The iPod: Lightning Rod for Criminals?

Crime statistics released Monday by the FBI showed violent crime increased in 2005 and 2006, and a new Urban Institute analysis offers evidence that the concurrent explosion in iPod use may have triggered the spike.

The gadgets are not just entertaining and convenient; their high value, visibility, and versatility make them “criminogenic”—or “crime-creating,” in the vocabulary of criminologists. And their power to distract users can give thieves an advantage. Researchers John Roman and Aaron Chalfin suggest in the report “Is There an iCrime Wave?” that iPods’ popularity with consumers and appeal to criminals may have translated into rising violent crime rates.

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Talk about unexpected impact of technology on society. How long until people start defacing their iPods to feel safer?

As I get ready to lead a discussion about the social impact of the web here at Stream07, John sent me this article about the changes in the way we handle our memories. Pretty deep and intimate things are being reshaped by technology, and it might not be for the better.

Before the presence of cameras and the like, humans passed on knowledge through storytelling, intertwining personal experience with a sense of place and time. They created visual landscapes through words, art, and the objects around them. This storytelling codified a shared sense of experience, bringing the audience into a collective understanding of their culture and environment. […]

In our frenzy to safeguard our memories in the online world, we have removed the intimacy of storytelling. We have made the web, not each other, the major source of shared experiences, knowledge, and opinions (often not even our own).

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Ask a hardcore Flickr user how his wedding went, and he’ll tell you “great, check my photo stream!”. His memories are stored in an efficient and rich way (i.e. high definition, always available pictures), but outside of his/her intimate memory system.

Digital cameras tend to make us focus more on capturing moments than on experiencing them. It’s a slow and invisible transition, but it has deep consequences on our capacity to refer to memories. We are outsourcing our stories to computers, simply keeping the pointers in our heads.

The Experientia tribe translated a study published by the French association of mobile operators about the evolution of phone usage in recent years. In the early days, mobiles were accused of plunging users in hermetic bubbles. Truth is phones developed more collaboration and reinvented interactions.

This study shows the gap that exists between the anticipated impact of technologies and their real effects. It exposes a part of our intuitive resistance to progress, a mechanism where we tend to think that every new way of interacting with others is fatally less rich that the ones we grew up with. I am convinced my grandfather thinks our generation’s social life is dehumanized when he sees us express deep feelings on SMS. But the facts - and a few years of usage - seem to prove different. How long will we claim that people who build their friends base on Facebook are not enjoying a proper social life?

Findings from the French study:

1. The mobile phone is no longer just a personal device, it is integrated within collective practices both in the family and between friends.

2. The mobile phone goes from being personal to transitory, from intimate to visible.

3. New social conventions are being established around the mobile phone

4. The use of the mobile phone is governed more by example than by rules and prohibitions.

5. While the mobile phone is often presented as the token of an individualistic and atomised society, in reality one observes collective and collaborative behaviours around the mobile in the family and between friends.

6. The mobile phone is seen as a “average medium” that renews amateur photo and film practice.

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Here is the talk Bruce Sterling gave at Korea University last week about the Estonian Cyberwar.

In this eye-opening presentation, Bruce explains what happened to Estonia earlier this year when the country’s infrastructures got down following by a massive DDOS attack. He shares his theory that a Russian group of hackers called the Zhelatin gang might be behind the attacks, and were actually only flexing the muscles of the world’s largest and most powerful botnet.

Anybody who is involved in the infrastructure side of a large business should watch this. We’ve been warned.

A young man […] had been arrested for stealing motor vehicles and assaults with weapons. At interview he was found to be experiencing the delusion that he was a player inside a computer game (adult-certificate game, widely available) in which points are scored for stealing cars, killing assailants and avoiding police vehicles.

Link via BB

How many more of these are we going to see with games becoming more and more realistic? Should more realism force a change in the minimal age required to play games, pushing everything up?

Hyunjung Kim, a MBA student I met back in April while presenting at the University of Seoul, is explaining what the “Akple” phenomena is all about. Read it, we will face it in 2-3 years!

The term “Akple” […] refers to malicious comments or curses in online posts with the intention to degrade the person whom the comments are addressed toward. With the recent incidents of famous entertainers’ being the focus, Akples became a heated debate topic and the voice to implement systems to control. […]

Most Akplers are presumed to be students, unemployed, and “WangDda”, a “defeated group” of the society, who are rather timid and oppressed in the real world that turn belligerent online. Akplers, whether intended or not, are becoming an evermore disturbing factor in the Korean society causing mental and/or emotional shock, leaving detrimental legacies such as elopement of minors, depression (and in some radical cases, deaths).

Akple has forced a strong reaction from the government, who took some radical measures in the form of the “Internet Real Name System”.

The government has passed a bill called “Internet Real Name System” that will be effective July, 2007. Any online postings posted on a portal with more than 300,000 daily visitors, would reveal the poster’s real name and her personal information.

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I caught quite a lot of heat when I organized a women and/in technologies panel at LIFT06 to raise questions about the fact that women seem to be fleeing the decision/building side of technology, while at the same time they now account for more than 50% of the online population. I still think it was a pertinent discussion to start even if the form could be debated.

Tim O’Reilly is also wondering what is wrong with women and computer science, and it looks like things have not moved forward much.

The roots of the problem seem to be somewhere deep in our educational system, so the patches will need a couple of decades to have some effect. Patience?

The Institute for the Future blog has some figures about broadband penetration in the homes of various Korean cities, and Seoul has moved beyond 100% to 105.99%.

(thx for the link Marco Enrique C.)

Korea is beyond wired. In that context it is not surprising that my meetings with potential sponsors for LIFT are much simpler in Korea than in Switzerland…

I am very interested in innovations in the way we work – it might soon be a major track at a future LIFT and the topic of several video interviews – and came across this article explaining the downfalls of commuting:

“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is. […] There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”

Link (via the Guardian)

Commuting isolates employees, so it might be better to let them work from home? But then what happens if we start having wifi in public transports?

When war doesn’t allow lovers to meet in the streets, people of course turn to the internet!

For Ali and Noura, love blossomed in an Internet chat room. […]

But their relationship was doomed from the start: He lives in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of east Baghdad; she is across the Tigris River in the city’s war-torn west. It was out of the question that they should ever meet.

Link

I have been trying to invite someone to LIFT to talk about online dating (preferably in an unexpected country like Iraq or somewhere in Africa), if you know a relevant person please let me know.