sure what to make of the Folding Lantern when I first got it. It's oddly shaped and seemed to be much more a lantern than flashlight. But then, that's what it says it is. And by the time I got finishing testing it -- especially since I had reason to actually put it to full use (more on that later) -- I came away blown away by how good it was.
The Lantern pivots open and can go from illuminating a 180-degree area when closed and compact, to providing 360-degrees of full floodlight when open. It can deliver a glowing 300 lumens -- or less when dimmed. (So, again, yes, it's dimmable.)
It can run from 40 hours at full power up to 100 hours when using eight AA batteries. However, in an interesting touch, the lantern can also run on just batteries. It will be just as bright, but the runtime is cut by a little more than half, running from 15-40 hours. Using four batteries saves money, but as you see you get more than twice the runtime when it's operating with eight batteries.
When folded closed, it becomes quite compact. There is a big handle, so that when open the lantern can be hung to illuminate a wide area like a floodlight. But you can also pivot the frame and use the base as a stand. It too is water resistant.
The Folding Lantern is intended for camping and outdoor backyard activity, and is wonderfully suited for such activities. But as mentioned above, I came across a firsthand use when testing it, and found another impressive use for the device.
As luck or fate would have it, the night I opened the package to test it -- my neighborhood had a blackout. (I suspect that Energizer arranged this...) Using other lights at hand, I decided to test the Folding Lantern under those conditions, rather than wait until later -- and it was absolutely terrific. The amount of 360-degree light it provided around the room was seriously impressive, and using its stand was very convenient. It really brightened the room significantly -- not like having my lamps on, of course, but it was reasonable comfortable.
(For that matter, I decided to add more light by extending the Pop Up Lantern, and even used the 180-degree area light of the "2 in 1" light. I hardly expect most people to have all three Energizer lights at hand, but I was very glad to have them at that time myself.)
I have one quibble with the Folder Lantern. It appears to have screws on the back for the battery compartment -- but it turns out these are just plastic latches holders. The manual says nothing about this, so for the longest time I was trying to unscrew all four of them to remove the back, and they kept spinning. (I thought I had broken something.) A mere quarter turn was need to remove the pins. They feel a bit fragile compared to the rest of the unit. Also, you have to wedge out the back panel to get to the batteries, it doesn't remove easiest, and I was concerned about breaking it. Though that fear appears unnecessary, since things removed fine.
The Folding Lantern isn't something for everyone -- but if you have need for such a thing, or if you want a back-up light in case of black outs, it was absolutely wonderful, and one of the most unique battery lights I've come across. It retails for $35 and at the time of can be found online for $25.50.
"The Writers Workbench" appears monthly on the website for the Writers Guild of America. To see this entire column, with additional "TWW Notes," please click here.
***
To read more from Robert J. Elisberg about this or many other matters both large and tidbit small, see Elisberg Industries.
The flashlights use what Energizer calls Light Fusion Technology. Honestly, I have no idea what that ultimately means -- companies all have their priority descriptions, and my experience is that sometimes they have meaning, and sometimes they don't. But what matters most is how well they work. Whatever Light Fusion Technology is -- it works well.
These aren't your standard, traditional flashlights. They use LED. My experience in the past has been that LED lights suffice but never much more than that. These are bright and powerful. And they offer additional capabilities that you don't get with a traditional bulb light. In fact, I have a couple of flashlights laying out for easy grabbing when I plan to wander somewhere at home in the dark, and more often than not, I find myself grabbing for the "2 in 1 Light" than my old fave flashlight. More on the "2 in 1" below.
I had one quibble with all the Energizer lights at first. They all have a TryMe test feature, which is certainly nice when sitting on a shelf in a store. But there was no information on how to turn the feature off until you read through the manual and found the explanation in in small print. And honestly when was the last time you thought of reading an instruction manual of a flashlight? The good news is that I've been told that info on turning off the TryMe feature has now been added to the product (or box) with a sticker. So, you should be fine now.
- Energizer LED 2 in 1 Light
- Energizer LED Pop Up Lantern
- Energizer LED Folding Lantern
ENERGIZER LED 2 in 1 LIGHT
At its heart, this appears at first glance as a standard flashlight. It has a directional light that delivers a bright 75 lumens and should run for about 10 hours.
Where the "2" part comes in is that it also can serve as an area light. If you hold down the on-off switch, the front light stays off, but the handle brightens up and becomes like a flood light. (It's all in one direction -- only one side of the handle lightens, so it shines in just one direction, not 360 degrees.) The area light provides 100 lumens.
Then another nice feature kicks in. The light is dimmable. By clicking the on-off switch, you can toggle through the settings. And at its lowest output, you can get up to 100 hours.
(Side Note: For all the lights, I had difficulty getting exact information on runtimes. What the box says would sometimes differ with what was on the website, which was different from the information in the manual. And that was occasionally a little different from what the company rep would tell me. I've tried my best to give as accurate details as I can, balancing what I was told with what makes the most sense.)
There is a convenient hanging hook, which particularly comes in handy when using the area light. And the device is water resistant. It comes with four AA batteries included.
At the time of writing, the "2 in 1 Light" retails for $25, but it could be found online for $17.50. Certainly you could fine a cheap, basic flashlight for less (and some for more), but it offers several convenient features that you wouldn't get with a standard flashlights, if such things are valuable to you, notably the area light, and dimming.
ENERGIZER LED POP UP LANTERN
My initial reaction when receiving the Pop Up Lantern was that it wasn't something I'd be interested in writing about, but after using it for a while, I came to appreciate it a great deal. Particularly nice is that it's collapsible and can function in either mode, while being very portable. At full use it's seven inches tall, and has a long neck which is illuminated on both sides -- like a lantern -- so you get full, 360-degrees of light. It delivers a powerful 150 lumens and has a 100 hours runtime. (I believe this is likely at the dimmest setting. Again, by clicking the on-off switch, the lantern is dimmable.)
You can lower the neck though and turn the thing into a compact package only four inches high. It still will deliver a bright-enough light to illuminate a room somewhat.
There is a big looping handle that makes this very convenient for hanging almost anywhere, and it's therefore particularly ideal for camping -- like any lantern -- or perhaps outdoor patio use. But what I also found and appreciated is that when collapsed to the compact mode, it made a terrific night light for a bed table. If you have to wander through a dark room at night, the compact light is plenty enough to help, but not overpowering like it might otherwise be at full floodlight height.
It too is water resistant, comes with four AA batteries, and retails for $25, though I found it for $18 online.
ENERGIZER LED FOLDING LANTERN
I wasn't quite sure what to make of the Folding Lantern when I first got it. It's oddly shaped and seemed to be much more a lantern than flashlight. But then, that's what it says it is. And by the time I got finishing testing it -- especially since I had reason to actually put it to full use (more on that later) -- I came away blown away by how good it was.
The Lantern pivots open and can go from illuminating a 180-degree area when closed and compact, to providing 360-degrees of full floodlight when open. It can deliver a glowing 300 lumens -- or less when dimmed. (So, again, yes, it's dimmable.)
It can run from 40 hours at full power up to 100 hours when using eight AA batteries. However, in an interesting touch, the lantern can also run on just batteries. It will be just as bright, but the runtime is cut by a little more than half, running from 15-40 hours. Using four batteries saves money, but as you see you get more than twice the runtime when it's operating with eight batteries.
When folded closed, it becomes quite compact. There is a big handle, so that when open the lantern can be hung to illuminate a wide area like a floodlight. But you can also pivot the frame and use the base as a stand. It too is water resistant.
The Folding Lantern is intended for camping and outdoor backyard activity, and is wonderfully suited for such activities. But as mentioned above, I came across a firsthand use when testing it, and found another impressive use for the device.
As luck or fate would have it, the night I opened the package to test it -- my neighborhood had a blackout. (I suspect that Energizer arranged this...) Using other lights at hand, I decided to test the Folding Lantern under those conditions, rather than wait until later -- and it was absolutely terrific. The amount of 360-degree light it provided around the room was seriously impressive, and using its stand was very convenient. It really brightened the room significantly -- not like having my lamps on, of course, but it was reasonable comfortable.
(For that matter, I decided to add more light by extending the Pop Up Lantern, and even used the 180-degree area light of the "2 in 1" light. I hardly expect most people to have all three Energizer lights at hand, but I was very glad to have them at that time myself.)
I have one quibble with the Folder Lantern. It appears to have screws on the back for the battery compartment -- but it turns out these are just plastic latches holders. The manual says nothing about this, so for the longest time I was trying to unscrew all four of them to remove the back, and they kept spinning. (I thought I had broken something.) A mere quarter turn was need to remove the pins. They feel a bit fragile compared to the rest of the unit. Also, you have to wedge out the back panel to get to the batteries, it doesn't remove easiest, and I was concerned about breaking it. Though that fear appears unnecessary, since things removed fine.
The Folding Lantern isn't something for everyone -- but if you have need for such a thing, or if you want a back-up light in case of black outs, it was absolutely wonderful, and one of the most unique battery lights I've come across. It retails for $35 and at the time of can be found online for $25.50.
"The Writers Workbench" appears monthly on the website for the Writers Guild of America. To see this entire column, with additional "TWW Notes," please click here.
To read more from Robert J. Elisberg about this or many other matters both large and tidbit small, see Elisberg Industries.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Facebook and the Future of Global Governance
Facebook has become a critical platform for international exchange that allows people around the world to seek out peers with similar interests and to begin serious exchanges with them about how to create a better world. Although Facebook is a for-profit organization that treats its users as potential advertisers and uses personal information gathered from postings as a private commodity for sale to third parties, it is still the best means to reach out to a broad audience and to develop a global audience.
Facebook was not intended for serious intellectual and political exchange. At present, you cannot easily seek out other people with common interests (or by region) using a search on Facebook and you cannot systematically store the materials that you send or receive through Facebook for easy reference. Information posted is designed to essentially disappear within a few days. In addition, there is no way for third parties to develop original apps to run on Facebook that would allow users to expand its functionality or customize their pages. There are many ways that those actually using Facebook can carry out the innovations necessary to make it a meaningful means of sharing information.
But in spite of all the limitations of Facebook, an increasing number of politically conscious users are pushing it to be a platform for profound debate on political and social issues, both locally or internationally. Even in its primitive current format, Facebook offers the possibility for a broad conversation with thoughtful individuals around the world and it is increasingly populated by individuals from developing nations, and thoughtful activists, who may even be middle school or high school students. That is to say, although it may not have been designed for that purpose, Facebook offers an opportunity for people who are completely locked out of the policy debate to contribute. Although there are specialized platforms for internet exchange available, Facebook is unique in cutting across class lines and international borders.
If we compare Facebook in terms of the potential for an individual to advocate for policy, develop a broad base of support on issues and seek out expert opinion, Facebook in its primitive current form is still years ahead of the United Nations, the World Bank, OECD or any of the international organizations supposedly engaged in global governance. Although those international organizations carry out their own informed internal debate, which is then distributed in a one-way manner to the hoi polloi via rather arcane technical texts, there is literally no means for someone like me, let alone a Nigerian merchant or a Chinese high school student, to have any say at all on policies those organizations put forth that impact the entire world.
Let us compare what Facebook has the potential to become with the current United Nations, the main institution of global governance. The United Nations is extremely limited in its mandate and recognizes nation states alone as its members (although it works with corporations and NGOs on a daily basis). With the governing institutions of most nation states torn apart by the interests of multinational corporations and internal class divisions, often with a tiny minority monopolizing access to political power, there is literally no way for ordinary citizens (even in the tens of millions) to put forth a proposal to the United Nations General Assembly, let alone to pressure the United Nations to implement policies.
Facebook, the company, did not actually build Facebook; we did. The company Facebook was able to secure massive low-interest loans at our expense and use them to scale up global networks. Anyone with access to that much capital could have built a "Facebook." We, the people, did the work of actually populating Facebook with people and contents.
We can think of the founders of Facebook as the equivalent of the robber barons who built the Union Pacific railroad in the 19th century. Although figures such as Clark Durant or Mark Hopkins raised money for the Union Pacific and built it for the shrewdest of profit motivations, over time those railroads were shaped into more rational institutions through the active demands of their users, people who advocated for such acts as the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, which outlawed short-haul discrimination and other predatory practices. Eventually, the free-wheeling railroads were made to conform to strict codes in the 20th century and moulded into reliable utilities.
It is not a moment too soon to start the hard work of transforming Facebook -- or some avatar of Facebook -- into a platform for participatory democratic global governance. We don't have long to design a global response to the crisis of climate change through meaningful coordination of humanity's actions; the institutions we assumed would respond to that global challenge have failed miserably.
We can't wait to form human networks that can bring us together as a species. Now, sadly, we are fully integrated through systems of distribution, logistics and data distribution, but we do not know each other at all. We must overcome our ignorance and indifference to each other and form an entirely new form of participatory global governance to respond to global threats. At this moment Facebook may be our best hope.
Until we make forceful and concrete proposals for what Facebook could be and through our will and our creativity push Facebook in the direction it should move, it will not become anything more than a place to exchange pictures of soccer games and birthday cakes.
Here comes the hard part. Building a true, common, global community online by lobbying Facebook directly for changes in the rules of governance (allowing the users to decide by democratic process what the design and structure of Facebook will be) is near impossible in that such a for-profit organization has no incentive to accept such demands. On the other hand, alternative social networks tend to be extremely limited in their participants and are even farther from true representative governance than is the commercial Facebook. For liberal thinkers to exchange their liberal thoughts with each other is not particularly helpful to anyone. What we need is a broad discourse in terms everyone can understand.
The first step is to present a concrete vision for the future of social networks as a form of global governance and for the importance of that vision for the daily lives of the users of online social networking services like Facebook. That vision should include basis rules of governance first for how Facebook (I use Facebook here as a term for social networks in general, both contemporary and future) will be governed internally: how individual users can debate what the policy for Facebook at the micro and macro level should be and proceed to propose that policy for approval within the Facebook community.
The governance of Facebook starts with reforms that make it more accessible, more transparent, and more oriented to the needs of individuals and communities. We can start with simple reforms like allowing individuals to design applications on their own within Facebook and have the right to give or sell them on their own to other members.
That process could involve the formation of local elected communities for debating and determining local and global Facebook policy. Unlike the United States government, Facebook can serve as a place for input concerning policy and voting to approve that policy. We must recognize that Facebook is potentially a political entity (and already serves that role) and endow it with the proper functions to serve that purpose locally and globally.
Once internal rules are in place for how Facebook governs itself, the next step will be for Facebook to create structures for larger forms of global governance. Of course Facebook does not have offices or anything like the resources of a government, and perhaps it does not require them. At the same time, we must remember that governments around the world are hollowing out at a rapid pace these days and are not serving the function of governance.
The nature of governance in a future "Republic of Facebook" cannot be dictated in this article; it must be worked out through a series of meetings between informed and visionary figures who are committed to building a better world. We can imagine something like a constitutional convention for Facebook that would do that initial work of setting forth a vision and following up with continued refinements.
Of course those who want to employ Facebook merely as a place to post photographs of grandchildren and hamsters are free to do so. But for those committed to doing something greater, there are several directions possible for the advancement of the next generation of Facebook. Some of those directions suggest a new vision of governance.
A systematically administered Facebook could serve as a place for those with similar concerns around the world to meet and propose new projects for collaboration, new solutions to common problems. It could be a means for those who pursue similar goals in every corner of the globe to seek partners and collaborators for research, policy debate and implementation. In an age of limited financing, the potential to share funds between similar groups offers tremendous potential.
Of course Facebook, or whatever network replaces it, does not serve the role of a government in the full sense of the word. That role can be left to local governments best equipped to respond to the problems of broken sewers and electric grids. But when it comes to identifying an effective response to climate change by coordinating between groups around the world and implementing the solution, an improved Facebook can bring together the stakeholders in a sense that so-called legislatures full of professional politicians cannot.
If we have the will, and a sense of obligation in the face of global crisis, the platform of Facebook can be transformed into a legitimate form of global democratic governance. Some parts of that new system will build on the best of governance from the past 3,000 years, but other parts will be, perforce, unprecedented in human history and maybe even offer new hope to those who despair of humanity's capacity to rise to today's challenges.
------------
This article was originally published by Truthout on April 3, 2014.
link
Facebook was not intended for serious intellectual and political exchange. At present, you cannot easily seek out other people with common interests (or by region) using a search on Facebook and you cannot systematically store the materials that you send or receive through Facebook for easy reference. Information posted is designed to essentially disappear within a few days. In addition, there is no way for third parties to develop original apps to run on Facebook that would allow users to expand its functionality or customize their pages. There are many ways that those actually using Facebook can carry out the innovations necessary to make it a meaningful means of sharing information.
But in spite of all the limitations of Facebook, an increasing number of politically conscious users are pushing it to be a platform for profound debate on political and social issues, both locally or internationally. Even in its primitive current format, Facebook offers the possibility for a broad conversation with thoughtful individuals around the world and it is increasingly populated by individuals from developing nations, and thoughtful activists, who may even be middle school or high school students. That is to say, although it may not have been designed for that purpose, Facebook offers an opportunity for people who are completely locked out of the policy debate to contribute. Although there are specialized platforms for internet exchange available, Facebook is unique in cutting across class lines and international borders.
If we compare Facebook in terms of the potential for an individual to advocate for policy, develop a broad base of support on issues and seek out expert opinion, Facebook in its primitive current form is still years ahead of the United Nations, the World Bank, OECD or any of the international organizations supposedly engaged in global governance. Although those international organizations carry out their own informed internal debate, which is then distributed in a one-way manner to the hoi polloi via rather arcane technical texts, there is literally no means for someone like me, let alone a Nigerian merchant or a Chinese high school student, to have any say at all on policies those organizations put forth that impact the entire world.
Let us compare what Facebook has the potential to become with the current United Nations, the main institution of global governance. The United Nations is extremely limited in its mandate and recognizes nation states alone as its members (although it works with corporations and NGOs on a daily basis). With the governing institutions of most nation states torn apart by the interests of multinational corporations and internal class divisions, often with a tiny minority monopolizing access to political power, there is literally no way for ordinary citizens (even in the tens of millions) to put forth a proposal to the United Nations General Assembly, let alone to pressure the United Nations to implement policies.
Facebook, the company, did not actually build Facebook; we did. The company Facebook was able to secure massive low-interest loans at our expense and use them to scale up global networks. Anyone with access to that much capital could have built a "Facebook." We, the people, did the work of actually populating Facebook with people and contents.
We can think of the founders of Facebook as the equivalent of the robber barons who built the Union Pacific railroad in the 19th century. Although figures such as Clark Durant or Mark Hopkins raised money for the Union Pacific and built it for the shrewdest of profit motivations, over time those railroads were shaped into more rational institutions through the active demands of their users, people who advocated for such acts as the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, which outlawed short-haul discrimination and other predatory practices. Eventually, the free-wheeling railroads were made to conform to strict codes in the 20th century and moulded into reliable utilities.
It is not a moment too soon to start the hard work of transforming Facebook -- or some avatar of Facebook -- into a platform for participatory democratic global governance. We don't have long to design a global response to the crisis of climate change through meaningful coordination of humanity's actions; the institutions we assumed would respond to that global challenge have failed miserably.
We can't wait to form human networks that can bring us together as a species. Now, sadly, we are fully integrated through systems of distribution, logistics and data distribution, but we do not know each other at all. We must overcome our ignorance and indifference to each other and form an entirely new form of participatory global governance to respond to global threats. At this moment Facebook may be our best hope.
Until we make forceful and concrete proposals for what Facebook could be and through our will and our creativity push Facebook in the direction it should move, it will not become anything more than a place to exchange pictures of soccer games and birthday cakes.
Here comes the hard part. Building a true, common, global community online by lobbying Facebook directly for changes in the rules of governance (allowing the users to decide by democratic process what the design and structure of Facebook will be) is near impossible in that such a for-profit organization has no incentive to accept such demands. On the other hand, alternative social networks tend to be extremely limited in their participants and are even farther from true representative governance than is the commercial Facebook. For liberal thinkers to exchange their liberal thoughts with each other is not particularly helpful to anyone. What we need is a broad discourse in terms everyone can understand.
The first step is to present a concrete vision for the future of social networks as a form of global governance and for the importance of that vision for the daily lives of the users of online social networking services like Facebook. That vision should include basis rules of governance first for how Facebook (I use Facebook here as a term for social networks in general, both contemporary and future) will be governed internally: how individual users can debate what the policy for Facebook at the micro and macro level should be and proceed to propose that policy for approval within the Facebook community.
The governance of Facebook starts with reforms that make it more accessible, more transparent, and more oriented to the needs of individuals and communities. We can start with simple reforms like allowing individuals to design applications on their own within Facebook and have the right to give or sell them on their own to other members.
That process could involve the formation of local elected communities for debating and determining local and global Facebook policy. Unlike the United States government, Facebook can serve as a place for input concerning policy and voting to approve that policy. We must recognize that Facebook is potentially a political entity (and already serves that role) and endow it with the proper functions to serve that purpose locally and globally.
Once internal rules are in place for how Facebook governs itself, the next step will be for Facebook to create structures for larger forms of global governance. Of course Facebook does not have offices or anything like the resources of a government, and perhaps it does not require them. At the same time, we must remember that governments around the world are hollowing out at a rapid pace these days and are not serving the function of governance.
The nature of governance in a future "Republic of Facebook" cannot be dictated in this article; it must be worked out through a series of meetings between informed and visionary figures who are committed to building a better world. We can imagine something like a constitutional convention for Facebook that would do that initial work of setting forth a vision and following up with continued refinements.
Of course those who want to employ Facebook merely as a place to post photographs of grandchildren and hamsters are free to do so. But for those committed to doing something greater, there are several directions possible for the advancement of the next generation of Facebook. Some of those directions suggest a new vision of governance.
A systematically administered Facebook could serve as a place for those with similar concerns around the world to meet and propose new projects for collaboration, new solutions to common problems. It could be a means for those who pursue similar goals in every corner of the globe to seek partners and collaborators for research, policy debate and implementation. In an age of limited financing, the potential to share funds between similar groups offers tremendous potential.
Of course Facebook, or whatever network replaces it, does not serve the role of a government in the full sense of the word. That role can be left to local governments best equipped to respond to the problems of broken sewers and electric grids. But when it comes to identifying an effective response to climate change by coordinating between groups around the world and implementing the solution, an improved Facebook can bring together the stakeholders in a sense that so-called legislatures full of professional politicians cannot.
If we have the will, and a sense of obligation in the face of global crisis, the platform of Facebook can be transformed into a legitimate form of global democratic governance. Some parts of that new system will build on the best of governance from the past 3,000 years, but other parts will be, perforce, unprecedented in human history and maybe even offer new hope to those who despair of humanity's capacity to rise to today's challenges.
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This article was originally published by Truthout on April 3, 2014.
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Saturday, April 12, 2014
'Privatization' Is Not 'Privacy'
Author's note: I had the privilege on April 4 of delivering the following remarks as part of a panel on "Creating the Politics of Privacy," a session of the capstone conference for Ohio State's 2013-14 series of campus-wide programs on the distinction between public and private.
America's cultural turn in recent decades toward a glorification of the private and a denigration of the public has coexisted with what quite obviously is a deterioration in privacy. As individuals, we have dramatically less capacity than in earlier decades to control information about even the most personal aspects of our lives. This is not just historical coincidence. The cultural turn to the "private" has actually hurt privacy.
What I mean by a cultural turn is that, for the last 35-ish years, U.S. law and politics have moved away from the public-regarding orientation of the New Deal and its programmatic outgrowths and toward the individualist orientation of Reaganite small-government conservatism. We can see these moves in a variety of ways that implicate the private/public distinction. For example, we know that public institutions, such as schools, simultaneously create both public value and private value. They help both to benefit society through an educated citizenry and to prepare individuals for economic self-sufficiency. Yet our public policy toward schools has increasingly emphasized only their private value as providing persuasive reasons for their support.
Likewise, private action simultaneously has both private and public impacts. What I do as an individual both serves my personal needs and gratifications and imposes externalities on others. Not all externalities are positive. Yet courts and politicians have increasingly resisted treating negative externalities as a sufficient justification for regulation. Supreme Court decisions limiting Congress' powers to keep guns away from schools or to provide federal remedies for domestic violence are perfect examples. The court's 2012 decision that Congress lacked power under the Commerce Clause to compel the private purchase of health insurance was based on legal arguments that earlier courts would have rejected out of hand.
To understand how these developments have hurt privacy, it is helpful to note that both legal and ordinary discourse commonly use the concept of a private/public distinction to mean quite different things. When we talk about the private/public distinction, we sometimes mean to refer to what might better be called the privacy/publicity distinction. This is a distinction often seen in terms of categories of information. Some information, personal information, we are entitled to keep confidential, or at least closely under our control. Other information about us is public. Third parties -- indeed, society at large -- are entitled to know and to disseminate such information.
The private/public distinction is often used, however, to mean something analytically different. It refers to a distinction in the legitimate locus of power that might best be called the private/governmental distinction. That is, there are activities in which we engage in which society presumes that everyone is entitled to govern their own behavior. People generally regard raising families or running businesses as paradigm examples. To various degrees, our behavior in these domains may be constrained by law, but the default position is individual autonomy. There are even aspects of our autonomy -- choice of religion, for example -- that the Constitution forbids government to constrain. "Private," as conceived by the private/governmental distinction, has no necessary connection to secrecy or intimacy. When we say a shopping center is private property, we refer to its governance, not its confidentiality.
Governmental action, of course, is distinctly different from private action. Only persons chosen through constitutionally approved processes are entitled to wield government power. That power is subject to constitutional limits. Its exercise is subject to mandatory norms of equality and due process. Notably, the Supreme Court in the mid-20th century increasingly identified a variety of private acts so entwined with government as to become "state action" also subject to mandatory constitutional norms. The paradigm case would be private ownership of a so-called "company town." The Court has now significantly retreated from that position, with the consequence that large swaths of what had once been viewed as inherently governmental functions are increasingly turned over to private hands, with far less public accountability. Private prisons are the perfect example.
So how has the cultural turn favoring the private in the private/governmental distinction weakened the cause of privacy in the privacy/publicity distinction?
First, vast quantities of information we instinctively put on the privacy side of the privacy/publicity distinction are now in the hands of third parties who enjoy their own presumption of autonomy under the private/governmental distinction. That is, if a firm operating a social network or selling merchandise online possesses information about me, they are entitled -- unless forbidden by law -- to use that information as they see fit. This includes highly personal information, such as information about the books and movies I like, the identities of friends and family members, the history of my pharmaceutical purchases, and the like. What I experience as a compromise of privacy is, to the firm, an exercise of its liberty.
Second, Facebook's or Google's or any other firm's entitlement to use my data as it chooses is legitimated by the fetish we have made of personal choice as justifying the firm's freedom to use my data in whatever manner I have supposedly agreed to. I have chosen, that is, to click "I agree" when presented with a chance to read the firm's terms and conditions of service. It is well known, of course, that hardly anyone reads or is familiar with the terms and conditions for which they click "agreement." Most people understand that in refusing to volunteer our data as these firms require, we would be excluding ourselves from major forums within the public sphere. We would estrange ourselves from information flows that are invaluable to our participation in society. We would deny ourselves services all but essential to the effective transaction of daily life. If the government insisted on access to personal data as a precondition for speaking in a so-called public forum, such exclusion would be subject to First Amendment challenge. But because of the private/governmental distinction, the First Amendment extends the liberty of private firms to regulate their own public forums; it does not restrict corporate prerogative in our favor.
These two points strongly suggest that reemphasizing the importance of the public or the governmental in our conceptions of the private/public divide might be helpful in protecting privacy because such a cultural move would legitimate regulating data-holding private firms in order to mitigate the negative externalities of their data uses. We could shift the locus of power regarding "terms and conditions" of data use away from unaccountable private actors and toward relatively more accountable government actors.
But that's only part of the problem. The most obvious material factor facilitating the breakdown of personal privacy has been the evolution of new technologies of surveillance. Surveillance has turned out to be a more pervasive government activity than most people understood prior to the Edward Snowden leaks. Might a cultural turn back toward the public side of the private/public distinction not exacerbate that problem? Aren't we better off, for example, when the government proposes -- as the president now has done -- that information potentially relevant to national security investigations be held by private firms, rather than by government agencies, and searchable only through court order? How could a cultural turn back to the governmental side of the private/public distinction possibly help that problem?
As I have already noted, the government is subject to limitations that private companies are not. So long as the NSA is gathering and storing information, it is subject to constitutional limitations and to judicial and congressional oversight. Nothing equivalent applies to private firms holding personal data. NYU law professor Kathy Strandburg has recently urged with some cogency that the NSA's collection of bulk communications metadata violates our First Amendment freedom of association. Whether or not that argument prevails, no such argument can hold for telecom companies because they are not subject to the First Amendment.
But I wish also to offer a more speculative but perhaps deeper point. The cultural turn toward the private has reinforced our tendency, even as citizens, to evaluate the impacts of government data practices mostly in terms of our individual welfare. If I am not breaking the law, the saying goes, why worry? But the most powerful arguments for personal privacy may not be the arguments based on individual welfare but rather on the threat to democracy posed when we conduct our lives under constant surveillance. My colleague Amna Akbar has written powerfully about how the surveillance of Muslim communities in the United States has led to the impoverishment of political and religious discourse in those communities:
We would be foolish, I think, to doubt that a regime of pervasive surveillance will eventually have a desiccating impact on our political life even more widespread than this.
If I am right, then a reenergized recognition of the importance of government in our lives could help ameliorate government policies that diminish personal privacy because that recognition would motivate us as citizens to regard privacy as a public, not just private, good. We would care more deeply about the quality of government because we would take more seriously the possibility of government as a positive force. Our public-regarding assessment of privacy challenges would weigh more heavily surveillance's democratic, not just individual, impacts. For this reason, as well as because of my anxiety about largely unregulated private governance over my personal information, I believe that "privatization," as both a cultural and institutional phenomenon, hurts the cause of privacy. Perhaps surprisingly, a cultural and institutional recommitment to the collective good might help it.
America's cultural turn in recent decades toward a glorification of the private and a denigration of the public has coexisted with what quite obviously is a deterioration in privacy. As individuals, we have dramatically less capacity than in earlier decades to control information about even the most personal aspects of our lives. This is not just historical coincidence. The cultural turn to the "private" has actually hurt privacy.
What I mean by a cultural turn is that, for the last 35-ish years, U.S. law and politics have moved away from the public-regarding orientation of the New Deal and its programmatic outgrowths and toward the individualist orientation of Reaganite small-government conservatism. We can see these moves in a variety of ways that implicate the private/public distinction. For example, we know that public institutions, such as schools, simultaneously create both public value and private value. They help both to benefit society through an educated citizenry and to prepare individuals for economic self-sufficiency. Yet our public policy toward schools has increasingly emphasized only their private value as providing persuasive reasons for their support.
Likewise, private action simultaneously has both private and public impacts. What I do as an individual both serves my personal needs and gratifications and imposes externalities on others. Not all externalities are positive. Yet courts and politicians have increasingly resisted treating negative externalities as a sufficient justification for regulation. Supreme Court decisions limiting Congress' powers to keep guns away from schools or to provide federal remedies for domestic violence are perfect examples. The court's 2012 decision that Congress lacked power under the Commerce Clause to compel the private purchase of health insurance was based on legal arguments that earlier courts would have rejected out of hand.
To understand how these developments have hurt privacy, it is helpful to note that both legal and ordinary discourse commonly use the concept of a private/public distinction to mean quite different things. When we talk about the private/public distinction, we sometimes mean to refer to what might better be called the privacy/publicity distinction. This is a distinction often seen in terms of categories of information. Some information, personal information, we are entitled to keep confidential, or at least closely under our control. Other information about us is public. Third parties -- indeed, society at large -- are entitled to know and to disseminate such information.
The private/public distinction is often used, however, to mean something analytically different. It refers to a distinction in the legitimate locus of power that might best be called the private/governmental distinction. That is, there are activities in which we engage in which society presumes that everyone is entitled to govern their own behavior. People generally regard raising families or running businesses as paradigm examples. To various degrees, our behavior in these domains may be constrained by law, but the default position is individual autonomy. There are even aspects of our autonomy -- choice of religion, for example -- that the Constitution forbids government to constrain. "Private," as conceived by the private/governmental distinction, has no necessary connection to secrecy or intimacy. When we say a shopping center is private property, we refer to its governance, not its confidentiality.
Governmental action, of course, is distinctly different from private action. Only persons chosen through constitutionally approved processes are entitled to wield government power. That power is subject to constitutional limits. Its exercise is subject to mandatory norms of equality and due process. Notably, the Supreme Court in the mid-20th century increasingly identified a variety of private acts so entwined with government as to become "state action" also subject to mandatory constitutional norms. The paradigm case would be private ownership of a so-called "company town." The Court has now significantly retreated from that position, with the consequence that large swaths of what had once been viewed as inherently governmental functions are increasingly turned over to private hands, with far less public accountability. Private prisons are the perfect example.
So how has the cultural turn favoring the private in the private/governmental distinction weakened the cause of privacy in the privacy/publicity distinction?
First, vast quantities of information we instinctively put on the privacy side of the privacy/publicity distinction are now in the hands of third parties who enjoy their own presumption of autonomy under the private/governmental distinction. That is, if a firm operating a social network or selling merchandise online possesses information about me, they are entitled -- unless forbidden by law -- to use that information as they see fit. This includes highly personal information, such as information about the books and movies I like, the identities of friends and family members, the history of my pharmaceutical purchases, and the like. What I experience as a compromise of privacy is, to the firm, an exercise of its liberty.
Second, Facebook's or Google's or any other firm's entitlement to use my data as it chooses is legitimated by the fetish we have made of personal choice as justifying the firm's freedom to use my data in whatever manner I have supposedly agreed to. I have chosen, that is, to click "I agree" when presented with a chance to read the firm's terms and conditions of service. It is well known, of course, that hardly anyone reads or is familiar with the terms and conditions for which they click "agreement." Most people understand that in refusing to volunteer our data as these firms require, we would be excluding ourselves from major forums within the public sphere. We would estrange ourselves from information flows that are invaluable to our participation in society. We would deny ourselves services all but essential to the effective transaction of daily life. If the government insisted on access to personal data as a precondition for speaking in a so-called public forum, such exclusion would be subject to First Amendment challenge. But because of the private/governmental distinction, the First Amendment extends the liberty of private firms to regulate their own public forums; it does not restrict corporate prerogative in our favor.
These two points strongly suggest that reemphasizing the importance of the public or the governmental in our conceptions of the private/public divide might be helpful in protecting privacy because such a cultural move would legitimate regulating data-holding private firms in order to mitigate the negative externalities of their data uses. We could shift the locus of power regarding "terms and conditions" of data use away from unaccountable private actors and toward relatively more accountable government actors.
But that's only part of the problem. The most obvious material factor facilitating the breakdown of personal privacy has been the evolution of new technologies of surveillance. Surveillance has turned out to be a more pervasive government activity than most people understood prior to the Edward Snowden leaks. Might a cultural turn back toward the public side of the private/public distinction not exacerbate that problem? Aren't we better off, for example, when the government proposes -- as the president now has done -- that information potentially relevant to national security investigations be held by private firms, rather than by government agencies, and searchable only through court order? How could a cultural turn back to the governmental side of the private/public distinction possibly help that problem?
As I have already noted, the government is subject to limitations that private companies are not. So long as the NSA is gathering and storing information, it is subject to constitutional limitations and to judicial and congressional oversight. Nothing equivalent applies to private firms holding personal data. NYU law professor Kathy Strandburg has recently urged with some cogency that the NSA's collection of bulk communications metadata violates our First Amendment freedom of association. Whether or not that argument prevails, no such argument can hold for telecom companies because they are not subject to the First Amendment.
But I wish also to offer a more speculative but perhaps deeper point. The cultural turn toward the private has reinforced our tendency, even as citizens, to evaluate the impacts of government data practices mostly in terms of our individual welfare. If I am not breaking the law, the saying goes, why worry? But the most powerful arguments for personal privacy may not be the arguments based on individual welfare but rather on the threat to democracy posed when we conduct our lives under constant surveillance. My colleague Amna Akbar has written powerfully about how the surveillance of Muslim communities in the United States has led to the impoverishment of political and religious discourse in those communities:
Muslims know they are being watched. Muslims feel pressure to signal loyalty to American identity over their Muslim identity or else risk signaling terrorist propensity. Muslims are afraid of being too Muslim and therefore labeled anti-American, extremist, radical. Instead of speaking up, many Muslims have shut up.
We would be foolish, I think, to doubt that a regime of pervasive surveillance will eventually have a desiccating impact on our political life even more widespread than this.
If I am right, then a reenergized recognition of the importance of government in our lives could help ameliorate government policies that diminish personal privacy because that recognition would motivate us as citizens to regard privacy as a public, not just private, good. We would care more deeply about the quality of government because we would take more seriously the possibility of government as a positive force. Our public-regarding assessment of privacy challenges would weigh more heavily surveillance's democratic, not just individual, impacts. For this reason, as well as because of my anxiety about largely unregulated private governance over my personal information, I believe that "privatization," as both a cultural and institutional phenomenon, hurts the cause of privacy. Perhaps surprisingly, a cultural and institutional recommitment to the collective good might help it.
Friday, April 11, 2014
Paying For It: Is PayPal Hurting Sex Workers?
"In a sluggish economy, never, ever f*** with another man's livelihood." - Risky Business
As a sex worker, I hear "why don't you leave the industry?" all the time. We all do -- it's one of the big questions I see Duke student and porn performer Belle Knox fighting off too. I've been in the industry for about 10 years, so I've had a lot of time to think about the answer. For me, becoming a sex worker was part survival and part career path, as I had been working three jobs at a mall for very little and knew it wasn't sustainable. I brainstormed how I'd transition from one aspect to another, taught myself marketing strategies, learned how to best utilize social media in order to connect to clients. I expected that I would stay in the industry for quite a while, either as a worker or an organizer. I enjoyed my work (most of the time), speaking publicly and without shame about it at universities, on television, online and over the airwaves. As an Internet-savvy professional, I blogged regularly, used online advertising and branded myself on social media. All publicity is good publicity, right? And I could always write about my experiences.
I discovered that leaving the sex industry was far easier said than done. I spoke to faith-based organization Solace SF about options. I had encountered them multiple times and they seemed friendly and not too pushy. Many groups that focus on the intersection of sex work and religion (or sex work and radical feminism) talk constantly about how much they want women to leave the industry, how it drains us, how it mistreats us. I didn't feel mistreated myself, but I was exhausted and ready to leave the adult industry behind. Solace promised to help me with my resume, get me interview clothes, advise me on applying for jobs when my primary work was adult in nature. Ten years is a long time to have a gap in a resume, after all!
A representative from Solace told me that I had two choices -- work as a freelancer, continue to hustle and don't worry about my history... or say goodbye to Kitty Stryker, delete everything related to that name and try to wipe the slate clean. I sat with that for a while, turning over in my head how it would feel to delete a persona I spent 10 years creating, honing, perfecting. I would lose all my contacts, lose all the work I had done in media. I couldn't tell prospective employers about speaking at South By Southwest if I distanced myself from this persona, because I had done a presentation on sex work under that identity. I considered it, but ultimately decided I'd rather take my chances and get whatever help I could without destroying my past like I was ashamed of it. But the help never came, and I discovered that Solace had fallen apart with rumors of fraud following in its wake. I can't say I was altogether surprised. All I had gotten in the end were cupcakes and the very occasional gift card for Safeway, nothing to help me move forward and start a new job.
And people wonder why sex workers don't trust the organizations available to "help" them.
Even if that help had panned out I was (and still am) somewhat conflicted about whether or not I want to leave the sex industry. I know I don't have the energy for it anymore on the one hand, but I don't know if I can get started anywhere else. I was outed under my legal name for a piece I wrote about Porn Wikileaks, so it's not easy, but is possible to link my legal name to my adult one. If an employer Googles my name, they'll find my "sordid past" and then will it matter how many Twitter followers I have or the success of my blog? Even if hired, I could be subsequently fired for having been in porn or written about dildos. What do you do when your brand is adult-based and all your best connections, writing and media appearances relate not to SEO, but SEX?
I'm a fighter, though, so I decided to try working independently, first as a marketing manager (sex work teaches you a lot about social media and branding) and later as a writer. I found Patreon, a service that allowed content creators to gather patrons who could pay for your art on a subscription basis. Knowing that crowdsourcing was unfriendly to sex workers and needing a sustainable option, I started up a Patreon account, making sure the content I posted followed their guidelines. It encouraged me to work harder on my writing, and was, for the first time, a viable alternative to sex work. It was great for the first few months. I funded a business trip to the upcoming Feminist Porn Conference in part because of the financial assistance Patreon provided, where I'd be speaking on porn and privacy.
Then I got an email from Patreon, saying that the payment processor PayPal had threatened to shut down all integration with their site because of "adult content." The email stated, "as you can imagine, this would be detrimental to creators -- hundreds of thousands of dollars were to be "frozen" unless we flagged all adult content pages, made them private and removed PayPal functionality from their individual pages... I'm so sorry that we had to do this without warning you first, but it was SUCH an emergency! We simply had to take action to avoid a situation where creators would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars of legitimate pledges." Patreon emailed all of our patrons to warn them, and suggested we also email them to ensure payments went through as usual at the beginning of April. They worked around the clock responding to my panicked emails. While Patreon was open to artists creating work that was adult in nature, their hands were tied. And not in a kinky way.
This was not my first clash with PayPal or similar service WePay, of course. As I've discovered by seeking out stories on Twitter and Facebook, if you have anything to do with sex in some capacity and have tried to use an online payment processor, you'll have had a run-in with one of them freezing your account, returning donations in best case scenarios and just taking it in the worst cases. As the organizer of an event with burlesque, I once had my account frozen for a week, losing vital time to purchase supplies, and I had to submit via email all sorts of information to "prove" I was legit (meaning, of course, not a sex worker). Companies like PayPal or WePay will Google people they deem suspicious and then take the money out of their accounts if they decide it's "adult" without ever clearly defining what that means. Like obscenity, the rule seems to be "we'll know it when we see it".
Of course, it's not just me. Andre Shakti found herself in similarly hot water in March for crowdfunding travel costs using Fundly to make it to the Feminist Porn Awards and Conference. While her offered perks followed Fundly's terms, WePay, the payment processor they used, shut down her account because they were "adult," causing the Sex Workers Outreach Project to write to Fundly encouraging them to stop using WePay and actually do what their tagline says... "raise money for anything". Or there was Maggie Mayhem, a porn performer, tried to raise money for going to Haiti to do relief work using PayPal, and, despite the fact her fundraising had nothing to do with porn, she found her account shut down. Michelle Austin, another porn performer, had accounts at both companies shut down at different times -- WePay did because her company was "linked to an adult company" (which can mean anything from linking to an adult company to having adult content show up in a Google search). She thinks PayPal shut down her donations simply because there was a porn shoot on her personal blog. Makes me wonder how many Tumblrs asking for donations for medical care get their accounts shut down for that reason?
PayPal and WePay are not required to give answers as to why they freeze or shut down accounts, but often all that's required is the history (or even the suspicion) of sex work. It's not just them, either -- Amazon Payments joined the list when Polly Whittaker raised money to fund publishing her memoirs of her experiences with sex culture, but when it came to cash out, Amazon decided her memoirs were too sexual in nature. Google Wallet has had similar issues for those looking to receive payment for handmade BDSM toys. And Square has banned Courtney Trouble for life, even though they were using it for non-porn purposes, because their Google search uncovered that Courtney is a porn producer.
Why do these payment processors have such a strict policy on adult performers, so strict that having worked in the industry means you could find yourself banned for life? I looked into this somewhat and found many such companies claiming that statistically, adult companies were more likely to be high risk for chargebacks (when someone buys the content, often downloading what they want and then calling the company to report fraud). However, I couldn't actually find these supposed statistics.
Instead, I discovered indie porn site owners saying their chargeback percentages were low enough to not warrant calling them high risk, and arguments about what constituted pornography (considered a "risky" investment) versus adult content (not necessarily deemed "risky" but a gray enough area to make enforcement completely arbitrary). I also discovered other types of business often considered at risk for chargebacks (travel, computer services, sorcery!). I spoke to someone who works in PayPal's fraud department, and he said that 90% of the cases he had deal with digital goods, as people could get the item or service immediately, and there's no traceable trail. But it's adult companies that get this treatment, time and time again. These businesses aren't targeted the way adult performers are. While current indie developers have had their accounts frozen, I haven't seen a situation yet where someone *used* to be an indie dev or had links in their sidebar for games they had made, and because of that they got their account shut down when they tried to crowdfund going to SXSW.
Also interesting is that being associated in any way with adult services or performers does not seem to be enforced across the board. Multiple erotica sites dealt with PayPal, telling them that "morally objectionable" content wasn't allowed... including books with BDSM content (they later sort of backed down from this, though it still seems to be case by case). Vicki Gallas, a former escort, was banned from using PayPal to process payments for her memoirs, because they included sex work. Seattle Erotic Art Festival had their account frozen even though they only used the service to process fine art submission fees. The SF Citadel, a BDSM community space in San Francisco, had no issues with WePay, though, though they've since stopped using it out of solidarity. SWAAY, a sex worker community project, accepts PayPal. It seems like what counts as "adult" shifts drastically and is impossible to anticipate.
Particularly interesting is that PayPal really got its start, not only through online auctions like eBay, but adult websites and online gambling. Both are things they now refuse to have anything to do with, even though porn sites and online casinos helped rocket PayPal to the popularity it enjoys today. In 2003, citing high fraud rates, Paypal stopped accepting adult transactions or gambling ones, offering instead to monitor user transactions and report potentially illegal activities.
Our economy is pretty terrible right now. When jobs are difficult to come by, people are starting small businesses out of their home, selling stuff on eBay, making mobile apps, crafting things to sell on Etsy. And, of course, more and more people are trying their hand at something in the adult entertainment arena to help them get by - perhaps camming here, maybe doing a porn there, possibly stripping or selling their dirty socks. College is expensive. Rent is rising in many major cities. Sex work can be and is a ticket out of debt for many people.
Yet, we live in a culture that brands us permanently for dipping a toe into sex work while simultaneously insisting sex workers should leave the industry and do other work. The subsequent shaming becomes a double-edged weapon. With PayPal and WePay controlling most of the online payment market, banning sex workers past or present from using either can mean that any other sort of small business idea is made impossible for us. I may want to stop doing sex work and write instead, but if I can't process online payments because of having an adult history, and companies won't hire me because they can Google my sex work history, I'm stuck in the business, whether I like it or not.
Interestingly, as faith in PayPal and WePay falls, companies like Verotel are moving forward, accepting Bitcoin as a possible alternative form of online payment for adult companies. Perhaps Bitcoin and other similar payment systems outside of the Visa/Mastercard monopoly is the way of the future for those on the margins when companies like PayPal or WePay can steal unfettered from marginalized populations.
But, until we can use Bitcoin to pay rent and buy groceries, the only payment sex workers can count on is the anonymity of cash in hand, and as long as that's true, that scarlet letter makes it hard to leave the industry. When payment processors can dictate morality, that's a scary road to walk down. I've felt sharply the need for society to stand with me, with all sex workers, to recognize that sex work is, in fact, work... and that staying employed during hard times is a sign of our resourcefulness in the face of a hostile world. Sex workers learn how to use tech as a survival strategy -- we're the CEO, CFO, marketing director, PR department and human resources, all on our own. I don't know a company alive that couldn't use that skill set in an unsteady economy.
In case you were wondering, my Patreon patrons all switched over and rent got paid. Guess PayPal just lost out on the fees for all those transactions.
I hope it was worth it for them.
As a sex worker, I hear "why don't you leave the industry?" all the time. We all do -- it's one of the big questions I see Duke student and porn performer Belle Knox fighting off too. I've been in the industry for about 10 years, so I've had a lot of time to think about the answer. For me, becoming a sex worker was part survival and part career path, as I had been working three jobs at a mall for very little and knew it wasn't sustainable. I brainstormed how I'd transition from one aspect to another, taught myself marketing strategies, learned how to best utilize social media in order to connect to clients. I expected that I would stay in the industry for quite a while, either as a worker or an organizer. I enjoyed my work (most of the time), speaking publicly and without shame about it at universities, on television, online and over the airwaves. As an Internet-savvy professional, I blogged regularly, used online advertising and branded myself on social media. All publicity is good publicity, right? And I could always write about my experiences.
I discovered that leaving the sex industry was far easier said than done. I spoke to faith-based organization Solace SF about options. I had encountered them multiple times and they seemed friendly and not too pushy. Many groups that focus on the intersection of sex work and religion (or sex work and radical feminism) talk constantly about how much they want women to leave the industry, how it drains us, how it mistreats us. I didn't feel mistreated myself, but I was exhausted and ready to leave the adult industry behind. Solace promised to help me with my resume, get me interview clothes, advise me on applying for jobs when my primary work was adult in nature. Ten years is a long time to have a gap in a resume, after all!
A representative from Solace told me that I had two choices -- work as a freelancer, continue to hustle and don't worry about my history... or say goodbye to Kitty Stryker, delete everything related to that name and try to wipe the slate clean. I sat with that for a while, turning over in my head how it would feel to delete a persona I spent 10 years creating, honing, perfecting. I would lose all my contacts, lose all the work I had done in media. I couldn't tell prospective employers about speaking at South By Southwest if I distanced myself from this persona, because I had done a presentation on sex work under that identity. I considered it, but ultimately decided I'd rather take my chances and get whatever help I could without destroying my past like I was ashamed of it. But the help never came, and I discovered that Solace had fallen apart with rumors of fraud following in its wake. I can't say I was altogether surprised. All I had gotten in the end were cupcakes and the very occasional gift card for Safeway, nothing to help me move forward and start a new job.
And people wonder why sex workers don't trust the organizations available to "help" them.
Even if that help had panned out I was (and still am) somewhat conflicted about whether or not I want to leave the sex industry. I know I don't have the energy for it anymore on the one hand, but I don't know if I can get started anywhere else. I was outed under my legal name for a piece I wrote about Porn Wikileaks, so it's not easy, but is possible to link my legal name to my adult one. If an employer Googles my name, they'll find my "sordid past" and then will it matter how many Twitter followers I have or the success of my blog? Even if hired, I could be subsequently fired for having been in porn or written about dildos. What do you do when your brand is adult-based and all your best connections, writing and media appearances relate not to SEO, but SEX?
I'm a fighter, though, so I decided to try working independently, first as a marketing manager (sex work teaches you a lot about social media and branding) and later as a writer. I found Patreon, a service that allowed content creators to gather patrons who could pay for your art on a subscription basis. Knowing that crowdsourcing was unfriendly to sex workers and needing a sustainable option, I started up a Patreon account, making sure the content I posted followed their guidelines. It encouraged me to work harder on my writing, and was, for the first time, a viable alternative to sex work. It was great for the first few months. I funded a business trip to the upcoming Feminist Porn Conference in part because of the financial assistance Patreon provided, where I'd be speaking on porn and privacy.
Then I got an email from Patreon, saying that the payment processor PayPal had threatened to shut down all integration with their site because of "adult content." The email stated, "as you can imagine, this would be detrimental to creators -- hundreds of thousands of dollars were to be "frozen" unless we flagged all adult content pages, made them private and removed PayPal functionality from their individual pages... I'm so sorry that we had to do this without warning you first, but it was SUCH an emergency! We simply had to take action to avoid a situation where creators would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars of legitimate pledges." Patreon emailed all of our patrons to warn them, and suggested we also email them to ensure payments went through as usual at the beginning of April. They worked around the clock responding to my panicked emails. While Patreon was open to artists creating work that was adult in nature, their hands were tied. And not in a kinky way.
This was not my first clash with PayPal or similar service WePay, of course. As I've discovered by seeking out stories on Twitter and Facebook, if you have anything to do with sex in some capacity and have tried to use an online payment processor, you'll have had a run-in with one of them freezing your account, returning donations in best case scenarios and just taking it in the worst cases. As the organizer of an event with burlesque, I once had my account frozen for a week, losing vital time to purchase supplies, and I had to submit via email all sorts of information to "prove" I was legit (meaning, of course, not a sex worker). Companies like PayPal or WePay will Google people they deem suspicious and then take the money out of their accounts if they decide it's "adult" without ever clearly defining what that means. Like obscenity, the rule seems to be "we'll know it when we see it".
Of course, it's not just me. Andre Shakti found herself in similarly hot water in March for crowdfunding travel costs using Fundly to make it to the Feminist Porn Awards and Conference. While her offered perks followed Fundly's terms, WePay, the payment processor they used, shut down her account because they were "adult," causing the Sex Workers Outreach Project to write to Fundly encouraging them to stop using WePay and actually do what their tagline says... "raise money for anything". Or there was Maggie Mayhem, a porn performer, tried to raise money for going to Haiti to do relief work using PayPal, and, despite the fact her fundraising had nothing to do with porn, she found her account shut down. Michelle Austin, another porn performer, had accounts at both companies shut down at different times -- WePay did because her company was "linked to an adult company" (which can mean anything from linking to an adult company to having adult content show up in a Google search). She thinks PayPal shut down her donations simply because there was a porn shoot on her personal blog. Makes me wonder how many Tumblrs asking for donations for medical care get their accounts shut down for that reason?
PayPal and WePay are not required to give answers as to why they freeze or shut down accounts, but often all that's required is the history (or even the suspicion) of sex work. It's not just them, either -- Amazon Payments joined the list when Polly Whittaker raised money to fund publishing her memoirs of her experiences with sex culture, but when it came to cash out, Amazon decided her memoirs were too sexual in nature. Google Wallet has had similar issues for those looking to receive payment for handmade BDSM toys. And Square has banned Courtney Trouble for life, even though they were using it for non-porn purposes, because their Google search uncovered that Courtney is a porn producer.
Why do these payment processors have such a strict policy on adult performers, so strict that having worked in the industry means you could find yourself banned for life? I looked into this somewhat and found many such companies claiming that statistically, adult companies were more likely to be high risk for chargebacks (when someone buys the content, often downloading what they want and then calling the company to report fraud). However, I couldn't actually find these supposed statistics.
Instead, I discovered indie porn site owners saying their chargeback percentages were low enough to not warrant calling them high risk, and arguments about what constituted pornography (considered a "risky" investment) versus adult content (not necessarily deemed "risky" but a gray enough area to make enforcement completely arbitrary). I also discovered other types of business often considered at risk for chargebacks (travel, computer services, sorcery!). I spoke to someone who works in PayPal's fraud department, and he said that 90% of the cases he had deal with digital goods, as people could get the item or service immediately, and there's no traceable trail. But it's adult companies that get this treatment, time and time again. These businesses aren't targeted the way adult performers are. While current indie developers have had their accounts frozen, I haven't seen a situation yet where someone *used* to be an indie dev or had links in their sidebar for games they had made, and because of that they got their account shut down when they tried to crowdfund going to SXSW.
Also interesting is that being associated in any way with adult services or performers does not seem to be enforced across the board. Multiple erotica sites dealt with PayPal, telling them that "morally objectionable" content wasn't allowed... including books with BDSM content (they later sort of backed down from this, though it still seems to be case by case). Vicki Gallas, a former escort, was banned from using PayPal to process payments for her memoirs, because they included sex work. Seattle Erotic Art Festival had their account frozen even though they only used the service to process fine art submission fees. The SF Citadel, a BDSM community space in San Francisco, had no issues with WePay, though, though they've since stopped using it out of solidarity. SWAAY, a sex worker community project, accepts PayPal. It seems like what counts as "adult" shifts drastically and is impossible to anticipate.
Particularly interesting is that PayPal really got its start, not only through online auctions like eBay, but adult websites and online gambling. Both are things they now refuse to have anything to do with, even though porn sites and online casinos helped rocket PayPal to the popularity it enjoys today. In 2003, citing high fraud rates, Paypal stopped accepting adult transactions or gambling ones, offering instead to monitor user transactions and report potentially illegal activities.
Our economy is pretty terrible right now. When jobs are difficult to come by, people are starting small businesses out of their home, selling stuff on eBay, making mobile apps, crafting things to sell on Etsy. And, of course, more and more people are trying their hand at something in the adult entertainment arena to help them get by - perhaps camming here, maybe doing a porn there, possibly stripping or selling their dirty socks. College is expensive. Rent is rising in many major cities. Sex work can be and is a ticket out of debt for many people.
Yet, we live in a culture that brands us permanently for dipping a toe into sex work while simultaneously insisting sex workers should leave the industry and do other work. The subsequent shaming becomes a double-edged weapon. With PayPal and WePay controlling most of the online payment market, banning sex workers past or present from using either can mean that any other sort of small business idea is made impossible for us. I may want to stop doing sex work and write instead, but if I can't process online payments because of having an adult history, and companies won't hire me because they can Google my sex work history, I'm stuck in the business, whether I like it or not.
Interestingly, as faith in PayPal and WePay falls, companies like Verotel are moving forward, accepting Bitcoin as a possible alternative form of online payment for adult companies. Perhaps Bitcoin and other similar payment systems outside of the Visa/Mastercard monopoly is the way of the future for those on the margins when companies like PayPal or WePay can steal unfettered from marginalized populations.
But, until we can use Bitcoin to pay rent and buy groceries, the only payment sex workers can count on is the anonymity of cash in hand, and as long as that's true, that scarlet letter makes it hard to leave the industry. When payment processors can dictate morality, that's a scary road to walk down. I've felt sharply the need for society to stand with me, with all sex workers, to recognize that sex work is, in fact, work... and that staying employed during hard times is a sign of our resourcefulness in the face of a hostile world. Sex workers learn how to use tech as a survival strategy -- we're the CEO, CFO, marketing director, PR department and human resources, all on our own. I don't know a company alive that couldn't use that skill set in an unsteady economy.
In case you were wondering, my Patreon patrons all switched over and rent got paid. Guess PayPal just lost out on the fees for all those transactions.
I hope it was worth it for them.
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