Month: November 2008

Schneier reviews Clay Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody:

No one coordinates Flickr’s 6 million to 8 million users. Yet Flickr had the first photos from the 2005 London Transport bombings, beating the traditional news media. Why? People with cellphone cameras uploaded their photos to Flickr. They coordinated themselves using tools that Flickr provides. This is the sort of impromptu organization the Internet is ideally suited for. Shirky explains how these moments are harbingers of a future that can self-organize without formal hierarchies.

These nonorganizations allow for contributions from a wider group of people. A newspaper has to pay someone to take photos; it can’t be bothered to hire someone to stand around London underground stations waiting for a major event. Similarly, Microsoft has to pay a programmer full time, and Encyclopedia Britannica has to pay someone to write articles. But Flickr can make use of a person with just one photo to contribute, Linux can harness the work of a programmer with little time, and Wikipedia benefits if someone corrects just a single typo. These aggregations of millions of actions that were previously below the Coasean floor have enormous potential.

But a flash mob is still a mob. In a world where the Coasean floor is at ground level, all sorts of organizations appear, including ones you might not like: violent political organizations, hate groups, Holocaust deniers, and so on. (Shirky’s discussion of teen anorexia support groups makes for very disturbing reading.) This has considerable implications for security, both online and off.

We never realized how much our security could be attributed to distance and inconvenience — how difficult it is to recruit, organize, coordinate, and communicate without formal organizations. That inadvertent measure of security is now gone. Bad guys, from hacker groups to terrorist groups, will use the same ad hoc organizational technologies that the rest of us do. And while there has been some success in closing down individual Web pages, discussion groups, and blogs, these are just stopgap measures.

In the end, a virtual community is still a community, and it needs to be treated as such. And just as the best way to keep a neighborhood safe is for a policeman to walk around it, the best way to keep a virtual community safe is to have a virtual police presence.

Newsweek has an article this week on groups that offer tips for self-starving:

Pro-anorexia, or “pro-ana,” Web sites (with more than one using the “Ana Boot Camp” name) have for years been a controversial Internet fixture, with users sharing extreme diet tips and posting pictures of emaciated girls under headlines such as “thinspiration.”

But what was unusual about the site mentioned above (which is no longer available) was where it was hosted: the ubiquitous social networking site Facebook.com. The (largely female) users who frequent pro-ana sites have typically done so anonymously, posting under pseudonyms and using pictures of fashion models to represent themselves. Now, as the groups increasingly launch pages on Facebook, linking users’ real-life profiles to their eating disorders, the heated conversation around anorexia has become more public. Many pro-ana Facebookers say the groups provide an invaluable support system to help them cope with their disease, but psychologists worry that the growth of such groups could encourage eating disorders in others.

Doctor of Psychology John Grohol responds:

These groups are a little disturbing, especially as you read through the postings. But no more so than the dozens of self-harm sites online, or the sites devoted to helping people be more successful in suicide. Or a dozen other topics that if you learned you could join a group that was “pro” that, you’d be saying to yourself, “Really? Wow.”

That is, after all, the nature of the Internet. It allows for people with very diverse wants and needs to find one another and hook up with one another far more easily than has ever been possible previously in human culture. The fact that some of these wants and needs are outside of the mainstream norm is not at all surprising.

So what does all of this do for people? Isn’t allowing people to discuss their pro-ana needs just plain harmful and potentially dangerous? Not necessarily…The more “out in the open” these kinds of concerns become, the more society learns and can answer the kinds of information (or mis-information) they promote. If more teens feel comfortable talking about eating disorders, then perhaps more will also feel comfortable asking for help when they notice themselves or a close friend who might be going down that road.

From the Daily Mail:

Human face movements are picked up by a video camera and mapped onto the tiny electronic motors in Jules’ skin. It can grin and grimace, furrow its brow, and “speak” as the software translates real expressions observed through video camera “eyes.” Jules then mimics the facial expressions of the human by converting the video image into digital commands that make the robot’s servos and motors produce mirrored movements. And it all happens in real time as Jules can interpret the commands at 25 frames per second.

Carr has video of the robot vowing to destroy humanity. Not a good sign.

What if Starbucks Marketed Like a Church by Richard Reisling:

Reisling is formerly of the corporate marketing world – and very devout:

The challenge is, if we think door hangers or websites will solve our marketing problem, then we have a bigger problem. The average church in America has less than a 15% retention rate of first-time visitors. If I owned a pizza parlor and more than 85% of the people who ate there once decided to never come back, I would think a mailer might just kill the business. It would bring people in faster and increase the speed of my demise. I, more likely, need to be working on things like… my recipe, my wait staff, my decor–anything and everything that could increase my retention rate outside of bringing more people in. The principle is stewardship. What are we accomplishing with what God is sending us? If we are not converting that, scripture would reveal that we are not ready for more (Luke 16:10).

This is all far too Protestant for me.

(Hat tip: Utne)

Is nothing sacred? Linda Yablonsky asks:

… how often does a work sell on the strength of an artist’s personality alone? “Most collectors are unaffected by artists’ personalities,” says [Mary] Boone. “They only care about the art.” But Donald Baechler has observed just the opposite. Through his friendship with such collectors of his art as Yoko Ono, Baechler has been bumping up against celebrity ever since his paintings of dripping ice-cream cones and long-stemmed roses hit the market in the early 1980s. “I met George Condo then, and it seemed to me people were taken with him before they were with the paintings. Everyone was charmed by him. [The sculptor] Walter De Maria, on the other hand, was notorious for not showing up at his openings. It was always a puzzle how he got to be so famous without bothering to be there.”

Winkleman adds:

The part of the article I found most interesting was that dealing with what Yablonsky termed "inverse magnetism," the notion that the more distant or inaccessible an artist or dealer is, the more others want to be near him or her. A high-profile art critic in New York once admitted that he was oddly attracted to a gallery in which they very consciously (if not down right rudely) ignored him whenever he entered. It was liberating in a way, he noted. Of course, this disposition probably only attracts people to you when what you’re offering in terms of art is still of high quality. Otherwise, I suspect, folks are more than happy to leave you to your inaccessible self.

A description:

In this series, "TREE," the "photography-act" is more than a click. The canvas that frames each tree is there by human design, turning the object into a subject, pulling it out of the landscape.

The artist in her own words:

Trees are attractive objects in that they enable people to think philosophically and appreciate aesthetically. But too often, we don’t recognize the value of ordinary mundane objects around us. Seeing trees in a refreshing way or restoring the value of trees is to awaken all beings on earth in my work.

A few more after the jump:

New research challenges the notion that city-dwellers are lonelier:

“Every 20 or 30 years, we have a lament about the decline of community, and it’s usually due to cities and urbanization,” says Robert Sampson, the criminologist who chairs Harvard’s sociology department, when I visit him one sunny morning this fall. He mentions one of the classics of the genre, Louis Wirth’s Urbanism As a Way of Life. “It’s all about the impersonal way of life in the city—how it almost deranged people, led to this sort of schizoid personality, to psychosis and loneliness.” He smiles. “It’s a fun piece, actually. There’s some great quotes in it.” He leans back in his chair. “But this idea that cities are bastions of lonely, despairing people is a myth,” he says.

Caleb Crain investigates traffic deaths in New York City in the 1860s.

NYT magazine has a video (above) on photographer Robbie Cooper’s new project Immersion. From the write up of the slideshow:

These images of kids playing video games were created by Robbie Cooper, a British photographer who employed a Red camera — a very-high-resolution video camera — and then took stills from the footage. Cooper, who says he was inspired by the camera technique that Errol Morris used to interview people in his documentaries, arranged his equipment so that the players were actually looking at a reflection of the game on a small pane of glass. He placed the camera behind the reflection so that it could look directly into their faces as they played.

Cooper’s blog is here.

Paul Heald attended a privacy conference last weekend:

Consensus seemed to emerge that legal remedies for invasion of privacy, defamation, tresspass, and sexual harrassment on the internet could reach the worst abuses, but many panelists expressed frustration that the anonymous nature of internet effectively prevented the enforcement of legal rules.  The "right" to communicate anonymously lies at the heart of the problem.  But where does this right come from?

Not the law . . . we have no legal intuition that it’s okay to commit crimes and torts as long as we do so anonymously.  Nor do we see a right to use any other mass media anonymously.  Can you go to your local radio or television station and demand to broadcast your most craven thougts anonymously?  What’s different about the internet?

The web’s architecture is what’s different.  To borrow from Larry Lessig’s emphasis on structure, anonymity is built into its very code.  Those who realized the web saw a chance to overthrow existing authority, existing hierarchies of power.  A glorious treasure trove beckoned just within their reach . . . including the seductive cloak of anonymity.  Thousands of coders chained to their terminals plotted a slave revolt.  They grabbed power their masters could not see; they claimed the power to be invisible.