Serenity... a life's expedition » stuff

i have an hour

Nanette — Wed, 11 May 2011 12:23:25 +0000

Well, probably a little less than that, now. Say 40 minutes. I have until 5:30 AM, anyway, before I am obligated to do anything. So this hour is mine.

I have, also, a blank page. Or two. Or a hundred.

It doesn’t really matter how many I have, because the pages insist that their pristine condition not be disturbed.

do you see what i see? with online “filter bubbles”, maybe not

Nanette — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:14:35 +0000

Google shows you something different from it shows me, even if we search for the same thing. Facebook filters out what it thinks I may not want to see. And, apparently, these two companies are only the beginning of information gate keeping and siloing online.

In my own push-back against self-created barricades, I stumbled across Eli Pariser’s TED Talk on online filter bubbles (transcript at the link). Pariser, you may remember, is one of the people who started MoveOn.org, though I guess he has, well, moved on from there. Some of what he said was surprising to me, like that Google, using an algorithm and something like 57 signals you send when you land on the Google page (logged in or not), tailors the search results to what they think you want to see.

He used two friends of his, Scott and Daniel, both fairly young males, as an example. Both put the word “Egypt” into Google; Scott’s results were about the uprising in Egypt and other news information. The results Daniel got were about traveling to that country, cooking, I think and other non-news type stuff. Nothing at all about the Egyptian protests.

That’s a little freaky. Now, generally Daniel may be far more interested in travel and food than he is in news, but if he is doing a search on a topic that is hot news at the time, why assume that he has no interest in it? A casual searcher who fits whatever of the 57 points Daniel fit, and who doesn’t watch much television news, could come away from that search still as ignorant of what was happening in the world as when they went in.

Eli Pariser:

So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time — my Facebook page. I’m progressive, politically — big surprise — but I’ve always gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they’re thinking about; I like seeing what they link to; I like learning a thing or two. And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends’ links than on my conservative friends’ links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.

[...]

So I do think this is a problem. And I think, if you take all of these filters together, you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. And your filter bubble is your own personal unique universe of information that you live in online. And what’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don’t decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don’t actually see what gets edited out

And you can be left, as he says, in a web of one. I am not on Facebook much so I wouldn’t know what was edited out or in, but it is disturbing that people seem to have no choice in the matter. If you don’t know what is not there, how will you know what you are missing?

Pariser has written a book, by the way,

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You and this next bit is from an interview he did that is on his book page.

I’ve always believed the Internet could connect us all together and help create a better, more democratic world. That’s what excited me about MoveOn – here we were, connecting people directly with each other and with political leaders to create change.

But that more democratic society has yet to emerge, and I think it’s partly because while the Internet is very good at helping groups of people with like interests band together (like MoveOn), it’s not so hot at introducing people to different people and ideas. Democracy requires discourse and personalization is making that more and more elusive.

And that worries me, because we really need the Internet to live up to that connective promise. We need it to help us solve global problems like climate change, terrorism, or natural resource management which by their nature require massive coordination, and great wisdom and ingenuity. These problems can’t be solved by a person or two – they require whole societies to participate. And that just won’t happen if we’re all isolated in a web of one.

I have some thoughts on all of this and related matters, but I’ll save those for a different post. They connect with what Pariser has said, but branch out in a number of different directions and I don’t want to confuse or dilute his points.

Transcript below (the one at the TED site is interactive, though. ETA – cool, so is this one. Click a link and it will take you to that part of the video at TED Talks.)

Mark Zuckerberg, a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed. And the journalist was asking him, “Why is this so important?” And Zuckerberg said, “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” And I want to talk about what a Web based on that idea of relevance might look like.

So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, the Internet meant something very different to me. It meant a connection to the world. It meant something that would connect us all together. And I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society. But there’s this shift in how information is flowing online, and it’s invisible. And if we don’t pay attention to it, it could be a real problem. So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time – my Facebook page. I’m progressive, politically — big surprise – but I’ve always gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they’re thinking about; I like seeing what they link to; I like learning a thing or two. And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends’ links than on my conservative friends’ links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.

So Facebook isn’t the only place that’s doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic editing of the Web. Google’s doing it too. If I search for something, and you search for something, even right now at the very same time, we may get very different search results. Even if you’re logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at – everything from what kind of computer you’re on to what kind of browser you’re using to where you’re located – that it uses to personally tailor your query results. Think about it for a second: there is no standard Google anymore. And you know, the funny thing about this is that it’s hard to see. You can’t see how different your search results are from anyone else’s.

But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of friends to Google “Egypt” and to send me screen shots of what they got. So here’s my friend Scott’s screen shot. And here’s my friend Daniel’s screen shot. When you put them side-by-side, you don’t even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. But when you do read the links, it’s really quite remarkable. Daniel didn’t get anything about the protests in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results. Scott’s results were full of them. And this was the big story of the day at that time. That’s how different these results are becoming.

So it’s not just Google and Facebook either. This is something that’s sweeping the Web. There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization. Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet, is now personalized — different people get different things. Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times – all flirting with personalization in various ways. And this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. As Eric Schmidt said, “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

So I do think this is a problem. And I think, if you take all of these filters together, you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. And your filter bubble is your own personal unique universe of information that you live in online. And what’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don’t decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don’t actually see what gets edited out. So one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix. And they were looking at the Netflix queues, and they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed, which is there are some movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses. They enter the queue, they just zip right out. So “Iron Man” zips right out, and “Waiting for Superman” can wait for a really long time.

What they discovered was that in our Netflix queues there’s this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves. You know we all want to be someone who has watched “Rashomon,” but right now we want to watch “Ace Ventura” for the fourth time. (Laughter) So the best editing gives us a bit of both. It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan. It gives us some information vegetables, it gives us some information dessert. And the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters, these personalized filters, is that, because they’re mainly looking at what you click on first, it can throw off that balance. And instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food.

What this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the Internet wrong. In a broadcast society – this is how the founding mythology goes – in a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. And along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. But that’s not actually what’s happening right now. What we’re seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones. And the thing is that the algorithms don’t yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did. So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they’re going to decide what we get to see and what we don’t get to see, then we need to make sure that they’re not just keyed to relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important – this is what TED does – other points of view.

And the thing is we’ve actually been here before as a society. In 1915, it’s not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities. Then people noticed that they were doing something really important. That, in fact, you couldn’t have a functioning democracy if citizens didn’t get a good flow of information. That the newspapers were critical, because they were acting as the filter, and then journalistic ethics developed. It wasn’t perfect, but it got us through the last century. And so now, we’re kind of back in 1915 on the Web. And we need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they’re writing.

I know that there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google – Larry and Sergey – people who have helped build the Web as it is, and I’m grateful for that. But we really need you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility. We need you to make sure that they’re transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters. And we need you to give us some control, so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn’t. Because I think we really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it’s not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.

Thank you.

(Applause)

so, i read this book…

Nanette — Tue, 03 May 2011 22:20:50 +0000

I’m done with the book I mention below and I just have to say — it’s pretty amazing how the casual racism of those days permeated just about everything. I often read the older ebooks (they are free!) and it’s almost like a formula: have a good plot, interesting characters, well-written story, but don’t forget to denigrate some ethnic or racial group somewhere in there. It didn’t seem to matter whether it fit in the story or added anything to it.

Take this book. It is primarily set in the US but some of the scenes are in England and Egypt. The Egyptian scenes are pretty bad, of course, following the formula of dirty cities and mysterious, untrustworthy, exotic people, fierce desert dwellers, savages, so on. A bit of conflict occurred in this location – a betrayal by superstitious Arabs, who left them to die in the desert, a rescue by a desert tribe, a capture by a different tribe, more conflict, escape, pursuit, recapture, then rescue by cool, calm and dominant British soldiers at the last minute.

Pretty bad, as I said. The characters in the story — at this point, three white men (one of them the “villain” of the piece) and two white women — react in different ways to all this. The white women — well, I’m not sure the author knew what to do with the women. He has them being all fainty a lot, but at the same time they help with the scientific discoveries, are the main character’s assistants in his detective work, they wield guns like pros, travel great distances while injured to rescue the main character and others and, in general, are fairly well-rounded for stories of that era.

Anyway, after they escape from the desert, they board a ship back to the United States, lose the villain again, and set off in pursuit of him across the western plains. Or maybe not quite there, because they wind up at a camp with a bunch of cowboys, close to the Mexican border. And, yes, of course the Mexicans come in for their share of denigration and stereotyping – the mustachioed woman-botherer, the bar-working, beautiful young woman who hides the white “villain”, and more.

I don’t mean to gloss over or excuse any of the racist treatment of the Egyptians, Mexicans or unnamed “savages” in the story. It’s all pretty bad. But each of these groups had some purpose in the story, some part to play that was essential, pretty much, to the plot. Each, of course, could have been written without all the racist stereotyping, too, but their presence in the story has a purpose in the plot. Pretty bad, yes.

But then we come to the Chinese cook and I realized we hadn’t seen anything yet.

See, the “villain” of the piece hid out with the cowboys, working as their cook. When he was found out he escaped into Mexico, where we get the chance to see all the Mexican stereotyping. Meanwhile, back at the camp, a Chinese cook appears from nowhere. I mean, we don’t see him enter the story, he is just suddenly there as a replacement for the escapee/cook.

Now, with the other non-white characters, even if they were racist stereotypes they were engaged with as people. Some grumbling about having to adhere to their cultural norms and so on, but still… people. The Chinese cook thing, though… a whole nother level of bad.

He interacts primarily with one of the white female characters. Prior to this I kind of liked her; she was smart, resourceful, happy with herself and her life and didn’t just moan about wanting to get married and all that. Probably close to what early feminists were like, without the book saying so. But when she interacts directly with the Chinese cook she’s haughty, vicious in her speech toward him, denigrating and very, very “I’m white and thus must be respected and obeyed; you, on the other hand, are dirt.” I mean, she doesn’t say that, but everything she does and says says that, if you know what I mean.

I found it a bit shocking, even though, of course, I know these old books are just dripping with racism, some of them, and anti-Semitism galore. But not, of the ones I’ve read, with this level of … just complete, face-to-face dehumanization. What made it worse is that this character seemed to have no other purpose in the story other than to allow this woman (or one of the characters, anyway) to treat him like this. After a few paragraphs he puts a snake in her bed, jumps on a horse and rides off with everyone in pursuit. He avoids them by rolling off his horse and letting the horse continue on while he hides in the grass, then escapes. And that’s the end of him in the story.

I remembered, then, that the Chinese Exclusion Act had just been passed in 1882, I think. And this book was written, or at least published in 1915, when anti-Chinese racism was still at its height. It’s one thing to read about that, though — quite another to see it in practice.

The author was a British writer who, I guess, was attempting to show some sort of white solidarity with Americans while writing this book. In fact, when the group is rescued by the British soldiers in the desert, one of them says something to the effect that they were Americans, not British. And the officer answers, “Same thing.” Which, of course, it’s not, but obviously there is more going on here, too. Wasn’t there a war somewhere around then?

It’s not, as I mentioned before, a very good book, and probably doesn’t merit all this rambling analysis, but I think what struck me most was how white supremacy/white privilege was reinforced by much of the literature of the day. Not a surprise or a revelation, mind — in decades to come people will probably look back at the treatment of Muslim characters in some current books with the same horror.

Anyway, I suppose I should edit this and attempt to pare it down and organize it into some sort of coherent piece, but that will have to wait for another day.

[Illustration from here. Wall with "Chinese Wall Around the United States of America" written on it. People on top of the wall pulling up ladders. Apparently Chinese people at the bottom of the wall. Text of cartoon says "Throwing down the ladder by which they rose."

Say... that wall kinda looks familiar, doesn't it?]

future vision

Nanette — Tue, 03 May 2011 00:58:52 +0000

I am in the middle of reading a fun book. It’s not very good, actually, but it is fun. I was more than halfway through it before something struck me about it. The characters were texting and using a telecam. Which, in the normal way of things, wouldn’t be all that odd — except this book came out in 1915.

If the book, The Black Box by E. Phillips Oppenheim, was a science fiction type novel I think I would be less surprised. But it’s a detective story. Mind, the lead character is a detective with a scientific bent, but like most pulp fiction of the era the books is filled with plot twists, outrageous and largely impossible happenings — and a glimpse of the future.

The detective invents a wireless communication device which allows him, and a person with a similar device, to text back and forth. Sounds downright possible, now, doesn’t it? The telecam thing is a little odder — when you make a call, a person on one end (the detective or his helpers) holds a mirror type thing up to the phone receiver and it somehow shows what is going on in the room on the other end of the line in the mirror. Without the people in the other room knowing about it. Personally, I’m kinda glad that that one hasn’t actually been invented (yet), but the video cam thingies come close!

I don’t know much about what life was like during that period of time. I mean, I know the general history, but people must have spent time dreaming up all sorts of impossible things, even then. Or seemingly impossible anyway. Then I got to wondering — what do we, today, dream of that is impossible?

I need to do some thinking about that one.

poor guy. can you imagine all the “so and so is following you” emails?

Nanette — Mon, 02 May 2011 20:29:51 +0000

Sohaib Athar, @ReallyVirtual on Twitter, apparently started the night with about 1000 followers. Then he unwittingly tweeted, in real time, a few odd incidents happening in his Abbotabad neighborhood — which just happened to be the attack and killing of Osama. Once word got around, people started following him (not sure why since by the time anyone knew of him, the incident was over.)

Still, as of this writing, he is up to 71,657 followers. I hope at some point he was able to turn off the email notifications, lol. Dang.

random question: does or does not England have…

Nanette — Sun, 01 May 2011 18:55:28 +0000

a Ministry of Silly Hats? If not, I know the perfect person to establish one:

Princess Beatrice in The Hat

Princess Beatrice (who is she, anyway?) appears to be a serial silly hat wearer:

So, I vote for her to establish, and perhaps endow, the Ministry of Silly Hats. Whoever she is (perhaps Fergie’s daughter? She has that look. I can’t be bothered looking her up though) I hope she never loses her penchant for strange headgear.

[photos from here and here]