Odyssey Online

…Facebook’s IPO has lead to a tumultuous couple of days for the company, nice summarized in Atlantic Magazine…

Use Facebook?  Okay, who doesn’t –but while I bet you do know that Facebook keeps some information about what you do whilst your at Facebook.com, you probably didn’t know that every single click you make as been saved, cataloged, and sold to who-knows-who.  An Austrian law student named Max Schrems managed to get the complete file Facebook has on him, and it totaled 1,222 pages.  Perhaps Max spends a lot of time on Facebook but I’m flabbergasted that anyone can compile a 1,222 page dossier on anybody…a definite moment to pause.

And read!  Facebook certainly has become a subject for commentary on both the evolution of the Internet and what an information economy really means and does.  We have a number of titles that comment on Facebook, and all the implications of the Internet’s great equalizer-time-waster-snoop-amusement-park.com

• Tales from Facebook by Daniel Miller
• The Facebook effect : the Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick
• People Will Talk : the Surprising Science of Reputation by John Whitfield
• Virtually You : the Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality by Elias Aboujaoude
• Rewired : Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn by Larry D. Rosen, L. Mark Carrier, and Nancy A. Cheever
• Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out : Kids Living and Learning With New Media by Mizuko Ito [et al.]
• You are Not a Gadget : A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier

Mr. Lanier was on campus this fall and gave a captivating lecture…much to think about…

…since we do blog about Facebook here, this is a fun map created by William Easterly about Facebook Connectedness: ergo, which Nations are the biggest Facebook users.  Visually compelling and illustrative of just what a big deal Facebook is…

From Atlanticwire, a sampling of reactions to a Federal Trade Commission proposal that companies be regulated  in their ability to track one’s treks across the Internet.  For truly thoughtful commentary on what happens and should happen to the information one leaves in one’s tracks across cyberspace, see Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s book Delete: Virtual Forgetting in the Digital Age…

Firesheep is a Firefox add-on.  Now, Firefox add-ons are generally good, utilitarian, useful things…this add on however allows anyone to hack someone else’s Facebook account and pretty much do whatever they want with it.  A man named Eric Butler created it saying he did so to illustrate the security vulnerabilities of social networking applications.  It strikes me that there is a “take pride in your work” issue when it comes to software that will do your hacking automatically for you, but leaving that for the moment here is other commentary on Firesheep’s implications:

• Whose Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?
• Firesheep Users May Be Breaking the Law
• Firesheep’s Real Lesson: Take Wifi Security Seriously
• Concerned About Firesheep? Here Are Some Wifi Alternatives

Fear the sheep…

…Joanna Weiss of the Boston Globe writes an interesting piece on Facebook today, as she argues that when we are on Facebook “we’re buying into a collection illusion.”

Writing on the Huffington Post Ryan Grim comments on Facebook’s decision to refuse advertisements by groups advocating the legalization of marijuana.  Like any for-profit publication medium, Facebook has every right to accept or reject whatever advertising it cares to accept or reject, but  how many Facebook users conceptualize of Facebook as a cafe or commons.  That Facebook is social media works against the notion that it may be playing by publishers rules, and thus raises questions about what, when, and why Facebook censors.  Let the buyer beware, Facebook is Newsweek…

…or at least showing some considerable awareness that Facebook activity has privacy implications.  Two interesting pieces in the New York Times by Sarah Maslin Nir and Laura Holson chronicle young Facebook enthusiasts making very deliberate decisions about what they put online.  It all rings as good news these kids thinking about their futures through privacy savvy.

However, in thinking about the sum total of networked information technology that the whole concept of privacy is going through a significant change, a change with cultural breadth, and a change that ends up with privacy-lite as the norm, particularly if you accept that privacy is the ability to control who has access to personal information.  To a certain extent the articles linked here demonstrate individuals doing just that…exerting control…but to do so they have to game the system. The system isn’t set up for them to control personal information.  Perhaps the ability to control personal information was never one held in both hands, but a memory can’t be hacked…that has to mean something…

…neither of course, can an abacus…

…the world of news is lit up by stories that Democratic Senators are calling on the Federal Trade Commission to take steps to insure user privacy and new social networking features have by announced by Facebook (this version of the story if from the Telegraph).

The news matters particularly if you buy Farhad Manjoo’s argument that Facebook is becoming the Web’s “killer app.” He writes, “We, Facebook’s hordes, are actively filling in the slots in its database, giving the company an extremely accurate picture of ourselves and our friends. No other company will have anything like Facebook’s towering database of human intentions and desires–not even Google.” It’s a convincing case, and one that makes me regret posting that I had ham and eggs for breakfast to my Facebook wall…

…Atlantic Magazine has an ongoing online series called What I Read, and the most recent contributor is Washington Post journalist David Corn. His essay is about information overload, about the sheer volume that some who is “information business” finds via Twitter and RSS.  I’m going to kind of ruin the essay (although you should read it, it’s short and very well written),  but the last line of the essay is so dead-on that it’s worth quoting: “I do miss reading. Nowadays, we absorb.”

It raises the question of how we use technology, or, better still, how we position technology. Mr. Corn could read books, he acknowledges, but doesn’t. People can coexist with networked information technology in an infinite number of ways, and ways very much divorced from the banter about “revolution” that the purveyors of said technology insist is happening.  John Freeman’s book the Tyranny of E-Mail provides an interesting model about how to position e-mail within the context of a life.  Also, when can settle accounts with the word revolution.  Technology doesn’t cause revolutions, nor does it enable them.  Revolutions are moments in either the history of a people or a person when an epiphany infused with either anger or joy that causes a dramatic change.  It causes curiosity to incite action. Social unrest brings revolutions, significant others bring revolutions, computers don’t.  In the history of commerce any number of products have caused a lot of people to alter their behavior one way or the other…but that doesn’t  a revolution make…think about that the next time the television tells you “There’s an app for that…”