Brave New World

Since a few days I’m living opposite the cemetery. One morning I was sitting in this beautiful place. It seemed like an island within the slowly awaking city. I can’t tell what it was; maybe it was the birds singing as if there were no tomorrow or the early morning sun blinking through the old trees, there was something magical but also real about this place. Sitting there eased my thoughts and it made me realise again the mortality of life and most of the things that are part of life and happen during our lifetime.

Thinking of mortality I remembered this article I read a few weeks ago. It was about a Swedish business idea, called My Webwill. The founder Lisa Granberg and her colleagues are dealing with the unusual question, what happens to our Facebook, twitter etc. profiles when we die. A question probably a very few people think of when they create their profiles. But even if nearly everything in life is mortal, our Facebook profiles aren’t until someone actually deletes them. (And then I am not quite convinced that they are really gone. But that is another question.) As weird as it sounds, My Webwill is offering a quite practical service that becomes necessary with the always growing use of social networks in society.

What is not really necessary in my opinion is an additional service they offer. If you register for My Webwill you have the opportunity to create your last status update or a message from the afterworld for your beloved. It could be argued that this is the modern form of a farewell letter but somehow it got this weird taste for me. It becomes even worse with their offer to maintain profiles after their owners died.
A Facebook profile can not replace the person behind it. As fascinating and unlimited the possiblities the web offers seem to be, there should be a limitation.

There are a few things that just don’t belong in places like Facebook, because they deserve some respect and reverence. And because they are too real.

Dead is definitely one of them.

It was at a reading by Gerhart Baum, the former German Minister of the Interior, when I experienced the generation gap about the dealing with personal data in the web once again. The controversy of security and freedom provoked a heated debate between the “digital natives” and our parents’ generation about how we portray ourselves in social networks. But what really made me think was this woman who called the way social networks are used narcissism.

Narcissism. Quite a deep term to describe a few status updates and some uploaded pictures, showing how interesting we are. And here it is. Showing how interesting we are. Is this narcissism?

Regarding its overall definition narcissism is the habit of admiring ourselves too much, especially our appearance. Furthermore, it is a form of character where a low self-esteem is compensated by an extreme opinion of the personal importance and the longing for appreciation by others.

The thing with social networks is, they only work if everyone regards himself or herself important enough to share more or less information and fragments of their lives with others. To take part in the digital world of communication and networking everyone has to be a bit of a Narcissus. Don’t we all feel interesting and a bit important if someone likes a link we posted, or leaves a comment on our status updates or pictures?

And this has not necessarily to do with low self esteem. I think its more a phenomenon of society in general.The French writer Voltaire already said: “Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”

We also want to be liked and accepted outside social networks with certain ways of acting and the way we appear.
We constantly try to view ourselves with the eyes of others, to reflect ourselves.

I think it is quite the same in social networks. It is just a bit more obvious and for some people also easier here. And the reflection is more direct.

The original myth of Narcissus says, that he felt in love with his reflection. This was his undoing. He drowned. I think, as long as we filter what we share with others and thus make sure we don’t drown in our effort to be appreciated by others in order to love ourselves and also don’t drown our friends in updates of every single step we do, its ok to be a bit of a Narcissus… because appreciation can be a wonderful thing…

A year ago, Skype launched its “The Skype Nomad”. The story behind this is an Australian writer, Rebecca Campbell, known as the Nomad who travelled around the world, followed digital by lots of fans.

The 26 year old travelled around the world in 33 days, without stopping. Not even to sleep or eat. She slept and ate on the aeroplane or in the train and travelled like this through 15 countries like China, Australia, the US, Italy, Estonia, UK and many more. She not just used traditional ways of travelling but also a hot air balloon, dog sleds and bumboats.

The mission Skype followed by this was to make people aware of the ability it provides to keep in touch all over the world, everytime.

Rebecca Campbell not only told people about her latest adventures in her blog, she also kept in touch with everybody who was interested through a number of Skype enabled gadgets. Additional, she had a Facebook and a Myspace page.

Skype never used traditional advertising tools, but it has over 309 million users all over the world.
I’m a Skype user myself and especially whilst studying abroad it helps me keeping in touch with friends and family at home, but it also helps organising some group work for uni for example.

I think Skype found a really suitable way to point out its advantages and character, but showed as well how all the other social media tools enable people all over the world to keep in touch.

Google – the ever – growing empire produces nothing but seems determined to control everything. This quote comes from Henry Porter who criticises the monopolist character of the Internet. And indeed, regarding businesses like Google, which seems to take over every single bit of the Internet, he might be right.

It even seems to take over the role of the owner of intellectual property, when announcing that every book will be scanned and available to everybody through the Web now. This is just an extension of the already existing debate around pirate bay, regarding the infringement of copyright of music and films.

To be honest, my opinion about all this is a bit two hearted.

I totally agree that Google developed into a monopoly in the Web and this is questionable regarding the freedom and individuality the Web promises. This is the question many producers and authors face as well, since Google announced its plans with the books.

The authors do not have a chance against Google, as they were not asked beforehand. The only way Google could be stopped would be through users taking action and denying the use of the online books, like it happened in Broughton, when villagers prevented Google to take pictures of their village for Street View.

It is feared that through moving the literature into the Internet a loss of culture will take place.
But then, regarding reading and writing as a basis for democracy, the digital books might be a possibility to encourage more people to read.

And regarding all the information in the Internet through blogs etc. a question of loss of culture could be asked here as well. Wouldn’t it be a chance to enhance the quality of ‘literature’ in the Web, if some real literature would be available?

So, Google might not produce something, but maybe it can help to maintain parts of culture through storing it and making it available?

Imagine sitting on your computer, uncovering personal photos, videos, and secrets of other people… tempting?

Well, spokeo.com promotes itself by guaranteeing exactly this.

The Web does not only let emerge new words, as it seems it also gives people ideas for new businesses.
Through a comment of one of my former posts (Does Facebook reflect my reputation?) I became aware of a webpage that offers a detailed “research” on your friends, nearly in real time. It provides the possibility to follow your friends on all of their Internet activities. The user of spokeo.com is asked to provide his Email password, which is used by the server to compare the address book of this particular email address. Those addresses again are used to check out the Internet activities of the friends. The friends, however, will never find out that they were spied on – if friends is still the right expression here.

To learn more about spokeo.com watch this.

To be honest, I find this idea quiet mental and I kind of see some ethical problems here.

First of all, why would someone need to spy on his friends? That would show that this person would have lost any real social contact and the ability to communicate. Besides the fact that status updates and photos in several kinds of social media already reveal a lot about someone. But these updates are made conciously and with the purpose to be seen rather than being spied out secretly.

Additional, wouldn’t this undermine the open and democratic character of Web 2.0?

I guess it just shows again: despite the tempting freedom Web 2.0 seems to offer, it has to be taken with caution. Because the less you expose about yourself, the less can be found.

And when someone really wants to know more about you – there is still something called face-to-face communication…

In March 2009 the Guardian reported about the draft for a new curriculum for primary school. It intends that pupils should be taught on how to use social media tools like Twitter and Weblogs as well as how to use Wikipedia as an information source. The worst on this proposal is that it is not an additional subject rather than a replacement for traditional lessons. It is thought to put less emphasise on science, history and geography.

That does not sound good to me to be honest: although a huge part of our communication might be transferred to the Internet, I do not really see a reason in not knowing where we come from and how the society and the world we live in developed to what it is now.

Would it not be important to have knowledge about other parts of the earth, other cultures and how history unifies and separates countries? Especially regarding the Web, where communication happens all over the world easily and where lots of different culture can be unified in communication.

As a research revealed, one in six children spend more than three hours a day in the Internet and a quarter of five-years old have Internet access in their rooms.

This shows that social media has become a naturally part of our lives, as well for young people. They will use these tools anyway, but they will possibly not teach themselves about history. When teaching them something about the Web, I think it would be much more important to make them sensitive for the risks the Web holds for them. And maybe on how to communicate outside the Web…

Critics of the new draft legislation for the closure of Web pages in Germany, which are in relation with child pornography, were successful by setting up an online petition against it last week. In record time of just four days 55.000 votes could be collected to protest against the law. Main tools for spreading the message were again blogs and twitter.

But what could possibly be wrong about a law, which tries to combat child pornography? Well, that was my first thought as well when I read about it in the news.

Looking on the law a bit more in depth makes it a bit clearer I think.

The law would allow the Federal Criminal Police Office in Germany (Bundeskriminalamt) to list every webpage they consider as dangerous in terms of child pornography on a daily basis and the provider would have to block these pages. Lots of Internet providers in Germany already confirmed their approval.

The thing is that that would not solve the actual problem, as the culprit could still operate on other pages or outside the web. This means that the actual problem would not be solved at all.
If the law would be processed probably similar regulations would follow, which would undermine the democratic character of the Internet.

I think it would be better to start at the source of the problem and first of all educate people how to protect themselves from this kind of criminality.

And I think the success of the online petition tells its own tale: it showed that the web really is a very democratic place and that the potential for fighting against something exists.

A few weeks ago I joined Twitter – finally. But still, I do not really get the point of it to be honest. Maybe that is why I am a quiet infrequent user of it. And that again might be the reason why I do not get the point of it.

But now I have learned about a new tool in combination with Twitter which ranks the popularity of the political parties in Germany with regard to the “Bundestagswahl 2009”, which will take place in September.

Here is how it works: if Twitter users in Germany post their tweets, they put the name of the party at the end of their tweet and combine it with the hashtag and a minus or plus, depending on their opinion. This is then used to create a bar chart, which can be viewed on a weekly or daily basis.
I found that quiet interesting, as I generally believe that as a massive part of the general communication moved to the Web, the political communication should as well. And like Barack Obama proved, this can be very successful.

The Wahlgetwitter (election twittering), what it is called, might not be very representative yet, but regarding the 27.000 people who use twitter actively in Germany, there is definitely potential for an effective use of it.

Using twitter like that seems a bit more to the point and might encourage an actual communication about something which really matters and where everybody could profit from.
It might be platitudes, which make twitter looking a bit pointless – although that is what it actually asks for: What are you doing?

Maybe that should not be taken too literal…

I just came over the term mommy hacker in the dictionary and it grabbed my attention, as I immediately had this controversial picture in my head: a mum hiding in the darkness of the night, following her criminal intentions…

Well, it is actually not that bad. The real explanation is: A mommy hacker is a mom, who out of worries controls the Internet activities of her children.

Following an article in the Guardian, those worries do not come out of nowhere: the book described in this article (Consumer Kids by Agnes Nairn and Ed Mayo) reveals that kids are becoming more and more web savvy and are spending an average of five hours a day in front of their computers. This makes them an easy target for marketers and webpages like Stardoll. This website targets more than 30 million girls, which create their avatars and dress them up in designer labels and are following role models in the Stardoll community.

Superbelly11, one of the young users of Stardoll finds that Stardoll is the only place in the Internet where she feels safe. Really?

Like on every other website, the children are asked to provide personal information like their email address for example. Therefore Stardoll counts to the 85% children’s websites that collect key information about their users, even though they are children; that makes it easy to market to them directly.

Brands know what the particular child purchases in its online world and use this information for their marketing.

Although websites like Stardoll provide Kid’s Privacy Policies and an Online Security Guide for Parents, as soon as the email address is out there it can be used and will never come back… not even the hacking mom can get it back.

And maybe she won’t even see the need to get it back, as she might discover in her nightly activities that the websites seem harmless, because the desire for the products they might create are invisible at the first glance as is the way brands market to children.

On March 28th 2009 at 8.30 the whole globe was mobilised to switch off the lights for an hour. Earth Hour, what the campaign is called takes place every year since the first time in 2007 in Sydney. The campaign is set up by the World Wide Fund for Nature WWF to raise awareness of the environmental issue of global warming.

As a main communication tool to gather all the people and to organise some kind of grassroot activism served several social media. An Earth Hour group was created in Facebook which has 900,131 members, Youtube videos were distributed (amateur as well as professional ones), Twitter was used to distribute the message and several blogs were posted about the campaign.

Using Clay Shirkey words: “It takes a village…”

For this kind of cause the use of social media seems the best way to engage people, especially when taking into account that the campaign took place all over the world. To quote Clay Shirkey again: “A story can go from local to global in a heart beat”. A group of people can be mobilised very quickly for the right kind of cause.

Another advantage of the use of new media in this case is that people were encouraged to tweet or blog about it and upload pictures and videos about their experiences during the actual event. Therefore the basis for the next campaign was already set.

George Marshall regards this campaign as the most mislead one of its kind. He calls it a small, simple act, which is easy to publicise. What is wrong with that?

Well, it might not reduce emission significantly but it raised awareness, especially when important places like the Eiffel Tower in Paris switch off their lights or Coca Cola agreed to switch off their billboard at time square for an hour.

It might be a small and simple act, but through an easy worldwide distribution of the message the main aim of the campaign was reached: creating awareness. And it is an event which not only gathers lots of people but it has promotion opportunities for organisations as well.

This will raise awareness on the one hand for Earth Hour itself and its cause and on the other hand serve as an incentive for the organisation to take part. Again Clay Shirkey: “Without plausible promise, all technology in the world would be nothing more than all the technology in the world”. 

As it is said in the Earth Hour group in Facebook: it’s about joining together and creating a vital conversation about the future of the planet – it’s as simple as a flick of the switch. And nothing more…

Clay Shirkey (2008) Here comes everybody. The power of organizing without orgnaizations London: Penguin Books Ltd.