Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Facebook Backlash in 3…2…1…ding!
In elementary-school science class, we all learned about Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion. The one that stuck with me was the third law: “To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction.”
Watching the mostly-positive news coverage of Facebook’s announcement that it would be selling stock in May, I wondered when the negative stories about Facebook would begin to trickle in.
The New York Times answered that question today, not with a trickle, but a torrent of negative coverage.
Their three-part series leads with an opinion piece, “Facebook Is Using You,” by Lori Andrews. This article reminds us that Facebook uses its users in two ways: first, it depends on its members to generate, for free, the content for the website; and second, the company then turns around and sells the information gleaned from that content to the highest-bidding advertisers.
This is nothing we haven’t heard before, but it is an unpleasant reminder of how much “free” actually costs us.
The second article, “The Death of the Cyberflâneur,” by Evgeny Morozov, uses a somewhat obscure word in its title to describe how we all used to explore the Internet before Facebook, Twitter and news aggregator sites like The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report did our “Internet Exploring” for us. We were lone hunter-gatherers, prowling the savannah in search of information and entertainment. Now we are moving toward a world where Facebook (or something like it) is our one-stop shop: no learning any other URLs, no thinking required. Everything we want to know is served up to us in one place, and automatically shared with all of our “friends.”
The third article, “Europe Moves to Protect Online Privacy,” by Somini Sengupta, shines a light through the darkness by offering a possible way to increase the protection of our online data here in the U.S.: do as the Romans (and Londoners and Parisians) do. European privacy protection laws are much stronger than in the U.S., and it would not take much political clout to do the same thing here.
Can this happen? I think so. Will it happen? Only if people pay attention to Newton’s law and start pushing back.
Follow me on Twitter at @charlesprimm.
Social Media, for Good and for Evil
It was around this time last year that a popular uprising began in Tunisia, followed by unrest in Libya and Egypt, ultimately leading to the “Arab Spring” movement that resulted in the fall of decades-old Middle Eastern dictatorships.
Social media has received a lot of the credit for helping keep these movements going, of providing the oxygen to fuel the fires of revolution. But the Internet, the backbone upon which social media rests, also is being used by corporations and governments to oppress the people.
That’s the theme of author Rebecca MacKinnon’s new book, “Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom,” excerpted here at Slate.com. MacKinnon describes how Egyptian protesters used social media such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to keep each other and the world informed of their struggle.
But as the protesters began investigating the Egyptian state security apparatus, they discovered that their government had used the Internet and the latest surveillance equipment to monitor their e-mail, track down their friends and contacts via their social-media profiles, and follow their whereabouts and activities over time.
People all over the world face a similar threat, MacKinnon writes, as Hollywood studios attempt to use legislation like SOPA and PIPA to stifle innovation and force individuals to consume media the way Hollywood wants them to.
Imagine if that rule had been in place just a year ago. Imagine the Egyptian protesters, desperately tweeting eyewitness accounts of police brutality in Tahrir Square, while in a bunker somewhere in Cairo, a government official was requesting that Twitter censor all traffic coming into or out of Egypt.
Scary to imagine, but don’t be surprised if the next revolution fails because governments shut down the Internet, rendering social media a silent bystander to political repression.
Follow me on Twitter at @charlesprimm.
Cautiously Optimistic 